Faultlines (26 page)

15

L
ibby, you aren’t going to take Jordy to his aunt’s house. Call 911. Let them handle it, whatever the trouble is.” Ruth’s voice was anxious, almost shrill.

“What would I say, Ruth? That I’m picking up a boy who’s worried about his mom? You know there are laws about calling 911 for no good reason.”

“For all you know, this is some kind of a trap, and Jordy Cline is part of it. I’ve been thinking about it, you know, all of this business with Ricky Burrows being a witness to that car accident—why was he of all people out there on 440 that night of all nights? The fact is, the man is dangerous. I don’t like it, Libby, not one bit. Come to the office. Let’s talk about it.”

“It’ll be fine, Ruth. You worry too much.” Libby turned right on Mystic Oaks Circle, where Jordan had said his dad’s garage apartment was located. Behind a blue two-story with yellow trim, he’d said, on the right about midway around the circle. She caught sight of it, and of Jordan, standing in the driveway. “I’m here,” she told Ruth, “and believe it or not, there’s no maniac running around with a knife.”

“This isn’t a joke, Libby. For God’s sake, will you please be careful? I’m going over to Greeley now to the police department there, since we can’t really trust anyone here. Somebody has got to find Ricky and stop him. I mean, so far animals are his only murder victims. But who knows what the man is capable of?” Ruth paused. “I’ll be scared for you and the Graysons till they get him.”

“They will,” Libby said, although how would she know? Ricky could be anywhere, carving up God knew what. He could be long gone, or hiding out somewhere at the Little B. But Jordan was right here, waiting for her, looking anxious, and she couldn’t turn her back on him. Telling Ruth she’d stay in touch, Libby clicked off and pulled to the curb.

Jordan got into the cab of the truck, overriding her greeting with his apology. “I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have called you.” His glance at her was rueful, anxious.

“It’s fine. I’m glad if I can help. Did you get hold of your dad, or hear back from your mom?”

“No. It’s like her phone is totally off now. It doesn’t even go to voice mail. My dad must be somewhere on an appointment, maybe at a drilling site. He probably left his phone in the truck, or he can’t hear it for all the equipment noise.”

“We can’t go to the police in Wyatt, I guess.” Libby wanted to make sure.

“Oh hell no,” he said, and then he apologized again. His hands shook when he ran them over his head.

“You’re right.
Hell no
is the way to put it.”

“I can’t figure out what Mom is doing at Aunt Jenna’s.”

“But you’re sure she’s there?”

“I heard Aunt Jenna talking in the background when Mom’s phone called me.” He sat a moment, thinking. “She left me a message earlier to call her. She said it was important. She left my lawyer a message, too, telling him she was going to Aunt Jenna’s. He’s in Austin, but he’s coming back, he said, as quick as he can. I didn’t want to call my grandparents and scare them.” Jordy turned his face to the side window and said, softly, “They’ve been scared enough. Everyone has.”

His voice hitched, and Libby patted his arm. “You couldn’t understand what your mom or your aunt were saying?”

“No. Has it happened to you—someone’s phone calling you by accident? You can hear them, like if they’re driving and the radio’s on, you can hear music and stuff but nothing real specific. I know it was my mom and Aunt Jenna talking, and there was a man’s voice, too. I couldn’t place it. I don’t know. I just have a bad feeling.”

“Well, we’ll go by and see if your mom’s truck is there. But if it looks like there’s any trouble, I’m driving away. We’ll call 911 and wait for the police. Okay?”

“Okay,” Jordan said, but Libby knew he wasn’t listening to her, that he only wanted to go, to get there.

She followed his directions, and in an effort to distract him, to distract them both, she told him she’d spoken to his mom. “Right before you called,” she said, and she could feel his astonishment and, on its heels, his dismay. “I was at Inman’s earlier, getting the boxwoods you and I talked about putting in the front beds at the cottage.”

“I saw them.” He jerked his head, indicating the bed of the truck.

“Your mom was there, too, buying plants for a client, I think.”

“Mrs. Langston. I talked to her. She said Mom canceled on her, that she said she had a family emergency.”

“I guess Mrs. Langston didn’t ask what it was?”

“No. But that’s when I totally figured out something was up. Mom hardly ever cancels a job, and she always takes my calls. Always. And if she can’t, she always calls me back.”

He was so confident, so convinced of his importance to his mother. Libby wondered if she had ever inspired so much trust. Probably not, she decided. Such faith was likely limited to the mother-child relationship.

“I told your mom about Coleta.” Libby glanced at Jordan and encountered his unhappy stare.

He shifted his gaze, and in profile he reminded her so much of Beck when he was pissed but determined not to let it show. She had seen the same muscle work the corner of Beck’s clenched jaw.

