One Mile Under (21 page)

“Chuck …” said his wife. “Maybe you should.”

“
Marie!
” His hand met the tabletop, causing the glassware to shake, his eyes ablaze. “Don’t you say another word,” he said to her. “Just don’t.” He turned back to Hauck. “If you had any sense you wouldn’t be looking around this mess in the first place. You’d do the smart thing and just be gone. If we had any sense …” He stopped on the word, as if something inside had stopped him, and his voice softened. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But just go back home. Please … You find anything, take it to the people who can do some good. Just let us alone. That’s all I’m asking now. I know you think you have the answers …” Watkins was a proud, tough man, but Hauck saw tears come into his eyes. “But just go. Please …”

The entire house seemed to stand still like it was in the grip of fear.

“C’mon, Dani,” Hauck said. He looked at her and could see she was bursting with frustration. “I’m sorry to bother you again. All of you.
Ma’am
.” He nodded to Watkins’s wife.

Dani said, “Mr. Watkins, if you only let us—”

“Dani, please, you heard him.” Hauck took her by the arm. She took a futile glance around the room, ending on Allie, who nodded back at her with a look that conveyed something like,
Thanks. It’s best. I’ll see you at home.

At the door, Hauck turned back. The farmer was still standing there with his hands balled around his cap. “I do know,” Hauck said. “I lost a daughter myself. She was five. So I do know how it is.”

Watkins just stared with an empty and impassive expression.

“So, Mr. Hauck …?”

Hauck looked back.

“They say it’ll get better. With time.”

“Which part, Mr. Watkins?” Hauck looked into the farmer’s hooded eyes. “The grief or the guilt?”

As soon as they were on the porch, Dani grabbed onto Hauck’s arm. “Something’s going on here. How can you just leave and not make them see it?”

“Because I can, Dani. That’s all there is to it. You don’t understand.” He went down the steps to their car.

“Uncle Ty, listen, please …” She caught up to him. “Allie told me inside, something’s not right here. She said she heard Trey’s father and mother arguing. She heard her tell him something like ‘You’re not responsible.’ ‘You’re not responsible,’ Uncle Ty … Allie was sure she was talking about Trey.” She latched onto Hauck’s arm and swung him around. “We can’t just leave.
She
wants to know the truth.”

“Then let her find it. We’re going home. We’re sticking our noses into something where we don’t belong.”

“What do you mean we don’t belong …? What’s happened, Uncle Ty? Why are you suddenly agreeing with him?”

He pulled the car door open, the blood heating up inside.

“Mr. Hauck …”

They heard the front door open behind them. Kelli Watkins came onto the porch. She came down the steps and over to them. “I’m sorry about my father. He’s not that way. Really. You can see, he’s toiling his whole life away, and look what’s happening …”

Hauck said, “You don’t have to apologize. I—”

“I’m not apologizing. I know you both felt from the start that Trey’s death wasn’t an accident, and I don’t want to get my father in trouble, or put anyone else in harm … But if my brother was the victim of something”—she looked up at him—“then I don’t want to keep it quiet, either.”

“I think he was, Kelli,” Dani said to her. “It’s just that no one wants to hear.”

“
I
want to hear.” She looked at Dani and then at Hauck, and pushed the bangs away from her eyes. “My father was always a courageous man. And look what’s happened. You don’t know the truth of what’s really happening here. My father and a few other townspeople got involved and …

“Just look around,” she said, her gaze swept over the parched, brown fields. “You can see what we’re struggling with here. None of them grew up with a nickel in their pockets other than this land. Now look at it. Then this thing comes like a gift from God that can save us. This was a quiet town, Mr. Hauck. Like some Norman Rockwell painting. Now it’s turned people against each other. To my dad, it was like making a deal with the devil to sell your soul. And now we all see the cost, what’s happened. The real cost …”

Hauck put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. Tears came into her eyes.

“Look around at this shit, Mr. Hauck. God knows why anyone would want to give their lives up to save it. Other than just their own will and stubbornness.” She wiped the tears away with her arm. “And look what it’s cost us now.”

