Crooked River: A Novel (5 page)

“I’ve got twenty on a drifter,” he said.

I stared at my shoes.

A long time must have passed with me staring at the ground like that, trying to think of something to say, because the next thing I knew, Travis was touching my shoulder, saying, “Hey. Are you okay?”

“What?” I lifted my gaze.

The back door swung open again. Travis let go of me and took a step back.

A redheaded kid I’d sometimes seen hanging around Travis poked his head through the doorway and said, “Hey, dumbshit! Let’s go! Something’s happening at the Meadowlark. They’ve got it all roped off. A bunch of black cars and men walking around in suits—” He noticed me standing there and his expression changed, like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t. “Oh. Hey.” And then talking to Travis again, “Looks like you’re busy out here, man. Sorry to interrupt.”

“Not busy. Just having a smoke.” He took one last pull on the cigarette and then tossed the butt away.

It landed in a clump of tall grass at the edge of an abandoned field, and I watched it, waiting for the whole thing to go up in flames, but there was only a thin ribbon of gray and then nothing.

The kid jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the front of the building. “So you coming or what?”

“Yeah. We’re right behind you.” Travis untied his apron and draped it over his arm. He turned to me, arched his dark eyebrows, gave me a sly grin, and said, “You got anything else going on right now?”

I didn’t think about Ollie or how I told her I’d only be a few minutes. I didn’t think about the jacket or Bear waiting for us back at the meadow. Right then, the only thing I was thinking about was that if this had anything to do with the dead woman, I needed to be there. I needed to know what was happening.

T
he deputy inside the taped perimeter waved us away from the yellow line. “Stay back, folks! Give us some space.”

Travis and I stood on the sidewalk, part of a gathering, gaping crowd that was starting to spill into the street. If I had bothered to look around, I might have recognized some of the people knocking up against me, trying to push forward even as we were being pushed back. But all my attention was on Detective Talbert and room 119. Everyone and everything else were just part of the scenery, blurred shapes shifting in my peripheral vision, jumbled voices rising up, falling down.

“I bet she was a whore—”

“A drug dealer—”

“A crack addict—”

“Maybe she got what she deserved.”

Detective Talbert knocked only once before taking the keys from the motel manager and opening the door. He disappeared inside the room for several long minutes, and when he came back out, he was holding his suit jacket over one arm and rubbing the top of his bald head. He stared across the parking lot to where an entire town waited, holding its collective breath.

Was this where she’d stayed in the days leading up to her death?

Was this where she’d dreamed her last dream? Taken her last shower? Watched her last news program? Eaten her last meal?

And her things—her clothes and shoes and makeup bag and whatever else she carried with her to places like this—were all her belongings still inside, barely unpacked, spilling from an open suitcase?

Did they know now who she was? Were they finally going to give us her name?

Detective Talbert nodded to a group of people all dressed in dark blue shirts and black trousers, huddled together under the awning a few steps from room 119.

Her room.

The group broke apart and set to work. Three of them, one with a camera around his neck, followed Detective Talbert back inside. The rest remained in the parking lot with a few of the sheriff’s deputies, fanning in a wide arc to search potholes and sidewalk cracks, gutters and storm drains, and all possible places in between for blood, hair, shoeprints, cigarette butts, gum wrappers, anything and everything that might hold some importance, a revealing piece of evidence to help reconstruct her final hours.

Someone bumped into me, jostling the satchel, and I panicked, thinking how stupid I was to bring the jacket here to the one place where every person might be a suspect and every unclaimed item a clue. I tried to step back from the tape and bumped into a thick wall of people pressing forward for a better look. I twisted, searching for a break in the crowd, some narrow opening to squeeze through, but we were packed in too close, our elbows and shoulders touching, our legs and breath tangling. I was stuck.

“Sam? Are you okay?” Travis touched my arm.

I flinched away from him and bumped into a woman standing beside me.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, gathering my arms close against my body.

“Hey,” Travis said. “You don’t look so great.”

I nodded and said something about the heat, about not drinking enough water, about feeling dizzy. He pulled me along with him, forcing a path through the crowd, away from the yellow tape and chaos, the deputies and the dead woman’s room.

We crossed the street and ducked into the shade of a maple tree growing in front of the First Baptist Church. I shrugged the satchel from my shoulders and let it slide to the ground.