Looking back at the road, she said she was sorry for breaking her promise. “I didn’t want to, but the situation you’re in is so serious. Your parents and your attorney need all the facts if they’re going to help you.”

He said it was okay, but Libby couldn’t be certain whether he meant it. “Your mom mentioned there’s another witness.”

“Yeah. My attorney told me. Guy’s name is Ricky Burrows. The detective found him, but now he’s dropped out of sight. I don’t stand much of a chance without him. Unless Michelle makes it. She knows Trav was driving. She tried to stop him.” He fell silent; then after a bit, he said, “I hope so much she’ll wake up, you know? Not for me, but for her family and for her. She didn’t do anything.”

Except ride with a driver who was drunk,
Libby thought.

They rode in silence for several miles, and it seemed to Libby that their shared anxiety rode with them, a third wheel, an unwanted companion. It started to rain; huge fat drops struck the windshield, and then, as abruptly, it stopped.

Libby said, “You know the animals I’ve found dead at the cottage? I think Ricky is the one who killed them.”

Jordan looked at her, startled. “Are you kidding?”

Libby said she wasn’t, repeating what she’d heard from Ruth about Ricky’s apparently groundless and twisted conviction that the Little B belonged to him.

“It figures, the one guy in the world who knows the truth is a total head case. Who’s going to believe him, if they can even find him?”

Before Libby could answer, he was directing her to turn.

“It’s the redbrick house with green shutters, there on the right.”

“I see it,” Libby said. “Your mom’s truck is there.”

“With a cop car behind it—from Wyatt.” Jordan sat forward; he wanted out.

Libby sensed he’d be gone like a shot as soon as she pulled to the curb, and she slowed but didn’t stop. Something was wrong; she felt it, a kind of panic. It crawled on spider legs up her spine. “I don’t think you should go in there,” she said. “I think we should call 911.”

“The cops are already here.” He was impatient. “Can you just stop, please, and let me out?”

“Okay, but I’m going in with you.” Libby parked against the curb.

Jordan was halfway across the front yard before Libby could cut the truck engine. She followed quickly in his wake, heart pounding. She had no idea why she was so afraid, and then she heard Jordan’s shout: “Mom? Oh my God, Mom!” and she ran up onto the porch and through the front door.

16

S
he stared uncomprehending at the body on the floor. How was it not her? She had stepped in front of Jenna. She should have been the one who took the bullet. Sandy turned to Jenna and encountered the reflection of her own uncomprehending shock. They groped their way toward each other, meeting in a clumsy embrace. Jenna was talking. Sandy felt the vibration of her voice, the urgency of her speech, but she couldn’t hear the actual words. The blast from Huck’s gun had deafened her. Her head felt hollow and as light as a helium party balloon, rising from her neck.

She was startled when Jenna grasped her by her upper arms, shaking her, not hard, but not so gently, either. “What were you thinking?” Sandy read Jenna’s lips. “Going in front of me like that? He could have killed you.”

I didn’t want you to die.
Did she say it out loud? Sandy didn’t know.

She felt herself being pulled back into Jenna’s embrace, and then as quickly, Jenna set her aside, going around Sandy, dropping to her knees beside Huck, heedless of the blood spreading beneath his shattered skull. She pressed her fingers to the space near the hinge of his jaw. Anyone who watched crime shows on television knew that space, where the carotid artery was located, where the pulse of life was the strongest. But it was stilled now for Huck. Sandy knew it even before Jenna turned to her and said, “He’s gone.” She sat on her heels, looking down at him, and then at Sandy, blank faced in her bewilderment. How had it happened? Huck here and alive one minute, dead and gone the next? The stench of his blood, his spent ammunition, an underscore of anguish and fear, perverted the air. Sandy didn’t want to breathe; black dots encroached on her peripheral vision. She ground her teeth, biting back the scream she could feel gathering strength from some primal and dark corner of her mind.

Breathe. You have to breathe,
said the voice in her brain, and she managed it.

She had her phone in her hand, and she was in the midst of dialing 911 when she heard Jordy shout for her, making her heart veer out of control again. She dropped her phone. Reaching to pick it up, she shouted back at him, “Stay there, Jordy.”

But he didn’t listen to her. Of course he didn’t. She blocked the kitchen doorway, thinking she could keep him from entering the room, save him from having to see it: Huck’s corpse on the floor to her left, lying in front of the kitchen sink. The hole in his right temple was so small and neat, almost surgically precise, and yet there was so much blood. It haloed his head, a thickening pool; it glazed the knuckles of his right hand, his shooting hand, and stippled the gun, Huck’s service revolver, which lay nearby. Above him, the cabinet, sink basin, and adjacent marble countertop were flecked with bloody bits of tissue and fragments of bone, the brain matter Huck’s bullet had reamed from his skull while on its deadly path. Sandy guessed the bullet was lodged in the wall somewhere. Her stomach lurched. She jerked her gaze away.

