Page 41 of The Bright Lands

Of course.

“It must have been difficult to watch your man get so much attention,” Clark said. “I bet there’s plenty of girls hoping to catch his eye.”

Bethany gave Clark a quizzical look. “They might have hoped. Dylan had his priorities straight.”

“Really? A boy his age? A boy that handsome?”

“Really.” Bethany chuckled, shook her head. “Dylan and I had something real. We—”

“You never had reason to suspect there was another girl in his life?”

Bethany refused to be flustered. “No.”

Mayfield scratched at his cuff. If Bethany knew anything else, she wasn’t going to reveal it today.

Clark smiled, clicked shut her pen, closed her notebook. “Thank you for your time, Miss Tanner.”

Something curious happened as Bethany readied herself to go. A long, painful-looking yawn brought tears to her eyes, a little tremor to her fingers. For the first time since she walked through the door, the girl looked unguarded. Off balance. Scared.

Clark couldn’t have chosen a better moment to ask her final question.

“You said you last saw Dylan leave the game at ten thirty Friday night, yes? What did you do with yourself for the rest of the weekend?”

“Me?”

“Yes. I just need something to put in the notes.”

“I went home by myself.” The girl sounded distracted when she said it, preoccupied by something else in her head—grief? pyramid drills?—but the moment the words were out of her mouth Bethany went very tense. Clark would have sworn she saw a flash of panic across her eyes.

“Your father wasn’t with you?”

A long pause. “No. He had business in Dallas.”

“Did he make it back that night?”

A tight smile. A green nail playing on the table. “No.”

“So you were home all weekend? Alone?” Mayfield said.

“I was sick.”

An idea occurred to Clark. “Your house doesn’t have a security system, does it? Cameras on the fences, maybe watching the doors?”

That green Bisonette nail on the table:tap-tap-tap. “You’d have to ask Dad.”

WEDNESDAY

PATTERNS

JOEL

Lying in his room, a thin square of hot sunlight burning his thigh, Joel felt unmoored. He had a body of sorts, an impossible heavy thing, but he had no conscious will, no desire to eat or drink, no idea how he had ever done anything as strenuous as walk or bathe or breathe. He had heard of people being broken by grief, consumed by it, but he had never realized before that so much of grief was guilt: guilt for not doing more (not doinganything) to help the people who needed you, back when helping could have been done. Guilt, and beneath it, a sadness at realizing you were more alone than you had been before. And then fresh guilt, for thinking of yourself and your own sorrows when someone else was dead on a slab.

He found himself slipping, quite unwillingly, into a memory he thought he had dammed and drained and forgotten. Apparently not. A decade wasn’t long enough to obliterate the sort of summer he’d had back when he was Dylan’s age: the delirious hot afternoons, the bitter fall that followed. How hopeless, how embarrassing, to think he could ever put those days behind him.

There was that guilt again, reminding him how he only ever thought of himself. Perhaps. But anything was better than thinking of the present.

The announcement had come in early June, a few months before the start of Joel’s senior year. In addition to their summer practices, the Bison would now play exhibition games to raise money for the football program. The team, still suffering after the injury and then graduation of Troy Clark—their once-brilliant star of a running back—had failed to even qualify for play-offs in the past season, but the town was enthusiastic about these new games. Maybe, the men at the bar murmured, playing in the heat would put some spine in those soft boys.