“Republican? Democrat?”
Greg shot him a look. “Aren’t you adorable? The new game is to play the spread.”
“Hmph.”
Darren looked through the windshield at the eighties-modern hulk of a building that housed this offshoot of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as Greg unbuckled his seat belt and exited the car. He motioned for Darren to join him. In the air seeping in through the driver’s-side door, Darren smelled rain coming. He looked outside and saw gray clouds moving in. He told Greg it was better if he stayed behind, that it was smarter for everyone if he wasn’t officially on the record distributing evidence to the FBI. Greg said none of this would be on the record. He was hoping his buddy Nathan could do all this on the low. Hack into the phone and call a lab tech Nathan was dating to see if the guy could get DNA from the blood on the shirt without leaving a paper trail. That one was going to be hard, but Nathan’s paramour was apparently smitten enough to try. Greg grabbed the two bags holding the phone and bloody shirt and left Darren alone in the Beemer. He heard a roll of thunder. It shook the ground beneath him.
There was a good-sized Texas storm coming, and again Darren felt an impulse to flee, to watch sheets of rain roll over the back lawn behind his house, all twelve acres of it, to watch droplets of it dance in the wind, washing everything clean. He could get gorgeously drunk, make an art of it. It would be so easy to slide back to life before he ever learned that Bell was sober. He reminded himself of the reason he was here, that his mother’s clearheaded thinking had led to a search for a missing student.
He opened his phone and got back to work.
In no time, he confirmed that both Carey-Ann Thorn and E. J. Hill, as private citizens, were bipartisan contributors to our nation’s two political parties as well as many candidates for state and local office, and at least one political action committee, a super PAC called KAW, for Keep America Working. Its stated aim was a bipartisan approach to improving the lives of American workers. The super PAC donated to political candidates on both sides of the aisle. Maybe American workers were a meeting ground of sorts. Next, he googled Carey-Ann and E.J., trying to piece together a story about their partnership. Both the love match and the birth of a new kind of industry.
E. J. Hill’s people had been in the timber business going back well over a century. In the early wildcat days of the timber game — cut first and ask forgiveness later — what was then the Hill Lumber Company had carved up the now protected land in the Angelina National Forest for years. They built their own sawmills and processing plants, which led to the creation of mill towns for their workers. Each company town consisted of housing for workers and their families, plus schools, a general store and commissary, churches, two gathering halls, and even a small hotel. These towns were strategically placed near forestland where the cutting was done or near the mills where raw timber was turned into an extremely profitable commodity, wood for building a nation on the rise. He found a photo online, so sepia-toned it looked as if the image had been burned. It was a picture of one hundred or so employees of the Hill Lumber Company in 1905. White and black workers were segregated and standing apart from one another, everyone gathered in front of the company store. The Hill Lumber Company paid partial wages in tokens that could be spent at the general store in town. These were self-contained communities in which lumber workers were meant to want for nothing. Darren found more photos of families standing on the front porches of their Hill company homes, sturdy, A-frame clapboard houses, as narrow as a balsam fir. The families were well dressed, the women in clean cotton dresses, in cuts that copied the Edwardian fashions of the day, the men with tobacco-stained teeth and scuffed work boots, but everyone looking well fed and seemingly happy. Mill towns disappeared sometime around the Great Depression, and as the timber industry dwindled down to just a few big players in Texas, the Hill family gobbled up smaller outfits, buying up companies left and right. In the 1970s, it was this outfit, Darren put together, that had employed his uncle Pete and thousands of other men at a mill in Nacogdoches, where Pete had swept floors for years, working his way up to janitorial supervisor. Then, in the 2000s, the owners of what was then called Hill Lumber Holdings sold their company to an even bigger conglomerate and got out of the business altogether — but not before E. J. Hill carved out a pocket of his family’s land along Highway 59 in the deal, land he’d held on to for reasons it appears no one in his family or in the larger business community fully understood. And at the time, maybe E. J. Hill didn’t either.
He had long been considered one of Texas’s most eligible bachelors, which seemed to be more about his last name than anything. He was something of a dilettante, with no clear role in his family’s company. He was not an officer, nor was he an innovator. And of what, anyway? People had been cutting down trees for millennia. What new could be invented or added to the process? He seemed to resent being perceived as dead weight on the company’s bottom line, and in interviews, he was often cagey or downright evasive about what exactly he was being paid to do. Instead, he diverted reporters’ attention to whatever was the reason for his current interview or glossy-magazine profile: the purchase of a Triple-A baseball team, followed by a winery in Texas hill country; the dabbling in conservative politics, including a failed run for Congress as a Republican in 2012; and the announcement of his engagement to Carey-Ann Thorn.
