The Missing Place (34 page)

The chief of police paused in the doorway, holding on to both sides of the frame as though he was trying to remain standing. He looked terrible, his hair pushed forward, his shirt wrinkled and not all the way tucked in on one side. Stubble made the skin of his face appear pale and waxy, as if a thumb pressed into it would leave a dent. His eyes were red and unfocused like a drunk's, but T.L. knew that Weyant didn't drink.

“My daughter's knocked up,” he said, his voice shredded and hoarse. “I just came from the hospital. They confirmed it. She says you're not the father. Is that true?”

T.L. went still, his fingers curled against his legs. He was wearing the jeans he'd had on yesterday, the ones he'd dropped on the floor when he'd gone to bed, exhausted, after closing up the store. They were softened from wear, the seams frayed. He tugged at loose threads while he tried to look Weyant in the eye.

“That's what she told me.”
Sir
, he added automatically in his mind, but he wouldn't give the man the satisfaction. Not now. Too much had happened, he'd been accused once too often. All he'd done was what seemed right, every step of the way.

At first, Elizabeth said the baby was his. It was only later, when
he refused to consider moving to L.A. with her and the baby, that she changed her tune. He should have believed her then. He should have backed off then. But T.L. had known only one direction since he went to live with Myron: ahead. Keep moving ahead, because behind you was a place you never wanted to return to.

“What do
you
say?” Weyant leaned in, as though some barrier prevented him from coming into the room. He brought with him a faint smell of cooked onions, not unpleasant. Whatever Elizabeth's mom had made for dinner hours ago.

T.L. felt the fight drain out of him, like air from an inner tube that had run over a nail. He'd thought he would stand up to Weyant, take full advantage of his youth and anything else he could think of to blunt the man's attack. Now he just felt exhausted.

“You can't keep me in here,” he said. “I didn't do anything.”

“So get up and fucking walk out.”

The word, coming from the chief, was shocking. He was straitlaced to the core, the sort of man who parted his hair and shined his own shoes. They regarded each other for a moment, and then the chief seemed to change his mind. “Your uncle's sitting out there in my waiting room.”

“Yeah, I know. He followed the car over here when they brought me in. Nobody said he couldn't.”

“It's a free country.” The chief rubbed the bridge of his nose with one of his meaty hands. “You know he broke my nose once. He ever tell you that?”

“What?”

Weyant regarded him carefully. “You know we knew each other. Back in the nineties.”

“You wrestled,” T.L. said uncertainly, something Myron had told him when he started seeing Elizabeth.
Be careful of him
, Myron had
cautioned.
He doesn't fight fair.
“You went into the army when he was still in high school.”

“Yeah. But I'm asking you, did you know me and your uncle have a history?”

T.L. shook his head, bewildered.

Weyant waited him out, drumming his fingers on the table. “All right. Never mind that. I want a statement from you. What happened that day, to that boy. Taylor Capparelli.”

“Could I . . .” T.L.'s voice was dangerously close to cracking. He cleared his throat, sat up a little straighter in the chair. “I want Myron here. I'll tell you everything right now, you let him come in here.”

“Your uncle's got the res lawyer out of bed. He's heading over now. Might as well wait for him.” He ran a hand through his hair, messing up the part. “Might as well make it a fucking party. Christ.”

THE LAWYER, JACK
Cook, had taught T.L. to tie flies. There had been five or six eight-year-old Cub Scouts around a banquet table in the rec hall where the troop held their meetings. Mr. Cook and Mr. Whitecalf wore their tan scout leader shirts over their work clothes, their polyester button-downs and stained ties. Mr. Whitecalf sold insurance, and the two men were the only dads T.L. knew who wore ties to work.

Mr. Cook's son had already been in high school then, living with his mother downstate. As far as T.L. knew, they'd never reconciled and Mr. Cook never remarried. He had a stroke a few years ago; he was hard to understand now and didn't use his left hand. He still drove and fished, but the limp appendage added to his general air of disheveled shabbiness, and for a fleeting second T.L. wished there
was someone else who could come in here and make Weyant feel small.

The recorder was on and they had moved into a bigger room to accommodate all four of them. It smelled of burnt popcorn and air freshener. There was a fake Christmas tree wrapped in a garbage bag in the corner, its stiff branches poking through the plastic.

Mr. Cook had accepted a cup of coffee, which seemed like poor strategy. Also, he had an actual yellow pad. T.L. suspected that a better attorney would have a laptop. Myron sat with his arms folded across his chest, staring at Weyant as though this was a livestock auction and the chief was leading one underfed calf after another up across the block. It was nearly four in the morning.

“I'd caught a walleye but it was less than a foot long and I threw it back,” T.L. began, choosing a scratch on the table to focus his attention on. “I'd had good luck at that spot before, but it was early in the afternoon and I wasn't catching much.”

He'd gone farther out that day than he should have, but he had his ice picks at hand, laced through his sleeves so that he'd be able to pull himself out in seconds if worst came to worst. He'd learned about the ice in Boy Scouts too. It had been his friend Alan's dad who demonstrated how to distribute your body weight if the ice started to give out under you, facedown in his Carhartt jacket on a sloping field of switchgrass since the lake had only begun to freeze for the season. How they threw themselves into it, a bunch of ten-year-old kids in dirty Wranglers and stiff shirts that their mothers sewed their badges on, all but T.L., whose badges were glued in place by Myron, so that the shirt could never be washed. They pressed themselves into the scratchy ground and giggled as Alan's paunchy, bald father yelled, “This is
serious
, boys, this is life and death—”

T.L. had no death wish, but he was in a gloomy mood. On that frigid day, the postholiday pall lay heavy on the town. Plastic garland hung twisted and limp from street posts, and the Walmart parking lot was full of people returning the gifts they'd received. He'd texted Elizabeth twice the day before, and again she'd ignored him.

