Wide Open (12 page)

She’d never wanted to hide in her life, but she wanted to hide now, because Dell was dead and she’d never said good-bye and her ghost never spoke or responded or did anything. It was just there, just looking like Dell, just reminding her, like she needed reminding.

She pulled the keys from the ignition, gave Dell’s ghost one last long look, and shoved open the door, the rain slashing in and soaking the seat even in the few seconds it took for her to jump out and shove it closed again.

Back inside, she showered, changed her clothes, dumped the soaked clothes in the washing machine, and wiped up the water she trailed through the house when she’d come in. When she finished, it was still raining and there wasn’t even a ghost of a chance she’d get off the ranch before morning—maybe not even then if it didn’t stop by nightfall. But she didn’t waste time thinking about that. She’d walk out tomorrow if she had to.

She wandered back upstairs, still barefoot, aimless for the first time in a long time. She picked up Dell’s cell phone, stared at it, put it back on the table by her bed, left the bedroom, and stood for another long minute in the hallway before she walked to the end and did what she’d known she was going to do all along—opened the door to Dell’s bedroom.

Dell hadn’t been living at the ranch, but she’d been out sometimes—liked to work at the desk in her old bedroom, her father had said. Because she’d liked the view, that’s what she told him, which was bullshit, but maybe she’d left something there.

Over the course of the next two hours, while rain pounded against the windows, she filled two bags with trash from the back of the closet, things Dell had probably even forgotten were there—six years’ worth of wall calendars, paperbacks with ripped covers, and an uncountable number of unmatched socks. She found half a dozen crumpled certificates from high school awards ceremonies, and those she flattened carefully and left on the desk.

She threw a bunch of clothes that had been hanging in the closet for who knew how long in a laundry basket and shoved it into the hall.

In a box on a shelf above Dell’s clothes, she found Dell’s old journals, all red spiral notebooks she got cheap at the Walmart in Rapid City. She’d written in them religiously every day between fifth grade and August of her junior year. That was when she’d lost her virginity to Brian Sigurdson at the county fair. “It’s the end of history,” she’d said to Hallie. “What’s left to write about after that?”

But Hallie knew there was one more notebook, a blue spiral one that Dell had started her last summer home.

She found it in the center desk drawer, along with half a box of condoms, a dozen old gas receipts, a broken hair clip, two leaky ballpoint pens, and a notepad with running horses across the top. The notepad had been buried under the receipts and condoms, and there were only three sheets left on the pad, the adhesive at the top curling up and away like a streamer.

There were three lines in Dell’s handwriting on the top sheet: Colorado, Jasper, and a Minnesota phone number.

Shit.

She stuffed the blue notebook and the notepad into a box with the red spiral notebooks and carried it and the trash bags downstairs.

When she walked into the kitchen, her father was sitting at the table, his hands clenched, staring at nothing. His jeans were wet and splashed with mud to the knees, but otherwise he was reasonably dry, which Hallie took to mean the rain had stopped by the time he’d crossed the yard to the house.

Hallie put the trash bags by the door, carried the box with the spiral notebooks and the notepad with her, and sat at the table across from him.

“You been in her room?” he said after a moment.

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” he said. He unclenched his hands, then clenched them again, the knuckles showing white. “Do you think I could have done anything?” he said.

“What?”

He was looking at his hands, at the grease worn like grooves into his fingers. “She came out here every Sunday since she came back,” he said at last. “We had dinner and she’d spend some time up in her room. Said she needed a little space of her own if it was okay with me. Which—it was always her space. Always. Just like yours.”

“Dad,” Hallie said.

“I know things were hard after your mother. And I’m no good with … with girl things.” He looked up from the table. “But we did all right, didn’t we? I mean—”

“She didn’t kill herself.” Hallie interrupted him. Because she needed him not to be like this.

He looked at her for a long moment. Finally, he pulled the box she’d set on the table toward him. Hallie lifted the blue notebook and the notepad from the top and let him look inside at the rest.

“These hers?”

Hallie nodded.

He fingered one of the spirals. “I won’t read them,” he said. “That wouldn’t be … fair.”

