Autumn Blue (4 page)

She had made it through another day of work at the insurance office, another evening of feeding the girls vegetable stew from
the slow cooker and nutty whole-grain bread that she had thrown together in her bread machine that morning. She signed more
papers from the school, barely reading them, and repaired a split in the seam of Sissy’s backpack. It was getting harder with
each passing hour to feign normalcy for the sake of her daughters. The girls were in their room now, reading and doing homework.

Sidney could no longer pretend that her son was just somewhere beyond the perimeter of trees at the edge of their yard camping
out under the stars. It occurred to her that a boy on the run could get pretty far hitchhiking. Ty could be in Canada or California
for all she knew, or in the dark alleys of Seattle where drug dealers and deviants preyed on kids like him—confused, angry
children running like animals from forest fires that they hadn’t kindled but that had burned them just the same.

It was after eight o’clock but not dark yet; they were still on daylight saving time. The September sky had deepened to soft
violet. Across the street, Mr. Bradbury was spraying his garden with the hose. He reminded her of her dad a little. Not in
looks so much; Mr. Bradbury was taller, with broader shoulders and long, gangly arms. But there he was, predictably doing
what he did every night around this time—on the nights it didn’t rain, anyway—wearing that same dove-gray cardigan sweater,
faithfully spraying his black-eyed Susans and orange mums. Just like her dad used to do. Mr. Bradbury’s entire life was packaged
up as neatly, she was sure, as his immaculate yard. Checkbook always balanced, bills paid a week or two before they were due,
that classic Lincoln lubed and oiled precisely on schedule. She missed her stable, dependable father, gone now for five years.
She remembered how her mother had grieved for him, the man she had slept beside for forty years, and at the same instant Sidney
had a twinge of revelation. Hadn’t she heard that Mr. Bradbury’s wife died just last year? He must be grieving, too. She should
go over there, maybe bring him a pie or a loaf of orange oatmeal bread. Yes, he would love her bread; everyone did. And with
the delay timer on her bread machine, she could deliver it to him after work tomorrow, still warm.

A car cruised up to her driveway and surprised her by turning in. Sidney’s heart lurched. The sheriff. Hot tea splashed on
her bare thigh and soaked into her khaki shorts.

She stood, gripping her tea mug, straining her eyes to see the shape of Tyson in the backseat of the patrol car. From the
front door she waited for what seemed like a day and a half before the uniformed deputy opened his car door and stepped out.
Mr. Bradbury had been headed inside for the night, but froze halfway up his front steps, staring curiously from across the
road. The deputy walked toward Sidney without so much as a glance back toward his car. “Mrs. Walker?”

“Did you find my son?”

He shook his head. Sidney’s blood was charged, racing through her veins. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.
If he had been in the car, Tyson would be on his way to jail. But if they hadn’t found him, then he was still lost, still
running, out there in that terrible unknown that haunted her with alarming visions every waking hour. The deputy stopped at
the base of her steps, a tall, thick-shouldered man with some kind of Latin blood. Probably Mexican. His dark eyes were cold
and she knew instantly that he had not come as a friend. “I need to ask you some questions.”

Should she invite him in? No, she didn’t want the girls to hear this. They knew their brother was on the run, but Sidney had
tried to shelter them from the specific details. “Ask away,” she said.

He stepped up to the porch. She read the name bar pinned to his starched khaki shirt just below the Winger County sheriff’s
badge. Deputy A. Estrada. Sidney drew back, leaning against the doorjamb, putting a comfortable distance between her and the
ominous visitor. She hugged herself, running her hands over the goose bumps on her bare arms.

“When was the last time you saw your son, Tyson, Mrs. Walker?”

“The morning he ran off from school.” He should know that. The school counselor had called the Sheriff’s Department immediately
that Friday afternoon to report that he had broken his probation, and Sidney had been in touch with them regularly since then.
“It was the ninth.”

He cocked his head, his piercing eyes narrowing. “You’re telling me you haven’t seen him since then? He hasn’t come home at
all?”

