Page 21 of The Bright Lands

“She certainly loves the attention. Mind if we lay into something stronger?”

Joel was halfway to the drinks cart by the time Wesley told him to help himself.

Joel plucked a whiskey at random from a thicket of bottles and poured himself a double. He drank it down fast, poured another for himself and Wesley. For a man with a cross in his living room, this youth minister possessed quite an array of booze.

“Does KT Staler ever come to church with my brother?” Joel shouted toward the kitchen.

“You mean Mister Powerball? He’s a cat, he comes and goes. His sister, Savannah, was in your class at school, no?”

“The one who went to jail?” Joel faintly remembered Savannah Staler, a cheerleader rumored to have a hole in her nose from all the powder she snorted.

“The very same. She used to date Jason Ovelle.”

“I saw that guy getting loaded into a cruiser Friday night,” Joel said, with a faint odd blush of nostalgia. Jason had been a bully, and a savage one at that, but Joel had once had quite the locker room crush on him (and on all that he’d once kept, barely concealed, beneath his towel). “What did Jason do at the game to get arrested for?”

“Whathasn’the done? It’s a sadness, how that guy’s turned out. And his buddy Ranger Mason is hardly any better. He lost most of his hand in Afghanistan.”

Nowtherewas a name with no pleasant memories tethered to it. Joel felt his heart shrink, felt a sudden need to pull his mind away from everything the thought of Ranger brought back to him. He opened his phone. He logged on to Grindr, smiled at the number of men who had messaged him since his arrival in town. Just like that, and he was desirable. He was worth something again, whatever Ranger Mason might once have said.

Joel took a sip of his whiskey. With a grin, he had a sudden recollection of Dylan at the field, smiling as the town laid itself at his feet.

They had something in common, the two brothers: they both loved attention from people they never wanted to know.

“My mother says KT and Dylan are very close,” Joel said.

“They are. Dylan was real concerned for KT over the summer. Staler got into some kind of trouble.”

“With drugs?”

Wesley poked his head out of the kitchen. Joel felt him glance at the open phone and quickly concealed it. If Wesley recognized what he saw on the screen, however, he gave no sign of it. “What makes you say that?”

“Dylan and KT went to the coast a few times this summer, no?”

Wesley accepted his drink. “Every few weekends. Your brother isn’t much of a churchgoer either way. Why do you ask?”

Joel almost mentioned something Investigator Mayfield had said yesterday—“The Staler boy hasn’t given Dylan any trouble?”—but caught himself. Just like he had with Kimbra Lott at the hardware store, Joel was leery of giving this man ideas.

Joel realized that Wesley had held his eye all this time. He cleared his throat and rose from the couch. “Can I use your bathroom?”

Wesley blinked. “Straight down the hall.”

On Grindr, a grid of men’s online profiles covered his screen. Most of the profiles, Joel saw, lacked any photo of their owner, which was unsurprising considering this corner of the country. A man’s faceless gray silhouette, the app’s placeholder image to conceal those users too cautious to even hint at their identity, repeated itself twenty times before Joel spotted an actual profile photo. A tight torso was posed in the mirror of an elegant bedroom so softly lit Joel doubted it could be found anywhere in Pettis County; good taste like this didn’t seem to exist outside of cities. This user, he suspected, was using someone else’s photographs.

Whoever they were, they had sent him a message:

omg ur the brother!!

Joel glanced at the man’s profile: no height listed, no weight, no age, no name. Who was this?

Am I?Joel wrote.

The user sent him an emoji with hearts for eyes.

Joel responded:

How old are you?

Joel stepped into a bedroom large enough to house a small plane and found little inside but hideous oak furniture and a sprawling painting of a cattle range.