When Clark arrived at Rummy’s eight hours later, the only people crouched over the bar were the professional drinkers. She recognized George Mason—father to Garrett, the defensive safety—an oily man who’d once been a big deal at the power plant at the dam before the county had shut it down. Mr. Mason was flanked by a pair of former employees, all three men whiskered and humbled, clad in grease-stained jeans and fraying plaid shirts, drinking slowly with a gruff, masculine boredom. A woman with frizzled hair was making eyes with one of them. All three were making eyes at her.
Clark retreated to a booth in the back before any of the men could register her as fresh meat.
It had been an odd day, had followed an odd night. She thought again of Jason Ovelle, her old classmate she’d arrested at the field last night. She’d hoped to question him at the station after the game but Jason had been gone by the time she’d arrived.
“Full house,” Deputy Jones had said. “I had to cut him loose.” When Clark had taken a peek down the hall and found half of the station’s holding cells empty, Deputy Jones, looming at her elbow, had said only, “A few slept it off since then.”
The sheriff’s station was small, it was true, but still, to let Jason go when he’d been facing a slam dunk charge of attempted burglary—it was peculiar. Deputy Jones was not a lenient man.
Joel arrived at Rummy’s a few minutes after Clark, and before he noticed her, she took the opportunity to study him through the dull wall of smoke that thickened the room. She saw that Joel had corrected his teenage slouch. He now walked with an alert, entitled poise which she suspected had once been affected but was no longer. He looked cocky, careful, bored. He signaled to the barman without being spoken to.
Remarkable. How different this Joel was from the one she’d once dated. Tonight he seemed closer, indeed, to the Joel who appeared in the photographs that had arrived on Bentley’s doorsteps ten years ago. That had been a nasty prank: a half-dozen loose photos of a naked Joel Whitley had been found stuffed inside the town’s Sunday newspapers one weekend, hiding between the glossy Dillard’s ads and the new issue of Parade magazine. In those photos Joel had sneered at the camera, had wielded a heft in his hand more compelling than anything he’d shown to Clark in all their fumbling efforts at fucking.
Clark had been seventeen at the time, old enough to have seen plenty, but still the pictures had shocked her. Before her father unwittingly flapped open the paper across the breakfast table that morning, Clark could never have imagined that the shy little gentleman who always asked permission to take her hand could be this same cocky provocateur with a face as brash and snide as any pinup boy.
The phone had rung not ten minutes after Clark had seen the pictures: her neighbor Miss Lydia calling to tell Clark of the rumor—the very creditable rumor—that Joel had been arrested with another man for indecent exposure at the park that past Friday night. Miss Lydia had called Clark to warn her. Joel’s arrest—and these strange photographs everyone was finding—were all anyone could talk about.
Young Clark, to her credit, had pushed through her shock to ask Miss Lydia the smarter questions: who was this other man who had been with Joel at the park? Why had he not been arrested as well? Who had taken the photographs, xeroxed hundreds of copies, stuffed them in so many papers?
And sure enough, the sheriff’s department did indeed mount an investigation into the photographs but things rapidly went nowhere, as they often did in Bentley. Who cared? The town had always known there was something off about that Whitley boy—really, had Clark never suspected anything?
Her miserable year had come to a ghastly conclusion. Six weeks after the photos had spread through town, Clark’s brother, Troy, had left the little house he had shared with his girlfriend in Rockdale, an hour north of Bentley, to buy cigarettes and a case of beer at a Zippy Mart a few miles down the highway. He’d never made it. Somewhere between Troy’s gravel driveway and the gas station’s door he and his truck had apparently evaporated into the twilight.
It had wrenched Clark’s world off its axis, broken all laws of nature as she knew them, to discover that her quiet brother with his razor wit—a boy who had once described the death of their batty, tender, financially hapless mother as simply, “The thriftiest thing that woman ever did”—could somehow slip between the cracks of the world and become abruptly, insistently absent.
Troy’s girlfriend had reported him missing, another investigation had been mounted (that had been a busy year for the Pettis County Sheriff’s Department), but little attention was ultimately paid to the disappearance of some old running back who had allowed something as simple as a neck injury to keep his team from reaching the championships in his high school days. The town gossips had been too busy still raging about Joel to care.
When Clark’s troubled mother had died, the grief had been simple enough for Clark to handle: the woman was gone, and probably the better for it. But with Troy, Clark had long since found she could not grieve nor resent nor relinquish him. Troy, somehow, was both alive and not alive. He was baked white in the sun, delivering infants in Ecuador or, at this very moment, nursing a drink in some fuggy bar, just like the one Clark sat in now, and thinking of her.
