Wide Open (4 page)

“Why is she so—?”

Art looked at Deputy Davies. Hallie didn’t know if he was concerned for her or just didn’t want to say it.

“She broke her neck,” Davies said.

“Oh.”

“She wouldn’t have suffered.”

You don’t know that,
Hallie thought.

Dell’s ghost drifted closer, like she wanted to see herself, which—if things weren’t creepy enough already—

The deputy put his hand on Hallie’s arm, startling her. “Thank you,” he said. Hallie couldn’t figure out what he’d be thanking her for; then she realized he was talking to Art Stephens.

As Art lifted the sheet in preparation to replace it, Dell’s ghost drifted
through
her own body.

“Wait!” Hallie lifted her hand.

Art held the sheet, half-raised. Deputy Davies tightened his grip on her arm.

Hallie ignored them. She held her breath, only half-realizing it, because there had been something—

Dell’s ghost paused as if Hallie had been speaking directly to her. She drifted back toward Hallie, through the table and Dell’s body and—

“What is that?” Hallie asked. In the hollow of Dell’s neck—Hallie leaned closer, could feel an icy chill from the proximity of Dell’s ghost against her arm and her right cheekbone—there was a symbol or a scar, like a lightning bolt but … messier, with undefined edges, like a real bolt of lightning in the middle of a massive thunderstorm.

“I’m sorry?” Art began.

A tattoo? Who would get a tattoo there? She reached out to touch it. Dell’s ghost drifted away from the table.

The lightning bolt disappeared.

“Do you—?” Hallie looked at the two men. Art’s face was professional, concerned, restrained. Deputy Davies frowned. He looked his age, or more like his age, which she guessed to be about twenty-six. Neither of them were looking at Dell. Davies motioned to Art, who pulled the sheet back over Dell’s body.

“Look—,” Hallie began.

“We should go.” There was something in his eyes that stopped what she’d been going to say. Compassion? Pity? She wanted neither. Who was he to pity her?

Art Stephens accompanied them to the front entryway. He assured her that everything would be tasteful and just as she and her father had requested. He was pleasant, sincere, and she could barely stand to listen to him. What difference did it make? They could have fireworks, floating streamers, and a pony keg at Dell’s funeral, and she would still be dead.

And what the hell was the lightning bolt? Or whatever? Had it really appeared and disappeared? Had Art seen it? Had Davies?

Once they were in the car, Davies turned the key in the ignition, backed the car out of the parking space, then sat, facing the road, as if he was waiting for something. He looked straight out the front windshield, squinting slightly, though the sun was lost behind thick gray clouds that looked like winter.

Hallie thought about what she’d seen inside. “Did you see something?” she asked. “On her neck?”

He turned his head and looked at her. Not compassion or pity or
Good Lord, you’re crazy.
Just … looked at her. “Her neck was broken,” he said.

It sounded a little like a question:
Was that what you meant?
So that she said, “Hmmm…” because she figured that he hadn’t or couldn’t or didn’t see what she saw. Which … she wasn’t sure what
that
meant in the greater scheme of things, except that something was going on beyond Dell in a car alone out on Seven Mile Creek.

They headed northeast out of town, Eddie staring at Hallie’s duffel in the back seat and Dell— Well, Hallie couldn’t actually see her at the moment.

The whole thing was too much to think about—ghosts, Dell’s death, invisible lightning bolts.

“There has to be something more you can tell me,” she said abruptly, an edge of desperation in her voice that she didn’t like. “I need to know,” she said. “I just—I need to know.”

He tapped his right thumb against the steering wheel. It was almost three o’clock in the afternoon. He’d presumably been working all day, in and out of his car, doing … something. But there was nothing out of place about him. Not a wrinkle, not a crease, not a line. “She was your sister,” he said, like it hadn’t already been said half a dozen times.

“She was.” But she wondered if he understood what that meant. Hallie’s mother had died when she was eleven. It had been Hallie and Dell after because her father—he didn’t know much about girls. Dell had been lots of things Hallie was not—outgoing, expressive, social, but she’d also been hardworking and dedicated to things she considered important. She’d had crap taste in boyfriends, but could pick the right horse for someone, even when they insisted that really, they’d wanted something different. “Trust me, this is the one,” she’d say. And she’d be right.

