Hidden Things (26 page)

Phyllis returned her wry smile. “Maybe we could catch each other up.”

“I'm sorry,” Calliope said. “I really wanted to see Dad.” Afternoon light slanted through the windows, and Calliope's throat had the pleasant ache that came from a lot of talking, but she'd turned the conversation away from uncomfortable topics or stepped around the land mines of old arguments more than a few times, and it was wearing her down. Also, she was becoming increasingly conscious of the time.

“Oh please.” Her mother smiled without showing teeth—it looked more like a pained grimace. “
I
ought to be the one apologizing.” Her expression took on that same distant, daydreaming look she'd had earlier in the day. “When you—” There was a knock on the front door. Her mother's eyes snapped back to the present. She looked at Calliope, the corners of her eyes tense.

Calliope's brow creased, and a surreal sense of danger sparked in her chest. “Mom?”

Phyllis shook her head and stood up. “Better get that.”

Calliope sat alone at the table for a few moments, bemused, then pushed herself out of her chair with her good arm and moved after the older woman. “I'd be happy to just stay and wait for him to get home,” she said, her voice raised just enough to carry, “but I should get going.”

“Maybe you could hold off on that,” replied a man's voice. Phyllis stood next to the open door, her arms crossed. She had stepped back and to the side to reveal her visitor, but Calliope had already caught sight of the broad, flat-brimmed hat over her mother's head.

The man in the doorway rested his hands on his hips, making it look as though he was simply stretching after sitting in a car for too long, not imposing his size on the two women or putting his hand closer to the firearm hanging from his belt. “Hello, Calli. Haven't seen you in a coon's age.”

“Hello, Jim.” Calliope tilted her head, letting a hint of sarcasm creep into her voice to mask her nervous concern. “Or is it ‘Hello, Sheriff' today?”

“Oh . . .” Jim Fletcher shifted and looked away from both women and out over the dry and rustling cornfields surrounding the farmstead. His breath puffed in the cold air. “I suppose sheriff is the right idea, at least for a little while.”

“Mmm.” Calliope folded her arms, unconsciously mimicking her mother's stance. “You want to come in, or should I get my coat?”

“Oh,” her mother admonished her. “Calli, you don't have to be—”

“How about we go for a drive,” Fletcher interrupted, with an apologetic nod to Phyllis. “No reason for me to track mud into your mom's house.”

“Jim . . .” Phyllis breathed.

“Right.” Calliope hadn't moved, and her face was impassive, but the adrenaline wash at the local lawman's words made her breathing short and tight and left her hands tingling. “Am I under arrest, Sheriff?”

“Ahh . . .” The older man spoke the word as though it hurt. His face sagged. “Do you think you need to be?”

Calliope pursed her lips and tried to remember that the sheriff was a friend of her family's—someone who'd let her off the hook on two tickets when she'd just been learning to drive, and fined her three other times when she had no good excuse and should have known better. “I really don't,” she said, turning toward the kitchen, “but I'll go for a drive if you like.”

He nodded after her. “That sounds about right. I just want to get things straightened out,” he added, to Phyllis.

“She hasn't—”

“It's fine, Mom.” Calliope pulled her coat off the back of the kitchen chair and returned to the room with it hanging over her bad arm—which conveniently gave her an excuse not to use it. She walked over to the door. “I'm assuming your car's warm enough I don't need to put this on.”

“Sure, sure . . .” The older man made room for Calliope to pass, holding the door as he did.

“Jim—”

“It's fine, Mom,” Calliope repeated. She stepped through the door and started down the steps, her eyes taking in the open yard and the tracks of the car her sister had left in. She stopped, remembering the look Sandy and her mother had exchanged just before the younger woman had left. “You should probably call Sandy and tell her you stalled me long enough.”

Her mother said nothing at all as Calliope walked the rest of the way to the sheriff's vehicle.

As the sheriff's SUV pulled out of the driveway and headed down the gravel road that led to the highway back into town, Calliope watched the cornfield on Jim Fletcher's side of the vehicle.

Don't come after me,
she thought.
Just . . . let me work this out before you show up and eat the local police department.
She didn't expect that anyone out in that field might have heard her, but that wasn't the point—her thoughts were more a prayer than a message.

“Something on your mind, Calli?” The sheriff had his eyes on the road, but he could obviously see the direction of her gaze out of the corner of his eye and thought she was looking at him.

“Not much,” Calliope said, sitting back and turning her attention forward. “I think we probably could have straightened things out back at the house, but it means a couple calls back to L.A., and I'd rather the long-distance fees got charged to you.”

Fletcher chuckled. “Well, thank you for not sugarcoating it for me.”

