Wide Open (11 page)

Dell laid a ghostly hand on Jennie’s face. The sun emerged from clouds in that same moment, and in the bright afternoon light, Hallie almost missed it. Along Jennie’s jaw was the same lightning bolt configuration she’d seen on Dell’s neck.

She grabbed Jennie’s wrist. “What’s going on?” she asked. “What does that mean?”

“What are you talking about?” Jennie tried to jerk her arm away.

It looked like a faded tattoo, like a watermark.

Dell drifted away. The mark disappeared. What the hell?

“There’s a mark,” Hallie gestured. “On your face.”

Jennie rubbed her hand along her jawline, like she had dirt on there or something.

Hallie heard a truck coming up the lane fast, oblivious of the vehicles parked all down the narrow drive. She grabbed Jennie by the wrist and pulled her out of the way. A swirl of dust, clatter of gravel, and the truck—big and dark and shiny—spun to a stop on the corner of the lawn.

The engine was still pinging over when the door opened and Pete Bolluyt dropped out of the cab.

Perfect.

He saw Hallie immediately, an expression on his face that Hallie couldn’t read. She smelled alcohol on his breath when he was still half a dozen feet away.

As Pete came toward them, Jenny retreated to the line of cars along the driveway. Hallie stepped up.

“Where were you?” she said by way of greeting, because she’d expected him at the funeral, even after last night, after sending a guy with a knife after her, she’d thought he was dumb enough or arrogant enough or cared enough to be there. “Wasn’t she worth it?”

She’d expected it to make him angry, wanted to make him angry. And his face darkened, but when he spoke, his tone was almost mild. “He said we shouldn’t come.”

“What?”

“I told him … I told him we needed to be there.” Pete’s hands were shoved in his pockets, and he was leaning forward as he spoke, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, and Hallie thought he might fall on her, which, if there was anything left to piss her off about this day? That would be it. “I tried to get him to at least come here.” He hauled a hand out of his pocket and pointed at the lawn directly underneath their feet, as if Hallie might not understand which particular
here
he was referring to. Dell drifted across the narrow gap between them, staring at Pete’s face as if it contained the world.

“Here,” he repeated. “Because he wouldn’t come to the cemetery. Said he
couldn’t
. But I think it’s because of—” He stopped abruptly, collected himself, and took a step back before continuing. “But, I knew her.…” He nodded, like he and Hallie were having a conversation. “Before. And whatever happened—whatever hap—” He stopped, caught his breath up sharp, and took another quick step backwards, as if he’d almost fallen over. “Whatever. That counts for something. Doesn’t it? That matters.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Pete frowned, as if he’d just realized whom he was talking to. He leaned toward her. “It’s important,
that’s
what I’m saying,” he told her. “What we do is important. And you—you need to stay out of it. Go back to the war.”

“Fuck you,” Hallie said, said it low, because she didn’t want to be angry today. Not today.

Pete cocked his head to the side. “No one wants you here, Hallie.”

“Yeah?” Enough was enough. “Did they want Dell to die? Is that what they wanted? Who killed her, Pete?”

“No one wanted her to die! I didn’t want her to die.” He was shouting now, leaning in on Hallie, and she was going to punch him in a minute.

“She died anyway, Pete. Where were you?”

Silence stretched taut between them. A half-dozen expressions flickered across Pete’s face—sadness, fear, rage, and something darker than any of those, something Hallie couldn’t name, something secret and base. He leaned close until his lips were right next to her ear.

“Where were
you
?” he said.

Hallie punched him hard in the chest with the flat of her hands. He stumbled back and fell with a jarring thump. She was ready for him when he scrambled back to his feet, wanted him to come, but Boyd was there and Tom Hauser, grabbing Pete’s arms, dragging him away from her.

Boyd gave her a look, like,
What did you do?
She would have punched him, too, if he’d said it out loud.

Boyd dragged Pete to his truck, where they stood for several minutes, talking. Boyd talking anyway and Pete listening, which surprised Hallie, that Pete would listen to him.

