Sour Notes, page 12
It never came.
As my eyes fluttered open, he was standing above me with an outstretched hand to help me up. I sat up and shook him off, holding the side of my head in my hands. Russ and Blake were standing by his side.
As my vision cleared, I realized to my horror that a sea of stunned faces was watching. Most of the senior class was still there helping with the cleanup and had witnessed the brawl. Russ and Blake stood with their mouths agape. Xander was off to the side, a drum still in his hands and his face pale.
I struggled to my feet and pushed Dean away. When he tried to approach me again, Russ and Blake grabbed his arms and guided him to his truck. The last time I saw him, he was behind the wheel, backing the truck out of the space. His class ring, hanging from the rearview mirror on its chain, sparkled in the reflections of an overhead light. In my daze, I thought the twinkle came from his eyes, not the jewelry. Like he was winking at me as he drove away.
As the truck peeled out of the parking lot, Sarah tried to talk to me, but I turned my back and staggered toward Xander. He asked what had started the fight, but I couldn’t really tell him, because then I would have to explain about Sarah and me. Instead, I told him the truth, just not the whole truth. I’d seen Dean chatting up Sarah. We’d fought over it. Period.
When I got home, I snuck upstairs so Mom wouldn’t see my swelling eye. She hated when Dean and I fought. My anger had cooled during the drive home. I didn’t want to get him into trouble. Besides, I realized, I owed Dean an apology too. He didn’t know how I felt, so why wouldn’t he talk to her?
I checked Dean’s room to see if he was there, but it was dark and empty. I guessed he had stayed over at Blake’s house. He often did that when he was out partying. I decided I would apologize first thing in the morning.
Except Dean never came home.
22
The sheriff gave me directions to the accident site so I could see it for myself. Sitting in that interview room, staring at those awful photos, I’d thought that seemed like a great idea. Visit the hallowed ground. Stand on the pavement and imagine what Dean had seen on that morning before losing control of his truck. Walk the edge of the road where someone had stood at his truck and looked in on his mangled body. Like they do in the movies, maybe I would spot something the investigators had missed.
Standing outside in the parking lot under the warmth of the June sun with a copy of some of the accident folder in my hand, though, the whole notion sounded ridiculous. What could I possibly see that trained investigators had missed? After all these years, what potential evidence could exist?
Maybe, I decided, I would go later, once I’d had time to process the horrific images of the wreckage he’d shared. Until I was ready, I needed a friendly face, someone to listen to me think things through. People like that were in short supply in Millerton. Not many in my life anywhere, really.
Stewart’s Consignments was a mere block-and-a-half walk. As my sole friend in this town, Xander would be a sympathetic ear. He would help me forget those awful images.
He was leaning against the cash register in the empty store, flipping through pages of a magazine. As soon as I entered, he smiled and waved toward the back. He scooped up a pair of drumsticks from his desk and headed toward his set. “I was bouncing off the walls last night. Hadn’t played in ages. It was such a blast. Could hardly sleep thinking of jamming again today.” He paused when he realized I had stopped at the desk and wasn’t following. “What’s wrong? Is your father…?”
“He’s okay. At least, he was when I left the house this morning.” I stared at the wall of memorabilia above his desk. The school photos. The graduation certificate. The Camaro. The Wicked Centipedes.
The last photo drew my attention. That last performance. Eyes closed, head back, I had one hand wrapped around the neck of the guitar, the other strumming with a pick. Xander’s hands were a blur as he played the drums in a drenched T-shirt. He watched Sarah at the front of the stage as she leaned forward with the microphone stand in her hand, smiling and singing. In the front row of the audience, Dean, Russ, and Blake stood at her feet, cheering.
A pang of jealousy shot through me. Sarah’s eyes were locked on Dean’s. She always said she sang best by picking a person out of the audience and focusing her performance on them. Is that what led Dean to talk to her in the parking lot later that evening?
I dropped into the chair and studied my hands. “I was at the sheriff’s office looking at the accident report.”
“You were in a wreck?”
Confused, I looked at him then realized he would have no reason to know what I was talking about. “Dean’s wreck.”
He winced. “Why would you be looking at that?”
“Coming back here has stirred up all those memories.” I pointed at the photo. “That party and playing on stage. Getting into a fight with Dean. And then waking up the next morning to find out he’d died.”
“That’s awful, but why torture yourself with the accident report?”
“Found out from Mom today that Dean wasn’t drunk.” I looked up at Xander. “I know the rest of you knew that, but I never did. I left before it came out. My parents and I… I guess we just avoided talking about it.”
He tsked. “I’m really sorry. Such an unfortunate accident. These crazy mountain roads.”
I stared at that photo from the graduation party. We were ridiculously happy in it, clueless our lives were about to crumble. “That’s what doesn’t make sense. I’d never asked exactly where it happened. I just knew he was coming home from Blake’s. The spot he wrecked in wasn’t curvy.”
“Something else must’ve happened, then.”
