I shifted into first gear and sucked in a shaky breath. Everything I loved most in the world fit in this tin box on the prairie. I wasn’t going to allow anyone to take it away. Or, for that matter, let Rosalina Marchetti make it anything less than it was.
“We’re forever,” I said, the words we used to write together on the sidewalk at school, in the sand at the beach, in the glass fog on the car window.
Sadie watched me drive away, growing smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror, until the blackness swallowed her.
The pickup crawled up the curved drive. The timed security lights from the sprawling ranch house glimmered through the trees. A cleaning crew showed up once a month to throw open the windows and dust, but the house had remained empty since Mama left it. I can’t say I was all that thrilled about walking into it alone after the events of the last twenty-four hours, not knowing what hid in the dark beyond the reach of the security lights and a moon that flitted in and out of smoky night clouds.
Stepping out of the pickup, I slung my backpack over my shoulder, gripped the.45 in my right hand and the suitcase in the other, and moved toward the veranda. I groped under the cracked pot near the porch swing for the key. The family ghost, propelled by a gentle breeze, rode the swing back and forth. The air smelled wet and fresh, like a storm was coming. The door gave a familiar whine as I opened it, and I punched in the security code.
Sadie and I had yet to go through Mama’s things. Neither of us wanted to admit she would never return.
But I was thinking the time had come to admit a lot of things.
The house felt hollow, empty, a shell of what it used to be. I quickly flipped on lights to dispel the shadows, dropping my suitcase and backpack at the staircase, heading down the hall, not to Mama’s room in the newest addition, but toward the kitchen and the centerpiece of my childhood-a long oak farm table where we ate and laughed and learned algebraic equations that left their permanent imprint in the wood. Where Mama and Daddy had their fight.
I opened the louvered doors of the cozy utility room off the kitchen. This was Mama’s favorite space. Her small antique desk still faced the big window Daddy had cut out for her, once a view of lazy cows and inquisitive wildlife and little girls thinking up games that occasionally resulted in stitches.
Here, I had curled up in a slice of sun on the pine floor, listening to the steady vibration of the dryer, watching Mama pay bills or write letters.
It had always been my safe room. If there was anything to discover, I was certain it would be here.
I set the gun on the top ledge of the desk, moving aside a Hummel figurine of a girl playing piano, a bowl of seashells, and a small blue-velvet-covered book of Emily Dickinson poetry.
The gun looked ugly beside them, its character changed forever today, the first time I fired out of fear.
Mama’s window loomed, a big black hole into the night. The security lights shone only on the front of the house and tonight’s schizophrenic moon was in hiding.
I imagined a face emerging in the glass like a floater rising to the top of a lake.
A man, an attacker, could be standing on the other side and I wouldn’t know until the shards shattered and rained all over me.
Stop it, I told myself. Stop it!
I yanked at the cord of the blinds, slamming them down.
The desktop rolled up easily. Inside, the desk was riddled with cubbyholes and rows of tiny drawers.
The middle drawer in the top row always held the most fascination for Sadie and me, with its miniature keyhole and a crudely carved monkey gargoyle, its hands over its eyes.
The irony was not lost on me today. I pulled on the drawer, but it didn’t open. I closed and opened ten other drawers, but they revealed only the usual debris: paper clips, old car keys, a bundle of rubber bands, a handful of buttons that weren’t related.
I saved the large right-hand drawer for last, giving it a solid yank. I knew what was inside: a plain white business envelope grimly labeled “Read After My Death.” As one of her last lucid acts, Mama made a specific point of showing me exactly where it was. Funeral arrangements, she said. I flipped over the envelope, tempted to break the seal. Instead, I slid it deliberately back into the drawer. There were other things to discover first.
I heard a scratching sound. A rat running along the woodwork?
No. At the window. Something outside.
It’s nothing, I told myself. Just like all those times as teenagers when Sadie and I lay in our beds upstairs, egging each other on, imagining all sorts of things congregating in the dark.
I cautiously pushed aside the blind because the nine-year-old version of Sadie wasn’t there to pay a dollar to do it.
Not a face. The fingers of a tree danced on the glass.
The wind was beginning to blow, the storm coming. The moon, gone. I dropped the blinds and checked the locks on every door and window in the house. I yanked every curtain closed, flipped on every light. When I was done, I felt marginally more secure.
Rummaging around in the large cabinet over the washing machine, I found a feather pillow with the right degree of mushiness and a set of striped blue sheets, smelling like they’d just been pulled from the line outside the window.
Halfway up the staircase, exhaustion overtook any paranoia about what lurked out there in the night. My bandaged knee ached. I turned on the light when I reached my room, taking in the bare twin mattresses, the bright yellow furniture, the red curtains running with black ponies.
With what little energy I had left, I thought about Fate. I thought about it as I kicked off my boots, as I tugged on the fitted sheet, as I yanked my hair out of its sloppy pin-up job, as I tucked the gun under my pillow, a big McCloud no-no.
I thought about my brother, Tuck, who used to sit on the edge of this bed and tell me stories before he died in a car wreck on his eighteenth birthday and left a bottomless hole in my childhood. I thought about Rosalina, still searching for her stolen daughter. I thought about Anthony Marchetti, a killer of children, and wondered again what in the hell he had to do with me.
The rain came as I shut my eyes.
I never knew Roxy Martin, but I saw gauze from her prom dress hanging like a turquoise ghost from a hundred-year-old oak tree a half-hour after the breath left her body. It plays like a movie in my mind. The mangled Mercedes convertible in the ravine. The flashing lights of the police cars that blocked the road, their headlights pointed toward silhouettes of three men down by the river searching among the wreckage for pieces of a pretty girl. The loud drumming of the helicopter ambulance landing on the black road ahead of us.
I read about Roxy in the paper the next day and the next: a sophomore, a star volleyball player, a daughter of a single mom, and the victim of a senior boy who drank straight vodka out of a plastic water bottle at the dance and survived the accident with a bruised spleen and two broken legs.
That was four years ago. I had been in Wyoming, driving back to Halo Ranch on my day off after picking up a prescription for a sick horse. Sitting there in my pickup, the police lights strobing my face, I was unable to tear my eyes away from the scene. I couldn’t breathe. A psych major halfway to a Ph.D., I could identify my first panic attack.
I could also draw a line to its source.
Tuck.
I’d never had a full-blown attack since. But this morning, after a brief, fitful night of sleep in my old bed, I sat at Mama’s kitchen table and my hand trembled while I pulled my gun apart to clean it.
I could be the daughter of a monster. For the first time, I gave that realization the freedom to roam my brain. Sadie’s revelation about Daddy’s words had opened a dark chasm.
I love her like she was my own.