Wherever she is now, I wonder, does she ever miss Barrens? Does she regret any of what she left behind? Somehow, I doubt it. I’m beginning to think Kaycee Mitchell may have gotten her payday after all. Maybe she did get sick. Maybe she was paid to disappear, and her family—and even her friends—was paid to lie about it.
Leaving the VFW behind, the silence seems to flow into the car like dark water. Saturday, eight P.M., and nowhere to be, nothing to do, no one missing me, even in Chicago.
Condor’s car is in the driveway, and the lights are on. For a second I debate going to knock on his door to apologize—but for what? And I can’t forget the way his face hardened into anger, and the sudden leap of terror in my chest.
A jump rope is coiled on the front stoop, and for some reason it fills me with dread. As if Hannah might have been spirited away from the middle of her game.
Then Condor passes in front of the kitchen window and I turn away quickly, realizing I’ve been staring.
Inside, I punch on the air conditioner and listen to it grind to life in the dark.
Round trip, the ride to Indianapolis has taken three hours, not counting the fifteen or so minutes I spent chatting up the goateed guy. The bill from Prestige is close to two hundred and fifty dollars—nearly triple my weekly expense allowance.
And every single dollar worth it.
I pull out the card from Goatee and run a search for Byron Grafton.
His LinkedIn profile lists him as a consultant and his Facebook profile mentions investment management and real estate. Nowhere is he listed as associated with Clean Solutions, or Optimal, or waste.
But it’s the picture that nearly punches my heart through my chest.
Byron Grafton is curly-haired, and in the handful of photos Google kicks back, dressed in the same kind of cheap, flashy suit that attracted my attention to the photograph I saw back in Brent’s house. And now I remember—Brent told me he had a cousin, Byron, who had a buddy at Optimal that took him under his wing.
I land on a picture of Byron in the University of Indiana newspaper. Long out of college, he’s nonetheless dressed in school colors, and tailgating outside of his alma mater with a bunch of other aging frat boys. Ten to fifteen pounds overweight, thinning hair, paunchy with money, they might all be identical twins.
Except that one of them, I recognize.
I punch in Joe’s number, forgetting all about our fight this morning, and curse when it goes straight to voicemail.
“Call me back,” I say. “I think I have something.”
My phone rings almost immediately after I’ve hung up, and I pick it up without checking the number.
“Hope I’m not disturbing date night,” I say.
There’s a pause.
“Is this Abby Williams?” The caller has the gravelly drawl of a pack-a-day smoker.
I straighten up instinctively, I snap my laptop shut—as if someone might be looking at me through the windows. “You got her. Who’s this?”
“This is Sheriff Kahn. I spoke to a Joe Pabon this morning about the fire. He listed you as the point of contact.” Sheriff Kahn has been around since I was a little kid. Big-ass mustache straight from the seventies, yellow fingernails, Chiclet teeth. Kahn is the kind of person you’d expect to see wearing cowboy boots and spurs, but instead, every day that I recall, he wore a spotless pair of white high-top Nike sneakers. “I wanted to let you know we’ve made an arrest. Local kid. Been in trouble before. Made some threats against Gallagher last Halloween. I doubt he meant to do as much damage as he did, though. You know how kids are.”
“Does this kid have a name?” I grab a pen and the first piece of paper I can get my hands on: Optimal check stubs, itemized, about two thousand of them, fanned out on my floor.
“Monty Devue,” he says, and I freeze. I used to babysit for Monty back when he was a stringy goofball, all knees and elbows, who wanted to be a freight train operator or Bill Gates when he grew up. A good kid—gentle, softhearted. Slow to learn, but tenacious and curious.
“There must be a mistake,” I say. Monty would never light a fire in the middle of a drought on Gallagher’s property, if only because of the animals. Monty always loved animals, used to rescue snails and turtles from the road.
“There isn’t,” Kahn says, and hangs up.
For a long time I sit there. Monty. The fire. Lilian McMann, and her daughter in those argyle socks, and Becky Sarinelli with her skirt cinched at her waist.
I open my computer again. The results page emerges from the darkened screen.
Wallace Rush, the CFO of Optimal, with Byron Grafton at a pledge event.
Wallace Rush and Byron Grafton, as undergraduates, shirtless and painted with the same fraternity symbol.
Wallace Rush and Byron Grafton, suited up at an alumni dinner for their fraternity. With them is Colin Danner.
And finally: a formal reprimand of Wallace Rush, Byron Grafton, and Colin Danner issued by the University of Indiana for “abusing the position of power they assume as representatives of their fraternity.”
Old habits, it seems, die hard.
—
I won’t sleep, not unless I drink, and if I drink I know I’ll be tempted by the closeness of Condor’s house, by his bright windows lit against the darkness like some kind of sign.
Before I realize it I’m in my car and I’m heading for Frank Mitchell’s storage space, as if I’m pulled there involuntarily by gravity.
Security is even shittier than last time: a secondary gate is wide-open, so I drive straight around to unit 34 without even blowing a kiss to the manager lumped over his phone in the main office. The whole place is a jigsaw of locked cells, a miniature postapocalyptic city with no people left in it.
The lock opens a little easier this time and I roll open the door, wincing at the way the sound makes crashing waves over the silence. But still no one comes, and I remind myself that I am here legally, sort of, that I’ve been given permission to enter legally, even if I got permission by lying. The lights blink on after a short delay, and I roll the door down behind me, once again wishing there was ventilation. The whole place carries a faintly chemical smell that tingles my nostrils and tastes sweet in the back of my throat. As I move toward Kaycee’s artwork I imagine that the paintings themselves are sweating acrylic, that the wet, slick look of the paint isn’t a trick of the light but because she was only recently here.
—
I’m only a few miles from home when an SUV pulls out behind me and nearly blinds me with its high beams. The brights bounce off my windshield and gobble up the road in front of me. I put a hand out the window, signaling. But the driver doesn’t take the hint.
Frustrated, I make a right on a ribbon of concrete that will loop me back to County Route 12 on the far side of the gas station.
A second later, the SUV turns, too.
My heart speeds up. I hit the gas, and the SUV accelerates to keep pace. It can’t be a coincidence.
There are no lights here, nothing but fields stretching blackly on either side of us. It was stupid to make the turn. The SUV nudges closer. I can hardly see. The windshield is all glare. My tires hit a rut and the wheel jumps out of my hands before I realize I’ve drifted and jerk back onto the road.
I spin a left at a dirt road and have a brief moment of relief: the SUV misses the turn. But a second later, it screeches to a halt, guns backward, and spins around the turn. It’s coming fast now.