Fallen Mountains, page 9
She wanted to shrug him off, push him away, but Chase stood just a few feet away, seasoning the steaks. She had to be careful. “Drunk already?” she said, forcing a smile. She gently freed herself and offered to help with dinner. Transom stepped aside and threw his head back, finishing his beer. She hoped he was done drinking for the evening—how many beers would it take before he’d get careless, the words tumbling out, the secret spilling like water?
Chase stood at the counter, slicing mushrooms, his flannel sleeves rolled to his elbows. He smiled. “Beer in the fridge. Help yourself,” he said. He grabbed the cutting board with the burgers and headed outside to the grill. “Be right back.”
With Chase gone, Laney turned to glare at Transom. “I thought we agreed to put the past behind us.”
“That expression: put the past behind.” Transom smiled and shook his head. “It’s never made any sense to me. Besides, we didn’t really agree to anything. You asked, but I didn’t agree.” He grabbed two beers from the fridge, cracked them open, and handed her one. He shook his head. “I don’t know how you do it, act like nothing happened.”
“Transom, please.”
Chase came back into the house, the cutting board red from the meat. “Cold out there,” he said, sliding it in the sink and washing his hands. “They said it might snow later.” He set the timer on the stove and picked up his beer. He raised it to Laney and Transom. “To old friends,” he said, smiling.
“Yes, yes,” Transom said. “To history.” He stared at Laney.
Her face burned. She clinked her bottle to theirs and took a swig.
Chase grinned. “This is great, the three of us together. Like old times.”
Chase seemed so happy, so unsuspecting, and that made Laney feel even worse. She watched as he continued humming about the kitchen, steaming the broccoli and then dumping the water off the boiled potatoes. He seemed energized tonight, happier than he’d been for a long time.
“You’re worse than Maggie,” Transom said, “buzzing around here, fretting over vegetables.” He eased himself into one of the kitchen chairs.
“I’ll do the potatoes,” Laney offered. She got out the beaters from the cupboard where Maggie had always kept them, flung a slice of butter into the pot, and added milk.
The timer went off.
As Chase stepped back outside to check the burgers, Laney turned off the beaters. “If you ever cared about anybody but yourself, I’m begging you—let it go. If not for me, then for Chase. Keep your mouth shut.”
Transom crossed his arms. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, talking to me about whether I care about anyone but myself.” His eyes traveled her body.
“That’s not fair.” She traced the rim of the bowl of potatoes with her fingertip. “I do care about him, and Transom, I want to believe that you do, too.”
He stared at her and finished off another beer. Chase came back inside, and Laney immediately began mashing the potatoes again, the beaters loud against the ceramic bowl. Chase turned off the broccoli on the back burner. “You look nice,” he said to her.
“Thanks,” she said. She looked at her sweater and jeans, the sixth outfit she’d tried on before coming. With each one, she’d stared at herself in the mirror, turning side to side, telling herself it was Chase she was hoping to impress.
Transom pulled a brown bottle of pills from his pocket and popped one in his mouth.
The rest of the evening passed with considerable smoothness, given the awkward nature of the situation. Thankfully Transom laid off, and the three of them ended up telling stories and laughing, deep into the night. But in the background of that laughter lay the fact that Laney had betrayed Chase, and it haunted her. She hated herself for hooking up with Transom; she hated that she hadn’t had the self-control. Most of all, she hated her own confusion, the way her heart still seemed to pitch in two different directions.
She hoped this wasn’t a snapshot of how life would look from now on: a precarious almost-happiness tempered at all times by the cloud of Transom looming nearby, threatening to burst and rain havoc. Because he might do that—burst, spill her secret. Transom had always been unpredictable. She couldn’t live like that, holding herself back from each moment in fear that a word, a glance, a gesture, might set him off. Maybe Transom would leave again. Maybe things would simply improve with time. If they didn’t, something would need to be done.
