Odd angle, lit by moonlight.
A baptism, the sixth in a series.
Two men, my father and my uncle, washing off sins in the lake.
June 7, 2005, scrawled on the back.
I tell the reporter the story Maggie told me, about the day five years ago that Odette disappeared.
How she visited her mother in the nursing home to mourn. Her mother had touched the mole on the back of Maggie’s neck. Your father has one in the same place.
Maggie remembered no mole on her father’s neck. But the reverend had skin cancer when she was little. Maybe the mole had been burned off. Maybe her mother was just lost in dementia.
The first thing Maggie begged of Rusty was to look hard for a scar on the back of the reverend’s neck. There wasn’t one.
Maggie told Rusty that the worst thing was not that she had Frank Branson’s blood in her, but that she didn’t have Odette’s.
“I believe Maggie,” I repeat to the reporter. “I believe she didn’t know.”
“And the reverend? Will you be able to forgive him?”
Finn shifts in his chair. I know that he never will.
Even though the reverend owned up to a lot in his statement.
Leaving the shovel on the porch. Odette never did understand the nature of forgiveness.
Making a repentant, sobbing phone call. I was drunk. Almost told Odette the truth that night.
Following Odette to the field where Wyatt buried the gun that killed Trumanell and Frank Branson. That was Wyatt’s one job and he blew it.
“Let’s wrap this up.” Finn’s anger chops at the air.
“No,” I say quietly. “I want to answer.”
I draw in a tight breath. “The reverend said it was the Lord’s hand that led him to the Branson place. He said it was his hand that plucked the eye out of Frank Branson as a souvenir before he threw on the first shovelful of dirt. He said he would do it again if he had to, seventy times seven, no matter who died, and God would forgive him.”
I hold my hand in the air, fingers spread wide, like Trumanell’s.
“He said it was this hand, my hand—and the head slam into the bathroom floor—that wiped away his memory of exactly what happened to Odette that night. I’m not going to let him get away with that.”
I am no longer emotionless. My voice squeaks on the last line.
Finn jumps out of his chair in the corner. This is over.
The reporter nods. He shuts off his recorder and tucks it in his backpack. He says Thank you.
But I know what he thinks.
He thinks I’m just a trailer park girl from Oklahoma who got herself into a little trouble.
That my promise is just words.
Which it is. Six, to be exact.
In my pocket, I finger the soft edges of Odette’s piece of paper.
66
Two weeks before classes start, against Bunny’s wishes, I’m back at the Blue House. Finn isn’t too crazy about the idea, either.
Trumanell and Odette are still out there. So is Frank Branson, if anybody cares and nobody does.
I begged Finn. Let me finish cleaning out the house. I need an ending. I promised to work it 9 to 5, like a regular job, and sleep in a hotel, not the closet. If he was still worried about that accidental kiss, he didn’t even need to see me.
He said he’d leave the key under the mat and a $750 check for the job.
Of course, I’m not really looking for closure. That doesn’t exist for someone who has been trying to lick the envelope shut on her mother since age ten. I am looking for something thirty-eight cops and CSIs might have missed.
The second I walk into the kitchen, my eye goes to the empty slice out of the bookshelf. The Betty Crocker cookbook is gone for good, boxed up in an evidence trailer, every page searched and swabbed with no significant result. The kitchen feels a hundred times lighter for it.
I walk the house and pull up every blind, letting in the sun. I’m relieved that somebody has cleaned up the bloody bathroom floor, removed my “weapon,” eliminated any fingerprint dust, stripped the white cloud off Odette’s bed.
I take the house square inch by square inch, room by room. I pack up an old typewriter tin of bobby pins, Victoria’s Secret underwear and Epsom salts, a prosthetic leg with purple toenail polish, and five boxes of bullets I find under a loose floorboard.
Every night, Bunny calls. Every night, I tell her it’s going fine.
Every night, I sleep in the closet and dive right back into the lake with Odette and Trumanell. I call Rusty and wake him up. He assures me the lake has been dragged once a year since Trumanell disappeared and asks if I’d like to come over for burgers on the grill.
On the third morning, I dethrone the old man on the wall at the front door. It’s empowering, deciding whether he is trash or treasure. I decide he’s neither, which is a problem with a third of the items in the house.
I flip over the frame. The paper on the back is brown and crumbly. Someone has written: Sheriff Reginald “Reggie” Hornback. 1829–1898.
So that’s who this grumpy asshole is.
Rusty had mentioned this guy in one of his campaign interviews. He is running for mayor on a platform to reform the town’s image, railing against “the historic mafia of the Blue House,” suggesting that “corn and kindness” be the town legacy.
There is a faint diagram sketched in pen below the old man’s name. A rip runs through the middle. I press the edges together. It’s so faded I can barely make it out. Various rectangles, all assigned numbers. A street called “Mourning Dove.”
It takes me a minute to realize I’m looking at a map of graves. One of them is marked with a T.
Dandelions are growing around the old headstone, little yellow pops of resurrection. Just like on my mother’s.
I want to think this has profound meaning—that God planted them for a reason. I can’t ever think like that, or I’d wonder why he sent two seeds of buckshot directly into my left eye.
I looked it up once—a single dandelion plant can produce two thousand seeds. Two thousand wishes. I know that if all those billions of wishes came true, if dandelions really held any power at all, I wouldn’t be watching forensic archaeologists carefully dig up a grave to find Trumanell.
Rusty said that finding a grave by using the dirt on a pair of boots might be a needle in a million haystacks. It’s a lot easier if one of the two men who dug it draws you a map.
When I hear the shout about a metal leg, I feel my own legs go out.
Two bodies. Not one.
I’m still sitting on the ground when they tentatively confirm that the remains of Trumanell Branson and Odette Tucker are side by side on top of Sheriff Reginald Hornback’s coffin. Faces up, in very different stages of decay, within sight of their commemorative statue.
An old man in a faded blue jumpsuit limps over to help me up. Rusty had pointed him out earlier as the cemetery caretaker. Ever since the Korean War, Rusty said, the man had struggled with a limp and insomnia that made him troll the cemetery at night. Rusty was just trying to distract me from the sickening moment; he didn’t know he had slid in another piece.
He’s insisting I don’t get too close to the grid that’s been set up around the plot. But I can see the brush that is carefully sweeping out the dirt from the sockets of Odette’s eyes.