I shake my head. This isn’t good.
We’ve been in this position many times before. A closed door. Something uncertain on the other side. Once, it was a shotgun. The blast tore a twelve-inch hole, nicked the walls, pocked my shoulder, Rusty’s hip.
Rusty likes doors best when they are splintered on the ground. When we shared our worst nightmares at the bar one night, I expected his to be set during his tour of duty in Iraq. Instead, he described an endless walk down a hall of closed doors, which he kicked down one by one until he woke up.
Rusty is itchy, slinking in from the side, a foot from the closet. “Wyatt, are you in there? It’s Rusty. I’m with Odette.” His voice is easy. Coaxing. “We’re both here in our capacity as police officers. Please open the door slowly. We just want to make sure you’re OK. Don’t want any problems.”
The words are right. But I don’t trust them. Neither would Wyatt.
“Rusty,” I hiss. “Wait.” I can’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, but I know.
He isn’t waiting.
Rusty thrusts his heel into the door.
The closet, empty.
Rusty’s already inside, kneeling, examining a knob on the back paneling. A small crawl space door is nailed shut. His gun is holstered, knife out. He’s not going to let this opportunity go.
I can feel the shift. Forget Wyatt. Find Trumanell.
There’s an exclamation, a snap, as he frees a board.
I had to get out of the house. I had to breathe.
A gray-and-orange sky is waking up over the Branson place. Everything feels dreamy and unreal, like time is repeating itself, the sun rising again over June 7, 2005.
Cops are searching the field in tidy rows. They are carrying boxes and trunks out of the house, down the porch, and plunking them in white vans. Rusty asked for every available unit in the county. They wailed their way here, an early alarm for anyone residing in a fifty-mile radius.
The crawl space was loaded. Plastic bins marked Trumanell. Boxes marked Daddy. A trunk marked Mama Pat. Black garbage bags, undetermined.
It only took the flip of a single breaker in the downstairs hall closet to light the bottom floor. “This could be a whole lot of nothing,” Rusty said to the first cops who arrived. “Or a whole lot of something. I can’t believe they didn’t catch this crawl space last time.”
In the kitchen sink, a plastic bag of chicken was defrosting.
Rusty thinks Wyatt has run, which he was instructed not to do. But I know about the ditches and cubbyholes he drew like a little da Vinci, starting at age six, and I’m not sure.
Rusty is on the porch, alternately directing traffic and sucking on his vape pen. Occasionally, he glances at me, leaning against the patrol car, like I’m his sick child he had to bring to work.
Every puff of toxic air he inhales makes me seethe a little more. He strolls over, his eyes hidden behind those two mirrors, wearing a smile that smirks victory. “You feeling better now?” he asks.
I snatch the vape pen out of his hand and toss it across the grass. “For a smart man, you’re stupid. Aren’t you the one always saying that what kills you will be the thing that says it won’t? Do you read the studies? Watch the news? This new vaping habit of yours is a lie, like just about everything else in your mouth lately.”
“That pen cost fifty bucks. It was a loving present from my wife.” Playing it slow and cool. He doesn’t want to take any shine off his beautifully orchestrated moment in the Branson case. We’re already getting a few curious stares from the army of box loaders.
I motion my hand in the direction of the house. “Finn and his lawyer buddies are not going to like this. They’re going to say it was an illegal search and seizure. That the cops have no right to drag his stuff out because we had no right to enter in the first place. Whatever you find in those boxes, a judge will probably throw out.”
“The chief gave it a go. Gabriel brought me the signed search warrant. You were standing right there.”
“It won’t hold up.”
“You know, I didn’t hear you so loud and clear on the staircase when you were wondering if your boy was in trouble. Or when we were staring into that crawl space I ripped open, asking ourselves if that nest of dead squirrel babies was really a nest of dead squirrel babies.”
He reaches in his pocket for the pack of Marlboros, crushing it into a furious ball when he sees it’s empty. He’s not so sure about everything himself.
“Why do you keep punishing yourself?” he asks. “Worrying about him? Is it because he’s the first man who screwed you? Because he has something on you? You tell me what that is, and I will take it to the grave, and we will finish this together. We—”
“Did you break into my desk at work?” I interrupt. “The locked drawer at the bottom?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Did you take something out of my father’s desk that has to do with Trumanell?”
“No, Odette, I did not. But now I’m curious. Do you have some evidence in the Branson case I don’t know about? Something your father didn’t disclose?”
Up in Trumanell’s window, shadows are merging behind the curtain. “You are wrong about me,” I say softly. “You are wrong about everything.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m not wrong about, Odette. Just like your father, you make up your own rules. Every time I think we’re a team—just a team operating with a difference of opinion—you pull something. I asked Gabriel to bag the pennies in the kitchen, and you know what he told me? There were no pennies. So I have to wonder—did you lie about there being pennies? Or did you go in there and take them when you told me you needed some air? And in either case, I have to ask myself: Why?”
“Do you want another partner, Rusty?”
“No, Odette. I just want the truth. And my vape pen back so I can kill myself any way I damn want.”
“Everything is a joke to you.” I’m already sliding into the patrol car, starting it up. “I’m going to make this easy.”
“Don’t say goodbye like this.” Rusty hovers at the open window, hand on the door panel. The tang of a hard, sweaty night is pouring off his body.
Tears punch the back of my eyes. I feel a sudden impulse to unburden myself. To tell him everything.
Where Wyatt’s hiding places are.
About a lost girl with one eye who needs our help.
How my father had a very dirty pair of boots.
Rusty’s intensity, the concern on his face, is dragging my heart out of my chest.
He almost, almost makes me believe.
32
I’m pushing the odometer of the patrol car to ninety, my father’s key burning against my skin. Black night is pouring through the windshield.
It’s not Rusty that I hate. It’s this fucking town. It stole my leg. It stole Trumanell. It twisted me up from the beginning.
I was six when a doll appeared on the porch of the Blue House with an eerie resemblance to me. A long pigtail. Two chubby legs.
One doll was odd. Eleven dolls were creepy. That’s how many were dropped off that day. Maggie’s had freckles like hers and was sitting in her front yard tree. Trumanell’s was roped by brown yarn to the cattle guard at the Branson place.