Darren motioned for him to roll down his window, again knocking the nose of his weapon against the driver’s-side window while scanning the car’s front seat.
In the dark, he could make out a few items of clothing and bags of chips and Mountain Dew. “How long have you been out here?” He knocked on the window again, as the young man managed to keep his gun aimed in Darren’s general direction while throwing the car into gear, nearly taking off Darren’s left foot as he sped off toward the red dirt road that led away from the house. Darren raised his gun and debated shooting out his back tires, stopping him long enough to viciously punish the man for making him afraid in his own home. But it was a violent impulse that would gain him nothing.
He had the information he needed.
The town of Thornhill was definitely keeping tabs on him.
And Ronnie Malvo was right: Something was very wrong.
25.
RANDIE HAD a house key.
Bestowing it had been one of the first signals that he was serious about this thing, serious about having her in his life for good, that his home could be hers if she would have it. He’d watched her work it onto a key chain that also had a key to her place in Chicago, a copy of which she’d given him in kind. He wished he could be here to greet her, spend long, winding minutes holding her in a tight reunion. But she said she’d be all right alone. She understood what he had to do. How could she not? It was partly her concern for Sera that had set him on this path in the first place. “Do what you got to.” The trust in him, the pride in her words, was something solid he could hold on to as he climbed into his Chevy, heading back to Highway 59. The whole ride to Nacogdoches County, he drove with his windows down. Texas had taken it down a notch, and the air, though still close and kissed by the dampness of the fall season, was mercifully cool. It smelled of hay and the iron, blood-rich scent of red dirt. It cleared his head, let his mind circle back to Rey and his tales about life at Thornhill. Darren wanted to know more.
Rey had finally responded to one of Darren’s texts.
He’d sent directions to the remains of the old lumber mill.
It was only when Darren made the long trek into the woods, ducking beneath the bough of a cottonwood as he came upon a clearing, that he realized that Rey was living out here. He had finally run away, Darren thought as he came upon a makeshift tent. It was a blue tarp, pierced through on two sides by sizable tree branches that were staked into the soft earth; the other half of the tarp was thrown over one of the remaining walls of the old sawmill. Amid the awesome beauty around it, it was a paltry shelter, a humble cathedral in the middle of the East Texas woods. The air was cooler here, almost cold. And it felt sharp and clean. It brought to mind crisp water that tinkled over river rocks in Garner State Park, where Darren had once camped as a kid. The crystalline, gem-like grandeur of nature unsullied, wild and free. “It was our special place.” His and Sera’s, Rey said. He’d emerged from his structure and expressed admiration that Darren had found the place on his own. Darren said he knew his way around East Texas woods. They held a natural logic for him, and as long as he could see a snatch of the sun’s rays, he knew he could find his way home. His tongue tripped on that word. Home and all it conjured. “They find you?” Darren asked Rey, meaning the Thornhill authorities. Is this why you’re now living in the woods? Rey shook his head and said he’d gotten in front of the problem. He didn’t want his folks getting in trouble, didn’t want to jeopardize his brother’s education, the medical care his mother received.
Then he shrugged. “I could do worse for a few weeks.”
Darren took in Rey’s campsite, likely the scene of whatever had gone down Labor Day weekend out here. “So, Sera… turns out she’s something of a fighter.”
“Wouldn’t be alive if she wasn’t.”
Wistful longing sank into Rey’s expression. “I mean, if she is still…”
Darren was quick to tell Rey the blood on the shirt wasn’t Sera’s, that she’d likely fought back against the boys, and girl, who had bad intentions. “She’s tough, huh?”
Rey smiled. “She can be,” he said. “But she’s goofy sometimes too. Fun. It always feels like she knows she’s living on borrowed time.” She knew she likely wouldn’t live past fifty, he told Darren, that she would never be an old lady. She was really grateful for the medicine, the life it made possible. “She actually got into schools all over the country,” Rey said. “But Thornhill offered to pay her way through SFA, and she wanted to be close to her doctors here. This new regimen she’s on, it’s been a game-changer.”
“Her mother suggested she had some health challenges this semester.”
“She wasn’t feeling as good as she had been.” Rey nodded.
“For how long?”
“Since the school year started.”
Rey picked up a stick about the length of a baseball bat and used its ragged end to stoke the smoldering embers in a small firepit he’d built out of rocks and old bricks from the mill. It gave off a scent of burning resin that was strikingly pleasant.
“It’s beautiful out here,” Darren said.
Rey showed Darren what was left of the old sawmill.
“I wanted to study it,” he told him. “If I’d been allowed to stay, if I’d gotten the kind of deal that Sera did with SFA, I wanted to look at the environmental impact of that and also mill towns back in the day.” He liked to talk about this kind of stuff with Sera.
“That why you wanted her schoolwork?” Darren said, remembering what a big deal Rey had made of asking about Sera’s notebooks, wanting to get a look at them.
“It was a thing I helped her with,” he said. “Something for one of her classes. She asked me if I could find any of the families that had left Thornhill suddenly, families like mine that had come in when the town and the company were brand-new. I managed to find a couple. Sera kept all the notes, all those phone numbers. I wanted them. If I can’t be with my family within those walls, maybe I can reconnect with people I once knew, ones that moved on.” He still needed some kind of community.
“I’m sure your folks would leave Thornhill if it came down to it,” Darren said. “Don’t think they want you living alone out here in the woods, pretty as it is.”
“My mom is close to becoming a citizen. That comes through, they’re set there. That means a good school for my brother, free health care for the whole family.”
“Your mom,” Darren said. “You said something about her being sick?”
“It’s the plant — the work is hard. And you smelled it. Plus, she was worried about my ass, the family breaking up.” Rey ran his fingers through the thick black waves of his hair. “But, yeah, she’s diabetic. It runs on her mom’s side. And has high blood pressure.” For which she received treatment at the Thornhill medical center, Darren confirmed.
He felt something roll in on a breeze, a wind of sudden understanding.
“Didn’t you tell me that some families were feeling sick before they left?” he said, remembering, as he mulled something over in his mind.
“It’s the plant, like I said. There’s no telling what shit they’re inhaling in there. It’s bad enough it’s in the air for all the families, the kids that don’t even work there.”
“And Sera was working on some kind of project about all this?”
“She wrote a paper,” Rey said. “For an econ class she was in.”
He would do this for Sera.
He would go back to his mother’s home.
They’d never actually returned Sera’s belongings to the Fuller family.
They were still in the house she shared with Pete.