“I’ll get you some water,” Travis said.

Before I could stop him, he was halfway to the church. The front doors were open, and he went inside.

I leaned against the maple tree and stared up into its twisting branches. The dark green leaves were still, even as the air vibrated with heat and light and shimmering, ocher dust.

Travis returned with a Dixie cup of cold water. I drank it in one gulp.

“You want more?” he asked.

I crushed the empty paper cup in my hand and shook my head. “Thanks.”

“You gotta be careful in this heat,” he said. “Gotta keep hydrated.”

He kept glancing at the Meadowlark. My gaze wandered there, too, but the crowd was too thick. Nothing to see but the backs of heads. I rubbed my eyes, wiping away sweat and dirt and the image of the dead woman’s battered face. Summer was supposed to be drowsy and carefree, measured by days and weeks of aimless roaming, doing whatever we wanted, lazy and young and unaware. Not this senseless violence and terrible death and so many questions unanswered, so many secrets and lies.

Travis was kneeling on the ground beside the satchel, tying his shoe. He straightened when he saw me looking down at him.

“Do you think they’ve told her family yet?” I asked.

“If she even has family.” He picked at the tree trunk, pulling off small strips of bark and tossing them into the air, watching them fall.

His mouth was turned down and his brow crumpled, his shoulders slumped. He wouldn’t look at me. This was the Travis I remembered, the boy from summers before who scowled at his feet if we passed on the sidewalk, who was always aloof and detached and so much cooler than me. Then he lifted his head and looked me straight in the eyes. He smiled, and I wondered if maybe I’d been wrong, if maybe he wasn’t cool at all. Maybe he was just shy. Like me.

He said, “I guess everyone has some kind of family somewhere, though, don’t they?”

“Shit,” I said, picking up the satchel from the grass and slinging it over my shoulder. “I have to go.”

I hurried away from Travis and the church.

How much time had passed since I’d left Ollie? Twenty minutes? Thirty? A whole hour? Long enough, I was certain, for her to worry and start thinking something bad had happened, that maybe I wasn’t coming back at all.

“Sam, wait,” Travis called after me. “Did I do something wrong? Did I say something?” He caught up with me quickly and grabbed my elbow, pulling me to a stop. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“No, it’s not . . . ,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s just my little sister. I—”

“You have a sister?”

I nodded.

“Oh.”

“I left her at your mom’s store.”

He let go of my elbow. “By herself?”

“She’s reading books.” As if that explained everything and made my leaving her okay.

“I’ll walk back with you,” he said, lighting up another cigarette.

6
ollie

W
hen the pale girl and the man who does not know he’s being followed come around the bookshelf, I hear tires screeching first, rubber burning pavement. Then glass shattering. They stop right in front of me. The shadows in this corner are dark enough that I can see the outline of her lowered head and her two yellow braids swinging loose, how she keeps her arms cinched around her waist and stands with her toes turned inward.

She’s young.

My age.

Younger.

I sag the way she sags. The weight of so many awful things presses down on my chest, making it hard to breathe.

The man stares. He jerks and flinches and rolls his head. His long, gray hair, pulled back with a rubber band, snaps the air. His fingers twist together as he says her name, “Delilah?” But he’s staring at me, not her.

I shake my head and back up to the purple chair where the one who follows me is coming apart. Gold bursts of light. Snapping like firecrackers. I press my hand to my chest because I, too, am coming apart. This is what happens; I feel what they feel.

I feel everything.

The man frowns, says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you like that. It’s just you remind me so much of my daughter. My Delilah.”

The pale girl behind him lifts her head and blinks at me, like she’s coming out of sleep. I plead with her,
Make him go away
. But she drops her gaze again, too weak to do anything except sigh.

The gray cat on the back of the purple chair hisses and swipes the air. He senses the Shimmering, knows they are here and unsettled.

The one who follows me wants me to open my mouth and scream, but I’m afraid that once I start, I won’t be able to stop and I’ll go on screaming forever.

“She had hair like yours.” The man reaches for me.

The pale girl hugs herself tighter.

“Such long, beautiful hair.” A step closer.

I shake my head harder and hold my hands out like shields.

