CALLIOPE WATCHED THE sere grass of the highway’s ditch blur by as she sat perched on the neck of a dragon. It didn’t seem normal, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn’t impossible. Not anymore. The most telling thing was that, despite herself, she was starting to get drowsy.
They had been flying—gliding, almost—for several hours, jarred only occasionally when Mahkah reached down to the road with one trailing claw to adjust the path of their flight, laying another mark along the pavement. Calliope and Vikous had recounted their story to Mahkah as they traveled, watching oncoming cars sweep by without so much as a second glance from the drivers or passengers.
“It’s partly magic,” Vikous had explained after the fifth or sixth pickup truck had gone by. “Enhancing shadows, implying a little more to the shape than what’s actually there, obscuring the wing shadow as cloud cover or an overpass.” He gestured at the highway. “Most of it’s just that people see what they want to see.” His hand swept back over his shoulder, indicating the massive bulk of the dragon. “And some of it’s the natural coloration and the sparks of light. Luminescence, whatever.”
Calliope nodded, but didn’t bother to look the way he’d gestured. She’d found that even now, sitting atop the creature, she still couldn’t really see it; her eyes slid away, or her mind wandered the way it did on long drives. “That’s natural? They’ve always looked like that?”
Vikous shook his head, but it was Mahkah who answered. “ALL BEINGS ADAPT TO SUIT THEIR ENVIRONMENT. WHAT WONDER THAT THE GREATEST AMONG THEM DO LIKEWISE?”
To this observation, Vikous added nothing. Calliope decided to follow suit, and let her eyes slowly close.
“You don’t want me to meet your folks?”
Calliope sighs, eyes closed. She pushes her fingers halfway through her hair, then grips it tight, focusing on the pain. “No; I don’t want to meet my folks.”
Josh blows air through his teeth. “You know, it’s funny to joke, but this is a little more serious than just not calling them on the weekends.”
“I know it’s serious.” She glares at him. “I don’t think you get how much.” Again, she tugs on her hair, turning to stare at the ground. “I don’t—”
“We drove,” he interrupts, “for two solid days. We are”—he turns, pointing down the road that runs past them and their parked car—“ten minutes from your house.”
“My parents’ house.”
“What d—”
“It’s not my house,” Calliope continues, raising her voice to shut down his protest. “That was made very clear when I left.”
Josh drops his chin down to his chest the way he always does when he’s swallowing words he doesn’t want to say. “Fine. Okay. Your parents’ house. But it’s still your family. They’re not going to leave you standing on the front step.”
Calliope’s eyes go wide, her expression incredulous. “Ha!” She tips her face up to shout the sharp, barking laugh at the sky. “You . . . that . . .” She gives Josh a look of pure, astonished disbelief.
He turns away from Calliope, pacing between her and the car, hands on his hips, looking at the sky. When he gets back to where she’s standing, arms wrapped around her midsection, he tries again. “Why?”
She shrugs. “They wanted me gone.”
“That was seven years ago,” he says, his voice quiet and intense. “We walk up and knock on the door—”
“They never forget,” she manages, barely above a whisper. “They’ll ruin everything.” She winces at Josh’s explosive exhalation. “Please—”
“You’ve got a family.” He bites off each word. “I don’t think you’ll ever understand how much that’s worth.”
“I understand them.” Calliope turns away. “Honestly? You’re the lucky one.”
As soon as she says the words, she knows she’s gone too far.
She is right. The next sound from Josh is the driver’s-side door of the car opening and closing.
Calliope turns. Josh sits behind the wheel, eyes forward, not looking at her or anything else. Through the glass of the side window he looks pale and bloodless, like a ghost.
She walks to the car, gravel crunching under her shoes, and stands next to the door. She doesn’t say anything; knows that anything she could say now won’t matter. Eventually, he rolls the window down, but doesn’t turn to look at her.
“Baby,” she begins.
“Let’s go home.” She can barely hear him.
She starts to protest; stops. Shakes her head. Tries again and fails.
He rolls up the window and, with nothing to say, Calli can only walk around and get in. Tears stand in her eyes, and she doesn’t know why.
There are too many reasons.
It was nearing dawn when Mahkah’s voice thrummed Calliope awake. “WE HAVE ARRIVED AT YOUR FIRST DESTINATION, CALLIOPE.”