“I do what I can.” Calliope allowed herself a small smirk. Although he was taking her in to his office, the sheriff hadn't put her in the backseat cage. In fact, he'd opened the front passenger door for her even though she'd stood next to the rear door. From where she sat, she could reach him, his gun, a vertical rack-mounted shotgun, and the steering wheel. Either he didn't think that Calliope was really any kind of danger, or he was pulling off the mother of all con jobs to get her guard down as far as possible.

That last was a sobering thought; the only reason the sheriff would have to play that sort of game would be if he were bringing her to Walker, and the supposed special agent had shown up unexpectedly so many times that Calliope couldn't bring herself to rule out the possibility.

She glanced at Jim Fletcher, and her misgivings faded. The older man had stoic and unreadable down to some kind of martial art—she imagined he was a terrifying poker player—but she didn't think he was a very good liar. It was a subtle distinction, but one that mattered a lot to her, and it didn't feel wrong.

“Think your mom's going to beat us into town, at this rate,” Fletcher said, interrupting her thoughts. Calliope looked in the rearview mirror on her side of the vehicle and saw her parents' pickup closing the gap behind them. “Guess she thinks I'm not going to give you a ride home afterward.”

“Are you?” Calliope turned to look at the sheriff. “ 'Cause if you already know you're going to, I'm not sure why we're driving into town.”

“Oh . . .” That familiar, pained expression crossed the older man's face again. “I guess I don't know. It's a little complicated.”

“Sounds like you've got a lot of badges being shoved in your face.” She tried to keep her voice neutral. “That's usually what complicates things for me.”

“Just the one,” the sheriff replied, his voice tinged with just a hint of disapproval. Calliope filed that away for later. “One's enough, sometimes.”

“Sure.” Calliope said, pronouncing it
shoore
. She could hear the verbal tics and phrases of her youth creep back into her voice with almost every sentence she spoke, as though her mouth was dropping into old habits with some kind of relief. “We'll get 'er all fixed up in town.”

“Mmm.” Fletcher's eyes went to his own rearview, and Calliope caught the faintest of twitches at the corner of his mouth and eye. “Think your mom'd be too happy if I pulled her over for speeding?”

Calliope raised her eyebrows. “You're the one with the gun, Jim”—she blew air between her teeth—“but I'm not sure that'd be such a hot idea.”

“You're pr'y right,” he said, holding his poker face. “Don't need that kind of trouble today.”

“Good,” Calliope replied. She let a few more miles scroll by in silence, then: “That badge flasher you mentioned . . .”

Fletcher didn't obviously react, but the air around him seemed to go still. “Yeah?”

“Is he still around?”

Sheriff Fletcher motioned Calliope into a seat in his office. “We'd better make this first part quick.” He lowered himself into his chair. “I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm not going to get a Christmas card if I don't let your mother in here pretty soon.” He raised his eyebrows and opened both his hands, palms up, in Calliope's direction. “Unless you don't want her in here while we talk. It's not like I need to have your guardian present.”

“Let her sit out there all day if you want,” Calliope replied. Her voice was even, but the last few silent minutes of the ride into town had given her time to review the way her mother had played her, and cast a gray pallor over what had seemed an impossibly good reunion.

The sheriff's eyes flickered at her tone, taking in the high spots of color that shone on her cheeks. He rested his arms on his desktop blotter. “Calli, look at me.” His tone was private and familiar—so far from his “sheriff” voice it surprised her into meeting his gaze. “When your mother came to the door,” he said, “her eyes were wet. Now”—he raised a hand to forestall Calliope's angry reply—“maybe you've got good reason to be upset with her, but you need to know that if she could have wished me off her front step right then, she would have.”

Calliope opened her mouth, closed it, and turned away from the sheriff's look. Jim Fletcher had always been hard to fool but, worse, he'd been a hard man to make trouble around—a talk with the sheriff back in high school had left Calliope feeling like she needed to apologize to everyone for being a bother.

Fletcher nodded as though she'd given him some kind of agreement and leaned back in his chair. “So . . . a couple questions before we bring everyone in?”

Calliope glanced back through the office window. Her mother stood near the dispatch desk, her arms crossed tightly over her midsection, talking with her father, who stood with his back to them.

He's thin,
Calliope thought.
Thinner than the pictures.

“Sure.” She turned back to the sheriff. “Just a couple; I'd like to see my dad.”

Fletcher nodded, his lips pressed together. “Fair enough. Back at your folks' house, you said you could straighten this out with a long-distance call. Can I have that number?”

Calliope pulled out her cell phone, scrolled to Darryl Johnson's name, and handed it to the sheriff. “That's the detective who was investigating my partner's disappearance back in the city.”

Fletcher squinted and copied the number onto his blotter. “And . . . he'll be expecting a call?” He handed the phone back to Calliope.