Tom Hauser was saying something to her. “Fine. I’m fine,” she said, because that seemed like what he expected, but she was thinking about what Pete had said about Martin and the things they’d done.

Boyd reached out a hand and Pete shook him off, reached for the door to his pickup truck, and Boyd stood and looked at him and shook his head. Immovable object. Jennie Vagts stepped up and said something to both of them.

Pete stepped back, threw his keys on the ground, and flung himself around to the passenger seat. Boyd picked up the keys and handed them to Jennie. He laid his hand over hers and said something. She shook her head, got in the truck, backed it around, and drove away. Dell drifted halfway up the lane after them, then turned around and drifted slowly back.

Hallie’s father came up to her, working his way through the small crowd that had formed halfway up the drive. “If the show’s over,” he said to her, “I guess I’m ready to go.”

12

Hallie slept badly again that night, dreaming of Dell and Afghanistan and someone chasing them through the mountains in a driving snowstorm. She finally gave up on sleeping shortly after six and took a long hot shower, which felt good while she was in it, but her teeth started to chatter as soon as she was back in her bedroom again. She pulled on long underwear, Dell right next to her.

“I’m doing the best I can,” she said to Dell’s ghost. Maybe she didn’t have much in the way of answers yet, but she had a direction. She had questions. It was more than she’d started with. And for at least a moment, at least while she was pulling on her work boots, the five days remaining seemed like almost enough time.

“Why are you dressed like that?” her father said when she came downstairs.

“Like what?”

“Like it’s twenty below zero.”

“You’re a noticing man, Dad,” she said as she went into the kitchen and poured herself some coffee.

Her father grunted in reply.

When she came back, she picked up the local newspaper and sat down. The phone rang.

Her father didn’t even look up. “Get that, would you?”

“Phones don’t bite, Dad,” Hallie said, but she got up and went into the kitchen.

There was no one on the other end of the line, and after she said hello a couple of times, Hallie shrugged, hung up, and went back into the dining room.

“You need help today?” she asked her father as she sat back down and picked up the paper, though she already had a list, now that the funeral and all it entailed was finally finished. She intended to find out more about Uku-Weber and Martin and what Pete had been up to while she’d been gone. She wanted to track down Jennie Vagts, too, find out more about that mark or tattoo or whatever it really was. She had five days left, and she knew she had to make the most of them. But she asked anyway, the old tug of ranch work and obligation.

Her father shook his head. “Norman wants me to look at some land he’s thinking about, over near Templeton. Be back after that, probably around noon.”

The phone rang again.

“Jesus!” her father said.

“I’ll get it,” Hallie said.

“Hallie?” It was Brett.

“Did you just call here?” Hallie asked.

“No.” There was a pause. “I wanted to see how you … were doing.” Her voice faded on the last words, as if she realized the futility of asking Hallie anything about her feelings.

“I’m fine,” Hallie said.

“Yeah,” Brett said. Hallie could hear
sure you are,
without her actually having to say it. “When are you going back?”

Hallie counted up in her head. “Friday morning.” Christ. It was already Sunday. And what did she know? Nothing.

“We should go for a ride,” Brett was saying. “Or something.”

“We should figure out what happened to Dell,” Hallie said.

“You should leave that to the sheriff.”

“Really? Pretty sure he thinks she killed herself.”

“Hallie…”

“No.” She closed her eyes because she didn’t want to fight with Brett about this. Because Hallie was going to find out. Even if …

“I’ll see you before I go.” She hung up before Brett could say anything more.

While she’d been on the phone, her father had finished clearing the table, wiped everything down, and left. When she looked out the front window, she saw the back of his pickup disappearing down the drive.

Hallie turned out the lights in the kitchen and dining room and went down to her father’s office, part of an addition from the sixties that was darker than the rest of the house and always cold. It looked as if no one had ever worked there, the computer hidden, three file cabinets in the closet behind closed doors. The desk clear of everything except a monitor, a desk lamp, and two pens lined up perpendicular to the wall.