AFTER
Red squinted as the door of the Fallen Mountains police department swung open and the heat from outside soared into the room, cool air sailing out, the whole morning’s worth of work for the old sputtering air conditioner undone, in a matter of seconds. The man stood just across the threshold, looking around the place, still wearing his sunglasses. Unabomber glasses, Red had always called them, thinking about the Montana man whose sketch had filled the nightly news for weeks back in the nineties, until Junior had explained once, “They’re called aviator glasses, Dad.”
“I’m looking for Sheriff Redifer,” the man said, taking off his glasses and tucking them into the pocket of his collared black shirt.
Red stood and stepped forward, extending a hand. “That’s me.” He wished Leigh were here. She had a knack for lightening up a tense room.
“Mick Dashel,” the man said, taking Red’s hand and squeezing it firmly, Red fighting the urge to wince, arthritis acting up with the humidity. “P. I.”
The day before, after finding the plane tickets and wedding plans in the middle of the night, Red had come into the station and flipped through the names in his Rolodex. He’d stopped in the S’s and pulled out an old business card that JT Shultz, just before he’d closed his factory and left Fallen Mountains, had handed him. “You ever need anything,” JT had told him, “you give me a call.” What Red had wanted to do, back then, was set a match to it. I ever need anything, he’d thought, you’re the last person I’ll call. Instead, he’d kept it, tucked it into that Rolodex Sue had bought him shortly after he got the job, mostly forgotten. Junior had helped him set up an address book in his cell phone, so the Rolodex had spent the last few years in the bottom drawer of his desk at the station.
After finding the tickets and wedding plans, though, Red knew he needed to fish out that number and call JT Shultz. Even if the man was a lying, manipulative jerk, he was still a father, and Transom was still his son. If something, God forbid, ever happened to Junior, Red hoped someone would do the same thing, call him.
On the phone he was shuttled through two different receptionists and placed on hold for eight minutes, having had to explain, twice, that he needed to speak to JT directly, that it was about his son, that no, he could not leave a message. When JT finally picked up, Red had just slid a Werther’s candy into his mouth. Heart racing, he slipped the candy onto a napkin at his desk. “Mr. Shultz?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Shultz, this is John Redifer, from Fallen Mountains. I was sheriff, back when you were here. Still am, actually.”
A pause. Had JT forgotten?
“Sheriff Redifer, of course. What can I do for you?” The voice on the other line suspicious now.
Red took a deep breath. “I’m afraid I have some upsetting news, Mr. Shultz. Your son was reported missing a few days ago, and, well, we sort of figured maybe he’d just left town again, him never being one to say good-bye and all, but still, you know, we would follow up on something like this because that’s, well, that’s what we would do. Anyhow, I been looking into things, and last night, I come across two plane tickets in a file of his, one for him and one for his fiancée, Teresa. That’s who reported him missing. Dated for next weekend, it turns out. Also a packet with arrangements for a special event, down in Jamaica. A wedding, it seems.”
No response. Red was rambling, he knew that, his nerves all twisted up over having to explain such a thing to a father. Maybe Red had spat out too much information, too fast. Maybe he hadn’t been clear? “So what I mean to say here, Mr. Shultz, is that it’s starting to look like Transom didn’t just up and leave this time.”
“Yes, I see that,” JT snapped.
Again, a long pause. Red tried to picture what was happening on the other end of the line. Was JT motioning to a troop of assistants? Was he typing things into a computer? Dialing Transom from a different phone? Did he know something, did he hold some piece of information that Red lacked? Was Transom with him? “Mr. Shultz, you there?”
A deep sigh. “I’m here. Listen, I have a guy: I’ll send him out there.”
Strange, Red thought. He knew JT and Transom had a falling-out, years ago—he remembered Jack and Maggie telling him how Transom showed up at their doorstep one weekend— but he couldn’t help feeling like something was suspicious about this. If he’ d received a call informing him that Junior had disappeared, he wouldn’t dream of sending someone in his stead; he’d go himself. Was there something JT knew and wasn’t telling him? “Mr. Shultz, that won’t be necessary,” he said.
“A private investigator, very experienced. He can take care of things, here on out.”
“Sir, I assure you we are putting every resource on this case.” Red felt his skin prickle at the lie. Not so much a lie as a stretch. Every resource. Him.
