“You some kind of a cop?” Mehki said with nearly as much contempt as Joseph had asked the same question for an entirely different set of political reasons. But the suspicion of a cop’s motives held in both men.
“And what do you care?” Ella asked Mehki. “Said you ain’t like her anyway.”
“He’s just asking a whole lot of questions.”
“About someone you ain’t said more than two words to.” She held up a hand in the general direction of Mehki’s face, which was pockmarked with razor bumps. For all their bluster, there was an underlying playfulness between the two students, and Darren wondered briefly about the true nature of their relationship, if they were dating.
Ella turned back to Darren. “She hasn’t been in class in over a week.”
Mehki made a face. “She drop the class or something?”
Ella’s expression likewise shifted. Darren watched a flicker in her eyes, a new consideration of this whole conversation that she had entered into with so little inquiry of her own. Was Darren a cop? And if so, what exactly did that mean?
“Wait, is she okay?”
In the back pocket of his jeans, Darren felt his cell phone buzz. It was a text from Greg. They’d earlier agreed to meet at the house on Lanana Street at a quarter to eleven, and he was close, he said. Darren needed to get him Sera’s phone and the bloody shirt. He thanked the two students for talking to him without answering Ella’s question.
Because he did not know if Sera Fuller was okay.
Greg was close. But somehow still late.
Darren would wait, grateful for the help. Greg had been alerted that in addition to him breaking into the girl’s phone, Darren now wanted a DNA test run on Sera’s shirt. He wanted to confirm the blood was hers beyond a shadow of a doubt. If he was going to do something crazy, like go over his lieutenant’s head all the way up to Austin in order to get help, he would need to know for sure. Greg took this in stride, asking only the obvious: How could they confirm it was Sera’s blood when they didn’t have any other genetic material of hers as a sample? Darren smiled to himself, remembering his mother’s obsession with the girl’s hair. They had a brush. They had a sample, he told Greg, who had already contacted a friend who worked in the FBI’s resident agency in Lufkin, just twenty miles south down Highway 59. While he waited on his uncle’s front porch for Greg to arrive, he thought about his visit to campus, how the mention of Thornhill had spooked Sera’s professor and shut down any willingness to talk to Darren at all. He pulled out his phone to look up everything he could about Thornhill.
It had a website… sort of.
The home page was a picture of a white family seated before an abundant table set in a field of the greenest, most obedient grass, each blade on its tippy toes. The mother in this tableau was standing as she set a plate of plump grilled chicken next to a platter of buttered corn on the table, which also held pork chops, burgers and hot dogs, two pitchers of lemonade, and a salad with fat tomato quarters as red and lush as painted lips. Everything on the table was shining, winking in the sunlight. The members of the family — a dad, two boys, and a girl — all had perfect rows of white teeth. They were all attractive in a regular-folk kind of way, in that they didn’t look like people who belonged on TV. They could be your neighbors. They could be you.
Well, not me, Darren thought.
Just as a clever bit of animation morphed the white family into a black one.
Clean fades on the kids, pressed shorts, a mother wearing a belted dress. The food was the same, though this family drank pink lemonade. Their teeth were just as white. The camera’s angle on the family widened so that Darren could see the black family’s Craftsman-style home in the background. Just then the image morphed to show a Latino family, whose table had a plate of corn tortillas, and they drank soda instead of lemonade. The family changed to South Asian next, with their bowls of rice and glasses of milky iced tea. The faces of the families kept changing as the camera lifted to give a bird’s-eye view of the entire town of Thornhill, including the industrial buildings behind the steel gates Darren had seen at the back of the town. He recognized the twin smokestacks, the cozy home-meets-industry vibe that was the Thornhill logo, as the image showed men and women heading off to work in their Thornhill coveralls. A tagline popped on-screen: Work Where You Live, Love Where You Work. A Job at Thornhill Means Never Going Without — Food, Medical Care, and Your Child’s Education. Here, You’re Family. And We Take Care of Our Family.
There was an About page… kind of.
When Darren clicked on it for more information, the image of the original white family from the home page filled the screen below a simple banner: Thornhill Is One of the Newest and Largest Suppliers of Pork and Poultry Products. Suppliers to whom, it didn’t say. There were no brand names listed, nothing that he might choose from a refrigerated shelf at the Brookshire Brothers in town and trace back to the processing facility in the town of Thornhill. And that was practically it for the whole website. A home page, an About page, and one labeled simply Apply. Darren clicked on it. It was a basic form. You could leave your name, an email address, and a cell phone number. But you could not know from this website the exact job you would be applying for. It was odd, all of it. There was no mailing address on the website, no listing of a CEO or president, not even an 800 number. Darren opened a new browser window and ran a wider search using the company’s name, which yielded very little.
