Instead, he was stopped at the security kiosk, itself a little Craftsman hut.
Inside, he saw racks of rifles on display, plus a bank of monitors. It was a lot of firepower for a suburban subdivision, and Darren found it odd. The guard was white and slim, clean-shaven, and genial as he asked Darren what brought him to Thornhill today. Darren, the window of his truck rolled down, said the name Fuller with a mix of nonchalance and purpose he hoped wouldn’t draw attention to the fact that he didn’t know the first name of either of Sera Fuller’s parents, who they were, or what their true connection was to Thornhill. “They expecting you?” the security guard asked.
Darren nodded but didn’t elaborate.
“I can give you a twenty-minute pass, sir, since Mr. Fuller’s shift starts at six.”
Darren glanced at his watch. It was 5:32.
The guard smiled kindly while sliding a pass with VALID UNTIL 5:52 printed in bold ink into Darren’s car, letting it rest faceup on the truck’s dash. “One-oh-seven Juniper Lane.”
Well, that was easy. Too easy, Darren thought.
He got an image of Kelsey on the phone as he left the Rho Beta Zeta house and had an irrational but no less invasive thought that she’d somehow called ahead. You deal with him. The steel gates suddenly opened, welcoming him into a kind of wonderland.
Behind the stone walls, Thornhill was even more impressive in its cleanliness and sense of order. The colors were brighter — planted snapdragons in cherry pink and lemon yellow along sidewalks. And the neighborhood was a lot larger than it had appeared from the outside. He’d of course known Texas subdivisions to have their own schools and houses of worship, but as he drove west down the main road, Hill Street, he passed a medical center, a small hospital, a library, and a business park, everything in the same humble Craftsman style, from the schools to the community center to the city hall, all except for a high-rise building in the architectural language of corporate headquarters everywhere. The words THORNHILL INDUSTRIES topped the brick-and-glass building. The town and the company were both located on the same property, just as he’d found in his internet searches.
The cross streets all had tree names: Ash, Hazel, Magnolia, Tupelo, Cedar, and more. But there were no through streets; each avenue and lane jutted off the main road like teeth on a wide-set comb, each leading to a mini community of houses all facing a shared small green space, a private park just for the families on that street. On Ash, there was a barbecue grill and lawn chairs in the shared green space, plus two long picnic tables. And a swing set.
Thornhill was a family-friendly idyll.
Darren passed mothers walking their kids home from a community pool, preteens on bikes, and a pickup basketball game. One man, with his little boy, wore a blue baseball cap with the Thornhill logo: a house as if drawn by a child’s hand, except where a chimney would go, there were two smokestacks of industry shooting into the sky.
Looking for Juniper Lane, Darren somehow arrived in a part of town where the residential streets ended, and the smell was stronger. The town’s main road, Hill Street, ended at a brick wall well over thirty feet high. Curious, Darren slowed to a stop. Behind the wall, he saw curls of smoke coming out of twin smokestacks that looked just like the ones on the Thornhill logo on the ball cap. Darren craned his neck, stared through his bug-crusted windshield, trying to guess what lived on the other side. There was wild, ceaseless screeching behind this second set of walls. The earth seemed to shake with it. He could feel the power of machinery going, the beast of industry. Back here, the smell was an actual presence, could have climbed into Darren’s truck and driven him back home to Camilla. Suddenly, lights in his rearview mirror caught his attention. They belonged to a Thornhill Police Department squad car, and they were yellow, no more threatening than candlelight. The officer behind the wheel signaled with a honk for Darren to pull over.
Darren was happy to comply. He was lost anyway.
By the time he put his truck into park, the officer was already out of his car and approaching the cab of Darren’s Chevy. “Looks like we got a little lost,” he said with a smile. His overly cheery tone had the reproachful edge of an exasperated parent poorly masking frustration: Looks like we had a little accident. “Can I help you get on your way?”
“I’m looking for Juniper Lane,” Darren said. “The Fuller family.”
“Other side of Hill Street, heading back east, Mr. Mathews.”
Had he shown his ID at the security gate? Given his name? He didn’t remember that.
