Page 103 of The Bright Lands

“Is that what it wants then?” Clark swallowed. “The...catfish—it wants blood?”

“Troy asked me the same goddamn questions right before you threw him out.” Her father grinned. “You really ran him through the wringer that night, you know. Poor boy hadn’t been able to sleep for a week when you went screaming at him like a banshee.”

She flinched away.

“You think I went deaf that evening you called him over?”

“Then what did you tell him?”

“I told him his mother was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life.”

Clark stood, put a hand on her father’s arm. She said calmly, “You hit another soul in this home, you’ll be walking the street.”

What did Joel mean about the Garrett/Dylan connection being “dubious”? Everything about Garrett Mason—that giant boy who seemed to lurk at every edge of this investigation—was dubious.

A second message from Joel hadn’t arrived until ten minutes ago, when Clark was stuck in traffic, though she saw that the message was timestamped 3:25 p.m.—over five hours before. Clark suspected Joel had sent the message at a moment when both he and she had no service. She knew from long experience that messages could become trapped in limbo around Bentley.

It was a link to a news article. Clark felt her scalp prickle when she saw the headline.

STAR PLAYER’S WHEREABOUTS REMAIN

UNKNOWN.

There was her mother, looking happier than Clark had ever seen.

And there was her mother’s first love. Corwin Broadlock.

“Her favorite man was always whispering things in her fucking ear.”

She called Mayfield. It went to voice mail. She hung up, deliberated—she, like Joel, wondered if whatever force had been tormenting them all week might not have invented this little diversion to drag her miles from town—and rang a new number.

“Pettis County Sheriff’s Department.”

“Browder?” Clark said, crawling around a nasty wreck on the highway outside Houston.

“Clark? Oh Christ, Clark. Fuck me for drawing the squawk box tonight. I’ve got catastrophes every which way.”

The tingling heat spread down her neck. “Catastrophes?”

“I got Mayfield heading to a gas leak all the way over in Rattichville. I thought Jones was supposed to be guarding that bank but he won’t get on the horn so nowI’mheading to a wreck in Lockpoint, the damn constables say they’ve never seen the likes of it. Clark, I swear those constables couldn’t save grass from shit.”

Clark held her phone against her shoulder, tapped her thumbnail to her teeth. She was suddenly very afraid for Mayfield.“We inherited this town,”he’d told her, as if it excused sabotaging an investigation. But then he’d worked her shift, he’d left hard proof on her desk that the department was covering up for the Bison’s golden boys. And now he wasn’t answering his phone.

And neither, apparently, was Deputy Jones. The man who’d last been seen with Jason Ovelle while he was still alive.

“Any of these catastrophes have to do with Joel Whitley?”

“Not that I know of. I saw his car outside the hardware store a bit ago. Want me to run back and check if he’s there when I’m done with this pileup?”

Clark saw the highway clearing.

“I thought these were the best years of our lives,”Coach Parter had said in that article Joel had sent.

Coach Parter, who had been so quick to defend Garrett Mason this morning.

She stepped on the gas.

“Don’t worry about it,” she told Browder. “I’ll be there soon.”