“Oh, please. I don’t remember anything about this. You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“You don’t know him, Sam. You don’t know him like I do. He’s different now, maybe. That’s what I hear. But back then, he made sure we all lived by the Mormon law.”
“So did everybody else’s parents.”
“Not like him. You don’t understand. You weren’t old enough to see what I saw. What he did.”
“So he posed us in front of the tree. So what? So we look sad. So what? Why did you come home now, Amy?”
“I like to think I came home because of Callie. At least that’s the thought that got me on the plane. She’s still with us. And she’s worried about you.”
“You sound like a freaking nutcase,” Sam said angrily, thrusting the picture back at her sister. “Carrying a grudge because of what happened to Callie. Carrying around this picture like it’s your own personal cross to bear. That’s just stupid. It happened. We were kids. And if you were worried about me, you should have stayed here. You should have taken care of me, instead of running out.”
“I know. You’re right. But he loved you. I thought you’d be okay. You were always his favorite.”
Sam stood and watched a silent exchange between D-Ray and Amy. He shook his head roughly, but she backed up, her mouth a tight slit, and then turned to Sam.
“Sammy, it wasn’t Callie. It wasn’t Callie who was having sex. She was covering for me—for me and D-Ray. Dad saw us in the backyard, but he didn’t know it was me.”
“No, stop it.”
“Callie stood up to him and said it was her. I tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t listen.”
“Stop—”
“And then she died. It was my fault.”
Shock, then sudden and overwhelming compassion filled Sam’s chest. Amy felt responsible for Callie’s death. She’d been carrying that around with her—just like the picture—for all these years.
Sam didn’t realize she was crying until she saw the moisture in D-Ray’s own eyes. Sam could taste the salt as her tears reached her lips and she tried to wipe them away, but they wouldn’t stop.
“Why? Why didn’t you just tell me?” Sam asked D-Ray.
“I couldn’t say anything, Sammy. Amy made me promise. We were both fourteen years old. I was just the town bastard that the Church and the people in it took pity on. If they knew about me and Amy, if they knew, they would have hurt her. They would have chased my mother out of town, and they would have destroyed us.”
“So you let Callie take the fall?”
“I didn’t know…,” Amy said, tearing up and wiping at her face with her hands. “I didn’t know she’d kill herself over it. I didn’t know it would be that bad.”
Sam thought of her night run to the top of the road. Her realization about the scene of Callie’s death. “Are you sure she killed herself?”
Amy paused. “What do you mean? Of course she did,” she said, still wiping away the tears.
“But why would she kill herself if she hadn’t done anything wrong?”
“Why does any teenager kill herself? Because it’s the end of the world. Because things are never going to get better. When you are a teenager you can’t reason beyond your emotions right then. Maybe she thought she would show him, or that she could stop it, and then it was too late. I don’t know.
“But now you know why I had to leave and couldn’t come back. Especially after Roger accused me of starting an affair with him. He kept trying to grab me, and I threatened to tell Susanna. And he said no one would believe me. It would destroy Susanna. I’d already killed one of my sisters. I wasn’t about to do it to another one. And then he told her anyway. She suspected something, and he lied to her about me. I knew I could never come back here.”
“But you did.”
“Yes, I did. For you.”
FORTY
Amy and D-Ray left after Sam convinced them that she needed time to digest all she had learned. Amy was staying in a hotel in Layton, and she and D-Ray had some catching up to do. Sam didn’t want to know what all that might include.
She was at her limit.
No more emotion, please.
After they left, she went to her room to change into running clothes. She thought about calling Gage but decided she needed more time to think through the evening’s events.
“No wonder we were the neighborhood basket cases,” she muttered to herself as she tied up her running shoes and threw her fanny pack around her waist, snapping it securely in back.
A wave of heat seemed to roll over her as she passed the furnace room, and she stopped, wondering when she was going to remember to get someone in here to look at the air-conditioning. She would have plenty of time now, actually, since she intended to resign from the force. Enough time to get this place looking sharp and put it on the market and move away.
Maybe farther than Salt Lake City. Maybe another state?
You aren’t leaving now, Sammy. You are too close.