Outwardly, her father didn’t act like he’d ever organized anything in his life, had a coffee table in the living room with a dozen magazines and newspapers from six months to a year ago. But there was something about cupboards and cabinets and, apparently, his desktop, some compulsion to put them in order and keep them that way. It had started when Hallie’s mother died, as if keeping the cupboards and closets perfect meant she wasn’t really gone, meant things would someday be okay.

Hallie fired up the computer—a powerhouse of a desktop that loaded up in nothing flat. She searched on Pete Bolluyt, on Martin Weber, and Uku-Weber.

There were three items on Pete—that his father had died three years ago in an automobile accident in Texas, that he’d been arrested in San Francisco a year and a half ago for breaking into an antique store, and a picture from the West Prairie City newspaper of Pete at a local rodeo with a girl Hallie didn’t recognize. The girl was holding a trophy half as big as she was. Pete had his arm around her, and they looked … happy. Hallie clicked back to the search page.

There were plenty more items on Martin Weber, clear back to when he’d graduated from high school in Rapid City. There were pictures at the groundbreaking for his new company. Excerpts from a speech he’d given about how pleased he was to be bringing jobs to his “spiritual home” in Taylor County, how he hoped that making profits and saving the world would never be mutually exclusive in the Uku-Weber lexicon, and a lot more in the same vein that Hallie didn’t bother reading. There was a picture from two years ago, of Martin at a county literacy fair in Colorado, presenting a check to the librarian in charge. The librarian, Karen Olsen, the caption said, looked at him with clear delight, and maybe something more. The article said a bunch of stuff about fund-raising and giving back and a life dedicated to making the world a better place.

Uku-Weber had a website, but there wasn’t much on it—all marketing-speak, which said a lot of nothing without ever specifying what exactly the company did or was going to do once construction was completed. Though there was a small section titled “Research” that might have been interesting if Hallie’d had the patience to sift through a dozen sets of spreadsheets and graphs of power outputs and blade rotations and production efficiencies, which basically seemed to say what Tel had already told her, that Uku-Weber turbines were more efficient than other turbines the same size. Finally, she found three articles in the anemic business section of the local weekly paper and one long article with half a dozen pictures in the Rapid City paper, which managed to say almost nothing as well.

She did a search on Dell and found two newspaper photographs and a Facebook page she hadn’t known Dell had.

Before she shut down the computer, she paused, pulled the search engine back up, and typed in, “Davies Boyd South Dakota.”

Just to see.

Nothing much came up except a short article from the local paper back in March when he’d arrested someone named Yancy McDowd for simple assault out at the Bobtail Inn.

Hallie shut down the computer, stood, and stretched. No one said this would be simple. But shit. Shit. She’d be back in Afghanistan and nothing to show for it if she didn’t start finding answers soon. She went upstairs, grabbed keys, wallet, cell phone, and left the house.

When she walked out the back door, her father’s truck was back in its usual place, under one of the pin oaks in the yard. Hallie figured he was in the equipment shed, working on the Allis again. It was raining and apparently had been raining for a while, though she hadn’t noticed. A sharp jolt of lightning, followed by a loud clap of thunder, and she ducked back under the low porch roof.

Goddamnit.

Because she wanted to be out of there, to be doing something, even though it was Sunday—anything. The Uku-Weber memorial service started in an hour. And that would be something productive, at least. She could get a quick look at the place Dell had worked, talk to people she’d worked with.

She ran for her truck and was soaked through before she got there, slid into the seat, jeans clinging to the soft cloth upholstery. Rain slanted sideways in the weak light from the headlights. The truck’s tires slipped on the gravel as she turned around. Two sharp cracks of thunder so close, there was no difference between the sound and the stark white arc of lightning that lit the sky. Water ran down the drive like a river, cutting deep tracks in the mud.

Hallie turned the engine off and cut the lights. She couldn’t drive in this; she’d get stuck in the mud halfway down the drive and be worse off than she was now. She sat there as rain pounded on the roof of the pickup, her hands clenched tight on the steering wheel. Dell’s ghost drifted beside her in the passenger seat. Water dripped from Hallie’s hair and ran along her cheekbone.