Wide Open (22 page)

“Unless,” she said, as if she were actually considering it. “Do you want to talk about bodies? Because a lot of them have been turning up. Or—” She snapped her fingers. “—maybe Dell. Do you want to talk about her?”

She stepped up close so that she and Martin were standing nose to nose. No one seemed to notice them—not the cowboys at the bar, not the couple by the door, and definitely not Prue, who was at the far end again, wiping the counter, like her single goal was to make it the shiniest counter in South Dakota. Dell was down there with her, staring at the top-shelf whiskey bottles, though as Hallie looked, she began to drift their way.

Martin shook his head, as if Hallie were just a poor deluded girl in an endless line of deluded girls. “I’m certain I could explain things to your satisfaction. Or, perhaps, show you.” He smiled, that smile that Dell and Lorie and even hardheaded Cass used to think was as charming as any man’s smile ever and Hallie used to think was “okay,” you know, until it wasn’t.

“Yeah … no,” Hallie said. “I wouldn’t go anywhere with you.”

Martin leaned close; Hallie resisted the urge to step back. “We could insist,” he said softly.

“You could try,” Hallie retorted. She could feel Dell, cold like a subzero December morning against her shoulder blade, and that was good. At least someone had her back. Martin stepped away from her, setting himself so that Pete’s left shoulder formed a half barrier between him and Hallie. Hallie sneered at him. She set the six-pack of beer on the bar.

“We are not going to fight, Hallie,” Martin said, like he was talking to a twelve-year-old.

“I don’t completely know why yet,” Hallie said, “but I know you killed them. Dell and Sarah Hale and Karen Olsen.” The last just to see what he would do.

Some of the color drained from Martin’s face. But all he said was, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He looked at her intently, though, as if he saw something different from what he’d seen before. Dell drifted between them, and Martin took a step back.

Hallie stepped up. “Here’s what I know.” She ticked points off on her fingers. “I know about the bodies. I knew where they were and how to find them. And I know about the blood. Yeah.” She stopped a moment, because Martin had backed up another half step. “I know. I’ve been to Uku-Weber. I’ve been in your office. I’ve seen blood hit that floor. I don’t know exactly what it all means or what you think you’re doing with it all, but I will. That’s what Dell was doing, wasn’t she? Figuring it all out. Jesus, Martin. That’s why she died, isn’t it? Because she knew or was going to know pretty damn soon.”

“Hallie—” Martin’s voice was sharp enough to get her attention. He stepped away from Pete and seemed to straighten, to draw energy back into himself until he was almost intimidating. “—you don’t want to push me.”

“Oh, hell, Martin,” Hallie said, “you don’t know me very well, if that’s what you think.”

Pete shoved her sideways, one hand wound tight in the sleeve of her shirt. “You better shut up, right now,” he said.

Hallie tried to figure out if she should break Pete’s foot or his balls. Because he needed to let go of her right now.

“That’s enough.”

They all turned to look at Boyd. Martin smiled, like he had never threatened anyone, least of all Hallie. Boyd didn’t smile back, like he was immune to charm, which Hallie hoped he actually was. Because it would make her like him quite a bit.

Pete dropped her arm and took a step forward. Martin stepped back, projecting sincerity and—yeah—puzzlement, she supposed. Puzzled that he could be so misunderstood. She really hoped she got to hit him someday. “I hope you don’t think—,” he began.

“Are you ready?” Boyd said to Hallie, like she was the only one in the room.

She deliberately turned her back on Pete and Martin, picked the six-pack up off the bar, and said, “Yeah, I think I am.”

24

“I didn’t need you in there,” she said as they crossed the parking lot.

“I know,” he said.

“I could have handled it.”

“I know.”

“Then what were you doing?”

He stopped, touched her elbow as a car pulled into the lot, and they both moved sideways out of the way.

“I thought it was time to make it clear where I stood.”

Hallie looked at him, but there was nothing to be read in his face. “Are you saying that—?” She frowned. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.” Because he couldn’t be saying that he knew Pete and Martin and lightning that wasn’t and the things that Hallie knew or thought she knew or was determined to prove. He couldn’t know about Sarah Hale or Karen Olsen.

He couldn’t.

“Hallie!”

