Wide Open (21 page)

“Sarah Hale?” Hallie asked.

There was silence. “Well,” he said, drawing the word out, “that wasn’t—” And his voice seemed flatter to Hallie, though maybe that was her phone, because it was fading out every couple of words, too, as if they were getting farther away from each other. “This was an intrusion, wasn’t it?” he said. “You’re upset. Finding a body can be an upsetting experience. And after your sister … They said you just stumbled across it?”

“Ah … yeah.” Martin must have pretty good contacts at the sheriff’s office, Hallie thought, because he seemed to have all the details.

“And they already—the sheriff’s identified the body already? You said the name was Hale, didn’t you? Sarah Hale?”

There was a truck behind Hallie on the road, far enough back that she couldn’t tell who it was or even exactly what kind of truck it was, grayed to anonymity by the late-afternoon light. She watched it in the rearview mirror—appear, disappear, appear again against the deceptive flatness of the county road.

“No,” Hallie said. “I just … you know what?” Because she wasn’t much for dissembling. “I thought it might be her.”

“Oh,” Martin said. His voice even flatter, like a knife blade. “That’s interesting,” he said.

“Yeah, it kind of is,” Hallie said, particularly since she knew, and she was damn sure Martin knew, that it wasn’t Sarah Hale, though there was a Sarah Hale body out there somewhere, presumably underneath the fountain out at Uku-Weber.

When Hallie’d known Martin before, she’d found him an interesting, attentive person. A little too attentive for her, too much
I hope you’re not too tired
and
Are you cold?
and
Here, let me take care of that for you
. But not like he was doing it for what it would get him, more like he actually cared if she was tired or if he was boring her or what she wanted to do that day. This Martin seemed like he wanted to be that Martin, but couldn’t pull it off.

“I understand you’ll be leaving soon,” Martin said.

The abrupt change of subject left Hallie silent for a minute. He was right. Damn him. She would be leaving soon. Leaving in two short days, to be exact. But it would be long enough to figure out what he was doing and to stop him. It had to be.

“The reason I ask,” Martin said, filling the silence, “I don’t know whether you realize how important Uku-Weber is, Hallie.” He laughed. “I know that sounds … grandiose, but we really are. And everyone here—I want everyone to be a part of it. You haven’t seen how people … You haven’t seen the struggle.”

“What are you talking about?” Hallie said.

“I will make the world a better place,” he said. Apparently,
Don’t fuck with that
was meant to be understood.

“Are you actually threatening me?” Hallie asked.

“It would be wise,” Martin said, “if you remembered that you don’t live here anymore.”

“Don’t count on it,” Hallie said. She broke the connection, but where had that come from? That last bit. Because she had a career, would be reupping in a couple of weeks. She wasn’t coming back here, not to live.

23

It was close to six fifteen by the time she pulled into Cleary’s, having gotten stuck behind three pickup trucks, a Suburban, and a tractor hauling big hay bales for three and a half miles. There were only three cars in the parking lot: two parked by the bar-side door, and Boyd’s Jeep Cherokee right up beside the other door.

The restaurant side, distinguished from the bar side by white tablecloths and chairs with padded seats, was practically empty. Boyd, seated at a table halfway along the far wall, looked up when she came in and smiled, quick and fleeting. He was still out of uniform, though he’d changed into a dark red shirt with a button-down collar and faded blue jeans. His face looked tight and thin, as if he hadn’t had much sleep lately. Perversely, it made Hallie want to dump everything on him—ghosts and Martin and blood and lightning. She wanted to hit him with impossible things, one right after the other, wanted to see him when he wasn’t so controlled, to watch how he reacted. Wanted him to be one thing or the other—on the side of rational and logical or on the side of Hallie.

She could hear faint strains from the jukebox in the bar as she crossed the room. Boyd already had a cup of coffee, but Hallie had had plenty of coffee, and she ordered a beer from the waitress who had followed her across the room to the table.

“I thought you wouldn’t come,” Boyd said. His hands encircled his stoneware coffee mug.

“You’re an ass,” Hallie said.

Boyd opened his mouth, started to say something, then stopped. The waitress brought Hallie’s beer and left again. “All right,” he said, and nodded once. “All right.”

