Sleeping in Eden (46 page)

Glancing at the clock before he turned off the engine, Dylan felt a little stab of worry at how long he had been gone. The belts had squealed a bit when Dylan started the truck that morning, and at the gas station, he had pulled around to the mechanic shop and taken a peek beneath the hood. The alternator belt was wet, but there was nothing that he could do about that except let it dry out naturally. However, while he was at it, Dylan figured he'd better check the oil and make sure the spark plugs were dry. Everything seemed to be in decent working order, but the quick trip to town he had promised Meg had turned into nearly two hours. He was anxious to get back. To see her.

Dylan left everything in the truck and hopped the fence into Jim's yard. It was strange to retrace his steps to the barn in the light of day. Surreal to remember the desperation of the night
before, the way Meg stumbled beside him, the unexpected refuge they had found. Dylan glanced over his shoulder at the decrepit house and wondered if Jim was even around. Should he stop and say hello? Or grab Meg and go? Jim's alcoholism was common knowledge on the squad, and Dylan had witnessed Jim turn violent on more than one occasion. Maybe it was best to just leave.

Ten steps from the sanctuary of the barn, Dylan heard a door slam behind him.

“Who the hell do you think you are? Get off my property!”

Dylan wheeled around, hands in the air. “Sir! Corporal Sparks, sir!” Dylan's voice snapped to attention and boomed across the space between them. “Private Reid, reporting for duty.” It was a ridiculous thing to say. No one called Jim sir, neither his rank nor his character warranted it. But as soon as Dylan saw the shotgun in Jim's hands, he knew he had said the right thing. The tip of the gun wavered as the drunken man regarded Dylan through slitted eyes.

“It's me,” Dylan said, trying to sound nonchalant though his heart threatened to throb right out of his chest. “I brought you home a couple months ago. Remember? After we had a few too many at the Rooster?” It wasn't
we
who had a few too many, and it wasn't just a few. But Dylan wasn't about to split hairs.

The nose of the gun dipped a little lower and Dylan took a few wary steps toward the sagging porch of the house. Jim was dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a white T-shirt that was more gray than white and bore yellow stains beneath the arms distinguishable even from a great distance. He looked homeless. Homeless and sick.

“I know this is really unexpected, Corporal Sparks, but my girlfriend and I got caught in the storm last night.” A twitch of surprise at how natural it felt to call Meg his girlfriend made the corner of Dylan's mouth curl. It was fine, for now. He wanted to call her more than that. But he couldn't think about that with crazy Jim before him. Dylan tried to focus. “We were in a bad way, sir, and when I realized how close we were to your
farm, well, I figured we didn't really have a choice. That was quite the storm we had last night.”

Jim still hadn't said anything, but a cloud seemed to pass over his face. He put the gun down, propped it against the porch railing, and sat down heavily on the top step. Dylan was afraid for a moment that he would slip right off the edge and smash his head on the cracked cement of the sidewalk, but Jim righted himself and heaved a congested sigh. “Get the hell off my property, you son of a bitch.”

“I will. I will right now, sir, but I have to get Meg first. She's still sleeping . . .”

Dylan was already several paces away when something about the grotesque way Jim cleared his throat made him turn around.

“She's not here,” Jim said.

Dylan froze, uncomprehending. “What do you mean, she's not here?”

“Are you deaf? I said she's not here. She's gone.”

It felt like flashbulbs were going off in Dylan's head, and he stumbled over a patch of uneven ground. Jim's words didn't make any sense, and yet a dark feeling seemed to descend over the farm, a faint awareness that everything was not as it should be. Dylan shivered.

“What do you mean, she's gone?”

Jim shook his head in disgust. “You really are the stupidest . . .” He trailed off, spilling the last of his tirade down his own chest like liquor he forgot to swallow. He looked up suddenly. “She left you. How hard is it to get that through your thick skull?”

“Meg wouldn't leave me,” Dylan said. He sounded hoarse, even in his own ears. “She wouldn't. Not now.” He glanced around the farm, barely taking it in. “Where would she go?”

Jim shrugged. “It's what women do,” he slurred. “They go. They up and leave you.”

“No.” Dylan shook his head, and found that he couldn't stop shaking it. “No. She wouldn't. She didn't.” He spun around and
ran for the barn, calling her name as he went. “Meg? Meg!” Bursting through the barn door, he shouted into the stillness, but even before he climbed the ladder to the haymow, he knew the barn was empty.

There was nothing on the wooden platform but the blanket where they had fallen asleep twined together. He could still smell her skin. He could still feel the weight of her head on his chest. Dylan stumbled uncertainly to the edge of the open haymow and scanned the barn as if it held the secret of Meg's disappearance. There was nothing to see. A soft mound of loose, fresh hay on the ground beneath him. An old plow. A cluster of rotting bee boxes.

“She's gone.” Jim sounded out of breath, and he leaned on the frame of the barn door as if he doubted his own ability to stand upright.

“You keep saying that,” Dylan whispered. It didn't matter that Jim couldn't hear him. He didn't care.

He wanted to scream. He wanted to throw things and hit someone and jump from the brink of the ledge where he found himself teetering, toes curled over the edge. He wanted to do it all again. He wanted to take it all back.

For a sharp, agonizing moment, he wanted to die.

His heart broke, but in mere minutes, he learned that a broken heart can turn into a bitter heart before it even has the chance to grieve.

“I don't believe you!” Dylan screamed. But the truth was, he did. He could feel that Meg was gone as surely as he could feel the crumpled corner of the blanket when he stumbled over it and almost tripped. A rush of vertigo made him light-headed, and Dylan fell backward onto the dusty planks of the haymow and sat with his head in his hands for what seemed like the remainder of his miserable life. But when he looked up, it was still morning. Jim was still framed in the door of his cursed barn.