“I can
leave,
if I want to leave,” she said loudly. She could take care of herself.
The air conditioner chose that moment to make a sudden belching noise. Sam started. The noise didn’t recur, and Sam stared at the door, transfixed. Several moments passed before she heard a scuffling noise. She jumped back. Something was inside. She pulled the gun out of her fanny pack. Aiming at the door, she reached for the knob. She took a stance and pulled the door open.
It was dark in the utility closet, but she could not see any human shapes.
She screamed as two little white mice ran across her feet.
Reaching in and flipping on the light switch, she saw nothing more. Rodents. A gift from Lind Harris, who had just been in her house?
Was he responsible for all of the incidents? Could he possibly have tried to run her off the road?
You should try harder to make friends, and not so many enemies, Sam.
It would sure help in narrowing down the suspect list.
Shaking her head, she looked around but couldn’t see where the mice had gone. They would have to be found later.
Sam headed out for her run. It had been raining most of the day but was just letting up now. Sam inhaled deeply, enjoying the clean smell of freshly washed earth.
She was jogging through Kanesville at midnight. One of those stories you read in the newspaper and think,
How stupid was she? Why didn’t she know better? She was a cop.
She knew better. She also carried a gun that could do some serious damage to anyone who got too close—and she was a crack shot. She needed to do this. She needed to talk to Callie. Alone.
It was still hot, and Sam considered how far she could run. How far away she could get by morning. Maybe she would never stop. Running was in the family genes. It was what Amy did years before.
It was what her mother had done mentally, until she died.
It was what Sam’s father had done every day as he pretended his wife was fine, just having a forgetful day. And it was what Callie had done. The ultimate getaway.
Callie had hung herself.
I thought we got this straight. I thought you understood.
Sam tried to ignore Callie’s voice.
You felt it. I know you did. I took you back there, and you felt it. You felt everything that I felt, and now you are just back to the “she killed herself” theory? What the hell. I took you back.
Again, Sam remembered the sucker punch of the other night, the feeling of despair and fear, like she was somehow inside Callie’s terrified head and swinging body.
I took you back.
Took her back to the scene of the accident and tried to tell her it was a crime. Unless this voice was nothing but a little bit of bat-ass craziness that ran in the family.
Callie had died hanging from a tree. But was it death by her own hand?
And what about the other teenagers? The ones who had just barely died? Sam’s niece, Whitney, who had narrowly escaped the same fate? What about the word “vengeance” written on Sam’s wall in bloodred paint?
What difference did it make? It wasn’t her case anymore.
The sudden sound of feet slapping the pavement and coming up quickly behind her made the hairs on her arms rise. She turned and ducked immediately into a protective stance, whipping out her gun before she could even distinguish the white figure headed toward her.
“Freeze!” she yelled. She would have laughed at her little pink gun standing out in the dim, if she weren’t so focused on keeping herself alive.
“Hey, Sam,” Paul Carson said as he stopped, eyeing the gun. “Sorry to scare you. I always run at night. It’s too hot in the day and I have a hard time sleeping.” He laughed. “Guess I’m not the only one.”
Sam lowered the gun slowly. “You should know better than to run up behind a woman jogging at night.”
“You should probably know better than to jog at night, being a woman alone and all.”
“I have a gun, as you can see,” she said, not appreciating his implication that she couldn’t take care of herself. “I can use it better than anyone else on the Kanesville force.”
“It’s pink,” he said with a half grin that reminded her of the teenage Paul.
“The color doesn’t affect the way it works.”
“Point taken. Well, since we’re both out here, and we’re both running, care if I join you?”
Sam remembered the car that had run her off the road: a car that looked just like Paul’s. And just like the rental car her sister had arrived in from the airport. And probably at least fifty other cars in the small town of Kanesville.
“Ask and ye shall receive,” she said.
“Huh?”
“You can take the girl out of the Mormon culture, but you can’t take the Mormon culture out of the girl,” she said wryly. “Fine, let’s run. I have some questions for you.”
She eyed him up and down and saw that he couldn’t possibly have a weapon of any kind hidden in his running gear. He quickly met her cadence, setting a good rhythm as their feet and breath made the only noise in the still night.