They sat like that for a minute, on Hallie’s side because she wasn’t entirely sure how to go forward if there wasn’t going to be an argument.

“I think we should lay our cards on the table,” Boyd said, breaking the uncomfortable silence.

“You first,” Hallie said quick, like she hadn’t even had to think, though she’d thought about it the whole drive in. Who was he? What did he want? How did it help her or Dell or Sarah Hale or Karen Olsen that he was here, that she was talking to him?

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” It took him a minute before he actually said anything else. “First, thank you.”

Hallie blinked.

An elderly man who looked vaguely familiar to Hallie stopped by the table to thank Boyd for pulling his tractor out of the mud last Thursday. There were already more people in the restaurant than there’d been when Hallie came in. Two tables of gray-haired ranchers who talked to one another across the gap, a table for six that consisted of two women and four kids of varying ages from three to sixteen or so, a solitary man with a grimy gimme cap against the wall by the windows.

“Thank you for coming here,” Boyd continued when the man had left their table again. “It was— I’m glad,” he finally said simply. He tried a smile, but didn’t quite pull it off, like there was a lot more stuff to come and he was afraid it wasn’t the right time.

Hallie raised an eyebrow because
I’m glad you came
wasn’t going to cut it in the explanation department. There was shoving her out of the way, leaving her behind, there was
This is an ongoing investigation,
there was … well, she didn’t know what there was, did she? That was the point.

Boyd signaled the waitress for more coffee. “I can explain about this morning,” he said. He traced a line on the surface of the table, finishing with a sharp tap. He kept tapping his index finger on the table as he continued, like he was marking off items in his head. “But I need to start, well, at the beginning, I guess.”

He sat there for another minute, somehow managing to both look and not look at her at the same time. Maybe thinking. Maybe figuring out how to lie to her.
Don’t lie to me,
she thought, and realized just in the thinking how important that was.
Don’t lie to me
—because that would be it, the one last thing.

“If I—,” he began, his voice low, though it carried clearly. “If I explain things—lay everything out as well as I can—”

“What?” she demanded. “You want, what?”

“I want you to believe me,” he said.

Hallie sat back.

Well
.

“I can’t,” she finally said, “until I know what you have to say.”

Boyd’s shoulders rose and fell in a silent half laugh. “Yeah,” he said. He was quiet for another minute, looking into the depths of his coffee mug. Hallie’s finger twitched at the loose edge of the paper label on her beer bottle.

“It’s complicated,” Boyd finally said.

“Everything’s complicated,” Hallie said. “Just spit it out.”

“Okay.” Boyd nodded. “All right.” But then he didn’t say anything else.

“Uhm … Boyd?”

“Do you think I’m a Boy Scout?”

“What?”

“Honest, loyal, helpful, friendly.”

“Hmmm…” Hallie frowned. This was not the direction she’d imagined this conversation taking.

“Yeah, I kind of am. And I’m … good with that. I mean, I’m okay being a Boy Scout or whatever you want to call it. But you’d think the payoff to that would be that people—people who know me, would believe what I tell them.”

“Okay?” Hallie said, because she didn’t know him and if he thought she did, then he had a weird idea of what
knowing
meant.

He leaned forward, intensity coming off him in waves, in the direct stare and the tight muscles underneath his jaw. Hallie wondered if this was what he bottled up in precision haircuts and polished boots and tightly creased khakis. “Because you have to know this before anything else makes sense. Before I can explain earlier today. Which I can. Explain. But this first. Yeah. I think…”

“Just spit it out,” Hallie said, almost laughing because—wow—the Boy Deputy stumbling over his words was … kind of cute, actually—made her willing to listen, at any rate.

He took a breath, rubbed a thumb along his jaw. “When I was … I don’t know, eleven or twelve, I had this dream,” he said. “My parents were arguing, in the dream, about … grades, I think. Something about school and keeping up. My brother came in and said the bus was waiting. My mother said, ‘No one rides the school bus, you’ll have to walk.’ My father goes out to talk to the bus driver, and he’s standing on the steps up into the bus, and then it—the bus—breaks into a million pieces, like confetti, and my father drops the couple of feet to the street because the bus and the steps he was standing on are gone. Then I woke up.”

