Page 27 of Cut Off from Sky and Earth

Twenty-Six

Tristan

F or months after Tate showed up and beat the shit out of me, I waited to hear that he’d been arrested. I was sure my anonymous tip would help the police connect him to Dana Rowland’s murder. But the news never came.

Now, I put aside the conversation with my mother and what I’m sure is Tate’s latest gambit—faking his death—and take a long overdue, clear-eyed look at what happened in Arizona. Mom isn’t the only one who hasn’t been completely forthcoming.

Less than two weeks before the dust storm, before Dana Rowland’s brutal stabbing, I got a card in the mail. There was no return address, but it had a Tempe postmark. I didn’t recognize the spiky printing on the envelope. I took it to my bedroom to open it.

It was a sixteenth birthday card, which was weird because I’d had my birthday in January, more than a month earlier.

Weirder still, the image on the front was two cartoonish males sitting in a convertible.

A speech bubble over the passenger’s head read “Happy Birthday, little brother! Time for you to take the wheel!”

My throat was tight and dry as I flipped the card open. Inside, in that same jagged handwriting, there was a more personalized message:

I wasn’t much older than you are now when Dad showed me what it meant to be a man. That pussy Mom married can’t demonstrate, so it’s up to me to be a role model. Meet me at the ASU bookstore on Saturday at 3:00.

My stomach heaved, and I gagged but managed not to puke.

“Not on your life,” I muttered as I ripped the card in half, then fourths, and continued to rip the thin card and the envelope into smaller and smaller pieces until they were nothing more than two large handfuls of confetti.

I crept to the hall bathroom, tossed the scraps into the toilet, and flushed it.

On Saturday, I went for a long trail run up through the mountains.

I ran for miles, to the point of exhaustion.

I ran until my spent body and tired mind were too worn out to worry about Tate’s overture and what it meant.

I thought I could forget about it, and him.

Then he showed up at the house days later.

I never told my mother about the card. Initially, I kept it from her because I knew the fact that Tate had tracked us down would upset her.

And later, after the haboob, I kept it to myself because I suspected the card, my failure to meet him, or perhaps the combination of the two played a role in Dana Rowland’s death.

One line from the note ran through my head in a nonstop loop for months, afterward: “I wasn’t much older than you are now when Dad showed me what it meant to be a man.

” I could only guess what that initiation into manhood had entailed, but I knew for sure that I didn’t want to be the kind of man my father had been and my brother had become.

What I didn’t know—and still don’t know now—is exactly how much responsibility I bear for Dana Rowland’s murder. Was his plan always to kill her or did he do it to send me a message?

I click through the cold case files until I find what I’m looking for.

Transcripts of the call providing tips and information about the Rowland case.

I search through until I spot Tate’s name and then read the follow-up: When the homicide detectives gathered university personnel for interviews, they did ask to speak to him, but he hadn’t shown up for work since the day of the dust storm, not even to pick up his final check. Tate Weakes simply vanished.

I continue to read through the chronology.

To their credit, the detectives did attempt to track Tate down.

But a seasonal laborer moving on without leaving a forwarding address isn’t, in itself, a red flag.

They were understandably focused on suspects they could find—Dana’s boyfriend, an old coworker who had a crush on her, a fraternity brother who’d harassed her at the university fitness center.

Although none of these leads panned out, it’s not surprising Tate fell off the detectives’ radar.

What is surprising is that I didn’t fall off Tate’s.

January 2017

Wichita, Kansas

My twenty-third birthday fell right after the start of the spring semester. I’d taken a gap year between high school and college, bummed around Europe, then worked for a while at a ski resort in South America. The year had been good for me. It helped me figure out who I was as a person.

And by 2017, during the second semester of my senior year, the person I was had no interest in partying.

So, I waved off my housemates’ cajoling requests to join them at The Coop and settled in for the night with the research materials for my genetics and genomics capstone project.

I was reviewing a dense longitudinal study when the doorbell rang.

I ignored it. I was busy, and I wasn’t expecting anyone. But whoever was on the porch hit the bell again and leaned steadily on it for several seconds before pulling back and jabbing at it repeatedly.

I swore and slammed my book shut. As I yanked the door open, I prepared to give whichever of my housemates had left without their key all kinds of crap.