She knew he meant the whole thing wasn’t fair, that Dell was dead, that Hallie herself would leave again in a few more days, that people died and he couldn’t change that.

“I’d like to keep them, though,” he said.

“I think that’d be fine,” Hallie told him.

13

The next morning, Hallie was determined to be up and out early. Her leave was more than half gone, and she still didn’t know what Dell had been doing or why she’d died. But first, she sat down at the dining room table with Dell’s notepad in front of her and dialed the phone number written there.

“Bill Stuart.”

“My name is Hallie Michaels,” she said. “My sister had your phone number.”

“Okay.” More a question than a statement.

“Dell Michaels.” Hallie said, “That’s my sister’s name.”

“Nope.” The word drawn out, almost like a drawl. “Where you from?”

“Prairie City, South Dakota.”

“Well, I talked to an Addy Temple from, I think, Pierre a week or so ago.”

Hallie caught her breath because Dell’s full name was Adelle. Her middle name was Temple, after their grandmother’s side of the family. “Why did she call?”

“Who did you say you were?”

“Look, my sister died, okay? She died, and I’m trying to figure out why, and she had your phone number.”

There was silence for a long time on the other end of the line. “There was nothing in what I told her that was dangerous or even secret,” he finally said. “She sent me some specs for wind turbines. I’m a wind energy consultant, do a lot of work with small farms starting up—what turbines, how big, that sort of thing. Anyway, she sent me some specs, and I looked at them for her. No big deal.”

“The specs,” Hallie said. “What did you tell her?”

“Wasn’t much to tell her, except she must have run the numbers wrong. Told her to check the measurements again and get back to me.”

“Okay,” Hallie said. “Thanks.” Then. “Wait. Could there be some kind of tech you’ve never heard of, something brand-new and super efficient?”

“Wind is wind,” he said. “You can’t squeeze more energy out of it than it’s got.”

The day was crisp and clear when she finally left the house, as if yesterday’s rain had never happened. The long drive to the road was still muddy and the back end of the truck slid once with the wheels spinning, but she muscled through and was soon out of the drive and more or less dry gravel road and heading down the county road toward West Prairie City. She saw only three vehicles on the road, an old white Bonneville, a gray Suburban, and a red three-quarter-ton pickup hauling a trailer stacked with hundred-pound bales of hay. The pickup truck driver waved when he passed her, and she waved back, though she didn’t recognize him.

She slowed as she approached Uku-Weber. It sat on open prairie ground, a long drive to approach and a parking lot in front. No creeks or brushland or even windbreaks around it. No way to sneak in, though Hallie wasn’t much for sneaking, especially at nine o’clock in the morning.

There were maybe half a dozen vehicles parked directly in front of the building, but otherwise the lot was empty. Right up near the front entry was a row of spaces with rectangular green and white signs that read
VISITOR
. Hallie parked in one, turned off her truck, and sat for a moment, looking at the building.

The entrance comprised huge panels of glass looking onto what appeared from the outside to be a two-story atrium. There was hardly any mown grass lawn, maybe a ten-foot strip around the building before it all turned back into short-grass prairie. Along the southeast edge of the parking lot, there were signs of construction—a mound of dirt, chunks of broken concrete, a bulldozer, a small crane, and a front-end loader.

Dried stalks of old grass rattled together in the rising breeze as she got out of the pickup and headed toward the entrance. Dell floated just behind her left shoulder. The double-width walk spread out into a broad patio with seasonal grasses in large pots. There was a fountain in the middle with no water, symbols carved along the bottom like petroglyphs.

Hallie stopped.

A ghost floated in the middle of the fountain.

“Well, hell.”

She said it out loud and didn’t care whether anyone heard her or not. Eddie’s ghost had been gone for two full days, since Hallie’d talked to Estelle.

But now, here was another one.

It was a woman, maybe Hallie’s age. It was difficult to tell because—yeah, she was a ghost. She had long dark hair and a strongly defined face. She wore a midriff-skimming T-shirt, short denim skirt, a half-dozen loose bracelets on her left arm, and sturdy closed-toe sandals, the kind people wore to hike in.