Calliope blinked her eyes into focus, staring at the half-harvested cornfield they sat in. With help from Vikous and some assistance from Mahkah, she slid to the ground without too much pain and looked around. There were buildings in the distance that were familiar, if not comforting.
“This will take me most of the day, Mahkah.” She turned back to the dragon. “I hope you—” She stopped, staring at an empty field.
“HAVE NO WORRIES ON OUR BEHALF.” The voice shook out of the earth, everywhere and nowhere. Behind Calliope, dried cornstalks rustled in what might have been the wind. “WE WILL FIND YOU HERE AT DUSK.”
“Look out for the hidden things,” she murmured to herself and turned to Vikous, who stood with his hands in his pockets, poking one great oversized shoe at a severed stalk of corn. “I think it might be—”
“—better if you do this alone, yeah.” Vikous smirked. “Sounds good. I’ll wait out here.”
“You sure you won’t be cold?” Calliope asked, but Vikous’s smirk only broadened.
“Don’t worry about me; this last bit’s been like a vacation.” He looked up from the dirt. “It’s your journey; I’m just the guide. If you know where you’re going, then I can pretty well take it easy.” His eyes flicked to the buildings in the distance.
Calliope said nothing and Vikous nodded. “Get walking. We’ll be here.”
Calliope turned down the long driveway that led to the cluster of buildings she’d seen from a distance. Surrounded on three sides by thick ranks of trees planted back in the late ’30s, the farm was clearly visible only after she walked into the yard.
Nothing had changed. She didn’t recognize the car in front of the garage, and the barn and machine shed both needed paint, but that was it. Calliope had walked down the drive a thousand times—more—dropped off by the school bus in the late afternoon. It had always looked the same.
No one noticed her approach. No one came out to meet her. That was pretty much the same as well.
She almost turned around at the mailbox by the road, again by the driveway gate no one ever shut, again when she walked into the main yard, and finally when she got to the base of the steps.
“They’re not going to leave you standing on the front step.”
“Oh, but they might,” Calliope murmured, her breath swirling around her in pale wisps. “They might.”
She stood at the steps for a long time, then climbed them and lifted her left hand toward the door. It shook visibly.
“We walk up and knock on the door . . .”
Calliope let out a short, nervous laugh. “God, I wish you were here.”
She knocked and jammed her hand back in her pocket.
A few seconds later—the time it takes to wipe off your hands and walk from the kitchen—the main door opened. Calliope watched the face of the woman on the other side of the screen change from polite curiosity to confusion to worry and finally, as expected, drop back into its familiar stoicism.
“This is a surprise,” the woman said.
“Hi,” Calliope said, hoping the wind muffled the shake in her voice. “Mind if I come in?”
It was probably only a second before her mother answered, but it seemed to Calliope that the question hung in the air between them for hours; dangerous, giving off a kind of poisonous heat.
“Good grief, like you need to ask.” Phyllis Jenkins pushed open the screen door, still holding the rag she’d been using to wipe off her hands. Calliope stepped past her into the house—their unfamiliar proximity awkward for only a second—and Phyllis glanced at the snow-packed drive. “How’d you get here?”
Calliope turned, unzipping her coat halfway as her eyes scanned the pictures on the walls. “I had a friend drop me off. They’ll be back this afternoon, if that’s all right.” She motioned to the walls, where each portrait had been updated over the years, except for Calliope’s sophomore head shot. “Everyone’s aged except for me, I guess.”
Her mother glanced up at the walls. “Sort of Dorian Gray in reverse.”
“God, do I look that bad?” Calliope forced a smile.
Her mother made a dismissive grimace. “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that.”
Calliope chose not to reply and nodded toward one picture. “Dad’s lost some weight.”
“That’s because of the cancer, actually,” said a voice from the archway leading into the hall beyond. “Hello, Cal.”
Calliope turned, startled, to the speaker. Her sister, wearing a faded apron that Calliope recognized, leaned against the door frame, unsmiling. “Cancer?” She shook her head. “Sorry. Hello.” She turned back to her mother. “Cancer?”
Phyllis shook her head. “Just some melanoma—your dad never covered himself up on the tractor like he should have.” She motioned toward the kitchen. “Let’s go sit down.”
