I’m considering all the ways to answer, how dramatic and specific to be. I’m secretly attached to a lost girl with only one eye. My husband left me. My father lied about a bloody, muddy pair of boots. Betty Crocker and I have regular girls’ nights with Trumanell.
The rough bark of the tree scratches against my back. “I got a weird call early this morning. A blocked number. Someone sobbing. They said ‘Trumanell.’ Or maybe I misheard. Maybe it was go to hell? Either way, the crying was a little … psychotic. He hung up within seconds.”
“He?”
“Yes. I think it was a he.”
“Think, not know?”
“Think, not know,” I confirm.
Rusty scribbles on his pad even though he has the sharpest and most proficient memory of anyone I’ve ever known. He usually holds the pad as a prop, something that unsettles suspects who know there isn’t a delete key on a piece of paper.
“We’ll try to track the number. Your private cell?”
I nod.
“OK, what else happened today?”
“I had a somewhat unpleasant visit from a woman named Gretchen McBride. Do you know who she is?”
“I know her husband. I’d call us dove-hunting friends. He gives me a deal on my trucks. I give him a deal on his speeding tickets. I know him well enough to sense that he’ll be scouting a fourth McBride in the near future.” He drawls hard on the bride.
I don’t offer up the satisfaction of a smile. No need to mess up a little nine-year-old girl’s life before it’s necessary. Or announce to Rusty that his truck dealer friend had a big, fat motive to kill Frank Branson when my guess is he already knows it.
“Ms. McBride wanted a personal favor of sorts,” I say. “I don’t think this shovel has anything to do with her. She’s into the less traditional nail polishes.”
Rusty flips over the cover of his notebook and tucks his pen in his pocket.
“We let Wyatt Branson go,” he says.
“I heard.”
“Chief made the call. It wouldn’t have been mine. I’m not looking for anyone out there to finish my job. I want you to know that. I believe in the law.”
“Noted.”
Across the yard, Gabriel is tucking the wrapped shovel in the back of a cop car, waving us over.
Rusty is his sovereign leader, but when we’re two feet away, it’s me that Gabriel is looking at with a question.
“I guess somebody wants your forgiveness real bad,” Gabriel says, grinning. “You in some kind of domestic dispute?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I ask grimly.
“Come on, a good Baptist girl like you has to know.”
I stare at him blankly.
“The shovel. Matthew 18. ‘How often shall I let my brother sin against me? Seven times? And Jesus replied, not seven. Seventy times seven.’”
Of course.
He slams the trunk. “See you back at the station, Rusty.”
Rusty waits until Gabriel is backing out of my driveway. “He’s kind of a shit stirrer,” he drawls, “but he has a mind for detail.”
“I don’t like him.”
“Just painting in some perspective. I’ll go back and write this up. I’m still down for our chat, but let’s not have it at the station. The boss is getting a little hinky about you being involved with Wyatt Branson. He’s happy you’re on vacation. Meet me at our usual place. An hour. Just you, me, and the trees.”
I lurch my truck along the pitch-black road, my second visit to the park in twenty-four hours.
It’s a whole new stage without the floodlight of sun. A papery half-moon has hiked into a black sky. Branches are drawn in fine detail, arms and fingers crawling up. Whatever I cannot see, which is almost everything, feels like an audience in the dark, waiting.
Somewhere along this road, Rusty has pulled the patrol car over in a shallow ditch and turned off his lights, a sleeping predator. Bad luck for anyone else who makes the mistake of wandering this way tonight, maybe even me. I’m always wary about what Rusty will think up next.
Lately, he has a habit of leaving me gifts, like a cat drops a slack-eyed rat. He says it’s not him, but I know it is.
I’ll pull out my desk chair to find an old psychiatric report that describes a teenage Wyatt as schizophrenic and unstable.
A photograph of a stalk of corn smeared with Trumanell’s blood.
A report on unidentified DNA on the shirt Wyatt was wearing that night when they found him wandering a country road, hysterical.
A collage of newspaper tabloid headlines: Branson Manson! Tru Is Out There! Aliens Snatch Two More on Texas Farm!
All of it copies printed from the official Branson case file, which I’ve reviewed dozens of times since Daddy died. I tuck all of Rusty’s presents neatly in the Betty Crocker cookbook.
I pass the turnoff for the lake and enter the blackest part of the park, where the trees crouch in tight cliques. The city has tried security lights here, but they are shot out almost as soon as they are screwed in. Mother-May-I dubbed this stretch the “Twilight Zone,” and it stuck. This is a place where trouble tends to drift and the park cleanup crew finds its best war stories.
I’m the only one, besides Rusty’s wife, who knows why Rusty is so partial to it.
Light is Rusty’s new enemy—glare from the Texas sun, the unforgiving fluorescents that extract confessions, high beams that surprise him over a hump on a country road.
It’s now such a regular thing for Rusty to wear his sunglasses in the station house that the guys refer to him as Wonder and Little Stevie.
If the shits can’t look in my eyes, they don’t know I’m human. That’s what he shoots back when his fellow cops tease him.
If you’ve got bigger stones than I do, pull them out. That’s what he drawls if they keep it up, but nobody thinks they do.
I have been keeping Rusty’s secret. Photophobia, a sensitivity to light so extreme it is physically painful. I’ve googled symptoms and treatments on my phone and read them aloud while we patrol. He says he doesn’t need a doctor, the problem is going to go away. In the meantime, he’s taking four shots of whiskey at bedtime.
Maybe it’s this relentless job combined with too many sleep-deprived nights after a surprise post-forty set of twins. “Babies are the only animals not ready to come out,” he grumbled to me at the two-month mark. “They need to stay in and cook a little longer. A calf comes out, he gets up and walks. All babies can do is scream and shit.”
Maybe Rusty can’t reconcile the crying of his own little girls in their cribs with the sobbing of the little girl we found last week kneeling by her mother, dead of a gunshot wound to the temple, who will always wonder why she wasn’t enough, or the one silent in the middle of the road still strapped in her car seat after a collision with a drunk driver.
It’s a goddamn miracle we don’t all have one leg, Rusty has muttered at me more than once.
Another mile, and my lights flash on the back of the patrol car. Except for the stone silhouette behind the wheel, it looks abandoned on the side of the road. I slowly slide my truck behind it and switch off the ignition.
We both know what this “chat” is about. He thinks he can still convince me of Wyatt’s guilt before it’s too late. It’s both sweet and patronizing that he believes he can save me from myself.