The Next Time You See Me (32 page)

Her car wheezed as it climbed Hill Street. There was, she was realizing, another part of her operating, a more coldly logical part, and it was taking inventory. Who could connect her to Wyatt? How drawn
into this situation was she? She had danced with him at the bar, but she left early, without him—even that blond-headed shit with the trashy girlfriend would have to acknowledge this was the case. She had tended to him at the hospital, but that was her job. Perhaps she had given something away on Sunday in front of Wyatt’s work friend, the one who drove him home from the hospital—but it couldn’t have been too much. They didn’t kiss. She had been keenly aware, before she had an obvious reason to protect the secret of this new relationship, that it would not be wise for her to let her work life be too evidently influenced by her personal life. That was why she had not yet even spilled the beans to Jan and Shurice: she had wanted to make sure this thing was real first. A part of her had wondered if what was developing between them wasn’t just some kind of Florence Nightingale thing; it was a cliché, but she had been hurt before, and so she had decided to tread quietly and cautiously.

She imagined how her parents would react if it got around that she was dating the man from the police sketch, the “person of interest.” The police might say that Wyatt was just wanted for questioning, but the subtext was clear, and the newspaper had spelled it out in fifty-point font:
SUSPECT
. They would tell her she was being foolish, kidding herself; they would tell her that she was hurting the family, her brother and nieces, who didn’t have a say in whether or not Sarah attached them to a killer. And they would be right, goddamn it—but did she really believe that Wyatt was capable of this? Wyatt, this good, gentle, loving man who answered her brash posturing with sweetness and patience, who kissed her as if
he
were the lucky one, as if she weren’t the kind of woman that other men stood up or walked out on?

A kid ran across the street as she started her ascent of Harper Hill, and Sarah braked hard—too hard, really; he was a good twenty feet ahead—her face slick with sweat. “Get it together,” she whispered to herself, easing the car forward and cutting the boy a hard look as he passed. He waved absently, backpack
bouncing against his shoulder. Sarah wiped her forehead with the hem of her blouse.

The fact was that she couldn’t conceive of Wyatt doing harm to another person. The idea was ridiculous. She might not have known him well yet—they hadn’t even gone on a date—but every day she was forced by her work to see people at their most frightened and humbled, which meant that she saw people at their worst. She had treated abuse victims and spoken curtly to the men by their sides, the men whose heavy brows and set jaws implied a threat that they wouldn’t come right out to her and say aloud. She had treated half a dozen people who were arrested in their beds for DUIs, one of whom awoke to the knowledge that she had hit and killed a ten-year-old boy riding his bicycle home from a friend’s house. She had treated two participants in a fight, big men with lacerated lips and broken noses and shattered bones in their hands, one with a ruptured spleen, the other a punctured lung, and listened mildly as they cursed each other and the woman who’d driven them to it. She knew something about the darkness of human nature. She thought she could recognize it when she saw it, and she did not see it in Wyatt.

She pulled onto his street and slowed her car almost to a crawl. Wyatt’s truck was in the driveway, and lights were on in the front room and kitchen. Nothing seemed unusual. Her yearning for him was a physical ache, as if the only thing she needed to do to fix her anxiety was to go inside that home and embrace him, to allow herself to love him and feel his love in return. She was forty-three years old. She had assumed for a long time that love would happen to her, then grown to assume it wouldn’t, and now here she was, a little over a week into this brand-new gladness, in which the impossible had suddenly seemed not just within her reach but within her rights. She hadn’t been unhappy before. She’d had her job, her family, her home, her good friends, and all of those people and things would still be waiting for her if she drove away right now, if she pretended these last two weeks of her life away. But it would never be the same, she knew.
She exhaled, noting how her breath clouded, fogging the windshield. But her head was at last clear. The choice wasn’t between staying or telling; it was between a sorrow she couldn’t conceive of and a sorrow she could.

She rolled up her window and hit the gas.

Chapter Twenty-Three

1.

Christopher ran downhill most of the way to town and made it in half an hour, before full dark. Out of the woods, his thoughts had rebounded with a child’s selfish flexibility to home, its comforts, and even what punishment he’d endure at the hands of his loving, indulgent mother. He started plotting excuses, then just explanations, anything that wouldn’t get him into more trouble than he was already in:
Mrs. Mitchell kept me after school—she wouldn’t even let me out of the closet until four o’clock today.
That was pretty good, blaming her, but what if his mother got mad and went to the school again?
I know I wasn’t supposed to, but I stayed to watch the basketball team practice. I’m sorry.
His mother would buy that one, but maybe that was too safe a route; he’d almost certainly get another night’s grounding, and maybe more. It was like gambling, finding the right lie: risking just enough to minimize the extra punishment but not so much that he brought down on himself all of his mother’s wrath.