Lorie crossed the parking lot toward them. “Are you going in or out? Because if you’re going in, well, I’m going in. But—” She spotted the six-pack of beer under Hallie’s arm. “—you’re leaving, aren’t you? You don’t even have a minute? Two minutes? No, probably not. You’re probably on your way somewhere and I’m keeping you. Well, I won’t keep you, but we have to talk.” She glanced at Boyd. “That thing we talked about?” She said to Hallie, “I think I might know where sh— I think I might have a line on what you wanted. I’ll call you, though, when you’re not— I’ll call.”

And she was gone.

Boyd and Hallie looked at each other.

“Yes, she’s always like that,” Hallie said, and hoped that Lorie really did have a line on Jennie Vagts, that she would turn out to be up in Brookings or gone on a three-day shopping trip or something that had nothing at all to do with lightning and blood and Martin Weber.

She and Boyd stood there for a minute, as if encountering Lorie had knocked them off stride, as if neither of them quite knew how to go on.

“I meant all our cards,” Boyd finally said. “But I have to—I have to start at the beginning.”

“With a dream,” Hallie said.

Boyd shrugged one shoulder. “Yeah.”

This time it was Hallie who said it. “All right.” She could be patient for once. She could. Really.

“Mine or yours?” Boyd asked then.

“Oh, mine,” she said, and pointed toward her pickup, because she wanted that much control.

Boyd smiled like he understood what she was thinking, but it was a friendly smile, not a mocking or condescending one, and she felt more or less in charity with him as she set the six-pack in the back and opened the driver’s-side door. She couldn’t say she understood why he wanted to talk about dreams he’d had when he was eleven years old, when they could be talking about what was happening now. Who cared? Who even remembered dreams they’d had back then?

She thought about heading to the old gravel pit down south of Templeton, but it was promising to be a clear night and not too cold, and there were likely to be several different sorts of people there already—target shooters and teenaged couples and people who wanted privacy and weren’t likely to get it in a county the size of Taylor. Privacy was all about pretending—that you didn’t know or didn’t see or weren’t there. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

Instead, Hallie headed out past the Sigurdson brothers’ ranch and took the turnoff just past Old PC, then turned again and headed east. Another three miles and she turned off onto an old road that saw more horse and cattle traffic than pickup trucks and cars. Ten minutes later, she pulled in behind an old church, the only building for several miles on the big flat open prairie. The building was weathered, some of the windows had been boarded over, and there were gaps in the roof, but for an empty building on the plains, it was in relatively good shape.

On the back door was a sign that read
ST. MARY’S. ENTER ALL.

Hallie got out and dropped the tailgate, hopped up, and set the cold six-pack beside her. The sun sat low on the horizon, throwing long shadows across the churchyard. There was the barest hint of the old lawn, everything fading back to short-grass prairie. Even the drive and the gravel parking lot were slowly giving way to the inevitable.

Eighteen miles away on the interstate, Hallie could hear a truck downshifting, the air so crisp and clean that the sound carried. She propped her foot on the tailgate and rested her chin on her knee, a longneck beer held loose in her hand. She wasn’t much primed for drinking, but it was the flavor of the thing, of the place that was important. This was a place for truth and secrets, a place where no one could overhear them, interrupt them, second-guess.

Boyd took a beer for himself, twisted the cap, and stuck it in his pocket. He held the beer bottle in his right hand, but didn’t drink. Hallie could feel Dell, but she couldn’t see her. She wanted all of them here—Dell and Sarah and Karen—because she was going to tell him, she was. Believe her or don’t believe her, that part was up to him. Trust him or don’t, because suddenly she didn’t care about that as much, which she supposed meant that she’d decided to trust him.

“So,” she said, “you had a dream.”

Boyd opened his mouth, started to say something, then stopped and took a long swallow of beer instead. He rubbed his thumb along his jaw. The light had turned gray, though it wasn’t quite dark yet, and it blurred his features. Hallie could see his face, but not his eyes.

“Yeah,” he said. “I had this dream.” He paused, figuring it all out again, what he was going to say. “For the next three days, I thought something terrible was going to happen.”

“Because of the dream? What did you think was going to happen? That you’d disintegrate into confetti?”