The one who follows me splits and comes together again in the empty space between him and me. But his hand goes straight through her, and his fingers come out the other side brushed in gold and silver and white and red and other colors that don’t have names. There is nowhere for me to go.

I bump into the purple chair. The gray cat screeches and leaps away, disappearing into some dark crack between the shelves, leaving me alone with them.

The man smiles and his fingers stroke my braid. “Spider silk. That’s what we used to call it. Spun gold.”

The woman from the back room calls, “Billy?” She’s somewhere close, but out of sight.

“Back here, Maggie.” The man replies, then drops his hand and smiles at me. “Remarkable.”

“Billy? What are you doing?” She comes around the corner, sees us standing too close.

She hurries. She takes his elbow and turns him away, leads him toward the front of the store. “I need your help moving some boxes.”

She glances quickly over her shoulder and we connect, but only for a second before she looks away again.

The pale girl shuffles after them. But even after she’s out of sight, I hear ripping metal and breaking glass, feel a heavy weight still pushing on my chest. Dizzy and too tired, I sit down in the purple chair, curl and tuck my legs.

The one following me crackles and sparks. I wish she would go away, too.

7
sam

T
ravis pushed open the Attic’s front door, and the bell jangled. Barely a second passed before the curtain separating the back and front rooms was shoved aside. Mrs. Roth marched around the counter, moving quickly toward us. Her raven-dark hair was pulled into a severe bun, her thin, pale lips made even thinner by the way she was pressing them against her teeth. Her nostrils flared, and there was a second where I could have sworn her brown eyes turned infinite black, but maybe it was just a trick of light, a shadow cast by something hanging from the ceiling, because when she reached us, her eyes were a normal color again, her pupils a usual size. She grabbed Travis’s elbow and pulled him behind the counter.

For someone so small—the top of her head barely reached Travis’s chest and her frame was feather light—Mrs. Roth was surprisingly strong. Or maybe it just seemed that way because Travis wasn’t putting up any kind of fight.

“Your shift at Patti’s ended twenty minutes ago,” she said. “Where have you been?”

I stood a few steps away from them, pretending interest in a stack of antique lunchboxes.

“We were over at the Meadowlark,” Travis said. “The deputies were searching a room. That woman was staying there, I guess.”

“What woman?” She inhaled sharply and then said, “I need you here today.”

“I’m here.” He shook off her hand.

Mrs. Roth arched up on tiptoe and sniffed the air around Travis’s neck. She pulled back sharply, her lip curling. “Have you been smoking?”

Travis folded his arms over his chest. They stared at each other for a few seconds. Mrs. Roth started to speak, but a loud noise, like something heavy being dropped on the floor, stopped her.

Travis glanced at the curtain. “Dad’s here?”

“Downstairs,” Mrs. Roth said.

Travis started to move around her toward the back room.

She grabbed his arm, with less force this time, and said, “Leave him be.”

“I need to talk to him.”

“He’s working.” And then, “You know how he gets.”

A moment passed where they just stared at each other, neither one saying a word. Somewhere in the mess behind me, a clock ticked off the seconds. Finally, Mrs. Roth let go of Travis’s arm. He turned away from her and disappeared through the curtain.

She snapped her attention to me. “And you. What were you thinking leaving that child here alone?”

I twisted my head, looking toward the bookshelves. “Is she okay? Did something happen?”

“She’s fine,” Mrs. Roth said, sitting down on a stool behind the counter. “But this isn’t a library, and I’m not a babysitter.”

I ducked my head and mumbled something I hoped would pass as an apology and promised it would never happen again.

“See that it doesn’t.” Mrs. Roth gave me a hard and narrow stare and then started sorting through a stack of receipts, dismissing me with her silence.

I found Ollie curled in the purple chair, head leaning against one side, her legs tucked under her bottom and her arms wrapped around her stomach. She stared off into a dark corner, didn’t even look up at me when I came closer. The gray tabby was gone.

I crouched in front of her. “Hey. You okay?”

She closed her eyes.

“Hey.” I touched her arm. “I’m right here.”

She uncurled her legs and threw her arms around me, burying her face in my shirt. I squeezed her as tight as I could.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I told you I was coming back, didn’t I? You’re okay. We’re okay.”

