“Huh,” Darren said, pressing the back of his head against the seat, thinking.
“They’ll keep looking for a match, but I thought you’d want to know as soon as I did,” Greg said. He shot Darren a look from the passenger seat, gauging his reaction and tensing over something else he was gathering the courage to say. “Darren —”
“The boy,” Darren said, remembering the marks on Brendan’s body, the particularly nasty injury on his skull. Head wounds often bled in copious amounts, the scalp rich with tributaries of the heart. “She could have fought back,” he said, telling Greg the story of the night at the frat house and an after-party in the Texas woods. “He pulls some shit,” he said. “He makes a pass at Sera, with Kelsey’s permission or participation, a rough game that goes too far. She grabs the nearest rock or drift of wood and hits Brendan in the head with it. He grabs the shirt to stanch the bleed —”
“Darren —”
“Don’t know why he would have left it behind, but it sounds like they were all drunk and treating the woods like some kind of a trash can —”
“D,” Greg said. “Can I ask you something, man?… Is it possible you’ve read this thing all wrong? I mean, yeah, those frat turds sound like assholes, the sorority girls too, but is it possible Sera is smart enough to have gotten out of both situations? Maybe she just went home, and her parents don’t owe you any kind of an explanation.”
“Why did her dad say she was at school, then?”
“Don’t know, man, but it’s their kid. And Sera is an adult in the eyes of the law.” Greg looked at his friend, turning his entire body in the truck’s cab. “I’d be a shit friend if I didn’t remind you that this all started with your mother. Your mother, Darren. The reason I just picked your ass up out of lockup. There is no proof that girl is hurt. It’s not her blood. We don’t know that anything happened to her at all —”
“Her mother, man,” Darren said because Greg’s doubt was sowing seeds, was making him question his own judgment, his lens on this whole case, if that’s what it was, the surreal haze over the days since Bell walked back into his life. “When I said she didn’t have her meds… I’m telling you that woman doesn’t know where her kid is.”
“And I’m telling you, you got a hell of a row to hoe in front of you. Maybe you need to drop this and focus on getting ready for your trial. You turned in your badge… it ain’t your problem anymore, D. Get right with what’s in front of you.”
By now, Darren was pulling down the red dirt road that led up to his house.
He threw the truck into park, red clay dust swirling right outside his window.
His head was an absolute mess.
He turned to Greg and said, “Need you to do something for me.”
His mind was spinning from a night in lockup; the threat of a conviction, maybe two; his mother uttering Frank Vaughn’s name, the same woman who had sent him down a rabbit hole searching for Sera Fuller, who Greg, like Wilson, was now suggesting was possibly not missing at all, that Darren had again fallen victim to his mother’s manipulation or delusion or both. But why then was Frank Vaughn so curious about the fact that Darren was asking after the girl — Vaughn, who had a connection to Carey-Ann Thorn and E. J. Hill? And why had Thornhill been attempting to block Darren’s inquiries into Sera’s whereabouts? His head hurt from the swirl of confusion, the lingering questions. It was a lot to process, and he didn’t want to have anything in the house that might make all this go down easier. He asked Greg to go in first and search every inch of the place, to be sure not a drop of liquor remained.
He would wait in the truck for the all-clear.
With the window down and a damp breeze blowing through the truck’s cab, he sat staring at the house where he’d been raised. To keep from biting a hole through his cheek while he waited, he opened the glove box and pulled out the plastic bag of his belongings that had been returned to him right before the arraignment, what he’d had on him when he’d been arrested. His pistol and a wallet, charcoal gray, the leather worn at the corners. His watch, which he took from the bag and returned to his wrist. And his cell phone. Plus the tiny construction hat he’d gotten from Benny. He now noticed that there were words printed across the front of the plastic toy. Sutton Fielder. The name sounded familiar. A quick search on his phone told him Fielder was a United States senator from Maryland. He was chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. This was who had met with the Fullers about their experience at Thornhill. Carey-Ann’s “model family.” Mom, dad, two kids, one in college, thriving enough to belong to a posh sorority. It made for a pretty picture of what Thornhill had to offer its employees. Hell, his own mother was sold on the place.
“You’re cool,” Greg called out from the front porch.
Inside, Greg asked if Lisa knew about the arrest.
Darren was filling an old jelly jar at the kitchen sink. He shook his head. Calling Lisa meant her telling Clayton, and he didn’t want to deal with his uncle right now.
“You guys still aren’t talking?” Greg asked.
“He’s unhappy about the divorce,” Darren reminded him.
It was that — Clayton’s judgment. But now it was the other thing too, this business about his father and Vietnam, new questions about how he’d died. His mother had sprinkled poison on the story he’d always been told, a trail of it leading all the way back to his uncles. And it left a burning inside, a low fire at the base of his sternum that he didn’t know how to put out. He didn’t trust her version of events, but hearing them had left him feeling newly unsteady, as if the foundation of the house he stood in had cracked. He lifted the jar of water to his lips and drank in large gulps. It tasted dewy, like drops off morning grass. It tasted of home and briefly cooled his fevered fears.
He refilled the jar at the sink, needing something in his hands.
Then he pushed out thoughts of his mother and turned to Greg.
“Carey-Ann Thorn and E. J. Hill,” Darren said. “I think they might be giving money to Frank Vaughn’s congressional campaign.”
“Easy enough to find out.”
Turned out it wasn’t just Frank Vaughn. It was congressional candidates in Virginia and Utah, Washington and Maine. It was men and women up for Senate seats in Mississippi, New Mexico, and South Carolina. Nebraska and Iowa. Several of whom were on the same Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee as Sutton Fielder.
“Stacking the deck,” Greg muttered as they both stared at Darren’s laptop.
“Yeah.”
The question was why.
After Greg left, promising to call him with any information on Sera’s cell phone as soon as he had it, Darren sat on his back porch. The view of the low rolling hills, golden green this time of year, was a blessing after a night in county jail. He set his boots on the porch railing and looked up more about Sutton Fielder. Had the Thorn-Hills donated to him as well?
Not directly, it appeared.
But the super PAC they gave money to, Keep America Working, had made contributions to Fielder’s campaign in 2016. The political action committee was also donating to the campaign of every candidate that Carey-Ann Thorn and E. J. Hill were backing, including Frank Vaughn, running for the Eighth District of Texas.
Stacking the deck.
His phone rang, vibrating on the railing in front of him, scooting like a June bug.
Darren grabbed it quickly before it fell off the edge.
He answered without looking at the screen.
Randie’s voice cut through him like a warm knife through butter.
24.