“Kelli, if you want us to just go home, we will.”

“I don’t want you to go home.” She shook her head and looked up at Hauck, a fire of something, maybe a last hope, flickering through her watery eyes. “Everyone goes home. I’m sorry for what you said in there, about your daughter. I wouldn’t blame you if you did go. We’ve been afraid of the truth, because of what might happen next. But I loved Trey, and if something bad did happen, well then I damn well want to know. And the people who did it made responsible. He was a good kid, whatever my father feels.” She turned to Dani. “You knew that, right?”

Dani nodded. “Everyone did.”

“You go back now and not look into it.” Kelli shrugged. “I don’t know who will.”

They stood here looking at her.

“So actually there is someone … Someone who you can talk to. In Greeley. She’s a lawyer. She might be the only one left who’s not on RMM’s payroll. But you have to understand, you’ll be going up against a lot here, Mr. Hauck, both with RMM and the town. They may be simple folk here, but trust me, they don’t take kindly to someone getting in their way. We see that now.”

“What this person’s name?” Hauck inquired.

“Jen Keeler. She’s with some environmental group. I could find out for you.”

“Keeler …” Hauck said. “Won’t be necessary.” He squeezed her shoulder in a bolstering way.

They got in their car. Kelli took a step or two toward the house as Hauck started the engine, then she turned back to them and Hauck came around.

“So you gonna stay or leave?” Kelli asked. The hot wind whipped her hair and she pushed it off her face. Her eyes seemed to convey that she had seen this picture before.

“Everyone leaves …” She shrugged with an air of futility. “Or ends up being part of them.”

Hours later, Hauck lay on his bed at the motel. The Golf Channel was on the tube. Some obscure tournament in Dubai with a lot of European players he had never heard of. After a couple of beers and some decent Mexican, he’d left Dani a while back and went back to his room.

You gonna stay or leave?
Kelli had asked him.

It had taken him two visits to see it. But standing at the door, looking into Watkins’s haunted eyes, he saw the very same thing that had been etched onto Hauck’s own countenance ten years before. The same cast of grief and helplessness and rage.

Guilt, too.

They always leave.

Hauck’s thoughts traveled back to a place they rarely did now.

Ten years ago, he had been behind the wheel of his Ford Bronco when he backed out of his garage in anger and over his five-year-old daughter, Rachel, who had been playing with her sister in the small yard in front of their house and had chased a ball into his path.

To this day, the remembrance of that impact, and the high-pitched terror of Jessie’s scream, still sent a shiver of anguish down his spine.

He was in a fit of impatience after a spat with Beth, which like most spats, could be traced to the most trivial thing, and had ended up costing them both the thing most dear to them.

That moment changed the rest of their lives.

But today he’d seen it again. Like it had happened just yesterday. Only a person who felt it himself with such immediacy would recognize it so plainly for what it was.

Leave,
Kelli had said to him.
I wouldn’t blame you if you did.

So what if Watkins had done something that led to his son’s death? Who cared if it was easier for him to live with it as some kind of unpreventable accident? Who was Hauck to force his way in and try to shine the truth on it? Truth is fungible, people say. Look at any conflict. There’s always a different side if you dig deeply. A different truth. This wasn’t his fight.

Does it get easier?
Watkins asked him at the door.

Which part? The pain or the guilt.

He should just go back, Hauck tried to convince himself, like everyone was telling him to. He had a life on hold. An important job. A girl. If he was so looking for an answer, those could show him the way.

But that was before the latest text had come in from Brooke, just before he and Dani went to dinner.

That the team looking into the balloon accident in Aspen
had
indeed found something. A tiny hole in the nylon—most of the fabric had been consumed in the flames—ringed with microscopic traces of sulfur and potassium nitrate.

Gunpowder.

Which meant that the tragedy wasn’t what everyone had thought. An accident. Someone had shot a bullet into the shell. It was just like Dani had said. A part of a cover-up that was aimed at the person Dani was headed to see that morning. Who’d caught sight of something on the river the day before, when Trey died.