“He’ll be there tomorrow, first thing.”
“All right.”
“And Sheriff?” Another pause, long enough for Red to detect a flicker of ache behind that sober, dangerous voice. “Appreciate the call.”
So, as promised, here he was, that private investigator JT Shultz had said he would send. Mick Dashel with his aviator glasses and black polo shirt and khakis, crease down the legs, shiny black shoes. His hair was clipped short and spiked, some kind of gel holding it in place and giving it an unnatural luster, strong jawline that he clenched as he stood there, hands folded across his groin. Every cliché Red had ever envisioned in a private investigator. Also a backpack. He was young, maybe thirty or so. Broad-shouldered and fit, and Red felt self-conscious then, with his knees that droned when he bent for too long, his stiff right hand, his thick midsection. When had all that happened, those small betrayals by his own body? He was only fifty-nine. Not that long ago, he’d lobbed a football with Junior in the backyard; he’d dug a walkway and laid the stone.
As Red filled him in on the details of the case, Mick nodded with mild interest, moving around the room, taking stock of his surroundings. “Mr. Shultz mentioned something about a file you have?” Mick Dashel said, when Red was done.
Red turned to his desk. “Yes, here. This will need to stay at the station, though. You understand.”
“Of course. Mind if I take a look?”
Red handed over the green accordion file and eased back in his desk chair.
“May I?” Mick Dashel asked, pointing to a chair across the room.
“Make yourself at home. Coffeepot over there, water in the mini-fridge. Soda, candy.” He motioned to the small kitchenette at the back, across from the room where the school board met, the vending machine where Leigh would slip coins every Tuesday and Thursday, the coil unwinding and releasing some treat that would drop to the bottom. Until two years earlier, Red had rarely bought a thing from that vending machine, but with Sue gone, no one to pack him lunch, sometimes he’d wander back there, fishing quarters from his pockets, hungry.
Mick Dashel took a chair and began leafing through the papers in the file. He pulled a calculator from his black backpack and quickly keyed numbers. He frowned and jotted notes in some kind of tablet with a fancy electronic pen. Any other Monday, Red would lock the doors and head out with the radar, tuck the Jimmy in one of his spots. Behind the Graysons’ white barn on 28. Along the tall hedge of Douglas Fir on Weaver Avenue, bottom of a hill, people always going too fast there, and it was close to the elementary school. More recently he’d been venturing farther out of town, nabbing frackers that hummed past in their fancy pickups, out-of-state plates. “Didn’t know you was a cop in that heap of junk,” one had said to him, the week before. Two hundred fifty-eight bucks for that guy. He’d nabbed him for speeding and driving too fast for conditions, the conditions being that it was when the school buses were out delivering kids.
Today, though, no tickets. He couldn’t just leave Mick Dashel at the police station. Red took out his little notebook and flipped through the few pages of things he’d written down. So it looked like Teresa had been right, after all. He remembered her sitting across from him, eyes wide, breasts pressed to the boardroom table. That ain’t what happened this time. We were in love. Had things gone according to Transom’s plan, the two of them would be packing up for that fancy beach resort right now.
Mick Dashel rose from the chair. “You been out to the Hardy place?”
“Sure, checked Transom’s vehicle. That’s where I found the file.”
“You got a warrant?”
“Yeah.” Anticipating this request, he’d gone to Judge Hess’s yesterday, right after he’d hung up with JT Shultz.
“The Hardy man, the one who sold the farm, what’s his name?”
“Chase.”
“Right. He’s probably our guy.”
Red tried to picture it, Chase as a guilty man. Chase Hardy, feeder of barn cats, one of the only men in Fallen Mountains who didn’t hunt. Chase, who stepped in to break up playground scuffles, who had a herd of little kids that looked up to him and followed him around the playground. A gentle giant, Sue had called him. “What makes you think that?” Red asked.
Mick Dashel gathered his things, placing them carefully into his backpack. He slid the papers back into the accordion file and handed it to Red. “Looks like he sold that farm under pressure to an old friend, someone he trusted. And I’d go out on a limb here and say Transom violated that trust, logging it as hard as he did, selling to the oil companies. Chase also stands to inherit the farm should something happen to Transom. Did you see that in the file? Which means Chase Hardy had motive.” He slung his backpack over his shoulder. “Can you take me out to that farm?”