“Why can’t you sleep?” Sam asked him as they headed up 200 North.
“Because I killed my wife. I was responsible. Makes for some gnarly nightmares.”
Sam felt herself reach for the gun again, resting her left hand on the zipper of her fanny pack. The hackles rose on her arms. Fear coursed up her spine.
She stopped and backed up. Pulled the gun out. Aimed it at him. He slowed and turned.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“You just told me you killed your wife. You said you were responsible.”
He just shook his head and laughed, but there was no humor in it. Sorrow emanated from his body, his shoulders slumped and his head low. “Put the gun away, Sam. I didn’t physically kill her. The day she died we were fighting. She’d found an old picture of me and you, together, standing in the lake, kissing, and she wanted to know who you were, and why I kept it.
“I should have just told her the truth. I kept it as a reminder of the man I could never be. The man I never was to you. But I was so damned ashamed I had sex with you and got you pregnant that I just told her it was an old picture and I didn’t know why I still had it. Do you know where I kept it, Sam?”
She shook her head, never taking her eyes off his face, although he was looking anywhere but at her. Whenever their eyes would meet, he would wince and look away.
“Inside my Book of Mormon. The same one I took on my mission. And I took it out every night, and I was so disgusted with myself. I hated that you made me want you so much, and that I still wanted you, and that I did things to you that I never should have.…” He stopped talking, his hands on his hips, his breathing ragged, even though they hadn’t jogged an inch for several minutes. “All I ever wanted was to be a good man. A faithful servant of God. A seminary teacher, and a missionary for my church, and I messed it all up. God punished you because of it. And I ran like a baby. Left you alone, went on my mission, and I’ve spent the rest of my life regretting it.”
He paused, perhaps waiting for her to say something. She didn’t.
“After she found the picture, she wouldn’t let it go. She was angry. She was trying to find a scripture she wanted for her Sunday school lesson, and my book was closer than hers. She opened it up and the picture fell out. It might as well have been porn to her—you in that bathing suit top and the way I had my arms around you.”
He shook his head and turned away from her, and Sam took it all in. She remembered the picture. Their old classmate Ricky had taken it. Summer of junior year, up at Pineview. She remembered the way Paul had made her feel. She remembered the look on his face just before he leaned in to kiss her. He tasted like lake water and chocolate.
Sam took her hand and moved it to her lips. It was hard to believe how much came back to you when you had a trigger. She remembered the picture. She had a copy of it tucked away somewhere.
“I don’t know why she was so angry. It was obvious that the picture was from high school, wasn’t it? I mean, she had to know it was from years before.”
“It wasn’t the picture, Sam. It was the way I reacted. I grabbed it from her like it
was
porn, like it was something that she shouldn’t see. And I couldn’t explain it. I’m sure she thought it was someone who meant something more to me than she did. Or … I don’t know. But it hurt her. I hurt her, because I couldn’t stand up like a man and tell her the truth. So she ran out. She was emotional, pregnant, irrational, and she took the baby and said she was going to her mother’s to stay, because I obviously still had a thing for you. And I wasn’t man enough to admit … I wasn’t man enough to admit I was a stupid, faithless human being.
“I was ready to come clean, and tell her. But she left. And then she died. And our two-year-old died, and so did our baby, the one inside her. She was so upset, she was crying, and the police said she just crossed the centerline and that was it. That was my punishment. I’ve been living with it ever since.
“Then you came back to town, and I felt the same old desire again, and I have to wonder what else God will take from me if I give in to you? What else will I lose?”
“Give in to me?” Sam said, putting her arms down but not putting the gun back into the fanny pack. Instead of making her feel wanted, his long-term desire for her had begun to feel creepy. She had old memories and feelings but had moved on. Why hadn’t he, especially when he wanted something so different from what she could offer? “I haven’t once given you any indication that I want anything from you. Way back then, we were young and stupid and we went too far. I got pregnant, you ran away, and life went on. What kind of a God would kill a woman and two babies because human nature took over and you made a mistake? How can you possibly believe in this God?”