Calliope glanced at the couch and several armchairs in the room they were already standing in, but said nothing and followed her sister out of the room.
“Your hair looks like you’ve been standing in front of a leaf blower.” Her mother set a cup of tea in front of Calliope at the kitchen table.
“The . . .” Calliope took a drink, not using her right arm, but trying not to favor it. “The ride I got was windy.”
Phyllis raised her eyebrows. “In this weather? Didn’t you freeze to death?”
Calliope tipped her head. “I guess not, Mom, since I’m sitting here.”
“Probably a motorcycle, that sounds crazy enough,” said her sister, sitting across from Calliope and looking at her over her own cup. There was no playfulness in her expression.
Calliope matched the look. “Sure, Sandy, it was a motorcycle.” She tilted her head. “Aren’t you working anymore? I thought you’d be in town in the middle of the day.”
“It’s Saturday, Cal. Did you lose track of time?” Sandy’s jaw was tight.
“A motorcycle.” Her mother’s expression was a mix of disbelief and embarrassment.
“It had a heater, Mom. It was fine.”
Her mother frowned. “One of those big . . . what do they say . . . Goldwings?”
Wings like a bomber, Calliope thought, furling in toward its body.
“Yeah.” She hid a small smile behind her cup. “Something like that.”
Sandy set her cup down. “Did you steal it?”
Calliope stared at her sister, her lips parted in astonishment. “Excuse me?”
“Sandy . . .” Their mother shook her head, her lips pressed together.
“Oh, please, Mom; you were thinking the same thing.” Sandy made a sharp gesture toward Calliope. “She shows up looking like she’s been living in a ditch, smells like roadkill, and you said the sheriff was through here two days ago asking about her.”
“I wa—the sheriff?” Calliope’s pulse rose as her stomach dropped.
Sandy turned back to Calliope. “That’s pretty good. You almost sounded surprised.”
“I am—” Calliope shook her head. “What’s going on?”
Sandy’s eyes narrowed. “That’s what I’d like to—”
“You’ve been on the warpath with me since I got here. I haven’t done anything—”
“You’ve got that right.” Sandy glared at her sister.
Calliope sat back in her chair, her expression slack. Her older sister had seemed her first and best friend all through her childhood, but the woman sitting across the table from her was, in light of those memories, worse than a stranger. “You don’t . . .” She shook her head. “You don’t even know me. You’d rather listen to some ignorant hick cop than—”
“Jim Fletcher isn’t some—”
“—even hear anything that I’m trying to—”
“Stop, stop, stop, stop!” Phyllis smacked the table with one hand, and both younger women subsided, each glaring at the other. Their mother reached out and put a hand over one of Sandy’s. “Sandra, we don’t know anything that’s going on, and this is your sister.” She reached out her other hand. “Calliope—”
Calliope, blood still pounding in her ears, jerked her hand free and instantly regretted it, not least because of the look of superiority in her sister’s eyes when she did.
Steel—the sort of strength that saw a person through year after year of living on the edge of profit—slid into Phyllis Jenkins’s eyes. “You will be civil in my house, young lady.” Her hand snaked out and gripped Calliope by the shoulder.
The pain pinned Calliope to her seat. The wound in her shoulder seemed to stretch, like strips of Velcro being pulled apart, and her muscles locked in shock. To her credit, Calliope didn’t scream or cry out, and at first her mother didn’t realize why there were tears in her daughter’s eyes, only that she had gone rigid beneath her hand. When a bloody flower began to stain the shoulder of Calliope’s sweater, she let go with a gasp, staring first at the widening blotch, then at her own stained thumb. “What? . . .” she said in a whisper.
“Just a bullet hole, Mom,” Calliope said through clenched teeth. “It’s nothing; ask Sandy.”
“Perfect.” Sandy stood up and yanked her coat from a hook by the back door. “You, you just stay away from me.”
For the third time in fifteen minutes, Calliope was left slack jawed in the face of her sibling’s rejection. “Because . . . getting shot is my fault.”