“Look,” Deputy Davies said after a minute. “It was a single-car accident. No one else was with her. There was no other vehicle involved.”

It was Hallie’s turn to stare out the front windshield at the low rolling hills and the big wide open. There was a certain comfort in how familiar it was, in how “right” it felt, the prairie and the big sky and the shifting gray and brown and gold. But that comfort, the release of tension because she was home and she knew what that meant, was canceled out by Dell’s death, by knowing that nothing would ever be the same.

“I want to see it,” she said suddenly. “Show me where.” Like she could tell, just from seeing, what had happened.

He was quiet for a minute, and she thought he’d refuse. He probably
should
refuse. From his perspective, she was nothing but trouble. What was Dell to him? Another body, another report, another trip to someone’s house to tell them their sister/daughter/friend was dead.

“All right,” he said, like it was the beginning of the conversation, not the end.

The clouds had turned steel gray and were starting to spit rain by the time they pulled onto Seven Mile Creek Road. Hallie was cold, but she couldn’t tell if it was because the weather had turned even colder or because there were two ghosts in the car with her. Probably both. They’d come up the county road, turned north, and headed back toward Highway 54.

Hallie thought they’d stop at that intersection, the one between Seven Mile and 54, thought that must have been where it happened because there was a stand of trees right there, between the road and the creek—cottonwoods mostly and a couple of old bur oaks. They did stop, waited for an old black Suburban to cross the intersection, then turned left onto Seven Mile Creek Road past an old garage and a partially collapsed house. The old cracked asphalt crumpled to nearly nothing as they came up on the town of Jasper, or what was left of it after the tornado in ’94—a couple of concrete block buildings without roofs or windows, stalky weeds ranged along what was once a road or driveway, a rusted-out car next to a stack of old tires.

Beyond Jasper, Seven Mile dwindled to practically nothing—old asphalt, then gravel, then, abruptly, hard-packed dirt.

Davies turned left again, bounced a little as the car dropped onto a dirt track with dusty brown blades of grass spiking up along the crown.

“This—,” Hallie began, then stopped when the deputy looked at her. But this couldn’t be right. What would Dell have been doing up here? At night? By herself? “I thought she hit a tree on Seven Mile,” Hallie said, eyeing the deputy suspiciously.

“I didn’t tell you that,” he said.

“You didn’t tell me anything.”

They headed down a shallow slope toward Seven Mile Creek itself. There were scrub trees along the creek. To the north were two groupings of big old trees seven or eight deep separated by a hundred feet or so, windbreaks for a ranch house that no longer existed.

Deputy Davies stopped the car, and Hallie climbed out while he was still turning off the engine. She thought it was warmer than it had been when they left West Prairie City, but it was hard to tell because Dell and Eddie exited the car with her, like traveling with her own personal blast of arctic air. The clouds broke apart just then, the sun streaking through like the victor of some ancient battle.

“Here?” Hallie said as the deputy came around to her side of the car. “What was she doing here?”

“I don’t know,” he said. But he thought he knew, Hallie could tell. He thought she’d come out here to kill herself.

She stalked away from him. Between the road and the windbreaks was mostly prairie grass, some still green from summer, but most of it gone dry and brown. Tangled brambles tugged at Hallie’s pant leg as she walked. She could see tracks through the hip-high prairie grass, tire tracks that crossed and crisscrossed each other. Dell, the police, an ambulance maybe, but also old tracks—high school kids and hunters, couples and loners looking for someplace no one would find them, at least not for a while.

Hallie and Dell had come down here in the summers when they were in high school—the creek ran all summer, and there was a tiny watering hole for swimming. No one they knew claimed the land, so it hadn’t felt like trespassing, more like a place that was theirs for a while, until they left and someone else—illicit lovers or kids with pellet guns—came in their stead.

They’d even double-dated a couple of times—Dell and Pete Bolluyt and Hallie and whoever. They’d swim in the creek and poke through the old basements in Jasper, maybe build a fire in the evening and roast marshmallows.

The last time had been the summer Hallie graduated from high school, when Dell had been home for three weeks, and it was she and Hallie and Pete and some guy Hallie’d met at the Founders’ Day turkey shoot in West Prairie City because he said he liked her gun.

