On the edge of town, long past dark, Clark was dozing fitfully at her kitchen table when she heard the sound of tires on the gravel outside. By the time a car door slammed, she was pressed against the front wall of her living room, her truck’s keys in her pocket and her father’s old revolver in her hand. Her heart was thudding, her mouth was dry, but she was frightened of more than just an unexpected guest. She’d been briefly certain, the moment she’d awoken, that someone outside had been watching her sleep.
There was a brisk knock at the door.
She eased back the hammer of the revolver. “Who is it?”
“Just me,” shouted young Deputy Browder, their brash man-child with two nice arms and half a brain. “Don’t you ever check your phone?”
Clark cracked open the door on its chain. He looked like a Boy Scout come to sell her coupon books. He held up a brown bottle of rum. He was alone. “A nightcap?”
It would do. She unlatched the door.
Browder stepped inside, taking in her small front room, her kitchen scattered with papers, the gun in her hand. He smelled of sweat and boot polish, a blend Clark was surprised to discover she didn’t entirely dislike.
“Are they helping you sleep?” Browder asked.
She folded up the case files on her kitchen table. “If by ‘they’ you mean ‘these,’ then no.” She grabbed two glasses from the cabinet by the fridge. She said, “Just one drink, yeah?”
“Long as it’s a double.”
Browder filled the glasses to their rims, propped himself against her counter. “Drink,” he said. “Be merry.”
The neat rum tasted wrong on her tongue, too jaunty for a week so somber. She drank more. “It’s quiet on patrol tonight?”
Browder shrugged. “Jones is running the squawk box. I ain’t heard nothing in hours.”
The squawk box was the department’s name for the software that forwarded any local 911 calls to an officer on duty. In the wake of the town’s latest budget cut they couldn’t afford a dedicated dispatcher.
“No sign of KT Staler, I take it?” he said.
“He’d have to walk through the door for us to find him, it seems. I can’t help but wonder if—”
“What?”
“It’s nothing.”
“You mean you can’t help but wonder why no one seems too worried about chasing a white boy with no alibi?”
She smiled, though there was nothing good about it. “Something like that.”
They sipped their drinks. Browder’s eye settled on a file. “‘Troy Clark,’” he read aloud. “That was your brother’s name, no?”
When Clark had returned home from the station this evening she hadn’t been able to help herself. She’d pulled her brother’s file from her closet and scoured the thin record of his missing person’s investigation for any sign of the eight-thousand-dollar debt Mayfield had told her about this afternoon and, just like the investigator had said, she’d found no trace of it. No record of drug use, no mention of known drug users in the few skimpy interviews that had been conducted with Hannah Szilack, the girlfriend who had reported Troy missing, nor in the interviews that had been conducted with Clark’s father or herself.
“It still is his name, as far as I’m aware,” Clark said.
“Sorry.” Browder pulled his eyes up from the file. “He was really something till he hurt his neck. Did they ever talk to any of the guys who was on the team with him?”
“Not that I know of. He hadn’t played for a few years by the time he disappeared.” Clark leaned back to check her phone, saw that it really had died. She plugged it into a charger by her toaster.
Browder chuckled. “It probably wouldn’t have done no good. They say girls is secretive, but shit—some of the Bison I played with had more tricks than a deck of cards.”
“I think the same’s true today.” Clark frowned. “How do I talk to those kids, Browder? How do I make them open up?”
The deputy gave her an exaggerated shrug. “Torture? I don’t know, man. If those boys know anything about what happened to Dylan they’re probably settling their own scores.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Clark finished her rum.
Browder refilled her glass before she could stop him. A funny look came into his eye as he filled his own. “I’m thinking of getting another tattoo,” he said abruptly, and he eased the shirt of his uniform up from beneath his belt to reveal a pale, firm stretch of stomach. He indicated the band of muscle that ran along his hip. “I want it to say Lead the Charge. Like inside of a football, maybe? Or is that corny?”
Eyeing all the tattoos already visible on his arms and torso—lots of birds and crosses and Chinese script—Clark said, “Why not just a Bison or something?”
“I already got two of them.”
She looked him up and down, arched an eyebrow. “Where?”
Browder undid his belt buckle.
“Oh God.” Clark held up a hand, laughed. “I don’t want to see this.”
“Too late,” the deputy said, and when Clark peeked between her fingers she saw Browder’s bare ass, where two green Bentley Bison charged toward one another from either cheek. Two scrolls floated above them, ornate and frilled like the garland of some ludicrous ceremony, reading 2008 and 2012.