In his mind, he heard the click of Kelsey’s camera phone, remembered the feeling of being reported. It was a low-grade paranoia in his veins, a condition he’d been suffering from for a while now. It lent a surreality to the current moment. It was if he’d wandered onto a film set, gotten lost inside a pretty good simulacrum of American life.
Darren nodded to the cop.
But before he could put his Chevy into gear, the officer reached in and grabbed his visitor’s pass on the dashboard. “Looks like you got about sixteen minutes left.” He smiled again, his teeth so white they looked vaguely blue, like Chiclets. “Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to give you an escort out when your time is up. Wouldn’t want you getting lost again.” His voice had dropped into a firm bass, and he tapped the holstered gun at his side, which Darren hadn’t noticed before. Thornhill was so sunny and pleasant, Darren might have thought the guy had a daisy in his holster. But this was a clear warning. All the while, the cop never stopped smiling. It creeped Darren out. The smile, the cheerful tap on his pistol, the way the officer treated Darren like a bug that had wandered too close to a clean house for its own safety.
As soon as Darren stepped out of his truck in front of 107 Juniper Lane, he felt eyes on him. The houses sat barely two feet apart, and from behind a window in the home next door, a Latino kid was staring at him, his face partially covered by a dark curtain. He was possibly older than he seemed at first glance, with a long, thin face and a sternum that nearly pulled in on itself. Darren gave him a nod, and the kid immediately ducked behind the curtain. But as Darren walked up the steps to the Fuller house, he glanced back and saw two dark eyes pinned in his direction again. The young man was studying him as Darren walked up the steps to the door of the Fuller house.
It opened before Darren had a chance to knock.
A black man in his fifties stood in the doorway. He had salt-and-pepper hair, clipped close to his scalp. It spoke of low maintenance and a no-nonsense approach to grooming, maybe to life itself. He wore dark gray coveralls with the Thornhill logo in blue and yellow above his heart. His face wore a blank expression, a mask that told little of the man himself, except his seeming suspicion of the visitor on his doorstep. He stared hard at Darren, trying to divine a meaning behind the stranger’s appearance. Inside, Darren heard a TV. The high pitch and zany score of children’s cartoons. The house emitted a smell that was a respite from the fog of funk that hung over the rest of the town. Through the door came an aroma of oxtails and rice, simmered in tomatoes, onion, garlic, bay leaves, and a bit of brown sugar. Darren heard a woman’s voice inside the house, dulcet and honeyed, call out, “Who is it, Joseph?”
Joseph threw the word “Nobody” over his shoulder.
As a brush-off, he said to Darren, “My shift starts in ten minutes.”
“Fourteen,” Darren said, tightly attuned to the time left on his visitor’s pass.
Joseph narrowed his eyes at Darren. He had a cluster of moles above his left eye, and the gesture squished them into the shape of an acorn. “The bus will be here in ten.”
“I won’t take much of your time. I came about your daughter, Sera.”
Darren heard something drop inside the house. A tray or a platter.
It didn’t shatter but bounced several times in the silence that followed Darren saying Sera’s name. Next door, the Latino kid had come out of his house by now. At the mention of Sera’s name, he hopped off his front porch and started for the Fuller house. This, more than anything, seemed to be the reason Joseph let Darren into his home.
The second Darren was over the threshold, Joseph shut the door.
Inside, the house was as nice as it looked on the outside. Not spacious, but immaculately clean and everything so new that the whole place seemed showroom-worthy. The home was two-story and narrow, the front door opening directly onto a living room, where a boy of about nine, maybe ten, was on the floor doing homework in front of a wide-screen television, which was indeed playing cartoons. The Amazing World of Gumball. The boy put down his pencil and sat up, taking in the stranger, as a woman stepped out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel, or wringing it, Darren thought. She gave him a tepid smile, curious. She had an oval face and wide, almost black eyes. “Did he say Sera?” she said, a note of hope in her voice.
Joseph held up a hand. “Iris, I got this.”
To Darren, he said, “She’s at school.”
“Stephen F. Austin?”
“You know our daughter?” Iris asked.
“By way of my mother,” Darren said, hoping that picturing him as somebody’s son would endear him to them. He was aware that he was a strange man asking about their daughter, barely out of high school. “She does some work around the sorority —”
He stopped himself from saying where Sera lived.
Some instinct told him to listen more than talk.