But the man standing on my porch was not a housemate. Not a friend. Not even a missionary in a short-sleeved dress shirt looking to save my soul. Any of these would have been preferable.

“Hey, little man,” he said.

I squared up, planting my feet in a defensive stance in case he took a swing and stared at my brother.

“Aren’t you gonna invite me in?”

“No.”

I moved to swing the door shut.

He reached out his hand and caught it. “Don’t be a dick.”

“What do you want?”

I kept my hand on the door. If I had to, I could force it closed. I’d crush his fingers in the process, but I was okay with that outcome.

“I want to talk to you.”

“Say what you need to say, then get off my porch.”

He eyed me, and I could see what he was thinking. I wasn’t sixteen anymore, and I’d put a lot of muscle on my lean runner’s body in the seven years since he’d kicked my ass. If things got physical tonight, I’d hold my own a hell of a lot better than I had as a high school sophomore.

“Just wanted to wish you a happy birthday.”

“Message received. Thanks. Bye.” I started to close the door again.

“Come on, let me in. It’s cold as balls out here.” He looked around the deserted street.

I tracked his gaze. The house sat at one end of a residential side street—an alley, really. All the houses on the block were rental properties. Most were rented to undergrads. Many were in various states of benign neglect, and a few were in outright disrepair.

I wasn’t worried about what the neighbors might think, but it was January in Kansas and I was letting the wintery air in. So, even though every fiber in my being was screaming at me to make him leave, I gritted my teeth and pulled the door open.

“The foyer, no further,” I told him and slammed the door against the cold.

He looked around the unremarkable house. And as I watched him take in the place, I wondered, for the first time, what his living situation was. And then I wondered what it said about me that through the years I’d had zero curiosity about his circumstances and not a shred of empathy for him.

I’d spent the previous summer on a team doing inmate interviews at the state penitentiary for my sociology professor, and I knew that the worst thing I could do was hurry to fill the silence.

People don’t like silence, at least not normal people in social situations.

Letting it drag on was an effective way to get someone to talk.

So I crossed my arms and stared at him. He looked less haggard than he had when I’d seen him in Arizona. His cheeks were filled out. He was cleaner.

He clocked me clocking him. “I don’t do seasonal work anymore. I have a steady job. In Ohio.”

“Don’t care.”

He kept talking as if I hadn’t interrupted. “It’s a nice little town. Reminds me a bit of home. Not that small, but smaller than the places where you’ve been living.”

The casual way he said it made me wonder how closely he’d kept track of me.

He must have read the question in my face because he laughed. “Oh, I didn’t have the kind of money to follow you around during your year of playtime, but I’ve kept tabs from a distance. Anyway, since you’re graduating, you should think about coming to Ohio.”

“I don’t need career counseling from you. The university has a whole department for that. But that’s not why you’re here.” I smiled tightly. “What do you really want? Money?”

His face darkened, and his hands fisted at his sides. “No, I don’t want money.” He took a deep breath as if he was controlling himself through extreme effort. “I’m here to renew my invitation.”

“Your invitation?”

He stared at me, and I stared at him.

Finally, I remembered the birthday card and his offer to initiate me into whatever sick version of manhood he had in mind.

“No, thanks.”

He shook his head, irritated by my flippant tone. “You’re taking all these classes in the psychology of criminals. Meanwhile you have the opportunity to do some firsthand research.”

“So you admit you’re a criminal?”

He clenched his jaw but didn’t answer.

I scoffed. “It doesn’t matter. I already have my thesis project, thanks. Just like we have career counseling, we have academic advisors here.”

I reached for the door, and he grabbed my sleeve. My eyes followed the motion.

“Don’t touch me,” I spat through clenched teeth. He pulled his hand back like my arm was on fire.

“Take it easy. I’m not here to hurt you.”

I locked eyes with him. “Newsflash: you can’t hurt me.”

He laughed bitterly. “Oh, believe me, you spoiled little mama’s boy, I absolutely can hurt you.”

“Try it.”

He ignored the challenge and went on in an unnatural, stilted tone like he was narrating a documentary. “Experts aren’t sure how many killers work with a partner. The most famous team, of course, was Leopold and Loeb.”