Carey-Ann Thorn was also the scion of a dynastic family in Texas manufacturing. And Texas Democratic politics — with at least one senator in the family tree, two assemblymen, and a lieutenant governor going back to the beginning of the state. Thorn Family Farms had been in business since shortly after Texas joined the Union, in 1845. They were chicken farmers out of Longview, a large operation that grew so steadily that as they neared the turn of the century, they were supplying poultry to restaurants and wholesalers and butchers all across the eastern part of the state and into Louisiana. They were one of the first in the chicken business to build their own processing plants, a game-changer for the industry, taking the whole operation from egg to chicken to shrink-wrapped three-piece package — thighs, legs, and breast — conveniently sold in a refrigerated shelf at your grocer’s. By the 1980s, they were the top supplier to several fast-food chains, having perfected an all-white-meat nugget, and soon they branched out into pork processing too. Carey-Ann had worked for her father’s company since she graduated from SMU, where she’d been an active member of that campus’s chapter of the Rho Beta Zeta sorority. She had been the keynote speaker at the sorority’s centennial celebration in Savannah last year and was currently a board trustee of the national organization.
Interesting, Darren thought.
Carey-Ann Thorn was the baby of the family and a woman, and even though she was smarter than both of her older brothers, as she had cheekily suggested in a Texas Monthly profile for the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Thorn Family Farms, she was passed over for CEO when her father retired. She made an announcement on her Instagram page that she would be leaving the company at once.
Some reports said E. J. Hill and Carey-Ann Thorn had met on a golf course in the Caymans; some said it was in an Austin nightclub; some said it was at a private party after a Luke Bryan concert at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo the year Milquetoast Mitt Romney lost the election and set off a bloodlust in the Republican Party — Romney, whose lack of any measurable charisma or true point of view E.J. always blamed for his own loss as a down-ticket Republican congressional candidate that year. No matter the theories and rumors about how E. J. Hill and Carey-Ann Thorn met, their courtship was always written about with an aura of fate and endless fascination. Two heirs of Texas industry royalty get married just as they’re both, for different reasons, on the outs with the companies under whose banners they were born.
Carey-Ann Thorn. And E. J. Hill.
Marrying not just two political loyalties but also two industries.
And so Thornhill was born, Darren surmised.
A town that was a stone’s throw from the Angelina National Forest, the old hunting grounds of Hill Lumber Holdings, né the Hill Lumber Company. A town that was built around a meat-processing plant where residents worked. A town that gave every appearance of being a twenty-first-century version of an old mill town.
It was raining by the time Greg dropped Darren back at his uncle’s house. On the porch, he thanked Greg for his time, to which Greg, reacting to Darren’s formal tone, said, “Come on.” He held out a hand and they shook in a way that bled into a hug, Greg again holding it longer than Darren, who fought an impulse to pull away and let himself be held. He was nearly embarrassed by how much weight it took off him, not just to be held, but to be held up. He had to admit that it felt nice. After, Greg patted him on the back and said he would get him news about the phone or DNA off the shirt as soon as possible. Whichever came in first. “It was good to see you, man,” he said.
Darren smiled and said, “You too.”
As Greg climbed back into his BMW, he nodded to the house. Bell’s home and where Darren had spent last night. “How’s that going?”
“Weird,” Darren said.
Before adding, “Pete says he knew my dad, and my mom might have gone to high school or something out here?” The muscles in his shoulders lifted in a half-hearted shrug. He wasn’t yet sure he believed much of what he’d heard from his mother, a known liar, or his uncle, whose age and condition were messing with his body and mind.
Darren watched his friend drive off but hesitated before going in the house.
It made his mouth water to think of how easy it would be to slip off and get a little taste of something, get a bottle tiny enough to nestle in his shirt pocket, like a baby bird he was nursing. He was just feeling for the keys to his truck when his mother’s blue Nissan came tearing up Lanana Street, hours before she was supposed to be off work, and pulled into what counted for Pete’s driveway, two parallel ruts in the grass just to the right of the house. She was getting out of the car before she’d even turned the engine all the way off. She stepped out into the rain with a thin plastic grocery bag tied around her head, moving so fast, Darren thought she might slip on the wet grass. “What are you doing home already?” he said as he came down off the porch to offer her a hand. She grabbed hold of his wrist instead, squeezing tight, as she told him matter-of-factly, “I got fired.”