That made things different now for Hauck. For Watkins, too, whether he liked it or not.

Five more people had died.

When he told Dani about it she wept and Hauck put his arm around her. He knew how hard it was when your worst fears turn out to be true. Even ones you carried from the outset. He went back to the room and lay down, and thought about Naomi. He needed to talk to somebody. This thing was growing. Whoever had done this not only had the means, but the will. He checked the time. Ten thirty
P.M
. Well after midnight back east. She’d long be asleep. Most days she was up at five
A.M.
for a run before work.

He wrote out a text to her.

Miss you.

Then his thoughts shifted to Jessie. His older daughter was sixteen now. She’d been seven when the accident occurred. She lived with her mom and her stepfather in Brooklyn. Hauck saw her every few weeks, though less frequently now, now that she was dealing with boys and AP classes. He figured she’d be asleep as well, but he thumbed out a text message to her. He needed to feel a part of someone.

Just letting you know I’m thinking of you.

Then he put the phone down and closed his eyes. He felt sleep coming over him.

Next to him, his phone jingled. A text coming in. Jessie had written back: “Thinking of you too, Daddy.”

Which made him smile.

So late?
he wrote back.
What are you doing up?

He waited a few seconds until her answer came in. “I’m with a guy.”

He bolted up, sleep rushing out of him, until he heard the phone jingle again: “Hahaha! Just doing homework, dad. It’s exam time. Gotcha, tho!”

He wrote back with a wave of relief, just happy to feel her close.
Yes, you did
. He closed his eyes again and flicked off the TV.

The phone jingled again: “When you coming back, Dad? I miss you.”

I miss you too, honey,
he wrote back.

It had been three months.

W
hat are you going to do?
Kelli had asked him.
Stay or go?

He knew his answer in his heart, even if he hadn’t made up his mind.

No.
It doesn’t get easier, he could have told Watkins. It doesn’t go away. It never does.

It only hides for a while.

He wrote out a last message. Something that made sense to him at least. Then he put the phone on the table and closed his eyes.

He was staying.

I am back, honey.

Wade Dunn leaned back at his office desk, the phone to his ear. It was going on eleven; only the two or three staff manning the night shift were still around. He dialed the number and waited for the person he was calling to pick up.

“
Wade …?
”

“The very same,” he said with a chuckle, doing is best to appear upbeat. “How’re you doing, Dani?”

An hour ago he’d gotten the call, the one that was tearing his stomach into shreds. It was an old lesson, one he knew he should’ve learned before. You open the door and let people in, in this case the wrong people, they never let you go. It just keeps getting deeper and deeper.

“Wade, it’s late.” Dani sounded tired. “I can’t really talk right now.”

“I just don’t want you to think we don’t follow up on our guests when we let them out of jail here. We’re a full-service operation. So where are you?”

“You told me to get out of town, so that’s exactly what we did. I’m with my uncle.”

“So where’d you go? Hiking? Fishing? Down to the sand dunes maybe?” He knew exactly where they were, of course. That’s what was behind his call.

“Actually, we’re up in Greeley. We came for Trey’s funeral.”

“You did, huh?” He acted surprised. Though he already knew that, as well. He knew most everything about what they’d been up to since they arrived. Who they’d seen. Who Hauck had spoken with. “The funeral was yesterday, Dani, wasn’t it? Heard a couple of people went up there from here.”

“Yes, they did.”

He held his breath for her next answer. “So why you staying around …?”

She paused. “What’s the issue, Wade? I thought you wanted me as far away from there as possible.”

“What I wanted,” he said, “was for you to keep that pretty little nose of yours out of things that weren’t any of your concern, Danielle. And I hope that’s what you’re still doing. Are you?”

“Am I what, Wade?”

“Are you puttin’ aside all those crazy notions you had? You and that famous godfather of yours. I figured this was kind of a reunion for the two of you, and you don’t want to be dragging him into something all pointless and foolish.”

“I don’t know, Wade, all of a sudden there’s a lot that doesn’t seem so foolish anymore.”