Either age had brought her here, to the tenderness of life, an understanding and appreciation for its utter fragility, or there had always been a gentle spot in her soul that had just never found a need for expression, certainly not as his mother. He felt bitter about it, but also tired. Of this day that had begun with a ghastly hangover, of the hours he wasn’t spending with Randie, and maybe, just maybe, he was tired of hating his mom. Especially since the one he knew to hate didn’t appear to be in this room. There was a Bell Callis in his mind for whom he still felt rage. But the quiet older woman before him now elicited only compassion, raw and unexamined, a pure human impulse to care, to have fellow feeling about the person in front of you. The emotion confused him and made the fatigue spread throughout his body, a weight in his bones.
“We should give these things back to her family,” Bell said after they’d been through most of the stuff. Darren nodded. He’d like an excuse to see the Fullers again.
He checked the campus health center anyway, plus every urgent care and hospital he could find in a two-county radius. There was no one named Sera Fuller who had visited or checked into any of those places. He had again donned his old identity, repeatedly introducing himself to hospital staff as “Ranger Darren Mathews” and using an old trick: bypassing nurses’ stations and asking the switchboard to patch him to the desk for volunteers, sweet older women who made sure flowers got delivered to patients’ rooms. They sometimes took messages for patients too, and they frequently said more than they should.
Meanwhile, Bell had reheated her plate and set it back on the table to share with him. Darren was too hungry to be anything but grateful, so they ate from the same plate. Bell barely picked at her side, making sure Darren got a hearty portion of smothered chicken. He in turn hardly touched the butter beans. “Never been a fan,” he said. Bell lowered her head, pushing a few of the pale, waxy-looking beans around on the plate. “I didn’t know that,” she said, soft and wistful.
She took a sip of her orange juice. It was freshly squeezed, and Darren had already had two glasses of it, the sweet tartness of it lighting up places on his tongue that longed for something else, something he’d told himself he wouldn’t have as long as he was in his mother’s presence. He would not let her see him drink.
He still hadn’t accepted her tacit invitation to spend the night.
He could still get a hotel, a bottle of bourbon.
“Kind of shameful, all the things I don’t know about you,” his mother said. “What food you like, your favorite song, what went wrong with you and Lisa…”
He felt his guard go up again. How did she know about the divorce?
“At least, I assume something went wrong, what with that other woman in the house in Camilla.”
“Oh,” Darren said. Right.
He put off talking about it by saying he needed to call his old lieutenant.
He’d been throwing the title Ranger in front of his name because the truth was, he felt the need for the weight of the Texas Rangers behind this. He needed their help. Sera needed their help. It was coming on nine at night, and he had no choice but to call Wilson’s home line. He was prepared for Wilson’s exasperation, even his irritation, at Darren’s apparent flip-flopping, quitting and then wanting to be put on a new case.
What he did not anticipate was that Wilson had been waiting for his call.
“Making me regret I didn’t fire you years ago,” his former lieutenant barked into the phone once Darren identified himself. He’d been to Wilson’s home only once, for a dinner Wilson had put together for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the swearing-in of Darren’s uncle William with whom he’d served. He remembered the dated kitchen, wood paneling and linoleum, canary-yellow trim on all the cabinets. Darren pictured Wilson in after-work clothes and slippers, talking on the wall phone next to the refrigerator. “Back when I was getting calls from Austin that maybe we ought to put you on leave again, some all out calling for your head, with you wrapped up in two grand jury investigations in less than three years. I mean, my God, Mathews, this is the kind of vigilante shit that’s got people questioning what side of things you belong on, whether you’re an honest man of the law that we all done swore to follow, or if you’re out here making up different rules for yourself.” Unsaid but lit vibrantly beneath his acid tone was the implication that Wilson, too, was questioning these things about Darren, after years of insisting that Darren was a clean cop. Before Darren could mention the name Sera Fuller, Wilson said, slowly and firmly, as if going over important safety measures on a firearm, “There is no missing girl, Mathews. You’re scaring that girl’s family for no good goddamn reason. They are in contact with their daughter. There is no concern or dispute about that.”
“Who called you?” Darren said. “That security detail out in Thornhill?”
“Police department. They are the municipal authority in that town.”
“It’s a glorified subdivision, a neighborhood attached to a job site.”
Wilson let out a sound that was both a sigh and a grumble. “They are an incorporated city, and they have their own police department recognized by the Texas Rangers as autonomous and absolutely none of our business unless they call us in —”
“Or we see something wrong,” Darren said. Because that was the law, the code.
