“And she was happy here?” Darren said, coming sideways at the issue of Sera reporting that she was being bullied, hoping to avoid any knee-jerk defensiveness.
He needn’t have bothered.
The blonde, Brit, said, “Who cares?”
Kelsey cut her eyes at her at the harsh tone. “Not every girl is cut out to be a Rho Beta.”
“We never wanted her anyway,” Brit said. “They made Kelsey take her.”
Darren felt like he’d lost the thread of the conversation and its meaning. Who were they and was this conversation about the same girl? “Sera, you mean?”
Kelsey’s beatific smile took on an edge now.
“Your ‘niece,’” she said, giving Darren a knowing look.
It was eerie how unbothered she was by his presence, a stranger asking after one of her sisters. Darren suddenly understood that what he’d read as patience was in fact utter indifference. She didn’t care about him lying because she didn’t care about Sera Fuller. It was not a leap to picture Kelsey as a bully, a mean-girl tormentor. But not a fool. Since they were dropping all pretense, he said, “Just tell me where I can find her.”
8.
SHE MENTIONED a place called Thornhill.
Her parents worked there or something, Kelsey said. Sera was some kind of scholarship kid — which Kelsey announced in a way that suggested this explained a whole hell of a lot. At least, Thornhill was the name on the checks that covered her dues and living expenses at the Rho Beta Zeta house. Maybe she moved back home, she told Darren. All this said as she grabbed the area above his right elbow to escort him to the door, pulling at him like an oversize toy she was done playing with. Darren was careful to lean his weight into the gravity of her pull, because to resist, to create any friction between his body and her white hands, was to potentially flip the moment to its photo negative — with Darren seeming like the aggressor. Here on Tara Row, police would be called; he’d be in handcuffs within a matter of minutes. The idea of it woke him to the idiocy of the situation he’d gotten himself into, working a “case” without a badge, a case that held no real mystery. These Rho Beta girls seemed fucking awful. And Sera Fuller did exactly as he might have in the same situation. She’d moved out.
Outside on the brick front walk lined with monkey grass and sprouting flowers an approved shade of blue, Darren glanced back at the sorority house. Through the panes of glass that flanked the sorority’s front door, he saw Kelsey pacing, talking on a cell phone. Her eyes locked with his and she held up her phone and took a picture of him. Great, he thought as he headed toward his truck. He had no idea whom she’d called, but whoever it was would now have an identifying image.
Not that he’d done anything wrong.
Not that it mattered, he knew.
By the time he neared his truck, parked at the curb, his mother was waiting for him. In the minutes since he’d last seen her, she had somehow made her way outside. She psst’d at him as he walked to his Chevy. She shuffled in his direction, trying to catch up, trailing a scent of menthol cigarettes and cherry Now and Later candy. She had a ball of the taffy tucked inside her right cheek like snuff.
“Why didn’t you just tell them people you’re a Ranger?”
She had a hand on her hip, miffed at him for robbing her of the chance to flex on those white girls, to brag on her son. “Because I’m not,” he said. “Not anymore.”
Bell’s hand dropped at her side, her voice plaintive and small. “Because of me?”
That she couldn’t see the repercussions of the havoc she had wreaked in his life, that she was blind to her own destruction, only deepened his aggravation, lighting a match to it and burning it to rage. Of course it was because of her. The potential indictment on obstruction charges, the threat of prison. Putting the first taste of liquor on his tongue when he was a boy, even the fact that Randie was gone now. It was all her fault, no matter the hangdog look of guilelessness she was peddling. He was sure if she hadn’t shown up at the house in Camilla, he would have proposed to Randie by now; they might not have left the bed for the past three days, celebrating. He might be in her arms right now instead of standing outside of a sorority house in Nacogdoches.
“Yes, it’s because of you.” He slid into the driver’s seat. “You have never, not once, not upended my whole life, and I honestly curse the day you walked back into it.”
“Darren, wait.” She walked around to the driver’s side, setting an ashy hand, dry and cracked from cleaning, on the hood of the truck. She steadied herself as she came off the curb and went to his window. “Don’t leave it like this.”
Darren ignored her, putting the truck in gear.
He glanced back at the house. Kelsey was standing at the windows in the foyer, cell phone pressed to her ear, monitoring this entire scene. “Just go back to work,” he said to her from behind his driver’s-side window. “And leave me the hell alone.”
He drove back onto Highway 59, looking for the nearest store.