Red grabbed the warrant from his desk and tucked it in his pocket. He hated the idea of showing up again at Chase Hardy’s place in the Jimmy with Mr. Aviator Glasses and a warrant. “Air-conditioning’s broke in my car,” he said. “Let’s take yours.”
BEFORE
Possum had a thousand regrets about his life, but if there was a single day he could go back and redo, it would be the one when he found the letters. Dozens of them, tucked beneath his mother’s bed in a fancy metal box, varying in length but all handwritten in black ink, some with newspaper clippings, three with poems. It was 1998. He was fifteen and home alone as usual, watching Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots on MTV and roaming the trailer, bored. His mother was at work, supposedly, and she was never home before eight, so Possum carefully pulled off the lid and began sifting through the contents of the box. All of them signed JTS, all of them signed Love.
JT Shultz, Possum thought to himself, perplexed. After looking through the first four letters, Possum realized they were dated. He began searching first for the dates because this was a mystery, a story to be pieced together, one letter at a time, like the Hardy Boys books he used to read, like the Christopher Pike novel on his nightstand. Piece by piece, he put them in chronological order.
Sixteen years. That’s how long it had been going on, the letters. The affair. But how was that possible? How did people keep a secret like that quiet for so long in a place like Fallen Mountains? How had they kept it from him? Nosy as he was, he hadn’t known, hadn’t even suspected. Possum swallowed, a sick feeling lurching its way up his throat. He read the first letter, worn thin from folding and refolding, the ink smudged in places, then the second, then all of them, in order. Some of them were lewd, and he could feel the heat rising in his cheeks as he read the words that JT had written to his mother—at fifteen, there was nothing more nauseating than the idea of his mother caught up in a feverish affair. But some of the letters were tender, apologetic, sweet. I wish things were different. I wish I could leave Marjane, but you know how it would look—not just for me, but for you and Tommy, too.
Then, there was one line, from one letter, four years earlier: Possum counted the years backwards. I was so proud when our boy won the spelling bee. That line, Possum knew with a terrible certainty—that line was about him. Sixth grade. He’d won the school spelling bee. Our boy. Possum had been told that his father was killed in a car accident before he was born, and he’d never had any reason to doubt the thing his mother had told him.
But now the memories began to swim hard at him, a frightful torrent, and all at once he saw his life for what it was, an eddy of lies, all swirling around this one secret. Lavish gifts beneath the tree, birthdays, too: things his mother never could’ve afforded. An all-terrain Red Flyer wagon, a remote-control helicopter, binoculars, a microscope, a ten-speed red bicycle. He remembered Christmas concerts and baseball games: JT coming up after, looking him in the eye, squeezing his shoulder with a strange affection that would make Possum swoon and cringe.
A bewildering sense of longing swept through him. All those times, JT had used the word son. He’d claimed it a hundred times, in the school parking lot, at the baseball field. So why the letters? Why all the secrecy, on both sides? If JT had really loved his mother—and based on the letters, Possum felt sure that he did—why the sneaking around and lying? The longing fell away as Possum saw the truth: JT had made a choice. And he hadn’t chosen Possum and his mother.
With an equivalent amount of dismay, it dawned on Possum that Transom must’ve figured it all out. Transom lurking behind his father at those concerts and ball games, that scowl. Also that appalling fury that Transom had been directing at Possum for almost a year. Although the two of them were the same age— only a few months separated them—Possum had inherited his mother’s small bone structure and delicate shape, so that as a fifteen-year old he only weighed ninety-eight pounds. Transom, on the other hand, had already hit puberty and stood thick and menacing, a formidable force, all muscle and rage. Possum didn’t stand a chance. When Transom held him under water during gym class when no one was looking, when he pissed on his shoes in the bathroom, when he murmured the ugly words, Possum didn’t disagree; he didn’t fight back. Your mother’s a trailer trash whore. And you’re a trailer trash son of a whore.