Dylan scrambled to his feet, leaving the blanket and the memories it held. He half slid down the ladder and landed
hard on the packed floor of the barn. “I'm going to find her,” he rasped, his throat sore from dust and heartache.

“Good luck,” Jim said. Up close, Dylan could see that the older man's eyes were red-rimmed and haunted. He couldn't focus on anything for more than a second, but he met Dylan's gaze once. And in that one look was a lifetime of hurt and anger and regret and hell. Dylan thought for a moment that Jim was going to vomit at his feet, but instead he doubled over and pulled something from the pocket of his jeans.

“She had this.” Jim tipped the object into Dylan's outstretched palm, but as soon as Dylan realized what it was, he dropped it into the dirt at their feet. Meg's ring felt like it had the power to burn. It was a slap to the face, a cruel reminder. A burden he had no desire to carry.

“I don't want it,” Dylan said.

He was too broken to realize that Jim's words didn't make sense. She had this. Not, “She gave this to me.” Or, “She wanted you to have it.”

Maybe, if Dylan had been listening, he would have known.

“So you left?” Lucas could hardly choke out the question, he was so absorbed in Dylan's tale. It was heart-wrenching. It was wrong. And it was wrong that Dylan had just hopped in his truck and driven away.

“Of course not.” The telling had obviously exhausted Dylan, and he pinched the bridge of his nose between trembling fingers. “I drove up and down the gravel roads for hours. I traveled the route between the interstate and back half a dozen times, and stopped at every gas station and truck stop within a thirty-mile radius. I figured she couldn't have gotten too far.”

“And you just, you just trusted Jim? You believed him that Meg had left?”

Dylan paused before answering. “Yes. And no. I did at first. I mean, she was gone. And I was so shocked and hurt, I wasn't thinking straight. But I came back late that afternoon
and parked in a field driveway about a mile from the farm. I circled back and combed his property. Looked through the groves and outbuildings. Tried to find something that would tell me where she had gone. What had happened to make her leave.”

“But you didn't find anything.”

Dylan scoffed. “I'm no detective.” Then all at once his face crumpled, his gaze darting back and forth as if he was scanning the interior of the barn in his mind's eye. “But there was fresh hay on the ground.”

“So?” Angela sniffed. “It was a barn. There was lots of hay.”

“I wasn't gone that long,” Dylan said, ignoring Angela. “He wouldn't have had enough time to bury her. But he hid her. It must have been so simple . . .”

“You're insane.”

“Something happened. He covered her.” He spoke evenly, logically, but his hands trembled on the table. “I looked everywhere except beneath my own nose. If I had just looked. I should have . . . I should have known . . .”

“You should have known that my dad killed your girlfriend in cold blood?” Angela's fury was so unexpected, Lucas started. He had almost forgotten that she was there.

“Nobody said that,” Lucas said calmly. “Dylan didn't say that. We don't know what happened. I'm starting to think we may never know exactly what happened.”

“He just implied that my father shot a young woman and covered up the murder.”

Dylan didn't say anything, so Lucas stepped in again. “She didn't die of a gunshot wound, Angela. She died of a broken neck.”

“An accidental broken neck? A broken neck that apparently my father felt the need to cover up?” Angela was working herself into a lather. “Are you telling me that you believe this shit? He's lying through his teeth, Lucas!
He
killed her and dumped her body in our barn, and now he's trying to frame my father! Why would Jim do that?”

“Maybe Jim woke up drunk and realized that there was somebody in his barn . . .”

“How?” Angela asked.

“The door was open,” Dylan said. “I didn't bother to shut it when I left for town. Maybe he heard me start the truck that morning. It screamed to wake the dead.” He swallowed hard, apparently conscious of his role in alerting Jim to the trespasser in his barn.

Lucas didn't need to remind Angela about her father's history of violence. In the years before he closed in on himself and more or less lived the life of a hermit, Jim had accumulated a long list of misdemeanors, including an aggravated assault from a bar fight that landed one man in the hospital overnight. And Alex had been down to talk to him on more than one occasion about his fondness for chasing teenagers off his property with a loaded gun. There were rumors of undiagnosed PTSD from events that Lucas could only begin to guess at, but he knew that the death of Jim's wife and a stint in the Middle East had to have left indelible marks. The truth was, trying to untangle the gnarled rope that was Jim Sparks's life was like attempting to undo a constrictor knot: impossible.

But, knowing what he knew about Jim, could Lucas believe that the fractured man had gone too far the morning that Meg died? Could he have snapped and done something that he regretted, and then tried to cover it up? That, Lucas decided, was sadly, and distinctly, possible.

“Angela.” Lucas said her name softly because she still looked ready to flay Dylan alive. “Jim had Meg's ring. It was tucked inside his suicide note.”

It wasn't proof of anything, but it was enough to poke a hole in the hot bubble of Angela's rage. She sagged a little, and bit her bottom lip so furiously Lucas was afraid she'd puncture the skin.

“What happened that night?” Lucas asked, directing the question at Angela. He already knew the answer.

“I left,” she whispered.

“And can I presume that you were telling the truth about everything? The fight, the whiskey bottle, the final straw?”

It took her a few seconds, but she nodded. Her eyes were tortured, and Lucas could tell that she was drawing the same conclusion he was.

“I was there.” Dylan studied Angela as if seeing her for the first time. “It was dark, and I had come to the farm one last time.”

“Why?”

Dylan was still staring at Angela when he said, “I was trying to . . . get rid of Meg's things. Her overnight bag and her carry-on. The toothbrushes that I had bought and the doughnuts. All of it. I threw it on the porch because I couldn't stand to have it in my truck. And Angela was just stepping out the door.”