Page 14 of The Bright Lands

A moment later Joel saw three little dots fill and empty on his screen, fill and empty, as Dylan typed a response.

Then the dots disappeared. No message came.

Now, twelve hours later, Joel’s jog brought him to Spruce Boulevard, one of the three old thoroughfares that ran laterally across town, and he could see clear through to the Flats. Nothing moved out there. Not even a bird passed over those wastes. The Flats were just as empty this morning as they had been last night, just ashungry—

Joel felt a shiver creep up his arms.Hungry?Where had that come from?

He tapped his watch again. He wondered (hoped, to his surprise) if he would hear from Officer Clark today. It would be a welcome distraction. He thought of the indignant stare she’d fixed on him last night, those startling green eyes she’d shared with her brother Troy. An erstwhile Bison running back, a jittery has-been, missing and presumed dead, Troy Clark was the man Joel had sworn to himself he would never allow Dylan to become.

Joel remembered Troy’s eyes resting on his face in the light of a fetid summer afternoon. Joel remembered Troy nodding toward his truck’s glove compartment and saying,“Pass me those pills in there.”

Joel took a long breath. Silence blanketed Bentley.

He felt a faint pulse on his wrist.

1 New Message, his watch informed him. From Dylan.

Joel read the message. Read it again. His stomach began to burn.

He turned toward home and ran.

“My brother isn’t illiterate,” Joel told the large man in the rumpled blazer and jeans who had arrived from the sheriff’s department. “He knows how to use an apostrophe.”

The man smiled blandly, shifted himself from one large haunch to the other on the Whitley family’s sofa. He had introduced himself a few minutes before as Investigator Grady Mayfield. He’d brought muscled Deputy Browder with him, the younger man reeking of body spray and chewing tobacco.

The two officers read the message that had arrived from Dylan, traded almost imperceptible shrugs.

The message was time-stamped 10:53 a.m. this morning.

joel im sorry but i cant stay in bentley right now theres something i gotta get away from somthing u cant fix dont worry im fine i will call when things r settled love u talk 2 u soon.

“He sounds bothered by something.” Mayfield accepted a sweaty glass of iced tea from Paulette. Browder settled himself against the door frame and pinched his reddened eyes. “Which is a good thing.”

“A good thing?”

“It means he’ll calm down. Where else is he going to go but home? You folks don’t have any other family, do you?”

“He’s notbothered,” Joel said. Mayfield and Browder exchanged looks again. Joel tried to calm himself: sounding like a hysterical queen wouldn’t do his case any good. He cleared his throat, deepened his voice like he was back in a boardroom. “I know how my brother texts when he’s upset. He gets worked up but he punctuates.”

Mayfield sighed through his nose. “Are you saying that someone else texted you from your brother’s phone?”

“But Dylan’s never been happier,” Paulette said before Joel could reply, picking at a fingernail. “Boys, they just need to stretch their legs sometimes.”

Browder flipped open his notebook. Mayfield said, “Ma’am, can you give me the address of the place in Galveston where your son is staying for the weekend?”

There was a pause. “The address?”

“Yes, ma’am. Where they’re staying with...”

Browder said, “KT Staler’s brother.”

“Thank you. With Mr. Staler’s brother. Thatiswhere you said he was staying, yes?”

“Oh. Yes. Well—” She broke off for a moment. “It’s just I never asked for the address, Investigator. I never saw any need for one. It’s not like I was the one driving down there.”

Joel gaped at her. Even once he’d bought his first cell phone, when he was Dylan’s age, he’d never been allowed to step out the front door without telling his mother exactly where he would be, who with, the exact minute he would be home. All those precautions had done little good, of course (as Joel suspected these men from the sheriff’s department knew very well), but he still couldn’t believe that this was the sort of lesson his mother had learned from Joel’s youth: to give a teenage boy unfettered run of the entire state of Texas.

“Of course.” Mayfield smiled. “Then you’ll have the phone number for Mr. Staler’s brother? And a name?”