Wilson was quiet a moment, hearing something in Darren’s voice that gave him pause.
Darren slid into the silence.
“I am in possession of the girl’s cell phone. Out of battery, by the way.”
“I don’t want to hear another word about it, don’t even want to guess what you’re up to that you got a hold of this girl’s property.”
“What I am saying, sir, is how can the parents be in contact with Sera if I have her cell phone?” Of course, even as he said it, he realized there was no chain of custody here that would stand up to scrutiny. His mother had fished it out of a dumpster. Wilson could even argue the girl had another phone. Darren might have stood down — except the echo of something Wilson had said finally hit him. “Why would they be scared, sir, if they know where their daughter is?” He remembered the look in Iris Fuller’s eyes. “And who told you they were scared, sir?”
This time the silence stretched so long Darren thought it possible that Wilson had hung up on him. That might have hurt less than what came next. “Mathews,” the older man finally said. “Listen to me. You do not have a badge. You are not a Texas Ranger. I don’t know if it’s the drink talking —”
“Sir —”
“No, son, let me speak,” Wilson said. He lowered his voice, but it lost none of its steel. “You are William Mathews’s boy, for all intents and purposes, and I have loved you, son, because of it. Because I loved that man. And I have protected you in ways you don’t even know. Folks coming for you in 2016 when Mack was first accused, folks coming for you now. And I ain’t ever want to believe that you was struggling as much as I’ve come to see that you are, and maybe that’s where I have failed you. But you need to understand there’s a hurricane of shit coming your way.”
“I just think we need to find this girl, sir.”
Wilson ran right over him, still talking, his voice trembling in a way that unnerved Darren. He felt Wilson about to cross a line within his own heart. “I’m not supposed to know this, Darren, and please don’t ask me how I do, but the grand jury is out with your case. They’re deliberating. Two days now. You go to trial, and I don’t want to have to get on the stand and testify that you was up in Nacogdoches County impersonating a police officer while you’re facing prison time. So I’m going to hang up now, Mathews, but not before I tell you to quit this shit, son. Go home. Get some rest.”
Wilson took a deep breath and then added softly, almost sweetly, “Bye, Darren.”
He heard a rough click, and then the line went dead.
Darren’s hand dropped and he stared down at his phone. When he looked up, his mother was sitting across from him with two bowls of vanilla ice cream. She slid one across the uncluttered part of the table that was reserved for eating. Darren felt a stab of pique, of exquisite vexation at the absurdity of his mother offering him ice cream right now. She was playacting motherhood. The home-cooked meal, a dish of dessert presented lovingly. When he’d just gotten news that because of her shenanigans, there was a grand jury debating his fate. He had to nearly stop himself from tossing the ice cream back in her face. He was so angry his head hurt. His teeth ached, his jaw was so tightly clenched. He realized it had been maybe eighteen hours since he’d had a drink.
He remembered Wilson’s words, the disappointment in Darren.
It made him sink down into his chair, so far that his neck rested on the wooden back. What the fuck was he doing in his mother’s house? The woman who was the reason he might be charged with obstruction of justice? He let out a laugh, opened his mouth and howled, laughing until he cried. Bell looked confused at first and disappointed and then sorry. “Let me guess, you don’t like vanilla ice cream either.”
“No, Mama,” he said, painting the word red with irony. “I don’t.”
“It’s for the sugar,” Bell said. “I can get you something else if you like. But I find the sugar helps when the cravings come on, which, honey, I hate to tell you, two years on, they still do. Little bite of something sweet seems to calm down the thing inside that hollers for you to drink. Petey got some raisins in there, maybe even a pack of M and M’s.”
Darren sat up and stared at his mother, feeling a strange new thing come over him. It was pure gratitude. It caught him against his will. In this tiny little house, walls so close he could kiss them, he felt strangely safe all of a sudden, protected by his mother’s watchful eye. She had seen him, seen where his mind and body were going, and offered a solution. “Thank you,” he said, because he very desperately did not want to drink. Not if Randie was gone because of it, not if he’d lost Wilson’s respect.
“Not saying you couldn’t do it on your own, but if you wanted my help with it, I’d give it to you, Darren. We could start with right now. Tonight, if that’s all it is. Stay here. Don’t drive off to how you know this will go if you get to a hotel room. I can walk you through one night at the very least. If you would let me do that for you, son.”
His eyes were still wet.
