I learned how she figured out my father was a murderer. I learned to never sip out of a water bottle in a cop car and leave it behind.
Of course, I’m telling Rusty none of this.
I think he underestimates me.
I wonder if he underestimated Odette, too.
52
“Wait.” Rusty’s hand is on my arm, but lightly. “Let’s continue this. Not here. Meet me back at the station around eight.”
“So you can stick me in your interview room? No thanks. My offer of a partnership comes with a two-hour timer.” I just pick a number out of the air, and I immediately wish I’d said one instead of two. “I can take my knowledge elsewhere. To the FBI. Or a TV reporter.”
That’s a lie. I would never let cameras zoom that close to my face. And right now, Rusty is the only man I want to talk to.
“All right,” he says easily. “Something more neutral. There’s a private spot I like at the lake. Do you know the park outside of town?”
“Yes.” I’ve hung in one of the trees. Smoked some pot. Thought about Odette diving for green M&M’s.
“When you drive in, take the first turnoff to the right, go about two miles and you’ll see my patrol car pulled over on the side of the road, under a grove of old oaks. It’s the place the trees arch over the road. Let’s say 6 P.M.” He’s manipulating more hours for himself, but I’m tired of arguing.
“You and Odette used to meet there,” I say. This is only a guess, based on one of her diary notes. “I know exactly where your spot is.” I know because he just told me exactly where it is. I’m beginning to get the feel of how this psychic thing works.
He’s up, laying a $10 bill on the check.
“This has to go both ways,” I insist again. “Odette is telling me new things all the time. They don’t always make sense. Like right now, she’s giving me an image of dead squirrels in a dark space. An attic. Lots of boxes. At the Branson place?” His reaction is minuscule. He is good.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ve got something to tell you. But since you are full of mystic powers, you must know that already.”
“The only voice in my head,” I reply, “is Odette’s. Also, I’m not getting in your car at the park.”
It is not a good feeling to stand in another place I almost died.
I now had four hours to kill before the park. So I followed the GPS coordinates in Odette’s diary.
Wyatt’s possible killing field? That’s what she’d scribbled beside the coordinates.
I want to clear that up for her. Say I’m so sorry I didn’t give her more information about how I ended up in a grave of dandelions on the side of the road. Tell her No, this isn’t Wyatt’s killing field.
Another trucker dumped me along this highway. All the way from Ardmore, he had liked to watch me suck on his stash of red lollipops. He had otherwise left me alone. Then my scarf slipped when he hit the brakes too hard and he couldn’t get rid of me fast enough.
Odette wrote like I fell from the sky. Like I wouldn’t have been able to crawl through a barbed wire fence without getting blood all over me.
You can’t get through there, people have told me all my life. And yet I slithered into a ten-inch gap under the trailer the day my mother died and through this barbed wire fence after the trucker pushed me out. “Cockroach” was actually one of my better nicknames in middle school, for my ability to squeeze my body into tight spaces.
The crickets out here are having a rock concert. I slap away something meaner than a cricket. I am mad at myself for letting Rusty manipulate me. I’ve just given him and his partner more time to dig away at who I am before we meet again.
I stop about two hundred yards past the fence, at a small patch of dandelions. After sitting in that black cellar with Wyatt, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to look at them the same. I’ll always be imagining a young boy in the dark, trying to call his sister through the hole in a weed. I lean over and pick one. I rip off the yellow head like Wyatt instructed, and blow hard into the stem.
The sound, eerie and loud, startles me, running through the center of my bones. It shuts up the cricket at my foot.
It makes me feel like I’m calling for Trumanell myself.
Maybe this is somebody’s killing field. Maybe a trucker with a red-lollipop fetish. Odette was right. I was lucky.
When I crawl back through the fence, it rips through my skin like a knife.
At the park, I slip into the passenger side of Rusty’s car, exactly what I said I wouldn’t do. It’s just so hot. A hundred and three degrees. I’ll keep my hand on the door handle.
On either side of us, a forest of trees. The sun is heading down. The lake is completely out of view, a relief.
Don’t say it too soon, I tell myself. Make him talk first.
“How’d you get that cut on your arm?” he asks brusquely. “Did someone hurt you?”
“It’s nothing. What do you have for me?”
“First, I want to assure you—and Odette—that I didn’t steal anything out of her desk. I believe it happened. I just wasn’t responsible.”
“OK,” I say impatiently. “That is noninformation. Also, I don’t know if Odette hears me back so don’t expect that. What else?”
“I have a piece of evidence I’m willing to share that is not general knowledge. Odette consulted with a forensic scientist the morning she disappeared.”
I already read this in her diary, but I stop myself from saying so. This is big. It means Rusty is actually telling me the truth.
“Odette said something … about boots,” I stutter out. “Her father’s.”
“What?” Rusty’s reply is sharp.
He didn’t know they were her father’s.
“Odette brought a pair of boots to a forensic scientist to examine,” he says carefully like he’s keeping to a script. “She didn’t know whose they were because Odette didn’t tell her. But after Odette disappeared—and the DNA results came in—the doctor believed they had something to do with Trumanell’s killer. And maybe Odette’s disappearance. So she brought them to me.”
I don’t jump in. I wait. I’m learning from the pro.
“In fact, Trumanell’s blood is on the boots,” he continues. “And the soil on them tells an interesting story. It contains toxic elements. Arsenic. Copper, lead, zinc. Formaldehyde.”
“I don’t understand what that means.”
“Arsenic is used to preserve coffin wood. Formaldehyde, in varnishes. All those metals I listed are common in coffin handles.”
“Are you saying that Trumanell was buried in a cemetery?”
“Possibly. The thing is, there are old family graves all over the farmland around here. Some marked, some not. It’s more than a needle in a haystack—it’s a needle in thousands, if not millions, of haystacks. And getting permission to dig up cemeteries—that’s a paperwork Armageddon.”
“That sucks,” I say, because I don’t know what to say.
“It does. We pulled a few soil samples from the ground at the town cemetery out on Bandera Road and from a couple of other graveyards in the county. No exact matches.” He’s watching my face, knowing the question that’s beating my brain.