“He came out here?”
“When he could.”
Drake walked with the shotgun faced outward and down as he had on so many other days with Patrick, following his father up the cut of a ravine so that they could find a high point to take in the terrain. The wood stock of the gun warmed by his hand.
As if sensing his thought, Morgan said, “I’ve been meaning to ask, don’t you have something in your cruiser that has a little more wallop?”
Drake kept walking. He didn’t want to tell his grandfather the two killers had emptied out the car. He was angry with himself for dropping his guard—for trusting Patrick. He still was. He didn’t want to tell Morgan the only protection he had left was his service weapon.
What the killers had taken from him was worse than anything they could have taken from within the cruiser. When they came into his house they took any sense of security he’d had. The life he and Sheri had made for themselves was fractured. Sheri pulled one way and Drake the other. And he was thinking about this now, watching the steps he took, feeling the grass bend beneath his shoes.
They walked for another five minutes. Drake watched his grandfather’s back. The grass as high as their thighs in places and the prairie rolling before them with the mountains far beyond in the west, the steam of Morgan’s breath floating back over his shoulder as he picked his steps.
“Let me ask you something,” Morgan said. “You had a good childhood, didn’t you? You lived a good life. You played basketball and Patrick took you camping in the mountains. You had friends. School was good to you.”
“Yes,” Drake replied. They had crossed a long stretch of flat ground and ahead of them was a fence of wooden posts and barbed wire.
“He wasn’t the man you think of now.”
“He wasn’t the man he is now,” Drake said. “He was a sheriff and now he isn’t.”
“Occupation defines him, then?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I think it’s easier for you to keep him in the box everyone else keeps him in.”
Drake wouldn’t respond. Behind him, the tops of the cottonwoods had dropped below the horizon and the prairie seemed to go on forever.
“I know when he was caught it shook you up,” Morgan said. “Everything you thought about Patrick was brought into question. And that scared you. It turned your life upside down. You blamed him for that, you still do.”
“Yes.”
“But yesterday when I asked you what would happen when you found him, you didn’t know.”
“I’m a sheriff’s deputy and he’s a criminal,” Drake said, feeling his voice tighten, struggling with the idea.
“So you would arrest him?”
“He messed his life up. Not me. I don’t have anything to do with it anymore.”
“So you think he did it all for himself?” Morgan asked. They had come to the fence marking the end of Morgan’s property. “You want to know what it was all about—the last twelve years your father was sitting in Monroe.” Morgan bent and found a small strip of black electrical tape wound to the bottommost wire. He rose and walked east to where the sun sat a few inches past the horizon. He looked north and then squared himself. “The county road down there can only be seen from this spot. If you’re not standing right here the grass hides it or, on the other side, the hills.” He looked over at Drake. “Come over here,” Morgan said.
Drake walked the twenty or so steps from the fence to where Morgan stood.
“You were five or six when your mother got sick and by the time you were seven she was dead,” Morgan said. “You probably remember that pretty well, don’t you? You think of her as a woman lying in a hospital bed with a bunch of wires connected to her. All you probably remember of her is the way the hospital smelled or what the waiting room looked like. If your father hadn’t kept a framed picture of the three of you, you’d probably have to guess what color her hair was or what her face looked like when she smiled.” Morgan stopped to gather his breath. He was looking toward the county road a mile away. Not a single car passing in the whole time they’d stood there.
“What you don’t think about when you think of your mother,” Morgan went on, “is how lovely she was—what a great person she was before she got sick.” With one leg he swept his foot over the grass, parting it and sweeping the dirt. The grainy sound of bits of rock and dirt rolling across a hard flat surface. “Everyone loved her and when she got sick it didn’t seem like it was really happening—it seemed like it couldn’t happen to her. Because things like that don’t happen to people like her. People with good hearts, with an easy laugh like hers or a face like hers, or any number of other things I still remember.” He knelt and Drake heard the old knee crack, his grandfather now bent to the prairie floor, his fingertips lifting a weathered board, one and a half feet long and eight inches in width. The hole below big and square as the grave Drake had dug in the apple orchard behind his house.
Morgan bent forward and brought up what looked to be a small tackle box. Green, with the metal clasps and pins all rusted and stained with time. “Patrick missed your mom more than anything. Having her there meant one thing in his life, and having her gone meant something altogether different. He loved her and when she passed it scared him. She really could have done anything—been whatever she wanted, had any life she chose—and for her to go like that, at her age, it didn’t make sense and it scared him more than anything he’d ever come up against,” Morgan said, still talking as he brought the box up and placed it on the ground next to Drake’s feet.
Drake knelt next to his grandfather and placed the shotgun away from him in the grass. He put his hands on the tackle box. “What’s in here?” he asked.
“You know what’s in there.”
“I don’t want to open it,” Drake said.
“He loved you,” Morgan said. “That’s all it proves.”
Drake undid one clasp, then the other. He bent back the lid and raised the small shelf beneath. A folded piece of paper with his name on it sat there in a plastic sheath. Underneath the letter, four stacks of bills. “How much is it?” Drake asked.
“Two hundred thousand, minus a bit Patrick asked me to bring him while he was in Monroe.”
“This is for me?”
“When Patrick put it here he told me to give it to you on his death.”
Drake brought up the piece of paper and slid it from the plastic. Drake’s name written there on the outside of the paper in his father’s hand. The first line written inside simply an apology. The next: “For the house and for whatever else you need it for.” Then a final signature from his father.
The message was short and to the point, like anything else his father had done. Still, Drake flipped the paper over looking for more. When nothing else could be found he slipped the paper back within its plastic envelope.
“You probably won’t believe me but Patrick was getting out when he was arrested. He was building up the money to pay off the house. He wanted to keep it in the family. He wanted to keep it for you.”
“But he didn’t get out,” Drake said. “He went to prison for twelve years.” His voice broke a little and he recovered himself. “He killed two men for this.”
“I don’t know what to say about that,” Morgan said. “You asked me last night whether it’s possible to still love a son who is a killer. I think it is.”
“That’s all you know about it?”
“I know what happened to those two men was an accident. It was a misunderstanding. Patrick was worried about it before he went and he asked Gary to come along and watch his back. Gary was too jumpy. He watched one of the men go for a cigarette and before the man could pull his pack from inside his jacket, Gary caught him at a hundred yards. The second man was a witness at that point.”