Clicking his way down a Thornhill-search rabbit hole led him to the Facebook page for Society Texas magazine, a publication Darren hadn’t known existed until this very second. It was a story covering the wedding of Carey-Ann Thorn and Ethan Jacob “E.J.” Hill. Darren stared at photos of the lavish wedding as his brain ticked over the names. Thorn. And Hill. Married together. A wedding portrait of the bride and groom showed a man with reddish-brown hair in his sixties and a younger woman with a head of glossy gray hair. The color seemed an affect. Darren wouldn’t put her within six months of forty. The gray was to let the world know that even though she had enough money to run every wrinkle on her face out of town, she was a grown woman who didn’t suffer fools. And yet the gray was a foil for her sharp features, her cutting expression. It softened her. She could be the later-in-life mother of a sprightly toddler.
Thornhill was not a publicly traded company. Nor could he find any lawsuits associated with the corporation. No trademark filings or patents. According to the Texas Secretary of State website, which listed contacts for every corporate entity in the state, the only way to get in touch with Thornhill was through a law firm. Thomlinson, Ratford, Morris, and Mulligan, which had offices in Austin, Dallas, Chicago, and Washington, DC. The firm did its fair share of “public policy law,” which was another way of saying they were government lobbyists. One of its biggest clients was a coalition of manufacturers in the U.S., for which the firm had secured a favorable piece of national legislation in DC, according to a few articles in the Dallas Morning News back in 2010. Darren was opening a new browser page to google more about the firm or the Thorn-Hills themselves when he heard a car engine approach, one that purred too smoothly to belong to any of the aging vehicles that regularly passed on this block. Darren looked up just in time to see Greg Heglund getting out of a late-model BMW.
14.
THE THREE years since he’d left the Bureau had apparently been good to Greg.
It had almost been that long since Greg and Darren had last seen each other.
Oh, there’d been texts here and there, birthday voicemails, neither willing to go totally radio silent. When Greg had heard through the grapevine — the vine holding a single grape named Lisa — that Darren’s uncle Clayton had had open-heart surgery last year, Greg had made contact, only to find out that Darren was not in fact bedside at St. David’s in Austin, had, in fact, never left the farmhouse in Camilla. Darren had been getting regular updates from Clayton’s wife, Naomi, and once he was assured Clayton was in recovery, that he would live, Darren had resumed not speaking to his uncle. Darren was angered by Clayton’s extreme disappointment over the breakup of Darren’s marriage, pressing his nephew to make right “the best thing that ever happened to you.” He had gone so far as to call Darren a tomfool for cutting ties with Lisa for some ol’ gal he didn’t really know. It was, in Clayton’s opinion, an even stupider decision than quitting law school years ago to become a Texas Ranger — which only stoked Darren’s grief over the death of his uncle William. The man he most admired, in whose footsteps he had set his life’s path. Darren hadn’t wanted to talk to Greg then or since. About Clayton or his marriage. He had pointedly dodged any attempt at an airing of grievances between them. Mostly because he didn’t have any. Not deep down, not when you got past his ego. Greg and Lisa fucking and not telling him about it was so low on his list of reasons he and his wife didn’t work out that it wasn’t worth getting too agitated about, not when he could just pour another glass of Jim Beam. But as he was now into his second full day without drinking, without that sloppy skirt around his feelings, he said, “You should have just told me, man.” Greg stopped in his tracks at the base of the porch stairs, one foot on the first step, one still in the marshy grass. He was in ropers — something Darren had never seen Greg wear — jeans, and a sweater that Darren took for cashmere. It was a heathered charcoal gray. It lightened Greg’s green eyes, drew attention to the feathered lines around them. He looked older than Darren now.
“That’s it,” Darren added. “That’s all of it.”
Greg did not advance, did not move at all, as if he wasn’t sure that either of them was ready for him to come closer. He scratched at the stubble on his chin, a patch of gray. “I wanted to,” he said. “All these years… I wanted to say something, brought it up to Lisa many times, but she always said it would only hurt you over something that wasn’t anything real. It happened only once, and every year put more distance between it and your marriage. Not that I’m trying to put it all on Lisa.”
“But it sure is convenient,” Darren said.
He didn’t even mean it as a dig. He knew Lisa to be headstrong and particularly adept at getting someone with an opposing view to bend to her will. It was the reason that, of the three of them, she was the only one who’d become a successful lawyer.
“She cared about you. We both did. Do.”
“Which is why you should have just told me.”
Truth had always been one of the core emotional principles of their friendship.
Greg, treading gently, asked, “Would you still have married her if I had?”
Darren sighed, not exactly proud of his answer. “I probably would have.”
At the time, he’d never thought any woman would love him besides Lisa.
His own mother had seemed fifty-fifty on the whole deal herself.
It had cost them nearly five grand in couples therapy for him to say that sentence, another six sessions to admit this was a wound he’d been carrying for too long and was likely why he’d gone through with a marriage that had holes in it before it even started. Greg, feeling no outright rejection coming from Darren, finally walked up the steps, slowly, as if testing the weight of their friendship, wondering would it hold.
“You look good.”
“You look old,” Darren said, and Greg threw his head back with a laugh.
There was love in it. Relief.