“What?”
“But listen, don’t worry about that none,” she said, pulling his wrist toward her car as he tried to steer her toward the house, the two engaged in a cross between a do-si-do and an all-out tug-of-war. Bell’s eyes widened as she tried to wrest his full attention to hear what she was about to say. “I talked to her,” she said, smiling widely.
Darren felt something lift behind his breastbone. Hope.
“Sera?”
Bell shook her head. Not Sera.
But she had found a link to the missing student.
“That Michelle girl… the one I thought might have left the note under Sera’s door, the note we found that was checking on her after what happened ‘last night.’ Remember?”
“Wait, did you get into Sera’s room?”
She shook her head and explained. “Kelsey caught me trying to get in there and said they were gon’ have to let me go.” It was said so casually that Darren felt that her excitement about finding Michelle was dulling a coming pain, when the realization that she’d lost her job would hit her hard. For now, she was too proud of herself. She had gotten to Michelle before Kelsey realized Bell was in the building. “I saw the girl, only one I ever heard called Michelle. And since nearly everybody else on her floor was away on campus, I got a feeling she might talk. I been seeing her since the end of her junior year, when she waited and waited until all the other girls moved their stuff out for summer break, so no one would see her dad loading up her things in an old plumbing truck. Wasn’t even his. It was borrowed from the man he worked for part-time. She always seemed all right to me. Kind. Sometimes you gotta be careful with white folks who ain’t got much of nothing. Either they get it, how it’s about eight different ways we’re both getting screwed in this country, or they’re sure you’re the reason they ain’t got shit, or as much shit as they think they should have, and they hate you for it.”
“Mama.” Darren tried pulling his mother by the elbow to get her into the house and out of the rain. But she pulled him right back. “Naw, we gotta go. I got us a lead.”
16.
THERE WAS a party Labor Day weekend, Michelle had told Bell. The first big one of the semester and the first exchange with Rho Beta Zeta’s brother fraternity for the year, Pi Xi. It was going to be out at “the Pound,” what the frat called their compound tucked behind a wall of pines off Highway 59, south of the campus.
“A bunch of us were going,” Michelle had told Bell. “I remember Sera didn’t want to go. I don’t know if she wasn’t feeling well — that was a thing with her sometimes, with that thing or whatever she has — or if she wanted to study, but Kelsey said she had to go.” The rain had slowed and the worn-down wipers on his mother’s Nissan squeaked with every motion, sounding like a braying donkey in distress. They were heading south on 59 now, Bell driving at speeds Darren wouldn’t have advised even if it weren’t raining. From her perch behind the driver’s seat, Bell told him, “Michelle said that Kelsey stayed on that girl, monitoring her closely. Fit checks and telling her how to wear her hair. Apparently, Kelsey even got all the girls to pitch in and get her a flat iron for Christmas last year, not understanding that wasn’t gon’ do a damn thing for that girl’s hair. I mean, if it had been a hot comb or if they’d just let her wear it natural —”
“Mama!” Darren slammed his hand against the dash as she inched too close to the business end of an eighteen-wheeler hauling dozens of bales of hay, bits of straw flying loose, as if he could stop the car with the force of his fear. The gesture tickled her.
“Boy, I been driving since before your balls dropped.”
She put on her blinker and edged over into the passing lane on the left and got back to her story. She still hadn’t told him where they were going, was too caught up with a perverse excitement she couldn’t hide. They’d argued before getting in her car about whose case this was. While they waited for Greg to work his FBI contacts, Darren had wanted to stick near the house on Lanana Street in the hopes that Rey would return any of the texts he’d sent him or just arrive back at the house unannounced. He still wanted Rey to show them where he’d found the bloody shirt, another vital part of the investigation. But Bell was now adamant that what Michelle had told her changed everything and insisted she was in charge. She reminded Darren, “It wouldn’t be no case if I hadn’t come calling for you,” as if Sera were missing only because Bell had noticed it, because she’d spoken up about it. Darren privately groused about what he’d set in motion by deputizing his mother to poke around the sorority house. But hell if she hadn’t hit a jackpot. And she believed she should have earned Darren’s trust.