A
few years ago, when Ollie was seven, Mom left her behind at the grocery store. We only got as far as the parking lot exit before I realized how unusually quiet it was inside the van.

I turned halfway around in my seat, saw the empty place where Ollie should have been sitting, and shouted, “Mom! You forgot Ollie!”

She cursed and slammed on the brakes so hard my seat belt locked, whipping my head forward and bruising my shoulder. She pulled a sharp U-turn, almost hitting another car, and drove too fast through the narrow aisles into a handicapped spot at the front of the store. She left the car running and we both raced inside the store.

“Manager!” Mom shouted at one of the checkout girls. “Where’s your manager?”

The girl was startled and looked about ready to cry. A man with a goatee and an angry scowl marched up to us and said, “Mrs. McAlister?”

“My daughter! Where is she?” Mom was looking over the man’s shoulder, but Ollie wasn’t there.

He said, “Calm down, ma’am. Olivia’s fine. She’s in my office.” He seemed on the verge of a lecture, but Mom shoved past him and pushed through a door marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY
and into a small office with a metal desk and filing cabinets that took up more than half the room.

Ollie sat in a chair behind the desk. She was spinning and spinning, her head tipped back, her hair flying, a huge smile spread over her face.

“Ollie!” Mom knocked a stack of file folders off the corner of the desk trying to get to her.

Ollie stopped spinning and held out her arms. Mom lifted her up, held her so tight I was afraid she wouldn’t be able to breathe.

“I’m so sorry, baby,” Mom whispered into her ear. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“It’s all right, Mommy,” Ollie said. “You always come back for me.”

That night Mom made Ollie’s favorite dinner. Spaghetti and hot dogs. When we were all sitting down, with our plates still empty, Mom leaned her elbows on the table and folded her hands together under her chin. She looked at me and then at Ollie and said, “I love you girls both so much. You know that, right?”

Of course, Mom,
we said.
Of course we know
. We thought we knew. At the time, we were both still so young, and death was something we’d only ever encountered in stories. I don’t think either of us understood what she meant. Not really. How terrified she’d been when she thought she’d lost Ollie. How she’d do anything, everything in her power, to keep us both safe. How one day we might lose her. One day she wouldn’t come back for us and when that happened, she wanted us to remember love.

I understood. Now, I understood.

I
held Ollie for another few seconds, until her breathing slowed and became less ragged. Then I pulled her away from me so I could see her face. “What happened?”

She looked over my shoulder. I turned to see, but there was no one there. I brushed my hand over her forehead the way Mom used to do. She was warm, but not feverish.

“I shouldn’t have left you alone. I’m sorry. But you’re okay. You’re okay, right?” I rose to my feet but kept one hand clamped around hers. “Did you find anything good?”

The stack of books she’d been gathering before I left was gone, the floor cleared. I looked behind the chair, but there were no books there, either.

“Nothing?”

She shrugged and wiped the back of her hand across her cheek.

“Not even one?”

Ollie reached into her back pocket and pulled out a small, green hardcover. Her
Alice
book. She clutched it to her chest.

“Aren’t you bored with that one yet?”

She shook her head.

I sighed and led her toward the front of the store. “You’re still going to keep quiet though, right? About the . . . you know.” I patted the outside of my satchel.

She squeezed my hand.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

As we passed the front counter, Mrs. Roth cleared her throat. She eyed the
Alice
book Ollie was holding.

I put my arm around Ollie and said, “We brought it in with us. It’s ours.”

Mrs. Roth arched her thinly plucked eyebrows. A deep crease formed straight across the middle of her forehead. Before she could say anything, a loud crash came from the room behind her. The shelves and window glass rattled. The trinkets on the counter shook. Mrs. Roth jumped up so fast she kicked the stool over on its side. She glared at the curtain.

Voices, loud and sparring, forced their way closer to the front room.

“Would you just listen to me for one second?” I recognized Travis’s voice, despite it being high pitched and frantic.

“Go! Get the hell out!”

“Dad, please. I’m only trying to help.”

“If I wanted your help, I’d ask for it.”

The edges of the curtain trembled.

Ollie tried to wiggle out from under my arm, but I held her tight.

The voices got louder, moved closer, almost right on top of us. Someone threw something hard against a wall. We heard a violent crashing and splintering, and then Travis shouted, “Fuck!”