He decided that the best bet would be a combination of things:
Mrs. Mitchell kept me a few minutes after to have me finish some work, and I walked home extra slow because I was so messed up after being in that closet all day. You wouldn’t believe this room they put me in, Mom. It was like prison. It was prison, but it was worse than prison. I’m kind of claustrophobic. I couldn’t breathe. I kept thinking I might get sick.
He nodded to himself, pleased, thinking that he could get his mother going on one of her rants about the local education system—how archaic it was to put a child in a storage closet! He was smiling a little coming into downtown, and he decided he’d made good enough time to walk the rest of the way, catch his breath. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and enjoyed the stroll, the way the trees on the square were still clinging to some red and gold, how you could see some straw littering the ground from the previous weekend’s Tobacco Festival. He passed Leanna’s dad’s law office and rolled his eyes, because her dad was such a joke—“Atticus Finch for the ambulance-chasing set,” his father had said a couple of times, and Christopher wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but he got the gist. “Hello there, young man,” Johnny Burke would call out in his deep drawl when Christopher came over to Leanna’s to hang out, eyeglasses pushed up on his head so that his gray hair stuck straight up, slurring a little over the drink in his hand. Or, if he were really sloshed, he’d say, “If it’s not our enemy from the North, come to steal our daughters,” and Christopher had learned to just bob his head sheepishly and grin in an aw-shucks,
You got me, Mr. Burke
kind of way. “Is your dad for real?” he always asked Leanna when they escaped to the basement rec room, and she always groaned dramatically. “God, Chris. Don’t encourage him.”

What a strange town this was, a strange place to end up.

He dragged his feet at the final approach to his house. The adrenaline from his run spent, he now felt heavy with dread, a dread that had nothing to do with the scolding he anticipated receiving from his mother. It was just sadness, a sadness like nothing he’d known yet in his life—abstract, physical. Like he was only getting most but not all of what he needed in a breath. Had he really been in the woods with Emily Houchens just moments ago?

He sat on the steps of the house’s side entrance and crossed his arms against the cold. Both of the cars were gone. His dad would still be at work, but his mom? God, she was probably out patrolling the streets already, working herself into a tizzy. He thought that he ought to
go inside to shed his coat and stow his backpack, make it look like he’d been there longer than he had, but he felt tired and numb; he couldn’t rouse in himself the momentum to stand up and unlock the door.

Forty-five minutes later, he blinked against the approach of headlights. He was relieved, he realized. He hadn’t wanted to be in the house alone. And if his mother would just give him a hug and stay close to him tonight—yes, he wanted his mother, what of it?—he thought that he could endure whatever she wanted to dish out.

The car stopped shy of the garage, and his mother emerged. “What are you doing outside? Did you forget your key?” She was wearing nice clothes, dress trousers and a suede jacket, and she had on the red lipstick she only wore for garden club meetings and dinner parties. There was something brisk and distracted about her manner that made Christopher hesitate.

“Um, yeah,” he said finally.

“Honey, I’m so sorry. You must not have even gotten my note. How long have you been sitting here? Why didn’t you walk to the library or something?”

Cheered that the exact right words were coming to him, he said, “I was afraid I’d get in trouble if I wasn’t here when you got home.”

“Oh, honey,” she repeated. She put her hands on his cheeks. “You’re freezing cold. Let’s get you inside.” She dug around in her purse for her keys. “I didn’t know I’d be gone so long.”

“Where were you?” He followed her into the kitchen. She flipped the lights and stowed her bag on the island, then scowled at a dirty coffee cup.

“I swear,” she muttered. “Your father knows good and well how the dishwasher works.” She turned to put the mug in the washer, then grabbed a towel to wipe the granite. “There was a meeting at First Baptist about Veronica Eastman—trying to organize some kind of volunteer search effort.”

“Mrs. Mitchell’s sister?”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “The one and only.” She tied an apron around her waist and went to the refrigerator. “Cocoa?”

“I guess,” he said.

