Faultlines (27 page)

17

T
hanks,” Jordan said, getting into the cab of Libby’s truck. “I couldn’t ride with my aunt. I don’t know what it’s going to take for her to believe me.”

“Maybe in time,” Libby said.
Hard evidence,
was what she thought.

Jordan’s phone rang. “It’s my dad,” he said, looking at her, and his eyes were worried.

“You need to let him know you’re okay,” she said.

From Jordan’s side of the conversation, Libby gathered his dad had spoken to his mom and was aware of Sergeant Huckabee’s suicide. Libby felt bad for Emmett, for his shock that would be profound, and his concern for Jordan that would be sharper still. Suppose she and Jordan had walked into Jenna’s house minutes earlier? Suppose Huckabee had shot either Sandy or Jenna as he’d threatened to do? He might have taken Libby and Jordan hostage; he might have barricaded them all in the house. These days, perfectly normal-appearing people went over the lip of sanity in an eye blink, spraying bullets with abandon, mowing down whoever was in their path. For little to no reason.

Libby thought of the last time she’d seen the sergeant, wearing his sunglasses with lenses like mirrors, and his cocksure attitude.
The boy has finally got his story straight.
He spoke in Libby’s brain.

Jordy ended the call. “Dad says he’s going to the house, that Roger wants to meet us there.”

“Your attorney?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll turn around, then.”

“No, we’re so close to your place now. I told him I was going to help you, then I’d be home. It won’t take that long.”

Libby was hesitant. He needed to be with his family. But she guessed he could also use breathing space. She didn’t turn around.

“I called my friend Ruth before we left your aunt’s house,” she said, breaking a short silence. “She was in Greeley, at the police station, when the call came in about the shooting.”

“Did she find out anything? About Ricky Burrows, I mean.”

“She seemed to think the cops there were giving her the runaround.”
I have a bad feeling,
she’d said. It was nothing she could put her finger on.
I’d be willing to bet a year’s worth of my commissions that Ricky’s still in the area, though.

Libby felt he was nearby, too. A person seized by an obsession didn’t ordinarily give up easily. Sergeant Huckabee being a case in point. And Ricky Burrows was supposedly not only obsessed but insane. How could she have been so duped by him? She had felt his anger, but she had assumed it was rooted in despair. He’d seemed a sad case to her, a guy who’d not been dealt a particularly promising hand in life. She’d felt responsible, in a way, that his truck got keyed on her property. Now that she knew he’d done the damage himself, she felt like a fool.

“I think we need to keep an eye out for Ricky,” she said, but pulling up to the cottage, she didn’t feel any particular fear.

Jordy hopped out, and rounding the rear of the truck, he lowered the tailgate.

Knowing she’d be taking him home shortly, Libby left her purse in the cab. “You want a sandwich, something to drink? You must be starving.”

His head popped up. “Do you have any more of that lemonade you made the other day?”

She laughed, going into the house, and said, “Coming right up.”

She didn’t see Ricky at first.

He was standing behind the front door. Then he was there, square in front of her the moment she closed it. Inches from her. Close enough that she could smell peanut butter on his breath. Fear clamped her heart. Her eyes darted past him, and she saw the open peanut-butter jar on the kitchen table, alongside a torn wax sleeve of Ritz crackers. The sweating jug of homemade lemonade was there, too, mostly gone now. It irked her, that Ricky had helped himself to the last of it, and it was ridiculous, but she was thinking of Jordan’s disappointment.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Ricky said. “I been waiting awhile, and I got kind of hungry.”

“It’s fine, Ricky.” She struggled to breathe normally, to appear as if finding him in her house were normal, a daily occurrence.

“I thought maybe you could help me.”

“Help you?” Libby looked past him toward the bedroom, where her dad’s loaded shotgun was propped in the corner beside the old chest of drawers. If she could somehow get across the living room, and into the bedroom—

“I don’t think you knew when you bought this property that it was mine, right?”

Libby met his gaze. “Yours?”

“Yeah.” He gestured toward the kitchen, inviting her to come and sit with him as if he were the host. “I want to finish my crackers.”