Liquor was preferred, but convenience or supermarket would do.
Anything he could find heading south, in the direction of Camilla, home, and his last memories of Randie. He had something now. He could call her and say it was all a misunderstanding, could even throw in an It was nice of my mother to be concerned, but there was nothing scary or nefarious going on, he could report with some confidence. This was nothing like Randie losing her husband, Michael, to the worst kind of violence. When he saw her again, he would be gentler with her heart, her grief. Be the kind man he was when they’d first met, when he’d protected her body and soul.
He was on the way to putting his future back on track.
He just needed to make one stop first.
Darren pulled into the lot of a small mart and watched two kids on bikes argue over money, exchanging sweaty bills pulled out of back pockets and the elastic of their socks. They finally landed on a plan, who would pay for what, and went inside, looking focused and determined. They hadn’t bothered to lock up their bikes, just rested them against the painted brick wall of the store. Darren paused with his hand on the door handle, deciding to stay in his truck until the two kids came back out. He’d forgotten he wasn’t wearing a badge, and he didn’t want two boys seeing a Texas Ranger buying a fifth of Jim Beam. He sat in his truck, waiting for the two boys to come back out.
It was muggy out, but the sky had deepened into an oceanic teal, a watercolor of a perfect fall afternoon. He rolled down the Chevy’s windows to get some air. It smelled of exhaust from eighteen-wheelers and highway traffic on 59 and fish-fry grease. The small store had a YOU BUY, WE FRY advertisement painted on one of the walls, along with a mural of a smiling catfish, his whiskers done up to look like Wyatt Earp’s mustache. Darren’s stomach rumbled as the moment in his cab gave him time alone to think.
To remember the report that Sera Fuller had filed with police.
It nipped at his heels a bit, bothering him.
On its face, it sure seemed that she’d simply done the right thing for herself and moved out. Moved home, as Kelsey opined. But he wanted to know that for sure, certainly before he called Randie to tell her all was well in Nacogdoches County, that the girl was fine, and Randie could come back to him. He reached for his phone so he could look up this place called Thornhill, to find out from her parents’ employer where Sera lived. His phone showed he’d missed a call and two texts from Greg Heglund. Lisa must have called him, Darren thought. She must have told him Darren was ready to talk. He wasn’t, though.
He wanted to close out this thing with Sera Fuller first.
The top two Google hits for Thornhill were a planned residential community off Highway 59, just south of here, and an agribusiness corporation, both of which were accepting applications. He was trying to decide which Thornhill he should try first — Village or Industries — when he realized they both had the same physical address.
Darren knit his eyebrows, momentarily perplexed by the coincidence.
He threw the truck into gear and pulled back onto Highway 59.
His truck’s navigation system put Thornhill seven miles south of Nacogdoches, right off the highway. He hadn’t found a home address for a Fuller family in Thornhill. But the housing development itself would have been impossible for even a blind man to miss. There was the smell, for one. It rolled up through the undercarriage of the truck’s cab about two hundred feet from the massive stone markers that welcomed him to the town of Thornhill. It was a stinging chemical smell that smarted his nostrils and watered one of his eyes. Ammonia, Darren thought. But something else beneath it too, a smell of active decay, cloying and almost tacky to the touch, sticking to the hair in his nose. He pinched his nostrils a few times to shake the feeling of having been invaded. But when Darren turned off Highway 59 toward the ornate steel gates at the opening of the town, he was struck dumb by how pretty Thornhill was. How tidy.
Over the fifteen-foot stone walls that surrounded the entire town, he saw the tops of buildings whose pointed gables and shingled roofs suggested revivals of early-twentieth-century-style bungalows. They were painted in shades of mint green, daffodil yellow, pale blue, or white with trim in navy. They were all perfectly maintained, untouched, it seemed, by Texas weather, not a shingle out of place, not a stray leaf in the gutters, as if they were freshly taken out of the box of a brand-new toy set. To his right, he saw snatches of a kids’ playground with the tallest red slide he’d ever seen. In the distance, stadium lights rose in salute to the Texas tradition of high-school football. Thornhill had its own schools, then. Churches too. He saw a cluster of chapel tops, crosses glinting in the sunlight. If there were synagogues or mosques in town, they kept their faiths and their building designs closer to the ground; he saw no evidence of any other houses of worship. Everything was so bright and clean, so cheerful in its perfection, that Darren half expected to be welcomed with a fruit basket.
