Drake pulled this up and opened the folder, looking down at the aged clippings. The newsprint gone yellow, cracked and dotted with pinholes or marked with tape at the corners where his father had probably secured these relics to his cell wall. Patrick said he’d kept them all, every article. And Drake went through them one by one. All of them in order, from the ten-page Silver Lake Weekly announcing Drake’s basketball scholarship to Arizona, to the Seattle Times article the day after he got himself shot in a North Seattle neighborhood.
He laid them on the bed as he came to them. Articles he didn’t even know existed. A high score from when he’d shot twenty-eight in one game. Speculations by the local papers on the team’s chances for a tournament, or even who among them might go on to a higher level of play. All of this carefully stacked, one after the other, in the folder. The clippings aged and yellowed, kept together with paper clips and bits of tape. All like some sort of family album locked up for years in the basement safe.
It was a long time since Drake had allowed himself to think of those years. When he’d been a young man, a couple years past high school, living in another state, in a city a hundred times bigger than Silver Lake, playing basketball.
Drake loved it all. The running endlessly, one end of the court to the other. The quick shots, the passes from player to player, the fade, the rebound, the way the world never seemed to pause in all that time and one action fed into the next like a flood of water carrying everything else along.
It was the beginning of his third year when he went into his coach’s office to tell him about the trouble back home. Telling his coach all the things the newspapers were saying about his father. And the coach standing up from his desk and walking around to sit facing Drake, trying to work through it all, trying to tell Drake he would always have a place on the team. Though Drake knew—no matter what the coach said—that the offer could wait only so long.
Drake sat in his father’s room, a room that had once been his own, and looked the articles over. Many of the clippings were about him, but the majority of them were about his father, about his arrest and then later conviction. That time in Drake’s life almost a complete wash. Like he’d been there and not there all at the same time. Gary had come to the airport to pick Drake up and told him how Patrick had been led into the courtroom for his sentencing. How even in the week since he’d been arrested, Patrick seemed to have lost weight, shrunk back into himself. The jumpsuit too big on his frame and the shuffling, almost hesitant, steps he took as he came out into the court, his eyes downcast on the floor.
Drake had tried to picture it all then, but he couldn’t get a grasp on it. The man Gary was describing so unlike the man Drake had grown up with, leading him on horseback through the hills. Camping in the high meadows in the years before he’d left for Arizona and listening to the rut of elk as they brought their antlers together late in the evening. Drake and Patrick rising from the small butane stove to stand watching as the big animals clawed the earth a hundred yards away, diving at each other with lust-filled abandon. The clash of their fighting echoing off the rocks high above while Drake and Patrick looked on.
Later Drake would sit in the courtroom with his grandfather and listen to the charges laid against Patrick. The trial going on for five days and then the judge waiting as the jury gave their verdict, listening to the foreman go down through the charges. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
Drake shuffled the articles in his hand. He’d read them all. He’d been a part of many of them, seen most of it with his own eyes as the reporters sat a couple rows back scribbling notes on paper. All of it taking shape. Drake’s vision of his father slowly cracking, until finally it had all crumbled, flake by flake, as his father was led away and Drake sat watching.
The articles dropped off until Drake saw his own name mentioned again in the Seattle paper. The story not about his basketball career anymore, but his role as a deputy, his father’s history, and the arrest Drake had tried to make in the mountains outside Silver Lake ten years after his father had gone away. An attempt that would eventually get him shot, leaving him as close to death as Drake ever cared to be.
He looked at them all, shuffling back through each clipping on the bed, trying to make sense of it. His life in this valley. His father’s life. The two so dissimilar from each other, but in many ways the same.
Everything his father, Patrick Drake, had ever done. Every highlight and failure. His rise as sheriff, the death of his wife to leukemia, and his eventual fall, outlined there for the world to see. And not a single article in his father’s collection mentioning the two dead men outside Bellingham.
What had Patrick said to Ellie on his first day out? Don’t get caught.
Drake looked up from the articles and saw his father staring in at him. His bald scalp still wet from the shower. His eyes red and worn from the water. “Is this why you came in here earlier?” Patrick asked.
Drake followed his father’s eyes to the open drawers beneath the changing table, all of the clothes in disarray, hanging loose over the sides. The cardboard box on the bed next to Drake with the articles spread everywhere on the mattress.
“You don’t trust me,” Patrick said. He was wearing a towel around his waist, standing there in the doorway. He was staring at Drake with an intensity Drake could only remember from when he’d been a child.
“There have been things said about you that I can’t ignore,” Drake responded, keeping his eyes focused on the door frame near his father’s head. Looking but not looking.
“By who?”
Drake took the box off the bed and set it on the floor again. “The DEA has been following you around.”
“Is that a fact?”
He met Patrick’s eyes. “They say you had something to do with two men getting killed outside Bellingham before you went away.”
“And you want to know if I did it?”
“I want to know if it’s true in any way. If you knew these men, or had anything to do with their deaths.”
“I told you a long time ago when you visited me that I wasn’t going back in.”
“I know what you told me,” Drake said. “What I want to know is if you killed those men.”
Patrick looked at the open drawers again and then looked back at Drake. “I didn’t do anything to those men.”
“But you know of them?”
“I know of them.”
“Then you know about the money, too.”
“Yes,” Patrick said. “There’s a lot of people who’ve heard about the money.”
“That’s how you got into all this, isn’t it? For the money. So that you could pay off Mom’s medical bills.”
“That’s what I’ve always said. I took on that second mortgage and never was able to pay it.”
“You did it for the money then?” Drake didn’t know why he was repeating himself. The emphasis he put on the end of the sentence more of a command than any kind of question and he realized he really didn’t want to know.
“There was no other reason. That was it, that was all there was,” Patrick said. “I never did intend to do that type of work for long, and I don’t intend to do it now that I’m out.”
Drake moved his hand over the articles. Gathering them up and putting them back into the folder. He knew he should let it go. His father had said he didn’t kill those men. Drake knew that should have been enough. But a lot of time had passed since Drake had gone away to college and his father had made the decision that would ultimately change both their lives.
“I’m a deputy now,” Drake said. “I know it’s been twelve years, but there are still plenty of people who probably question what I knew about you, and what I know now. I don’t want you to put me in that position again. If the DEA is still looking into this then there’s a chance Sheri and I could lose the house.”