“I know.” I hung my head and studied my hands in my lap. “I was headed out there to look at it but just couldn’t yet. That’s why I stopped by.”
Xander sat down opposite me. “Then don’t go. Why would anyone want to see that? You’re torturing yourself for something that happened a long time ago. Sometimes, things just go wrong.”
“I would, but there’s more. Sheriff says someone else was there. Tire tracks show someone turned around and parked right beside the accident. Walked around the wreckage and left a bunch of footprints. And then left without calling it in.”
“Oh.” Xander sat back in his chair and looked toward the front of the store, though I knew the electronic chime would announce arriving customers. He’d never been good at confronting things that made him uncomfortable. Avoidance had always been his habit. It’s one of the many traits we shared. Part of why we were such good friends. “Probably just the cops or firefighters, right?”
I explained to him about the deputy being the first on the scene and taking photographs right away. How the flashing red lights of the approaching fire truck were obvious in the early dawn. “So the question is whether it was someone who just got scared and left, or maybe they had something to do with the accident.”
“They don’t know who it was?”
“Not a clue.” I leaned my head back and studied the ceiling. “That’s why the sheriff had me tell him all about that night at the party. About the fight I had with Dean. Everything.”
He fidgeted with a pencil on his desk. “I thought the wreck was in the morning. What does the party have to do with it?”
“They think whoever was at the accident followed him because of something that happened at the party.”
“That seems like a huge leap.” He stood and paced around the warehouse, running his hand through his hair like he always did when he got agitated. “Remember when we were down in Asheville and that guy tried to mug you? He had been watching you collect money in your guitar case. Maybe it was something like that.”
I laughed. “Dean never had much money. Besides, no one would mug you out in the middle of nowhere.”
“All I’m saying is everyone at the party loved Dean, right? You’ve said it yourself. Superstar.”
“Well, yeah, unless he got in a fight with someone there over something.”
“It wasn’t that big of a building. We would’ve known if he had.” Xander leaned forward and pointed at me. “The only person he got into a fight with that night was you.”
I clasped my hands together and hung my head. “There has to be some explanation.”
“There is,” he said softly. “Dean had a stupid wreck. Maybe someone stopped, checked on him, and then left. It happens.”
It was the most logical answer, so I nodded slowly. “I guess.”
He sat down again and put his hand on my shoulder. “The accident was a long time ago. You’ve got enough going on with your father. It just feels like picking at this isn’t healthy for you. Leave it alone.”
23
But I couldn’t leave it alone. The accident photos haunted me too much. The twisted metal. The shattered glass. The blood-splattered seats. The same horrific scene, photograph after photograph, shot from different angles. Each shard of glass on the dash lay in the same spot. Each dried drop of blood on the seat remained affixed in the same pattern. The John Deere hat on the floorboard never shifted positions.
Nothing moved in the photos except for the graduation tassel that hung from the rearview mirror. A gentle morning breeze must have been blowing through the open doors and broken windshield. The dangling threads shifted in each photo.
Dean made me laugh at the cartoons he sketched. Caricatures of teachers, coaches, friends, and even our parents. He would magnify some physical feature, which was funny enough, but he also added speech bubbles that had them saying ridiculous things.
The best, though, were the little stickmen he drew in the margins of his textbooks. On each successive page, he would adjust the figure ever so slightly. A foot forward. A knee bent. A mouth opening into an O.
By the end of the book, the little man would have moved from one end of the page to the other, usually with a dog, a bear, or a group of other stickmen in pursuit. By flipping the pages rapidly, he could make the characters come to life, the little man racing for his life to escape his pursuers. He would fan the pages with his thumb as I giggled.
On the last days of school each year, he would spend hours erasing his art from his textbooks before turning them in. Getting grounded for defacing school property was not the way to start the summer break.
I imagined stacking the photos from the sheriff’s folder and thumbing through them, making the tassel come alive, twisting and spinning in the wreckage.
I decided to do more than just visit the accident site. I retraced the entirety of Dean’s last drive.
Blake’s childhood home looked like almost every other house on the block. A small front yard with scraggly grass. A covered front porch the width of the house with an old couch for seating. Peeling white paint. Faded shingles.
Growing up, I had never thought of this part of town as run-down. Despite owning acres of land, we’d never considered ourselves wealthy. Money was always tight, but my parents had maintained their property the best they could. In this neighborhood, where more people rented than owned, it was different.
The mills had built these houses a century ago for the workers they’d brought in from scattered farms. The homes were functional, not luxurious, since the employees toiled long hours. By having somewhere to sleep and raise a family close by, they could work more.
When the factories closed, the corporations that owned them sold off the houses. A few lucky employees had saved enough money to buy their own. Investors had bought others then rented them out just as the old plants had. However, the bosses no longer drove by to ensure maintenance was being done.
Anna was one of the exceptions. She owned her house, a point of pride with her. Perhaps because of that, the yard was better kept than others on the street. Or maybe Xander was just good at keeping the grass cut and the weeds pulled.
I didn’t know if he still lived there. I hadn’t asked. Since Anna had owned it, maybe Xander inherited it when she passed.