Clark couldn’t hold back a guffaw. “Put it away! Put it away!”
“I’m taking your mind off the situation,” Browder said over his shoulder. With a touch of disappointment he added, “You don’t like it?”
She laughed harder. “Not in my kitchen I don’t.”
Browder tugged his pants back up. He blushed. “It was my graduation gift to myself.”
“Money well spent.”
The radio on Browder’s shoulder sputtered. It was Jones, calling in a report of illegal fireworks being shot off FM 217. Browder copied him. Clark finished her second glass of rum in one long gulp. Her phone buzzed.
Browder thanked her for the drink before remembering he’d brought it himself. He hesitated at her open door.
“That was inappropriate,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not filing a complaint.”
“I just feel so useless out here sometimes. Like I can’t do nothing to stop the shit people keep doing to each other.”
Clark squeezed the young deputy’s shoulder. “You’re keeping the peace.”
“Just don’t go easy on them. Whoever did this fucking thing. Don’t let them get away like they always do.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. She watched him until his taillights flared and disappeared down her road.
When Clark closed the door again she heard the old windows of the house rattle in their frames. She checked the latches, carried the empty glasses to the sink. Browder was right. People sure seemed to get away with a lot around here.
the best years
She thought about missing case notes. She thought about dreams.
Only the best years of my life
She stared out at the night, half expecting some black shape to detach itself from the horizon and come shambling across the Flats toward her house.
But nothing moved, of course. She was totally, hopelessly alone.
For the second time that day, Clark thought of her mother. Margo Clark, née Delbardo, remained the strangest woman Starsha had ever met in her life, even after three years in law enforcement. Margo had lived in Pettis County from the day she was born but never did she seem at home here. She had once—somehow—been a cheerleader as a girl but, as an adult, had grown into something of a hippy, or perhaps just a watered-down Texas mystic (though she’d have no doubt resented the description, much as she resented everything). She was prone to wearing beaded garnet shawls and turquoise headscarves and talking, whenever she was overcome by her drunk husband’s antics, about a spirit that had visited her in high school and revealed to her the exact date of her death.
Margo used to explain away all her mistakes with superstitions she had failed to heed or rituals she had failed to properly execute—the floors of Clark’s house had always been gritty with salt—and the woman could say something like, “Dreams are just our souls going for a swim at night,” with all the calm, bored confidence of a woman describing the laundry.
It had been Margo who’d instilled in Clark a lifelong aversion to the Flats outside the family’s house. Other children grew up with Bigfoot in the woods and the bogeyman under the bed, but not Clark. She’d been told stories since she was in diapers about a monster that slept in a trench under the Flats, coiled and lethal as a snake in a toilet’s U-bend. “The thing out there’s got long whiskers like a catfish,” Margo used to tell her daughter. “And nails as long as the school bus and two black iguana eyes that’re as big as your face.”
Looking back, Clark always thought that the monster had been a brilliant tool for a mother with a useless husband and two wild children to corral. The creature drank little girls’ tears, for one thing (“So quit your bawling unless you want him to come say hello”) and kept Clark well on her mother’s side of the property line. “Don’t you dare go over that fence, Starsha Marilynn Clark. Ain’t nobody goes out there in the Flats don’t get lost on the way back. And that’s how he gets you.”
The monster even had a name, though it was something so bizarre and alien it had always struck Clark as far too peculiar for her mother—a woman who was rather prosaic, under all the crazy—to have invented herself. Clark struggled now to remember that name, feeling suddenly as if it were a vital thing to know, though why on earth she suddenly cared after twenty years was beyond her. The name had sounded like something she’d find in the Old Testament, she remembered that much. “Botox,” Troy had called it once. “Bullshit.”
Margo hadn’t cared for that. “You just wait till you feel it moving in your sleep,” she’d told him. “Just you wait till he makes your nightmares go woolly—then you’ll know he’s took a shine to you.”
When Clark had discovered, much to her surprise, that none of the other children in her kindergarten had ever heard of a monster that slept under the Flats, her mother’s stories had quickly lost their power. But now that Clark, with more than a little fear, was approaching what she was certain would be a sixth night of troubled sleep, she couldn’t help but wish her mother were here with her tattered tarot deck and her prayer beads. Because Margo had been right about one thing: one afternoon, when her mother picked Clark up from the middle school, she’d greeted her by saying, “Next Tuesday’s the day.”
And sure enough, late on the morning of the following Tuesday—April 6, 2004—a pickup truck from Denton, Texas, had come roaring down the highway with Margo’s name all but written in blood on the front fender.