So, despite all her furious misgivings about Joel, when Clark had received word this afternoon that Dylan Whitley had apparently decided to run away from home, she’d dug Joel’s card from where she’d stuffed it in the pocket of last night’s uniform. She’d texted to ask him if there was anything she could do. Who could imagine better than she the anxiety he must be going through?
She wasn’t sure Joel deserved her kindness. She wasn’t sure she could have treated the news any other way.
Joel made the barman pull down a full bottle of whiskey from the dusty top shelf, paid with cash, left his change. He approached her booth with the bottle and two milky shot glasses. He had spotted her after all.
“I hope you’ve developed a taste for rye,” he said, settling into the booth.
“I’ll taste whatever’s liquid.” She accepted a glass, let him pour her a heavy shot. “How are you holding up?”
He didn’t answer her immediately. He downed a double with a grimace, watched her in the hazy light. A runty man at the bar whose eye Clark had been avoiding sidled to the jukebox with a pout and turned on “When You Say Nothing at All.”
“How much do you know?” Joel asked.
“Just that Dylan wants to stay out of town,” she said truthfully.
“And won’t respond to anything I write.” Joel opened his phone, scrolled through it and laid a text exchange in front of her.
Dylan’s most recent text read:
joel im sorry but i cant stay in bentley right now
This was followed by three messages from Joel:
Who is this?
If this is Dylan answer the phone.
Where is my brother.
“Why did you assume right away that this isn’t him?” Clark said.
“Because even when he’s upset he doesn’t text like this. Look.” Joel pulled down an earlier message, one that began, i can’t quit football. “That message Sunday night is the reason I came down here in the first place—there’s something wrong with my brother. Not that the investigator bothered to ask.”
Clark read the message twice. “What’s the Bright Lands?”
“Fuck if I know. Did anyone get hold of the guy Dylan and his friends were supposed to be staying with at the coast?”
She pushed the phone back across the table. She tried to smile. “You have to know I can’t tell you that.”
He nodded, played his fingers on his glass.
“Hey,” Clark said. “Maybe the message this morning was just a prank—KT or Jamal got hold of Dylan’s phone and decided they wanted to put you through the wringer. Boys can be like that.”
“How did they get through the phone’s passcode?”
“Maybe they saw Dylan type it in one time. Maybe he didn’t have one.”
“And Troy never sent you anything like this? Back after—everything?”
Clark wondered if Joel realized how rude he had become. She poured another shot for the both of them and said calmly, “How is New York?”
“Isn’t it a hell of a coincidence?” Joel went on like he hadn’t heard her. “Two football players who both run off for no obvious reason?”
“Joel, I don’t quite know how to say this. The biggest game of the season is Friday. It must be plenty of pressure.” She slid her glass back and forth. “People around here might say a coincidence is you turning up after ten years away and your brother running off the next morning.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “I have an alibi.”
She downed the drink. “I ain’t accusing you of anything. Listen—boys your brother’s age do strange things. Present company included, yeah?”
He struggled to return her smile.
“You’ll be happy to know the fat fucker who arrested you at the park had to go on medical retirement,” she said.
“Heart attack?”
“Something more satisfying. Old Deputy Grissom was out riding his horse this summer and the damn animal spooked, fell on him, dragged him over a rock. By the time some hikers found him, he’d had so much brain bleeding he’d percolated into a vegetable.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You shouldn’t be. Listen, Joel—” She waited for him to meet her eye. “We care, alright? The whole department, the whole town, we love Dylan. The sheriff’s already gotten a call from the mayor about it, just like he has from every man in the Chamber of Commerce. If Investigator Mayfield says he’s going to call KT Staler’s brother then he’s going to call him. But you’ve got to bear with us, alright? We had two officers take jobs in the city this spring. Thank God we had Browder join up because Grissom’s retirement would have put us three down otherwise. It’s a big county. All the usual rambunction. We got the meth crazies breaking into trucks and farms, we had someone burn down that damn church—”
“So it was arson?” Joel said, tilting his head. “My mother said it was an electrical fire.”
Clark tsked. She’d forgotten how sharp Joel was. “Have a good night, Mr. Whitley.”
She rose to go but he grabbed her hand. “I’m sorry,” he said, and sounded like he meant it. Sounded suddenly, thoroughly defeated. “I know it sounds crazy but I was just—I woke up afraid. I spent all night dreaming about my brother.”
Clark’s hand lingered under his. So had she.