It had been a good day—relaxed. Toward the end, Dell had declared that she would buy the land someday and rebuild the farmhouse that had once stood there and breed the Best Quarter Horses in the World.

Maybe she would come here to kill herself.

Shit. No, she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t do it. Not Dell.

No
.

“Was there a note?” Hallie asked the deputy, who had been following silently behind her.

“I can’t—” Then he stopped. “No,” he said. “There was no note.”

“She didn’t kill herself,” Hallie said. She turned away, then stopped cold. Because she could see it, right in front of her, the tree Dell had hit. It was a big Ponderosa pine. The nearer trees had died off, leaving it standing alone, separated from the next closest tree by twenty yards. There was a deep gouge where the car had hit, ripping off the bark and leaving a wide swath of clean new wood in its wake.

Hallie’d seen destruction. She’d seen people die. She’d killed a man her first week in Afghanistan, a suicide bomber who’d rushed their convoy. But this was—if not different, then harder. She would never see Dell again. Not alive, anyway.

“Are you okay?”

Deputy Davies’s voice was quiet. She was surprised that he’d brought her here. He seemed like a by-the-book sort of guy. Not that she wouldn’t have come herself as soon as she’d gotten a vehicle. Maybe he knew that. Maybe she should give him credit for it anyway.

“I’m fine,” Hallie said. But she wasn’t.

She walked up the road. If she could get some distance, if she could look back, see the whole broad picture, maybe it would make sense. Maybe she’d be able to see how it had happened, what Dell had been doing here, what her death could be called other than suicide. The deputy let her go, stayed back by his car, and she was grateful for that, for giving her the space.

Something metallic flashed sharply in the field to her left, reflecting in the slanting afternoon sun. Hallie stepped off the road to investigate. The field still bore the remains of old fence posts, weathered down to soft gray sticks, warped and cracked. The fencing itself was long gone. Barbed wire probably, and the ranchers would have hated it, cutting access to the creek. The field, once a horse paddock or something similar, had brambles and multiflora rose mixed in with the prairie grasses, marking its proximity to water.

The wind tugged at the back of Hallie’s jacket like an old friend pulling her back. Dell’s ghost was behind her. Hallie couldn’t see her, but she could feel the cold like permanent winter along her spine. Though if that was Dell behind her, then where was Eddie? She looked back, couldn’t see Eddie or the deputy, but the field was a foot or so lower than the road. She couldn’t see the sheriff’s car from where she was either.

She stumbled over a concealed rut. The sun had shifted or her angle had changed enough that she couldn’t see the flash of metal that had caught her attention in the first place. She tried to estimate where it had been, maybe twenty yards farther on from where she was standing. But when she reached that point, she didn’t see anything—just dirt and brown grass and tangled thorns. Probably didn’t matter, probably just something that had been there forever and didn’t have anything to do with Dell or her death.

Yeah.

She took a deep breath and turned back.

Suddenly, Dell was
right there
. Eddie, too. Right in front of her, both of them flying at her, like frightened birds. Not like when Dell had gone through her at the airport, neither of them trying to go through her. Just hitting at her, frantic, their insubstantial hands, like winter wind against her face, her neck, her chest. And it was blinding cold—blizzard cold, hopeless cold, desert cold, blind from the sun so cold just stop please stop.

Stop.

5

“Hey.”

Hallie opened her eyes. She was lying on the ground, looking up at Deputy Davies. He looked concerned or nervous, she couldn’t figure out which, crouched beside her. She sat up and he stood, straightening one trouser leg so the knifelike crease fell straight, the movement so automatic, Hallie didn’t even think he knew he’d done it. “You fainted,” he said.

Hallie shook him off and scrambled to her feet. “I didn’t faint,” she said, but even to her, her voice sounded shaky. “I didn’t,” she said again, as if saying it twice would make it true.

And she hadn’t—had she? Fainted? Something had happened with the ghosts. Dell and Eddie had been—there—hammering at her like she was the barn door and they were desperate to get out. She looked around. Neither of them was in sight now, but she was still bone cold; it was all she could do to keep her teeth from chattering, her jaw clenched so tight, her muscles ached.