Mrs. Roth turned her head, blinked at me and Ollie like she was just seeing us there for the first time. “I think you girls had better leave.”

She didn’t wait for us to go. She just turned her back on us and disappeared through the curtain.

“What is going on?” Her voice reminded me of Grandma’s that time Ollie and I were visiting and tried to make milk shakes in her kitchen, but forgot the part about snapping the blender lid on tight.

Another something smashed and broke against the wall.

Travis shouted, “Shit!”

Mrs. Roth said, “Language.” And then, “I will not have you two fighting in my store. This is neither the time nor the place.”

The curtain twitched. Mrs. Roth’s long fingers and violet-painted nails poked through, gripping the edge, readying to pull it open again. “Get a broom and clean up this mess,” she said.

I rushed Ollie out the front door. We jumped on our bikes and rode hard and fast out of town.

Z
eb and Bear sat side by side on the lowered tailgate of Zeb’s truck, parked in front of the hemlock stump. They kicked their legs back and forth in the air like they were boys again and bored with summer. When Ollie and I came around the last bend, Bear hopped off the tailgate first. Zeb climbed down more slowly.

Two Decembers ago Zeb had broken his hip going down the driveway to get the mail. He wasn’t watching where he was going, he’d said, too busy staring at the snowflakes coming down. He slid on a patch of ice and landed the exact wrong way. He’d recovered quickly for a man his age—seventy-nine and holding—and liked to say it was because he drank a glass of whole milk every damn day of his life as far back as he could remember. He used a cane for a few weeks after, but now he got around just fine on his own, only having trouble if he was climbing up or down from something, or if the weather was about to change. Even then, you’d hardly notice. A slow descent, carefully putting one foot down, testing the weight; a hand rubbing over the bad hip, massaging the aches away. Mom had once said that Zeb was going to outlive us all.

I got off my bike and leaned it against the side of the truck. Ollie dropped hers in the dirt and ran full speed toward Zeb. He crouched and held out his arms and when she ran into them, he folded her up and swung her around. For a few seconds he was as strong as Zeus, she was as light as a cloud, and there was no such thing as gravity. When he set her down again, she kept tight hold of his hand.

I was close enough now to see the equipment loaded in the back of the truck: a spray bottle of sugar water, a saw, a ladder, a bucket, an empty Langstroth box. My bee suit and helmet.

Zeb smiled at me and touched the brim of his straw hat, nodding once. He said, “There’s a swarm trying to make a home in one of my apple trees. Your daddy said you might be able to do something about that?”

“Me?” I looked over at Bear.

He was leaning up against the truck bed, arms over the side, hands loosely clasped together in the air. He squinted off into the trees, worrying a long piece of grass between his teeth. Though I’d seen it done, I’d never captured my own swarm—that had always been Bear’s job.

“You sure?” I asked. “You think I’m ready?”

Bear took the grass he was chewing on and tossed it aside. “You don’t have to be ready. You just have to try.” He climbed into the back of Zeb’s truck and held his hand out for me. “I’ll be right there, walking you through it.”

I grabbed hold and swung myself up into the truck bed beside him.

“Ever seen a swarm scooped from a tree crook?” Zeb asked Ollie.

Ollie shook her head.

“No?” Zeb’s expression was the same as if she’d shaken her head no to his asking about whether or not she’d ever seen the ocean. “Well, then, I guess we’ll have to go ahead and make a day of it.”

He brought her around to the front of the truck and opened the passenger door. As she climbed in, Zeb said, “Did you know that the ancient Egyptians thought bees were messengers sent from the sun god Ra? The Greeks, though, now they believed bees were souls of the dead come back to keep the rest of us company.”

“Don’t tell her things like that,” I said.

Zeb came around to the back of the truck again and lifted first my bike, then Ollie’s, up to Bear, who found a place for them beside the beekeeping equipment.

“No harm in thinking there’s some place to go after we’re done with this life, is there, Sam?” Zeb shut the tailgate, walked around to the driver’s side, and climbed in.

The back window of the cab was open. Ollie had her head forward, looking through the windshield, but I knew she was listening. I said, “It’s bad enough already, her thinking she can see ghosts. She doesn’t need any more excuses for not talking.”