Word ate through the town. The easy wheels of local business ground to the kind of stop that left Main Street dying as they gathered at the edge of the woodland. Kids rode hard, red cheeked as they dumped bicycles, spoke beads still spinning as they joined the procession, watching and waiting for a dead kid to shade the color of their childhoods.
Saint stood apart from them and watched as Chief Nix rolled his cruiser past a line of local press, already backed up and herded by a barrier made from traffic cones and some tape.
He climbed out and blocked the sun with his hat. Most days his moustache framed a smile. He watched Saint as she watched a man photograph the tire tracks, like they weren’t baked hard into the mud, the kind of fossilized nightmare Saint would pay homage to over the coming weeks.
Saint looked up at his handsome face, then back down at the mud again. A low pain spread in her stomach. A tightness across her bony shoulders that would mature and stop her sleeping each night until she no longer knew herself. Each part of that woodland was claimed with soft memories, and she battled tears. Her and Patch holding out stick guns and chasing phantom goons. Her hanging upside down from the twisting limbs of sweet gum, warning him not to try it because his missing eye fucked up his balance. Him trying to stand on one leg to prove her wrong. Her helping him back to his feet.
Nix crossed before her, hollering to the other cops, “All points. Got the whole damn county locked up tight. Highway 42 to 86, you can’t get in or out without a flashlight in your face.”
“Interstate 35,” she spoke in a whisper that carried toward the big chief, who stepped toward her.
“You’re the bus driver’s granddaughter?”
She nodded.
“You’re friends with this kid?”
She nodded again.
“He did a brave thing.”
She might’ve screamed that he was not tough enough. She might’ve told them he once sat on the low roof by her bedroom window the whole winter night when she got sick with bad flu. That Norma found him blue in the early hours and brought him in to thaw. That he spent six hours rounding up silverfish, longhorn beetles, and even a luna moth when she fretted over her vacant bug motel. That he stole only what he needed, and not ever what he wanted.
Dogs jumped from the back of a white Taurus.
The scream hit them.
A cop stood his ground, one arm wrapped around the waist of Ivy Macauley as he struggled to keep hold of her.
Chief Nix waved a hand toward the cop who gratefully let her free. Ivy walked toward them slow, didn’t lose it again till she saw the bloodied shirt in the bag. She was put together, always, even when she cleaned at night. When she scrubbed piss from the floor of bathrooms and swept tobacco from mahogany desks.
Ivy folded, arched her back and screamed the kind of wrenching sound that stained them all. The echo Saint would hear when she sat in the yard that night, shivering though it was warm. Trying hard not to cry out when news spread through the town.
A local, Pattie Rayburn, had seen the van.
It made a right turn onto Highway 35.
Patch was gone.