Sandy dropped both of her hands to the table and leaned over it. “I have kids, little sister,” she said, her own eyes bright with unshed tears. “Until people stop shooting at you, stay away from them. And me.” She pushed away from the table and turned. “Bye, Mom. I’m—I’ll call you.” The two women exchanged a look and Sandy left, closing the outside door behind her as she went. A few moments later, Calliope heard the car out front start up and pull out. After that, the kitchen was silent. Calliope sat, mute and still, left hand gripping her right biceps as if she could cut off the flow of pain to the rest of her body.
Finally, her mother said, “Are you running from the poli—”
“No,” Calliope said. Her mother didn’t respond. “I’ve got a phone number of a detective in the city. You can call him and ask.”
Her mother shook her head, still not looking at her. “How did you get hurt?”
Calliope simplified things as much as possible. “A bad guy shot me.”
“On purpose.”
“Bad guys do that.” Calliope snapped, goaded by the pain in her shoulder and the shock of her sister’s words. She glanced at her mother, then away, uncomfortably guilty at her own reaction. “Some people don’t like me much, Mom,” she continued, her tone subdued. “It’s a mystery.”
A faint, sad smile ghosted across her mother’s face. “Why are you here?” She caught the look on Calliope’s face and shook her head, closing her eyes as though to retract her words. “I mean . . .” She looked at Calliope, then got up and moved to a cupboard drawer. “It’s been a long time. And an awfully long drive for some coffee.”
“I’m working,” Calliope said, “kind of.” She sighed, trying to figure out where to begin. “I started this job a while back.”
“Two years from September.”
Calliope blinked. “Good memory.” She frowned. “Wait, how do you know that?”
“Your sister read us the last letter you sent her.”
“My last—” Calliope’s brow furrowed as she pieced things together. “That letter came back Return to Sender. The last two did, actually.”
“Well, she read it to me,” her mother replied. She pulled a bundle from a drawer and walked to the sink, wetting down a fresh dishtowel. “I don’t know how you’d get them back if she opened them.”
Oh, I do. Sandy had been a secret ally after Calliope had first left, always staying in touch and keeping her up to date (mostly), but a few years ago something had changed, for reasons Calliope had never been able to figure out. Resealing a letter and sending it back apparently unread no longer seemed out of character for her older sister. “Anyway, my partner’s”—she hesitated, remembering that the deal with Faegos might still hold—“missing. The police and the feds got hold of me last week and told me about it. It happened out here—”
“Here?” Phyllis returned to the table. “Let’s pull that sweater off and see how bad I got you.”
Calliope sat forward and started to pull her left arm in through its sleeve. “Not here exactly; Iowa in general. I thought I might be able to help figure out where he was.” She pulled the sweater over her head with her left arm and, with her mother’s assistance, moved it off her right arm and shoulder. The T-shirt underneath was soaked in a circle the width of an outstretched hand.
Phyllis blew out a long breath. “I hit the bull’s-eye, looks like.”
“It’s all right,” Calliope said. She opened her mouth to say something, but stopped, heat rushing to her face.
Her mother caught the hesitation and the hot flush on her cheeks. “What?”
Calliope gave her head a short shake. “I think you owed me one anyway,” she murmured, her eyes averted.
Silence was Phyllis’s only reply. She turned her attention back to Calliope’s shoulder and clicked her tongue. “It sounded like that job might be dangerous; I guess it is.” Her nose wrinkled. “And your sister wasn’t wrong about your clothes. Get that stuff off and I’ll get ’em in some water after we look at you.”
Calliope started to comply, but paused—somehow reluctant to give her mother some kind of advantage. “I don’t want to be a hassle.”
“I just shoved my thumb into a bullet hole in my daughter’s shoulder,” Phyllis replied. “I think you can impose a little.”
The blood looked worse than it was. Whoever had stitched up Calliope’s shoulder (Vikous, spooky clown of many talents, most likely) had done a good job; two or three stitches had been pulled hard but none had torn loose. Calliope took a long, much-needed shower, and her mother found her something to wear while her clothes washed. An hour later, Calliope was back in the kitchen in a pair of sweatpants and a flannel shirt, eating her first real meal in two days.
“Where’s Dad?”
“In town, working on tax stuff. He’ll be home late.” Her mother folded clothes as they talked. Early afternoon light shone through the west-facing windows.
Calliope frowned. “It’s not even January.”
“This is still from last year.” She paused. “Or the year before last, maybe.”
