Page 82 of Shame the Devil

His dad’s face. His dad’s hand, coming at him. It was like a horror movie, but you couldn’t turn it off.

“I’m asking you,” his dad went on. “For Annabelle’s sake. What’s it going to do to her to have me in here? You’ve got to help me hire those … expert witnesses, or whatever. There’s no proof I did anything to her. It’s a mistake. I’m your father.You know I wouldn’t do this. So you’re pissed at me. Fine. Everything I did, I did for your own good. I toughened you up, and it worked. You were a mama’s boy, and you’d have stayed one without me. You can’t be soft and make it in this world. Twenty million a year, that’s how much I did for you. Twenty million. When I get out of this, we’ll talk. I’ll explain.”

Harlan said, “Explain it to the judge.” And hung up.

34

Battle Scarred

Jennifer was just pullingup to the house when she got the call. She fumbled the phone out of her purse, looked at the screen, and said, “Harlan?”

“Could you come meet me at the jail?”

“Uh … of course. I just got back with your sister. Or two of your sisters. Annabelle and Vanessa. But I can come, if you want.”

“I could use you here.”

“I’m on my way.”

She hung up the phone and told Harlan’s sister Vanessa, a tall blonde who was as Viking-beautiful as Harlan himself, “I need to go pick Harlan up at the jail.”

“I thought you said he took a car,” Vanessa said with a lift of her eyebrows.

“He did. But …” She was itching to put the car into reverse. She hadn’t turned it off, and she didn’t do it now. Something was wrong. Or something was important. Harlan’s voice hadn’t held the weary strain of last night. It had been filled with something else. She couldn’t tell what, but that voice was dragging her across town.

It was rage, probably. Grief. How could you not feel that?

She couldn’t believe he’d gone to see his father. He’d said, “Who knows why he wants to see me. Doesn’t matter, really. Maybe I feel like I need to face him. I want to ask him why. I know it’s stupid. What do I expect him to say? But I still need to ask him.” His Norse-god face looking so troubled, all she’d wanted to do was put her arms around him. How could she, though? He wasn’t even the father of her child, not for sure, even though he felt like it. Or even though she wanted him to be. She wasn’t sure which.

Annabelle said from the back seat, “Maybe I should have gone to the jail, too. Harlan shouldn’t have had to do that alone.”

“No,” Vanessa said. “You shouldn’t have.”

Jennifer tried to think what to say, how to put this. “Harlan didn’t want you to,” was what she came up with. “He needs to feel like he’s protecting you now. It matters to him, because he couldn’t do it before. If you really want to see your dad, though, you should tell Harlan so.”

“I don’t,” Annabelle said. “I can’t stand to. I feel like I should, though. I feel like …”

Her voice wobbled, and Vanessa said, “Let’s go in the house. We’ll make lunch and talk about it. You can tell me what happened. What’sbeenhappening.”

She hadn’t been home for years, Harlan had said, but she was picking up the big-sister role all the same. And finally, they were out of the car, and Jennifer could leave.

She had to consciously keep her speed down as she drove, the turns announced in the preternaturally calm, robotic voice of the navigation system. She had time, though, to wonder why hehadasked her to come instead of Vanessa.

Because hewasprotective, that was why. Because she was separate from it, and he wouldn’t be dragging her into confronting too much, the way he’d have been doing with his sisters. He was a big brother all the way, and if that just made her like him more, well … it was better than being attracted to a jerk, right?

Her mom had said, one Sunday morning after Mark had dropped her off at home and headed out again to go fishing, “You know, you can ask for more.”

“I don’t think Mark has more,” she’d answered.

“Then that’s your answer,” her mom had said. “Don’t you think?”

You could ask for more, she guessed. That didn’t mean you’d get it. Maybe you didn’t ask because you were afraid youwouldn’tget it, and it would hurt too much to admit you wanted it. So much safer to settle for less.

The drive was only ten minutes, but once again, she’d left the city behind, because the Detention Center was the definition of “in the middle of nowhere.” A slab of gray, windowless concrete set back from a lonely intersection, the land around it so flat, there weren’t even ditches. The road just stopped and the ground began, and it went on forever. There were hardly even trees, because this was the tallgrass prairie. Just with no tall grass.

Maybe it had felt like limitless possibility to those Norwegian settlers, but she wondered. She’d done a school project on Norway once, back in the fourth or fifth grade. She’d paged through library-book pictures of neat, multicolored houses, red and yellow and orange, bright and cheerful, set side-by-side next to a harbor. Spectacular mountains and summer valleys that looked like something out of a fairy tale. And fjords. Lots and lots of fjords. She’d never seen a fjord other than in those pictures, but she knew the word. She’d etched the jagged back-and-forth of the coastline with a knife in salt dough, building up the ridges of mountains down the center and painting them brown with white at the tops, because they’d be covered in ice and snow.

Surely, some of those Norwegian farm wives had stood in this cutting April wind, looked at their new home, and despaired, knowing they’d never see those colorful houses again, or the deep green of evergreens, the icy peaks of mountains, the blue of the sea.