She held his gaze for a moment, disbelieving she had heard him correctly, afraid she might laugh in his face at the utter outrageousness of the situation. “Okay.” She managed to get the word out and waited, hoping he would go first. But no. The look on his face, the tight way he held himself, put every atom, particle, and cell of her body on alert.
Crazy like a fox.
The phrase jumped into her mind.

He fell in behind her.

She went to the table and, pausing, let her glance run quickly over him, hunting for a sign that he had a knife, but if he did, he could have it concealed anywhere on his person. He could grab one out of a kitchen drawer. It occurred to her he could have found the shotgun. She looked out the kitchen window, but she couldn’t see Jordan or the truck. She was listening so hard for his step on the porch, the sound of the front door. Did Ricky not know Jordan was here?

“Sit,” he said.

She sat, gingerly, on the edge of the straight-backed chair.

“I know that once you know the truth—” He sat opposite her, and picking up the knife, he slathered a cracker with peanut butter, wiping it clean, licking his thumb, smiling at her.

He had a nice smile. He’d never smiled at her before that she could remember. He’d always seemed sad, pissed at the world.
One of those down-on-his-luck young guys . . . 
That’s how she’d thought of him. How badly she’d misjudged him.

He topped the buttered cracker with another and popped the tiny sandwich into his mouth, working his tongue around, washing the sticky mess down with the lemonade. “So, here’s the thing,” he said, making another cracker sandwich. “I’ve got the deed and my grandparents’ will that shows how they wanted the Little B left to Aunt Fran and my mom. Not just Fran.”

“Your grandparents who lived in the farmhouse next door, right? They haven’t died—”

“I know.” He was annoyed. “Aunt Frannie stuck ’em in an old-folks’ home. If my mom was here, she would’ve never done that.”

“Your mom is Jewel, right? Fran and Jewel were sisters?”

“Yeah. After my mom had her breakdown, Fran sent her and me away to her uncle’s house in Colorado. They said she would get better there, but she didn’t. She got worse. She was doing real crazy shit, crazy even for her. One day men came and took her away. Her uncle said they were taking her to a hospital, where she’d get help. The bastard never checked on her, never took me to see her. They treated her like shit there, locked her up like an animal. It was no hospital. It was a nuthouse, the worst kind, and she died in there because of that asshole. He kicked me out. I ended up in foster care. You know what that’s like living where nobody wants you? Nobody cares? Where they beat you down just for shits and giggles?”

Ricky’s eyes on Libby’s were intent, hard walls of anger, riven with defiance. Libby had seen the expression before on the faces of high school kids, the harder cases she’d worked with. The ones who’d been abused, damaged by their families or the system. Their rage was a defense, a tool of survival. Ricky was older than her students by a few years, but he wasn’t different. Down underneath that brittle glare was the history of a little boy’s bewilderment and his fear, along with an overwhelming sense of abandonment.

She said, “I’m sorry, Ricky, but I don’t see—”

“This. Is. My. Land.” He pounded the heel of his fist on the table with each enunciated word.

She kept his gaze but could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t incite him further. Her dad’s shotgun might as well be in another country. She thought how easily Ricky could grab a knife, overcome her, the same way he had evidently overcome the nurse in the mental ward where he had been locked up like his mother. She wondered by whose authority he had been committed there. Foster parents? Child Protective Services? The justice system? She thought of Jordan, outside, oblivious, that he would walk into this at any moment.

“It’s okay,” Ricky said. “I’m not mad at you. You didn’t know. Anyway, you tried to help me, you and your husband did, with my truck and all. You felt bad, I could tell.”

“Yes,” she said.

“I didn’t want to do it, but you kind of forced me.”

“I don’t understand,” Libby said, even though she did.

“I did it. I keyed my damn truck; I slaughtered the hog, too, the bird, the rats.”

“What about the note? Did you write that, too?”

“Yeah. I figured you’d think it was Huckabee who left it. You told me he warned you about keeping your doors locked.”

“I did?”

“Yeah. You said we should keep our vehicles locked up, too.”

Had she? Libby guessed it was possible.

“I figured you’d think it was him, that it’d scare you. I figured if I did what that wacko in Houston was doing, you and the cops’d think it was him, that he was after you all, and you’d leave. Get the hell off my land.”