When Jordy appeared in the doorway, she slammed her flattened hand into his chest, growling, “Don’t come in here,” even as she bit down on a sob and the rush of her emotions, some complex mix of overwhelming love and relief at the living sight of him, combined with an urgent need to spare him seeing the carnage. There was her lingering horror, too, her shell-shocked numb amazement, the disbelief: Was it a dream? Please, God, would she, could she waken now?

“Are you all right? What happened?” Jordy searched her eyes, then looked past her at Jenna. “Aunt Jenna?” The way he addressed her, it was almost a plea.

But she didn’t respond, didn’t so much as look his way. She was staring fixedly at the wall, gripping the edge of the kitchen countertop, as if it alone kept her upright. Except for a white line around her mouth, her face was gray, the color of ash.

It was inevitable that Jordy would see it: the body on the floor. Sandy marked the moment. His breath went out in a whoosh, a kind of groan. She braced him with her arm, wrapping his waist. Not that she could hold him, or even that he was close to falling. It was the need to touch him, the need in the moment for physical contact between them. A way to say,
I’m here
.

“It’s Huck? He’s dead?”

“Yes.” Sandy tried to steer Jordy back into the hallway, toward the front door. “C’mon,” she said. “We’ll go outside.”

But he said, “No! Mom, for God’s sake, what the hell happened?”

“Jordan? Sandy? I hope it’s all right, my coming in. I—”

“Libby?” Sandy said. “Libby, wait. Something’s happened here. You should stop right there.” But Libby was no better than Jordy at heeding Sandy’s warning. She came past him and around Sandy, and she gasped when she saw it, the body of a man on the floor. “Is that Sergeant Huckabee?” She looked at Sandy.

Did you do it? Did you shoot the man you suspect of framing your son?

The questions blazed in Libby’s eyes, as vocal and stark as if she had asked them out loud, and Sandy realized how Libby could make the assumption. Even Jordy, or the police when they came, which they surely would, might assume she had killed Huck. God knew she had a motive. “He did it,” she said. “He shot himself.”

“Did you call the police?” Libby asked.

“I was trying to, but I don’t think my phone is working.”

“It’s not,” Jordy said. “It called me. That’s what got me worried. I could hear you and Aunt Jenna, and a man—Huck, I guess—talking, so I hung up and tried calling you back to see if you’d answer, but it didn’t even ring.”

“Maybe I did something to it.” Sandy looked at the phone. She remembered getting it from her purse before Huck drew his gun, and randomly, frantically, hitting the numbers. Maybe she’d speed-dialed Jordy.

Libby said, “He called me when he couldn’t get hold of anyone else.”

“She gave me a ride here,” Jordy said.

Sandy looked unhappily at Libby, and it wasn’t reasonable, blaming her that Jordy was here, a witness to this horror, but Sandy did.

“I tried to talk him out of coming,” Libby said, and Sandy knew her feelings must show on her face.

Jenna came up behind Sandy. “We have to call for help.” Her voice was cold and flat, too flat, and Sandy wondered if she was in shock, physical shock, the kind she would need treatment for. She wondered how much more Jenna could stand.

Libby had her phone out, tapping numbers, saying she would do it, and when the dispatcher answered, she said, “I need to report a shooting.”

Sandy led the way outside, and it wasn’t long before they heard the wail of the first siren. Soon after, there were multiple emergency vehicles clogging Jenna’s street. A 911 call in Madrone County never failed to generate a full-scale production, starring a cast of what seemed like thousands of first responders, from firemen to paramedics to police officers to sheriff’s deputies. Neighbors came out of their houses, looking alarmed, and yet they seemed avid, too, for the story, the details.
What happened?
As bystanders they would have the luxury of knowing the answers without having to suffer the consequences of actual involvement. Whatever the nightmare was, thank you, Jesus, it wasn’t theirs.

Go home,
Sandy wanted to shout at them.
It’s none of your damn business,
she wanted to say.

The yard was cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape. A few of the officers began questioning the neighborhood folks about what they might have heard or seen, and at what time. Sandy would read in the local newspaper that the sound of the gunshot had wakened Lyndsey Abrams’s newborn baby and caused Marva Duerksen to spill iced coffee down her shirtfront. Dawson Pate, who was resting on his back deck after mowing the lawn, thought a car had backfired. It was the sort of newsy detail folks expected to read in the
Wyatt Times and Record
, the local biweekly newspaper.

A group of officers entered Jenna’s house.

While Jordy and Libby were questioned where they stood on the front walkway, Sandy and Jenna were led several feet away by a detective from Greeley. He began by asking their names. He wanted to know who owned the house, who made the 911 call, how Sandy and Jenna were related, how they knew Huck. What Sandy was doing at Jenna’s, why Huck had come there. He didn’t question it when Sandy called it a suicide. He didn’t even look at her.

