Harlan’s scalp was prickling, the hair standing up on his arms. He said slowly, trying to sound confused, “Why would somebody kill Mom?”
“Why do you think?” His dad laughed, the sound harsh and jarring, and Harlan had to control himself not to leap forward and … what? Maybe the barrier wasn’t just there to keep the prisoner in. Maybe it was also to keep the visitor out, because if it hadn’t been there, he’d have been across the table.
“You saying somebody else was sleeping with her?” he asked. “And that he killed her? Who?”
“That bookstore guy,” his father said. “I’ve always known that was who she went off with. Looks like I was right after all, except that she didn’t go far, did she? Right there under my feet the whole time. Maybe she wanted to go with him, and he didn’t want to take her. Maybe she told him she was pregnant. Or maybe she told him it was over. Maybe they were fighting about it, and he lost his temper and was, I don’t know, shaking her. He probably grabbed her neck just to shut her up. He probably didn’t even mean to do it. How the fuck do I know why?”
Harlan was going to be sick. He said slowly, “She was pregnant?”
“No. I don’t know. Whatever. It wouldn’t be the first time she used that line, though, would it? You’ve got to believe me, Harlan. It wasn’t me.”
Inside Harlan’s mind, pieces were starting to fall into place like the wooden blocks in a Jenga game. Click-click-click-click-click. He said, “If you want a lawyer, hire one. Maybe you’ll have to choose between that and the bail bond, I don’t know. I guess that’s your choice. Like you always say, it’s your money. You worked for it. Spend it however you want.”
“Harlan.” His dad had his hand on the Plexiglas now, was leaning forward like he was trying to get through it by sheer force of will, and it was everything Harlan could do not to lunge forward himself and shove him back. Which he couldn’t do, because he couldn’t get through.
His dad’s face. His dad’s hand, coming at him. It was like a horror movie, but you couldn’t turn it off.
“I’m asking you,” his dad went on. “For Annabelle’s sake. What’s it going to do to her to have me in here? You’ve got to help me hire those … expert witnesses, or whatever. There’s no proof I did anything to her. It’s a mistake. I’m your father. You know I wouldn’t do this. So you’re pissed at me. Fine. Everything I did, I did for your own good. I toughened you up, and it worked. You were a mama’s boy, and you’d have stayed one without me. You can’t be soft and make it in this world. Twenty million a year, that’s how much I did for you. Twenty million. When I get out of this, we’ll talk. I’ll explain.”
Harlan said, “Explain it to the judge.” And hung up.
34
Battle Scarred
Jennifer was just pulling up to the house when she got the call. She fumbled the phone out of her purse, looked at the screen, and said, “Harlan?”
“Could you come meet me at the jail?”
“Uh … of course. I just got back with your sister. Or two of your sisters. Annabelle and Vanessa. But I can come, if you want.”
“I could use you here.”
“I’m on my way.”
She hung up the phone and told Harlan’s sister Vanessa, a tall blonde who was as Viking-beautiful as Harlan himself, “I need to go pick Harlan up at the jail.”
“I thought you said he took a car,” Vanessa said with a lift of her eyebrows.
“He did. But …” She was itching to put the car into reverse. She hadn’t turned it off, and she didn’t do it now. Something was wrong. Or something was important. Harlan’s voice hadn’t held the weary strain of last night. It had been filled with something else. She couldn’t tell what, but that voice was dragging her across town.
It was rage, probably. Grief. How could you not feel that?
She couldn’t believe he’d gone to see his father. He’d said, “Who knows why he wants to see me. Doesn’t matter, really. Maybe I feel like I need to face him. I want to ask him why. I know it’s stupid. What do I expect him to say? But I still need to ask him.” His Norse-god face looking so troubled, all she’d wanted to do was put her arms around him. How could she, though? He wasn’t even the father of her child, not for sure, even though he felt like it. Or even though she wanted him to be. She wasn’t sure which.
Annabelle said from the back seat, “Maybe I should have gone to the jail, too. Harlan shouldn’t have had to do that alone.”
“No,” Vanessa said. “You shouldn’t have.”
Jennifer tried to think what to say, how to put this. “Harlan didn’t want you to,” was what she came up with. “He needs to feel like he’s protecting you now. It matters to him, because he couldn’t do it before. If you really want to see your dad, though, you should tell Harlan so.”
“I don’t,” Annabelle said. “I can’t stand to. I feel like I should, though. I feel like …”
Her voice wobbled, and Vanessa said, “Let’s go in the house. We’ll make lunch and talk about it. You can tell me what happened. What’s been happening.”
She hadn’t been home for years, Harlan had said, but she was picking up the big-sister role all the same. And finally, they were out of the car, and Jennifer could leave.
She had to consciously keep her speed down as she drove, the turns announced in the preternaturally calm, robotic voice of the navigation system. She had time, though, to wonder why he had asked her to come instead of Vanessa.
Because he was protective, that was why. Because she was separate from it, and he wouldn’t be dragging her into confronting too much, the way he’d have been doing with his sisters. He was a big brother all the way, and if that just made her like him more, well … it was better than being attracted to a jerk, right?
Her mom had said, one Sunday morning after Mark had dropped her off at home and headed out again to go fishing, “You know, you can ask for more.”
“I don’t think Mark has more,” she’d answered.
“Then that’s your answer,” her mom had said. “Don’t you think?”
You could ask for more, she guessed. That didn’t mean you’d get it. Maybe you didn’t ask because you were afraid you wouldn’t get it, and it would hurt too much to admit you wanted it. So much safer to settle for less.
The drive was only ten minutes, but once again, she’d left the city behind, because the Detention Center was the definition of “in the middle of nowhere.” A slab of gray, windowless concrete set back from a lonely intersection, the land around it so flat, there weren’t even ditches. The road just stopped and the ground began, and it went on forever. There were hardly even trees, because this was the tallgrass prairie. Just with no tall grass.
Maybe it had felt like limitless possibility to those Norwegian settlers, but she wondered. She’d done a school project on Norway once, back in the fourth or fifth grade. She’d paged through library-book pictures of neat, multicolored houses, red and yellow and orange, bright and cheerful, set side-by-side next to a harbor. Spectacular mountains and summer valleys that looked like something out of a fairy tale. And fjords. Lots and lots of fjords. She’d never seen a fjord other than in those pictures, but she knew the word. She’d etched the jagged back-and-forth of the coastline with a knife in salt dough, building up the ridges of mountains down the center and painting them brown with white at the tops, because they’d be covered in ice and snow.