“Ricky, did you follow Beck from here? Did you run him off the road?”

He looked at her, brows knit, drawing a blank. There was not a trace of the canniness that had marked his expression a moment ago. He didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Here’s the deal,” he said after a moment. “You get Ruth Crandall to take the Little B off the market, okay? Then you and the folks that bought the parcel of land with my grandparents’ house—you guys can just sign papers, giving the ranch back. Simple.” Ricky leaned back, smiling.

Libby smiled, too, as if it were the perfect plan.

He extended his leg the way men do when they’re going to pull something from the pocket of their pants. Ricky was wearing worn but sturdy work jeans, and boots with thick soles. It was the uniform of a construction worker, regardless of weather or time of year. She wasn’t surprised when he brought the knife into her view. Unfolding it, he began to clean his fingernails with the tip of the blade. He was still smiling.

Libby watched him, somehow fascinated, absorbed. “I’ll call Ruth,” she said, “but I’ll need to get my phone. It’s in the truck.” She started to get up.

“No.” He jumped to his feet. “I’ll get it.”

“All right,” Libby said, and her voice seemed to come from a distance. It came from some part of her that was unaffected by the blunt force of her alarm. Thoughts surfaced, that if Ricky left, she would grab the shotgun.
Jordan—Jordan is outside.
That was her specific thought when he came in the front door, and her heart stuttered. She looked from Jordan to Ricky, expecting him to make some move on Jordan, to somehow threaten him with the knife.

But it was slack in his hand hanging at his side, and he was staring at Jordan as if transfixed at the sight of him. The color drained from his face. His neck worked when he swallowed. He looked scared. More than that. He looked terrified.

Libby’s eyes met Jordan’s. His shrug was almost imperceptible, an indication of his confusion that bordered on something more.

“You’re dead, man, right?” Ricky closed his knife and shoved it back into his pocket. He took a step toward Jordan, stopped, cocked his head to the side. “C’mon now. I don’t believe in this shit, you know? The walking dead? Shit like that? Hell no.” Ricky glanced at Libby, smirked. “You seeing this?” He held out his hands toward Jordan.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Libby said.

Ricky rounded on her, punching the air. “Do you see that guy there? Because if you don’t, I am fucking nuts like everyone says.”

“I see him.”

Ricky heaved a breath. “Okay, then. Okay. He was dead, but now he’s not.”

Libby glanced at Jordan and understanding came, leaping between them.

Jordan said, “You think I died in the car crash.”

Libby was amazed at his equanimity, the quiet authority in his voice.

“I know you did.” Ricky was half turned from Jordan and spit the words over his shoulder. He was shaky, suspicious, and still scared.

Vulnerable,
Libby thought. Like you would be if you were worried about your sanity, worried about whether what you were seeing before your eyes was real or a specter up from the grave. He didn’t trust her when she said she saw Jordan, too, and maybe she could make that work in their favor. She shifted her weight, taking what she hoped was an inconspicuous step toward the archway separating the kitchen from the living room. She didn’t have a plan in mind other than if she could, she would get to her phone or the shotgun. She wasn’t going to simply stand here and let herself or Jordan be carved up like this year’s Thanksgiving turkey.

Jordan said, “You saw the wreck happen, right, man? I mean, you were almost in it, I heard.”

“Car came right at me. Right fucking at me. I see it every time I close my eyes.” Ricky shut his eyes now and shivered.

“Am I the driver?” Jordan asked.

“Nah. Passenger. It was like that close with you guys.” Ricky held his thumb and forefinger apart, showing a sliver of space. “Then you went airborne. I never saw anything—heard anything like it. There was like a high whistling sound, then it was like some big giant was ripping apart metal, breaking glass. Goddamn driver popped up out of there like a cork out of a champagne bottle on New Year’s Eve, you know what I’m saying? He went up like somebody tossing a rag doll, then came down—bam!” Ricky slammed his fist into his palm.

“You came over to us. I remember you were there. I heard you call 911.”

“Yeah. I felt your pulse, bro. It was gone. I figured you had enough life left in you to get out of the car and over to your buddy, but then you, like, collapsed on top of him and died. You were dead,” Ricky said. “I know. I checked.” He was getting more distraught now.