For a moment, the two ghosts—Dell and the girl in the fountain—floated there, more or less facing each other. Hallie wished they’d talk each other out of her sight, though it didn’t matter, because, ghosts or not, Dell and, presumably, the woman in the fountain, were still dead. And Hallie still intended to find out why.

The two ghosts drifted over to Hallie and seemed to follow her as she continued on to the building. When she entered, she was hit with a sharp blast of warm air, which ruffled her hair and made her stop. Dell and the ghost from the fountain floated sharply backwards, as if the downblast had knocked them out the door. There was something … substantial about it, the blast of air. It felt … gritty. Hallie looked up, but it was two stories to the ceiling and she couldn’t see anything. She looked down. There was a narrow grate in the floor running the width of the building, where the sand or grit or whatever it was that had struck her when she walked inside appeared to be sucked in and disappear.

“It’s a barrier.”

Hallie turned. The atrium was large. Staircases curved up on either side, though there couldn’t be more than three or four offices up there. A large reception desk occupied the center space.

“An air barrier,” the woman at the reception desk repeated. “It’s so we can open the big doors in good weather and still keep … things out. So we’re not completely dependent on, you know, air handling.”

“Things?” Because she couldn’t mean ghosts.

“Prairie things,” the woman said. She was wearing a tailored suit, but she’d taken the jacket off, revealing a cream-colored tank top. Her hair was short, dyed two different colors, and she looked about fourteen. “Rodents and, I don’t know, snakes. Mr. Weber says it can be a problem.”

“Huh,” said Hallie. Was that what Uku-Weber did? When they talked about the weather of the future or whatever? Bring the outdoors inside? Hadn’t Tel talked about wind turbines? About splitting storm fronts? Maybe it was all just talk, the whole thing. “Is Lorie Bixby here?” she asked.

“Would you like me to get her for you?”

“That’d be swell,” Hallie said.

It took Lorie a good ten minutes to come out and meet her. Hallie paced the atrium. The ghosts knocked silently against the glass outside, as if they wanted in but couldn’t figure out how to accomplish it. The flooring in the atrium was concrete cut to look like twenty-four-inch tile with some sort of giant mosaic pattern picked in subtle shades of brown and tan. The walls were glass, with narrow strips between that appeared to be constructed of sandstone, though they probably weren’t. They were etched with petroglyphs like those Hallie had seen on the fountain outside, though now that she was able to study them, she realized that though some of the symbols were Native American, not all of them were.

She occupied herself identifying them, etched so thinly, most people wouldn’t even notice them. She’d spotted a stag, a buffalo, something she thought might be a fu dog, a Celtic knot, a pentacle, and on the very centermost strip, a hammer, ax, and sword laid one across the other.

“Hallie! What are you doing here!” Lorie didn’t sound particularly happy as she crossed the atrium.

“Dell had an office here, right?”

Lorie cocked her head and looked at her. “Yeah.”

“I thought she might have … things,” Hallie said.

“Oh … wow.” Like it hadn’t occurred to her. “Okay, then,” she said. “Come on upstairs.”

She led Hallie up one of the curving staircases, talking as they went. “I was just so surprised to see you. Here, I mean. Because, well … I thought you were going back?” She said the last like a question, like,
Why aren’t you gone?

Because I’m going to find out what happened to Dell.
What she said was, “Not until Friday.”

At the top of the stairs, they paused.

“Holy shit,” Hallie said.

Because it was the same pattern—the
same pattern
—she’d seen on Dell’s body, on Jennie Vagts, on Pete’s belt buckle, etched into the atrium floor. A jagged lightning bolt striking the earth from deep in a roiling cloud.

“What—?” Hallie cleared her throat. She felt as if something had crawled up her spine. “What is that?”

Lorie looked over the balcony railing. “Oh … yeah. Isn’t it awesome! Martin designed that himself. It’s so … subtle, but distinct, don’t you think? You can’t even really tell what it is unless you’re up here on the executive floor.”

“But…”
Think, Hallie, think.
Outside, Dell and the fountain girl continued to bump up against the atrium glass. “I mean, what does it mean?”

Lorie looked at her curiously. “It’s … weather,” she said.