“It was a mess, really,” she said, putting the milk and cream out on the counter. “Completely unorganized. More symbolic than practical. I think people felt like something had to happen once it made the Bowling Green news, so they’re going through the motions.”

“Didn’t you tell Dad she was wild?”

Her face reddened. “Well, you must have been eavesdropping. That’s just something I heard. I don’t know if there’s any truth to it.” She unhooked a saucepan from the rack and pointed a finger at him. “Not that it even matters, young man. Her personal life has no bearing on what’s happened to her.”

He shrugged and looked at his hands. “Was Mrs. Mitchell there?”

“Yes, she was. I said hello to her. I thought it might do you some good for her to know I made the effort.”

Christopher scooted onto a bar stool. “Yeah, well, she hates me. So you shouldn’t have even bothered.”

“She’s still young yet. She doesn’t seem young to you, I’m sure, but I don’t think she’s even in her thirties. She’s going to take everything personally. It wouldn’t hurt for you to show her some respect.”

He shrugged and grunted a little.

“At any rate, she’s going through a hard time right now, so you’d be wise to pick your battles.” She went to the pantry and came out with a foil-wrapped square of chocolate. He liked watching her carve the bar into shards with her big knife, then whisk the shards into the cream. She shook some sugar out of the bowl, not measuring, then a few drops of vanilla.

When the cocoa was finished, she poured some into a mug, dropped mini marshmallows on top, and scooted it across the counter at him. “Forgive me for getting home so late, sweetheart.” She leaned across the island to kiss his forehead, then wrinkled her nose. “God, Chris. You smell awful. What on earth have you been doing?”

He lifted his arm and sniffed his sleeve, where Emily had grabbed him. There it was, that stench: she had marked him with it.

“I ran home from school,” he said.

“Through a pigsty?”

He shook his head.

“Well, you need to hop in the shower after you finish that. And put those clothes in the washing machine right away.”

“OK, OK,” he said, embarrassed.

“I’ve got to go change before I make dinner. Do as I say with those clothes.”

“God, Mom. I get it.”

She left, perfume making a delicate trail behind her. Christopher tried sipping his cocoa, but now that Emily’s smell was in his nose he couldn’t enjoy it. The liquid was thick and overly sweet, his tongue fixing on some distant sour note in the milk, a precursor to rancidness.

Chapter Twenty-Four

1.

Tony wasn’t enthusiastic about leading a community meeting on Ronnie’s disappearance, but he’d been given little choice in the matter. Sunday evening, after the ABC affiliate in Bowling Green ran Ronnie’s picture on the local news, he got a call at home from Reverend James Riley, head pastor at First Baptist. “Roma,” Brother Jim had said, “is the kind of community that circles the wagons in times like these.” Tony had promised to keep the suggestion in mind but told the reverend that organizing a search would be premature. Where would they begin? He wasn’t even convinced yet that there was a body to look for.

Half an hour later, the police chief, Evan Harding, called.

“I’ve got the mayor in my ear,” Evan said. “The mayor’s got Brother Jim in his ear. Make this thing happen, will you? They just want to get on the Nashville news.”

So Tony did as Evan asked and returned Brother Jim’s call. Yes, he said—on second thought, a community meeting sounded like a fine idea. Yes, sir, it would make a world of sense for you to start by leading a prayer. Five o’clock tomorrow sounded just fine. Thank you for generously offering the use of your church.

The meeting was better attended than Tony had anticipated it
would be on such short notice, but he guessed he had underestimated his neighbors’ morbid curiosity. The Channel 5 news did come, and Tony heard Brother Jim offer the reporter his line about circling the wagons; he was dressed resplendently in a tweed suit with a bow tie, his shave so close that his jowls were faintly flecked with red. The crowd was a motley assortment, some dressed as if for Sunday service, some arriving in their work clothes: coveralls, heavy canvas button-downs and trousers, restaurant uniforms, hospital scrubs. Tony had not slept Sunday night, worrying that he might have a crazed mob on his hands—that folks would come ready to start pointing fingers at every balding, mustached man in the county, or that they’d cry and wring their hands about community safety—but the group gathering in the pews, even occupying the far left and right wings, seemed merely interested, even excited, like fans at a baseball game. They smiled and shook hands across the pews; every now and then a bark of laughter would rise above the regular din. Tony didn’t know if he should be disturbed or relieved, but he leaned on the latter. If the worst he could expect was some crass rubbernecking, he’d take it.