He closed his notebook and, pocketing it, thanked her and Jenna.

She asked if they could go into the house. She felt under scrutiny from the growing crowd of onlookers.

“We need to get my sister’s things,” Sandy said to the detective. “I’m taking her home with me.”

“Yeah. Okay,” he said. “Just wait until the coroner removes the body. Shouldn’t be much longer.” He looked at Jenna. “There’s a biohazard and crime-scene cleaning service out of Austin that handles this sort of thing. I can give you the information, if you want—unless you wanted to tackle it yourself.”

“Oh no, no, no,” Sandy said, emphatically.

Jenna shook her head, hugging herself.

The detective pulled out his notebook again and wrote down a company name and phone number. Tearing out the sheet, he handed it to Jenna. “Ask for Pat,” he said.

Jenna thanked him, and when he was gone, she said, “We should call Mom and Dad before they hear about it somewhere else.”

“Let’s get out of here first.” Sandy walked with Jenna over to where Jordy and Libby waited on the sidewalk.

Sandy put her arm around Jordy. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Are you?” He looked intently at her, and she knew he must feel as conflicted as she did about Huck’s death. He was gone now, and so was his grudge against Jordy and his campaign to make Jordy the guilty one. Who knew if it would make a difference, but Sandy had hope now where she had not before. But at what cost? Hope in exchange for Huck’s life? Wasn’t there some better way?

Jordy said, “We overheard a couple of the cops talking. They were saying somebody found a letter Huck wrote back at the police station in Wyatt.”

“A letter?” Sandy said. She was thinking suicide note. She was thinking if he had left such a thing, it meant he had planned to come here and do this on purpose—in front of Jenna. The idea horrified her.

Libby said, “We may have misunderstood.”

“It’s so messed up, you know?” Jordy sounded angry. “Why would he kill himself? I don’t get it.”

Sandy gave her head a slight shake. This wasn’t a good time to talk about Huck’s reason, not when emotions were so raw. She was unsure how Jenna might react, what she was feeling. It wasn’t regret. Sandy wasn’t feeling that from her.

“Do you realize none of these squad cars are from Wyatt?” Libby made a small arc with her arm.

It seemed as if she posed the question deliberately, as a distraction, and Sandy was grateful for it. She turned to Jordy. “Did the detective who talked to you just now say anything about the accident?”

“Yeah, he told me Ken Carter, Huck’s buddy, would be in touch, but it’s like, who cares? Carter’s the same as Huck. In his mind I was driving.”

Sandy glanced at Jenna; Jordy did, too, but she kept her face averted, and it seemed willful. It seemed to suggest she wasn’t giving up on the idea that Jordy was responsible for Travis’s death. It didn’t matter to her that Huck had admitted to having pressured witnesses. Maybe it wouldn’t matter to local law enforcement, either.

A police force was a brotherhood. They protected their own. They were even more likely to protect Huck now after his death. They would want everyone to think well of him, to honor and respect his memory—the way Jenna, and Huck, before he shot himself, wanted Travis to be remembered.
And to hell with the truth,
Sandy thought.

To hell with my son, and his reputation, his future.

Anger warred in her chest, backed its heat into her throat, but anger wouldn’t help, and she bit down on it. If she could find Ricky Burrows, if she could talk to the Detroit-based long-haul trucker, Nat Blevins, herself, and tell them Huck no longer posed any threat to either of them, maybe they’d tell the truth. Thinking of this steadied her.

The fire trucks were the first of the emergency vehicles to leave. Someone came and drove Huck’s squad car away, then several of the Greeley squad cars left, and finally two attendants from the coroner’s office wheeled the gurney bearing Huck’s bagged remains to the hearse parked at the curb.

Sandy went with Jenna into the house and helped her pack an overnight bag. When they came back outside, Jordy said he would ride with Libby.

“Her house is on the way,” he said. “We can stop there and I’ll unload the boxwoods. She can bring me on home after that.”

Sandy said it was all right; she wouldn’t argue. But she looked at Jenna, unsure of what she wanted from her. A sign that she was aware of how far they had fallen apart as a family, a family that couldn’t even ride together in the same vehicle. There was nothing of the sort in Jenna’s eyes, though. They were as vacant as the windows in an abandoned building. She looked shell-shocked, as if the slightest nudge would send her cartwheeling into some distant pocket of space from which she might never return. Sandy felt her earlier fury dissolve. She opened Jenna’s door and, stowing her tote, told Jordy to come home as quickly as he could.

She thanked Libby. “I am so in your debt,” she said. “For everything today.”

Libby looked at her truck. “It feels like a lifetime ago that we were at Inman’s.”

“I know.” Sandy’s laugh was rueful. Someone else’s lifetime, she thought, one she didn’t recognize anymore as her own.