He was on the ice by one, having spent the morning helping Myron retag the remainder of the holiday merchandise, the crap that didn't sell at half off. Now it was 80 percent off and the reservation kids would come and buy it. T.L. had stopped for a Subway sandwich on his way to the lake and he ate it after he got his line in the water, tossing the crusts into the water and watching the fathead minnows come to the surface to nibble at them, tiny mouths jerking, bodies twisting and bumping against one another.

It was almost two o'clock when the white truck came down the road to the public beach and parked a hundred feet back from his own truck. Two figures got out; from this distance it wasn't possible to make out much about them other than one was tall and one was average. The truck was new, shiny and big. T.L. figured it was bought with oil money.

Both men dug knit caps from their pockets and pulled them over their heads. They were the type of cap with holes for eyes, the cheap orange ones you could get for six bucks at Walmart. They walked down to the lake, struggling through patches of jutting weeds and scabs of dirty snow, and started out on the ice toward him.

The shorter one had a baseball bat.

That was when T.L. got scared. He would have run, but he couldn't safely go any farther out on the lake. Behind the ice was honeycombed and uneven. Two hundred yards away he could see water shimmering in the sun.

That left only one escape route. If he didn't go toward the men,
he could go to the right, but the shore dipped at that point and he would have an extra fifty yards of ice to cross. A man on land could easily outrun him. Two men could trap him and take away his options.

T.L. stood his ground, hand on his belt where he kept his bait knife in a leather sheath that had belonged to his grandfather. He eyed the auger lying on the ice, wondered if he should make a grab for it.

His considered the possibilities. Most likely, these were nothing but hopheads—there were plenty of them these days, guys who couldn't get through a shift without a hit of meth or Adderall. They went on benders between hitches, coming back on the job more strung out than when they'd left. In town, the pharmacy had been broken into twice, looted of prescription uppers; men coming out of bars and nightclubs were held up for their cash and phones.

Maybe these two would take his truck. It wasn't worth more than three thousand, thirty-four hundred tops, and there they were with a new Silverado. Still, desperation made people do crazy shit. In his wallet was thirty bucks and Elizabeth's senior portrait, which he had promised himself he would get rid of.

“T.L. Collier,” the short one said, passing the bat from one hand to the other and ending that line of thought. They knew him, but T.L. didn't recognize the voice.

“Yeah?” He stood with his hands hanging at his sides, his legs slightly apart. He'd played football in the fall, putting in a dismal season but welcoming the distraction from the breakup, and he was feeling strong. He'd take either of these guys in a fair fight. Together—and with the bat—he didn't stand a chance. “Tell me what you want and you can be on your way. I'm going to reach for my keys, now. Keys to my truck? Okay? You want them?”

His hand hovered outside his pocket, considering going for the knife. But one swing of the bat, even a clumsy one, would knock it from his hand.

“I know what you did to Elizabeth,” the short one said. “I
saw.
”

T.L. blinked. Everything shifted. Elizabeth flashed in his mind—the last time he'd seen her, before her dress rehearsal for her fall choir concert. It had a Halloween theme, and she'd been wearing a glittering mask that she pushed up on her forehead. It held her hair back, and as she turned away it gave the illusion of a jeweled crown, and she'd looked like a movie star from the old days, like Grace Kelly. That was when she'd told him she couldn't see him anymore.

“I haven't seen her in months,” he said. Then he told a lie. “She doesn't mean anything to me.”

“That why you
beat
her, man? That why she's black-and-blue under her clothes? You're a fucking coward, hurting her where no one can see it!”

The taller one said something that T.L. couldn't hear, his voice low and steady.

“You're going to stay away from her, man.” The tall one stepped forward, close enough that T.L. could see the fringe of light brown hair coming out of the bottom of the cap. His eyes were narrowed and intense through the holes. “You hear? Don't talk to her, don't call her, don't text her, don't even say her name.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” T.L. said. He had no idea what they thought he'd done.
Beat
her? The last time he'd touched Elizabeth, he'd wound that silky hair of hers around his hand, pulled her gently closer, inhaled her perfume, and she had whimpered—but not from pain. Her body, pale and almost shimmering in the faint light of the setting sun, stretched across the truck's bench seat in the middle of an alfalfa field early in October, had been perfect. Flawless.

Had someone else done something to her? But who? He'd never seen these guys in his life, and besides, how would Elizabeth meet a rig man? As he cast about for an explanation, out of the corner of his eyes he saw the shorter one get a two-hand grip on the bat and get ready to charge him.

T.L. tried to sidestep, but he was too slow and the bat caught him across the hip. He heard wood on bone before he felt it. The blow was hard enough to knock him to the ice, pain shooting through his body. The guy raised the bat and T.L. was sure he was going to bring it down on his head. His friend tried to stop him, grabbing for the bat, blocking the hit, and it crashed down on T.L.'s groin, glancing off his thigh in an agony of pain that made him gasp. He rolled onto his side in time to throw up on the ice.

“Stop! Paul, Jesus!” The tall one wrestled for the bat. T.L. forced himself to roll to his knees. He'd absorbed most of the hit in his gut. He didn't think his hip bone was broken. Maybe a rib or two. He tried to crawl, got a few feet away and felt rather than heard a cracking deep in the ice.

The others must have sensed it too because they paused, long enough for T.L. to grab his knife. He nearly dropped it before getting a good grip on the handle.