He looked at Hallie, and his eyes narrowed. “I know,” he said, like he’d been through it a thousand times. “Because it was just a dream. But there was a feeling of … dread, or doom. My heart was pounding a mile a minute. I just … I thought the world had ended. It was just this dream, and I had to wake my brother up to make sure he was still alive, run down to my parents’ room to see if they were still breathing.”

Hallie didn’t know what to say. Because it was just a dream, right? A dream he’d had twelve or fifteen years ago. That was the big deal? The thing he was afraid she wouldn’t believe? Well, she believed he had a dream. “I don’t—,” she began.

“Look—,” Boyd said at the same time.

The waitress came back and refilled Boyd’s coffee mug, asked Hallie if she was sure she didn’t want pie, because the pie was pretty good today. A mother and three boys under the age of ten took a table right behind theirs, bumping Boyd’s chair three times as they seated themselves. There was a loud commotion over by the cash register as the man in the gimme cap argued with someone over something.

Hallie raised an eyebrow. “We could go someplace,” she said. She wouldn’t have, earlier. He still hadn’t explained anything, except some weird dream he’d had when he was eleven, but he was—she trusted him. Even after this morning. It was disturbing, actually, but she was going with it.

Boyd picked up the check and walked to the register by the door. Hallie watched him, then crossed to the bar side and picked up a six-pack to go.

Prue Stalking Horse was behind the bar. She brought Hallie her six-pack and change. When Hallie reached over to take the money, Prue leaned across the bar. “Can I tell you something?” she said. There weren’t many people on the bar side of Cleary’s yet—some ranch hands sitting at the bar, two men toward the back at a round table, and a couple in matching shirts and cowboy hats over by the door.

“Okay,” Hallie said.

Prue kept her voice low, though her face was still and calm, pretty much like always. She laid her hand over Hallie’s, flat against the bar, and Hallie had to fight to keep from yanking away from her touch.

“How old were you in ’94?” she asked.

“What?” Hallie didn’t have time for this shit.

“You were, what? Four? Five?”

“Something like that.”

Prue stepped back, removed her hand from Hallie’s. “Then you don’t remember.”

“Remember what?”

“The end of Jasper.”

Hallie didn’t remember, but she knew. Jasper had been hit by a monster tornado in ’94, in the fall, after everyone thought tornado season was over.

“I was there,” Prue said. “I saw what happened.”

“A tornado happened. Right?”

Prue studied her face. Then she said, “Do you believe in magic?”

“What?” Hallie stepped back from the bar. “What are you talking about?” But it wasn’t as if she didn’t know. Because
something
happened when blood hit the atrium floor at Uku-Weber, because Martin could, or seemed to think he could, control the weather, but she hadn’t named it. Because calling it what it clearly was, calling it magic, felt like stepping over the line she’d been avoiding since she started seeing ghosts, felt like never coming back to normal.

Magic.

Yes. Hallie believed in it.

She believed the shit out of it.

She leaned toward Prue. “What—?” she began, but Prue had already stepped back and started wiping down the bar again, as if they hadn’t been talking. Hallie straightened, felt an itch between her shoulder blades, like a target. She picked up the six-pack, turned, and practically ran right into Pete Bolluyt.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” she said.

Pete grinned at her. He took a half step to his right and picked up a beer that Prue had just put down, anticipating his order. Behind him, was Martin.

Hallie raised an eyebrow. If she hadn’t been holding the six-pack of beer, her hands might have already clenched into fists. As it was, the muscles in her arms, across her shoulder blades, and underneath her eyes tightened in anticipation.
Fight or flight,
one of her sergeants had told her,
that’s what everything comes down to.

Hallie didn’t run.

“We need to talk,” Martin said. He looked smaller than the last time she’d seen him, like, well, like Hallie’d gotten bigger, which she didn’t think was right, since Pete still looked the same size to her, or he’d shrunk, which wasn’t likely either.

Hallie shook her head. “No.”

She took a step to walk around them—Pete and Martin—but Pete moved away from the bar and blocked her.