"You gonna be able to detach from this? I mean, how long till I have my wife back? I can’t go for a week without you—"
"He murdered an entire family, Max. Children, you know? Tore up the parents something fierce. Since before we got married, my period has started every twenty-eight days between two and five o’clock in the afternoon. My body’s an atomic clock, and right now, I’m two days late. This didn’t even happen when Papaw died."
Max rolled over on top of Vi, held her face between his palms.
"I know what would take your mind off this," he whispered, planting delicate kisses along her eyebrows. "Wanna play?"
He had the long lean body of a runner and it fit perfectly between her legs. She sensed him swelling against her through his nylon pants, felt lewd for wanting him while the slaughter of the Worthingtons consumed her.
"I still have the smell of that family in my nose," she said. "How can you even—"
Max slid her sweatpants below her knees, kissed her inner thigh, and moved up slowly with his tongue.
"You just tell me when to stop," he said, "and I’ll go get your dinner."
He went back to work. She did not tell him to stop.
26
ON Halloween I flew into Rock Springs, Wyoming, rented a car, and by sunset was cruising north up Highway 191 into the unending bleakness of the high desert plain.
At dusk I pulled over at an abandoned gas station in Farson where 28 crosses 191 and runs northeast around the southern terminus of the Wind River Mountains for seventy miles to the city of Lander, my destination. Stepping out of the car, I walked across broken faded pavement into the middle of 191 and gazed north and west into the evening redness.
I wondered if my brother’s cabin still stood in this wasted country. Just thirty miles north I imagined I could feel it, a dark presence on the horizon exhuming memories I would not acknowledge. The wind was calm, the highway empty. The silence and loneliness of the desert bore down on me, matching my spirit.
At an elevation of 7,550 feet I crested South Pass. Through the driver side window I could see the lavender foothills of the Winds. When I swallowed my ears popped.
The highway descended at a gentle grade. A brown sign informed me that I was now in grizzly bear country.
The moon came up, lit the hills.
I drove through downtown Lander, a small town that in the summer months served as a port of entry to the eastside of the Winds. But now that the range was snowmantled and inaccessible most businesses had closed for the winter leaving the streets of Lander forlorn and listless.
Brawley’s Self-Storage Co. was located off 287, two miles north of town. I pulled up to the gate several minutes past eight o’clock and punched in the access code. The facility was dark and deserted. As I entered and the gate rolled shut behind me, I recalled the last time I’d come here, after fleeing the cabin seven years back, in that state of shock and dread. At the time I didn’t think I’d last through Christmas. My life was over in every way imaginable and the first enticing whispers of self-destruction had begun to germinate in the weakened tissue of my psyche.
I drove through the empty rows of storage buildings for five minutes until I located mine.
It was colder when I stepped outside, the moon still rising, the snowfields glowing high on the distant peaks. I unlocked the door and stepped into the hallway of small storage lockers. Mine was a 3’ by 4’ on the bottom row. I’d rented the space for nine years at a cost of $1,200.
Kneeling down, I removed the padlock and pulled open the door.
Dust plumed.
I coughed.
The overhead light had burned out in the corridor and the moonlight that streamed in through the doorway did not provide adequate illumination. So I dragged the filthy suitcase out of the locker. I walked back outside, set it down on the hood of the Buick.
I unzipped the suitcase.
They moved me in a terrible way, these artifacts of Orson. Sitting down on the hood, I lifted a manila folder and a notebook from the stash. Despite what I would have to pay for looking at his photographs and reading his words, I intended to examine everything, to immerse myself once more in my brother’s depraved world, to learn what I could of his accomplice, Luther Kite, and where he might possibly be.
27
THE starting gun for the girls’ race fired as Vi opened the back hatch of the Cherokee and grabbed the folded blanket she always brought to Max’s cross-country meets.
She followed the trail to the start/finish line, staring through the tall limbless loblollies of MacAnderson Park at the field of runners dashing up the first hill of the 3.1 mile course. The cheers of the spectators faded as the runners moved out of sight.
It was the first Monday of November, a mild one, the sky unblemished and sapphire, the leaves a week beyond peak—red into crimson, gold into russet. The air stank of pine needles and exhaust from the tailpipes of the yellow buses that had carried the six cross-country teams of the Foothills Athletic Conference to this championship meet.
Vi walked over a footbridge and made her way toward the circle of blue and white uniforms near the start line. Max stood in running shorts and a tank top amid eight lanky boys, charging them for this last race of the season. He’d woken her this morning practicing his pep talk as he shaved in the bathroom.
Stepping out of her heels and spreading the blanket across the grass, she listened to Max, tickled at his excitement.
"This is a special day, gentlemen. You each have the opportunity to make history for your school. Now I know we aren’t favored. I know ya’ll think the Raiders over there are an awesome squad—and they are—but anything can happen at a conference championship. What’s the most important thing? Somebody tell me."
"Having fun?" offered the smallest boy on the team.
"Well, yeah. But after having fun."
"Breathing," said Patrick Mullins, truest athlete of the bunch and oldest son of Barry Mullins, Vi’s sergeant in Criminal Investigations Division. Patrick would be attending Davidson next year on a track scholarship.
"That’s it," Max said. "Breathe, gentlemen. That’s all I want you to think about out there. Filling your lungs with sweet oxygen. Now it’s thirty minutes till the gun. Go warm up." As the boys took off from the start line Max jogged over to Vi’s blanket.
"You came," he said.
"Wouldn’t have missed it."
That wasn’t entirely true. She would’ve missed it had Sgt. Mullins not left a message on her cell phone saying he needed to see her at the cross-country meet to "discuss things."
"You look cute, honey," she said. "Just don’t let your package hang out of those itsy bitsy shorts."
Max grinned, said, "Violet King, you better watch that mouth." He leaned down, kissed her, and ran off toward the footbridge to rejoin the team. As Vi watched him go, someone called her name.
"Violet! Hey, sweetie, how are you?"
She saw Judy Hardin walking toward her from the scoring station. Judy was a magpie, the loquacious mother of Josh Hardin, a junior, and the second fastest runner on the team behind Patrick. As Vi rose and met Judy in the grass, the tall redhead bent down and hugged her crushingly around the neck.
She wore a sweatshirt with "MOORESVILLE MAMA" in block letters across the front. "Go Blue Devils!" was stenciled on each cheek with glittery blue face paint.
"So you finally came to a meet," Judy said. "Big day for the Blue Devils, huh?"