She nodded. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

He raised a dark eyebrow and inspected her face without speaking. He might as well have called her a liar. Sidney had a fleeting
impulse, a vision of her leg shooting out karate-style, kicking the sour-faced deputy sheriff off her porch. Instead, she
reminded herself that he was just doing his job. Mr. Bradbury had obviously changed his mind about retiring for the night.
He was stooped over, popping dead heads from the mums growing outside his picket fence and casting furtive glances across
the road.

“You wouldn’t mind me taking a look in his room, then?”

She straightened, inflating herself to her largest stature, trying for the life of her to avoid being intimidated by the badge,
the gun on his hip, his broad chest and shoulders, and those austere eyes. “Yes, I would mind. My girls are inside and I don’t
want them upset. What are you looking for, anyway? You know he turned himself in right after the incident at Graber’s Market.
The only thing he took was a bottle of wine and he didn’t even make it out the door with that.”

The store proprietor had been watching Ty via strategically placed mirrors, saw him tuck the Mad Dog 20/20 inside his jacket,
and tackled the boy before he made it out the automatic sliding door. The bottle shattered. Sidney was shocked when she learned
that her son had then rolled onto his back, pulled his pellet gun out of his pants, and pointed it directly beneath Mitch
Graber’s chin. Mitch backed off, thinking of course that it was a real gun, and Ty ran out the door. Sidney had heard the
patrol car sirens from her bedroom that warm August night, never suspecting for one moment that her son was the cause of them,
thinking that he was just in the woods out back cooling off after a heated argument in which she insisted that he would indeed
be attending his freshman year of high school, whether all the teachers were idiots or not.

The deputy smirked. “I’d turn myself in too if I needed somebody to tweeze all those glass splinters out of my chest.”

“Well, I’ll bet you got a good laugh out of that down there at the Sheriff’s Department,” Sidney retorted. “He probably looked
like he’d been shot, with all that Mad Dog bleeding into his jacket. You all must have been rolling on the floors.”

The deputy’s smirk disappeared. “Look, Mrs. Walker, I’m just trying to do my job here. I’m not the bad guy. Your son’s crime
got real serious the minute he pulled out a gun. He’s charged with attempted armed robbery and that’s a felony.”

“But it wasn’t a real gun.”

“Yes, ma’am, it was. In the eyes of the law, anyway.”

“The thing shoots little plastic BBs. The boys around here shoot one another with them all the time.”

“Even threatening someone with a squirt gun is a crime nowadays. Anyway, the judge released Tyson to your custody with strict
stipulations, including that he was to go nowhere but school and home until his sentencing hearing. Now he’s on the run and
I have reason to believe he’s committed another crime.”

Sidney’s heart sank in her chest. “What kind of crime?”

“A burglary in town.”

She shook her head. “Ty wouldn’t do that. He’s not a bad boy, Deputy.” But she immediately wondered. Who was the angry young
man who had taken over sweet, compassionate Tyson’s body?

“That’s why I’d like to take a look inside. To see if he might have stowed any of the stolen items in there.”

“He hasn’t been here,” she stated firmly, sliding her body directly in front of her door. “Believe me, if he had, I would
know it. I’m not going to let you come into my home with that gun on your hip and scare my daughters.”

His full lips pulled into a straight line and he gazed at her as if pondering his next move.

The front door suddenly opened behind her, and before Sidney could stop her, Sissy was on the porch, eye-to-eye with the deputy’s
Glock, or whatever he packed in his black leather holster. Her youngest daughter peered up at him with a sweet smile. “Hi.”

“Sissy, you go on back inside,” Sidney said.

She began to back up. “Are you the sheriff that came to my class?”

His face softened slightly. “I might be. Who’s your teacher?”

“Mrs. Gilbreath.”

Sidney gently pushed Sissy behind her. Rebecca peered curiously around the doorjamb. “Will you girls please go back in and
let the deputy and me talk in
private
?” She emphasized the last word, hoping old Mr. Bradbury’s hearing was good enough to take the hint. It was dark enough now
that he was probably plucking off perfectly good blooms just for an excuse to stand out there within earshot.

Sissy called out a friendly “’Bye” as the door closed.