Boyd looked at her, and though Hallie couldn’t read his expression in the dimming light, she could imagine it. She forgot, sometimes, that not everyone had grown up in her family. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s your story.”

“It didn’t make sense when I was eleven, either,” he finally said. “But it didn’t stop the feeling. Disaster. Somewhere. Somehow. I was so sure of it. I told my parents I wasn’t riding the bus anymore.”

“How’d that work out for you?”

“Not well. My mother finally agreed that I could stay home until the end of the week, but then, Monday, right back on the bus.”

“So, did you have the dream again? What happened?”

“The next week, I had another dream,” Boyd said. “This girl I had—well, I had a crush on her—and she was going to Washington, D.C., to the Lincoln Memorial because she’d won some essay contest.”

“In your dream?”

“Yes, in my dream. I didn’t want her to go. I told her that terrorists had targeted the Lincoln Memorial and she’d be in danger. She went anyway, and when she got there, they put all the kids on a big yellow school bus and took them on a tour of Washington. Just as they were driving past the Lincoln Memorial, the road collapsed and the bus shattered into a million pieces. Same feeling when I woke up, like the world had ended while I was sleeping, like everyone I knew had died.” He kicked at a piece of gravel with his foot, held the beer by its neck in his right hand. “Three nights later, I had another dream—six people got on a bus, drove it halfway across the country, and plunged off a bridge in California.”

He rubbed a hand across his face. “I tried not sleeping, but that didn’t work. I tried sleeping with my light on, with music on. My father told me if he believed in psychiatrists, he’d take me to one.”

That surprised a laugh out of Hallie, but Boyd just looked at her like he didn’t get the joke. “Because psychiatrists actually exist,” she pointed out.

He frowned.

“Yeah, okay. Sorry. Are you still having these dreams? Is that the point?”

“The point,” Boyd said, like the point was both what he was trying to reach and trying to avoid. Like he could have just said,
I had dreams, then something else happened
, except he didn’t want to say the
something.
Which impressed her, that it was hard for him. “The point,” he repeated, “is that two days after I had the fourth dream, a bridge collapsed in the mountains in California near a place called Lincoln, while a school bus was crossing it, and seventeen kids died.”

“So … what? You read the paper and said, ‘Oh my god, that’s what my dreams were about’?”

“No.” As if he didn’t notice her sarcasm. “I didn’t figure it out for years. I mean, once I figured out about the dreams, I went back and looked. Because they’re never easy. Or clear. And there’s never enough time. When—”

Hallie dropped her leg and leaned forward, bracing her hands on the tailgate. “You mean you have these dreams all the time?”

“Not all the time,” Boyd said. “Maybe every couple of years. I didn’t have any the first two years I was in college, and I thought I’d— Well, it doesn’t matter, but yeah, they’re dreams about disasters.”

Hallie knew the next question. She didn’t want to ask it, but she did. “And now? You’re having dreams now? About here?”

He nodded. “It started about two years ago. Wide-open prairie and fire and screaming—I mean, different things happened in the dreams, but there was always fire. And storms. Lots of … lightning. In the beginning, I don’t have them—the dreams—often. It makes it hard to figure things out. And they’re like the confetti dream. They don’t make sense. They get clearer, more pointed as the disaster gets closer, but the only one that’s one hundred percent clear is the one I get when it’s too late to change anything.”

“How often now?” Hallie asked. “Like every night?”

“Yeah. More.”

“More than once a night?”

“Yeah.”

Shit
.

“It’s not very … restful,” he said.

There was a pause, long enough for Hallie to notice the rustling of dried grass in the rising breeze. Then, “Do you?” he asked.

“Do I what?”

“Believe me.”

She reached out and grabbed a fistful of his shirt, pulling him in close. His breath was warm against her cheek. He didn’t reach out and touch her in return. He just stood there and waited. “Has anyone believed you before?” she asked.

He huffed out a breath. “I don’t tell people.”

Hallie believed that. Everything she knew about him said that he desperately wanted the world to be rational and sane, wanted it to count that he did all the right things, made all the right choices. He shined his boots and ironed his shirts and got his hair cut every third Thursday, washed his car and shelved his books in alphabetical order. All that was supposed to mean something, was supposed to guarantee that the world was a logical place with things you could see and taste and smell.