Page 56 of The Bright Lands

“You and Dylan had stopped sleeping together?”

“Of course we had. I mean, we tried to keep it up for a while.Itried. But you can’t fix it, can you? You can kick and scream and say it isn’t fair or you can live with it, right? That’s what the women aroundherehave always done. It’s a goddamn way of life for these bitches—acting like you can’t see what’s right in front of your goddamn face.”

Joel blinked at the night, at the shallow river puddled with stars.

“Bethany,” he said. “What did you accept?”

“You mean—but Dylan said you must have known. Dylan always said you must have known about him because he always knew about you.”

CLARK

On the edge of town, long past dark, Clark was dozing fitfully at her kitchen table when she heard the sound of tires on the gravel outside. By the time a car door slammed, she was pressed against the front wall of her living room, her truck’s keys in her pocket and her father’s old revolver in her hand. Her heart was thudding, her mouth was dry, but she was frightened of more than just an unexpected guest. She’d been briefly certain, the moment she’d awoken, that someone outside had been watching her sleep.

There was a brisk knock at the door.

She eased back the hammer of the revolver. “Who is it?”

“Just me,” shouted young Deputy Browder, their brash man-child with two nice arms and half a brain. “Don’t you ever check your phone?”

Clark cracked open the door on its chain. He looked like a Boy Scout come to sell her coupon books. He held up a brown bottle of rum. He was alone. “A nightcap?”

It would do. She unlatched the door.

Browder stepped inside, taking in her small front room, her kitchen scattered with papers, the gun in her hand. He smelled of sweat and boot polish, a blend Clark was surprised to discover she didn’t entirely dislike.

“Are they helping you sleep?” Browder asked.

She folded up the case files on her kitchen table. “If by ‘they’ you mean ‘these,’ then no.” She grabbed two glasses from the cabinet by the fridge. She said, “Just one drink, yeah?”

“Long as it’s a double.”

Browder filled the glasses to their rims, propped himself against her counter. “Drink,” he said. “Be merry.”

The neat rum tasted wrong on her tongue, too jaunty for a week so somber. She drank more. “It’s quiet on patrol tonight?”

Browder shrugged. “Jones is running the squawk box. I ain’t heard nothing in hours.”

The squawk box was the department’s name for the software that forwarded any local 911 calls to an officer on duty. In the wake of the town’s latest budget cut they couldn’t afford a dedicated dispatcher.

“No sign of KT Staler, I take it?” he said.

“He’d have to walk through the door for us to find him, it seems. I can’t help but wonder if—”

“What?”

“It’s nothing.”

“You mean you can’t help but wonder why no one seems too worried about chasing a white boy with no alibi?”

She smiled, though there was nothing good about it. “Something like that.”

They sipped their drinks. Browder’s eye settled on a file. “‘Troy Clark,’” he read aloud. “That was your brother’s name, no?”

When Clark had returned home from the station this evening she hadn’t been able to help herself. She’d pulled her brother’s file from her closet and scoured the thin record of his missing person’s investigation for any sign of the eight-thousand-dollar debt Mayfield had told her about this afternoon and, just like the investigator had said, she’d found no trace of it. No record of drug use, no mention of known drug users in the few skimpy interviews that had been conducted with Hannah Szilack, the girlfriend who had reported Troy missing, nor in the interviews that had been conducted with Clark’s father or herself.

“It stillishis name, as far as I’m aware,” Clark said.

“Sorry.” Browder pulled his eyes up from the file. “He was really something till he hurt his neck. Did they ever talk to any of the guys who was on the team with him?”