Deputy Estrada ran one hand across his jaw. He would have been a strikingly handsome man without the pinched forehead and
squinty eyes. “Something tells me they’re not afraid of me.”

“Just the same, I’d rather you not come in.”

“You know, Mrs. Walker, if you’re knowingly possessing stolen goods . . .”

“I am not doing any such thing!” Now she was indignant, outraged. How dare he insult her like that? She felt branded, as if
someone had burned the letter
L
for
loser
on her bare arm. Like she was one of those pathetic, dysfunctional women on
COPS
, only she still happened to have good teeth. It was as if he knew all about the past, all those sordid situations that Dodge
had dragged her through. But her ex-husband was gone now. Cut off. She was making a new life for herself and the kids.

Maybe it was the shards of truth that sliced into her from his comment that enraged her so. Like the shattered bottle hidden
inside Ty’s jacket. She was guilty. Guilty of being an idiot. Believing that Dodge had really won that big-screen TV in a
poker game. That all the nice things he brought home had been gifts from friends or incredible deals that he just couldn’t
pass up. The first time a pair of officers from the Bellingham Police Department had shown up at their door, she had been
shocked. Ty was a baby on her hip then. And now, it was like déjà vu, standing out there on her porch and staring into a badge,
only this time Ty was the suspect. The phrase “Like father, like son” popped into her mind uninvited.

“Look, Deputy . . .” She sighed, rubbing one temple that was beginning to throb. “If you had a search warrant, you would have
pulled it out by now. Whether you believe me or not, I’m not hiding anything. I’m just tired. Please, go away now. I have
to get my kids to bed.”

He nodded curtly, glaring. “Have it your way, Mrs. Walker.”

She watched him turn and walk to his car, head high and shoulders back like a marine. He glanced up at her again before ducking
his head, sliding in, and slamming the door. The official green sedan accelerated quickly once on the road, and Sidney stood
there massaging her hammering chest until the car’s red taillights disappeared around the bend.

“Good night, Mr. Bradbury!” she called, adding “You nosy old coot” under her breath.

He looked up as if startled to see her there. “Oh, good night now,” he stammered almost inaudibly, then turned and headed
down the path to his front door.

I
T WAS A TERRIBLE SHOCK
, catching Millard Bradbury so off guard that he stumbled backward several steps and caught the front doorjamb for support.
The
Winger County Herald
lay forgotten at his feet.

A mole. Dad-blasted blind-as-a-doorknob mole! It had pushed up a string of mounds from the picket fence that bordered the
grassy field on the west halfway to the center of his immaculate lawn, where the tunnel was punctuated by a pile of rich brown
earth.

His breath became short as he strode down the concrete steps. Stopping abruptly at the bottom, he detoured to his left toward
the garage, which was set back at the end of the driveway, and emerged from it with shovel in hand. As he approached the scene
of the crime, he tiptoed, holding the rough, wooden handle like the shaft of a spear, ready to send the mud-sucking rodent
to its maker the moment it showed its snout.

He waited. The mound of dirt was still. Birds trilled and swooped through the sky, oblivious to the weighty drama playing
out beneath them. A squash-colored school bus screeched to a stop across the unlined county road, rumbling and smoking as
the little girls from the house across the street boarded. A row of curious faces peered out its windows at the seemingly
frozen man, knees slightly bent and arm raised like a statue of an old warrior, but Millard did not see them as the bus roared
past.

Still no sign of movement. He slowly lowered himself to one knee, using the shovel for support. Then, down on all fours, he
listened. Perhaps if he put his ear right down to the earth like the Indians used to do to tell if the buffalo were coming
. . . He lay flat out, his face on the cool, damp lawn. At first there was no sound other than the current of his own breath.
Of course, his hearing wasn’t all it used to be. He waited patiently, closing his eyes to enhance concentration. This invasion
was an act of war and he could be as stealthy as, if not more than, the enemy. After all, he was the one with superior intelligence.
His mouth spread into a sinister grin as his fingers fondled the handle of the shovel. He was the master of the guillotine.

Finally he heard something. Yes. The ground was definitely vibrating. He forced himself to remain still, as still as a cat
hunting in the tall grass.

“Mr. Bradbury!”