Clark turned away from the dark Flats outside her window with a shudder. She rinsed out the glasses in the sink and told herself she didn’t see a pair of brilliant black iguana eyes out there, staring back at her from just across her fence.
Her phone buzzed again on the counter. She ignored it. All her fear had knocked loose a thought. Browder had even mentioned it: rifling through her brother’s file, Clark saw that none of Troy’s old teammates had been interviewed after his disappearance.
Something else occurred to her. It was in her own interview with the police ten years ago—an interview conducted, she remembered, at this very table—during which she had told a much younger Detective Mayfield that she had no idea where Troy had gone but that her brother might have said something about his plans to Joel Whitley.
Yes, that Joel Whitley, she had told the detectives. By the time of the interview it had be almost two months since Joel’s arrest but the sound of his name had still sent a tremor through the room. Joel and Troy had hung out on a few occasions over the summer, she’d explained to Detective Mayfield, usually on weekends when Troy was back in town.
And yet there was no mention of Joel in the notes of her interview. There was no mention of him anywhere in the report.
Was it a clerical error, she wondered, or another deliberate omission, just like the drug money?
“Mr. Boone asked that we keep that little detail out of the files.”
A heavy, painful memory fell unbidden into her mind and began unwrapping itself before she could stop it: late fall, midway through a chilly football season, a few weeks before everything started to come apart. Clark and Joel had never been better. Clark and her father had been a different story.
The old man had been out of work for weeks (again) living half in a bottle and pawning whatever he could carry out of the house. Clark had returned home from school one afternoon to find her father, chisel in hand, working to open the padlock she used to seal her bedroom shut against him. In a fury, Clark had wrenched her father away from the bedroom door and all but thrown him down the hall. She spotted the revolver he’d been using as a hammer a moment later.
She got out of the house before he could get his wits about him. At gossipy old Miss Lydia’s house a mile down the road she’d called Troy, had told him that he needed to come now, and then spent the last hours of the day in Miss Lydia’s kitchen, eating stale Fig Newtons and suffering through recorded episodes of The Price Is Right. “If you play them back you can guess the answers,” the lady had explained. No shit.
She saw her brother’s truck pass Miss Lydia’s windows just after dark. She set off after him on foot, the first few stars appearing above her, and when the coast sounded clear she made her way into the house just in time to find Troy emerging from their father’s room bearing an armload of empty bottles, a box of ammunition and the old revolver, his finger roguishly hooked around the trigger guard.
“Is that all of it?” she said, nodding at the ammo.
Troy dropped the bottles in the sink with a clatter. He wiped sweat from his brow, eyes wide with adrenaline (or, she wondered now, with something harder?) and said, “The man’s room’s a rat’s nest.”
In those days, Clark had still been sore that Troy, the only person on the planet who could calm their father, had moved away. “Took you enough time to get here,” she had said. “The highway from Rockdale get longer this afternoon?”
At first she’d thought Troy hadn’t heard her. He seemed interested only in studying the sprawling Flats outside the window.
“I have to tread so careful around here, Star,” he said at last.
She had not taken that well. She had not taken that well at all. He had to tread careful? He had not been the one living alone with a drunken animal for a year. He had not been the one with the gun pointed in his face that fucking afternoon.
He was not the one who, despite every achievement, was perpetually known as “Troy Clark’s sister.”
No. She ran Troy from the house that evening and told him to tread his careful way home. She had spat on his truck. Hell, she shouted, if it were such a strain then maybe he should never come back at all.
It was the last time she ever saw him. She hadn’t expected him to take her seriously, but there you go.
But what did any of that matter now? Why did that memory come back to her, why those words specifically—“I have to tread so careful”?
“If you play them back you can guess the answers.”
Her phone buzzed. She snatched it off the counter.
“Christ, Clark, I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour.” It was Joel. He was driving somewhere, by the sound of it.
“I was sleeping,” she lied, not caring for his sharp tone. “You might try it.”
“I envy you. I’ve been trying to sleep for days.”
Clark felt that prickling heat in her scalp again. “Have you been having strange dreams?”
“It sounds like everyone has,” he said, sounding annoyed she would mention it. “Clark, listen to me, that’s not why I called. I think whatever happened to Troy happened to Dylan—”
“Joel, I’ve been over all this with Investigator Mayfield—”
“They were gay, Clark.”
The sound of Joel’s car seemed to fade in her ear. The table grew distant. Her brother’s face appeared briefly in front of her kitchen window as Joel Whitley, very distantly, said, “Troy and Dylan, they were both gay.”