Sarah’s old house was in between the two. Since she’d lived there for only a year, I had been inside just a few times. And mostly just to her bedroom, so I moved quickly to avoid being caught by her father or stepmother. Xander wasn’t the only one we tried to hide our relationship from.
The house was laid out just like Xander’s. They all probably were. A den in the front. A kitchen in the rear. A flight of steps to the second floor with two bedrooms. A slightly larger one in the back.
On that fateful morning, Blake’s father had come down those steps to brew coffee and found Dean asleep on the couch. He didn’t remember him coming in the night before, but he didn’t remember coming home himself either. He had been hanging out at Sammy’s, tossing back beers and shooting pool.
But he wasn’t surprised to see Dean. He often slept there. With a swift kick to the couch, Blake’s father told him to get home. Skeeter worked hard. He needed the lazy good-for-nothing home doing his chores, not sleeping the day away.
Dean grabbed a cup of coffee—much to Blake’s father’s dismay—and went out to his truck parked at the curb without going upstairs and saying goodbye to Blake. It was about a quarter to six when he cranked the engines. The neighbors were sure of the time because he had busted the muffler driving over a rock in a field. It woke Blake, who thought little of it before he fell back to sleep. Sarah’s father heard it from his bedroom in the back of their house and cursed the noise. Plenty of people could attest to the time Dean left.
I didn’t know which way his truck had faced that morning, but it didn’t really matter. Whether he’d started out going north or going south, he would have worked his way out to Broad Street, the primary thoroughfare through Millerton, then turned onto the two-lane road leading to our farm, miles away.
I drove the route, thinking of my brother doing the same that morning with just the hint of the sun over the edge of the ridges to the east. Much as he would have, I slowed for the curve that caused me to lose control just a day before. Dean knew the road at least as well as I did, probably better. Up a rise, through some S-curves, down the other side—a slippery stretch of road that had seen many wrecks over the years, but Dean handled it that morning without an issue.
Then the road straightened out. A row of trees lined the right side. One of them had claimed my brother’s life. On the other side of the road ran a creek, which could become a raging river during torrential rains. The water raced down the mountains and overfilled the channel, flooding the surrounding farmland at least once every few years. No houses were close to the road because of the flooding—they were all set back on the other side of the sprawling field. Because they were so far away, the residents wouldn’t have heard the impact unless they were outside. Only the farmers milking their cows thought they had heard a car skidding but didn’t think enough of it to investigate.
I wanted to stand where he’d taken his last breath, but I wasn’t sure how to find the spot. The skid marks would have faded long ago. Would a scar still be visible on a tree all these years later? But which tree? The stretch was at least a half mile long, so I despaired. I crept down the road, searching for any sign.
Then a flash of white caught my eye. A small wooden cross nearly hidden in the tall weeds. I pulled my SUV off to the side of the road just beyond it and trudged back. The lettering had faded, but I could still make out the name.
Dean
The rough edges pricked my fingertips as I slid my hand along the bark of the nearby tree, feeling for imperfections. Perhaps a bump here. A divot there. Roughly the height of a truck hood.
Or maybe it existed only in my mind. Did I need to see it so badly that I could conjure it?
Stepping back, I looked at the other trees. Maybe the one he’d hit was so damaged it had been cut it down. Should I be looking for a stump instead, the sign of another fatality from the accident?
Of course, a backhoe could have pulled the stump from the soft mud. It wouldn’t have taken too much effort.
Through the trees, I spied the background of the photos from the sheriff’s department. The barn, where the farmer had been milking his cows, stood in the distance.
I returned my attention to the imperfections in the tree’s trunk. This had to be it. The point of impact.
If that was true—and it had to be, just had to—then the driver’s seat would have been… I paced off the distance and stood still. The low-hanging branch stretching away looked like the one I’d glimpsed through the shattered windshield in the photos, the leaves dancing in the background beyond the swaying tassels hanging from the mirror.
I was standing where Dean had taken his last breath. Or maybe I just wanted to believe I had found the exact spot. But if I was right, that means…
I spun to face the road and scanned the ground between me and the asphalt. I took a step closer to the pavement and turned back to face the truck, imagining my shoes sinking into the boot prints from seventeen years earlier. Someone had stood here. Close enough to touch Dean. They could have easily helped him. But they didn’t. Who would be that callous?
Maybe the farmer had heard the crash after all. Came out to investigate. Found Dean dead or dying. But why not call for help? What would he have been hiding? An old still in the barn? A cash crop of marijuana hidden in the field’s corner?
But the highway patrol wouldn’t have looked for that. They wouldn’t have had any reason to. So it was someone else. Someone who had something to hide.
I looked down the straight two-lane road. Not a car had passed in the time I’d been standing on the side of the road. It would have been even more desolate early on a Sunday morning. Dean’s headlights would have easily cut through darkness, but daylight had already been growing. The patchy fog wasn’t thick enough to have fooled him into turning off the road. He knew this road as well as he knew our own fields.