Calliope made a face. “I don’t know how you do it . . . this.”
“Oh, neither do I, most of the time.” Her mother’s voice was light, but Calliope could hear the strain. “We’ll have to retire when we’re fifty-five so we have time to get jobs that pay.”
Phyllis glanced at Calliope and pulled another article of clothing out of the basket. “The sheriff said that a federal agent was asking if you’d been in the area. He wasn’t sure if the police were hunting for you or just trying to get in touch.”
“The police are not hunting me, Mom.” Calliope hoped she was at least telling the literal truth.
“But they don’t know where you are.”
“No.”
“They don’t know you’re doing this.”
“Officially?” Calliope took another spoonful of thick soup. “No, but they didn’t say not to.” Her mother sighed. Calliope glanced at her sidelong. “What did you tell the sheriff?”
“I told him the truth.” She turned to Calliope. “I told him I didn’t know where you were, what you were up to, who you were with, or how to get hold of you. Which he already knew and has known for years.”
Calliope searched her mother’s face. “I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t apologize. I’m the one who got you in the shoulder.”
“No,” Calliope said, reaching out to lay her hand on her mother’s arm, making her stop folding clothes for a second. “I’m sorry. About everything.” The apology hung in the air between the two women. Phyllis’s face fell into an expression Calliope couldn’t read. After a few seconds, she shook herself like someone casting off a daydream and moved aside the folded laundry.
“So,” she said. “You came looking for your boy.”
“My partner.”
“Your partner.” Phyllis rotated her coffee cup on the table in a way that reminded Calliope of Vikous. “Someone you know well enough to drive across the country for.”
“Yeah,” Calliope cut in, “it’s complicated, Mom. We’ve known each other a long time. He dropped out of the band we were in and decided to do something with his degree. I wanted to—” She shook her head. “He offered me a job, and I decided to get into the new business with him.” She sat back in the chair, rubbing at her hairline. “It’s complicated.”
“You were in a band?” Phyllis said.
Calliope winced, internally. “We could never get a record deal,” she explained, unasked. “I sang, and it was really good in the clubs—when we were live—but our demo tapes could never—”
You were never happy with them, came Joshua’s voice; from a dream, or her own memory, or both. You got nervous whenever things looked like they were becoming real—just like with us.
She grimaced. “They never came out right.”
Her mother set her cup down on the table. “That sounds like it would have been good for you,” she said. “Better than playing detective, certainly.”
Calliope blinked. “What?”
Phyllis looked at her, her eyes showing some surprise. “Well, you always loved singing, and you were so good.”
“You . . .” told me it was a pointless waste of time “ . . . never told me that,” she finished, looking away. “You made music sound like a . . . very bad idea.”
“I never said any such thing.” Her mother looked affronted.
Calliope leaned forward, as though to make sure the words made it clearly across the table. “I was fifteen. It was June. It was a Saturday. I told you I wanted to sing. I told you I wanted to be a star.”
Her mother frowned. “Honey, I don’t remember you saying that.”
“I—”
“Not specifically,” she continued. “I remember the sentiment well enough. And that summer. Do you remember that summer?”
Calliope nodded. “It was hot.”
Phyllis stared at her. “It was hot, yes.” She took a drink of her coffee. “It was the worst drought in twenty years. Nothing was growing. Your father didn’t know how we were going to make our loan payments. Your grandfather had died three months before. I think . . .” She looked into the middle distance. “I imagine I was worried you might end up in some crazy situation with no stability, like what we were going through. If I said something that bad, well, I’m sorry. I am. I don’t see why you’d never tell us about—” She shook her head. “You’ve always been so secretive.”
Calliope opened her mouth to speak twice before she could get the words to come. “I’m sorry, but I seem to remember something about Dad having cancer.”
“Oh.” Her mother waved her hand as though to sweep the words away. “That was just your sister blowing things out of proportion. It was a couple of lumps on the back of his neck; they cut ’em right out. We would have called you if it had been important. He wears sunscreen now, and . . .” She trailed off, watching Calliope’s expression. “I suppose I shouldn’t be calling the kettle black.”
Calliope shook her head, the corners of her mouth twitching.
Phyllis returned her wry smile. “Maybe we could catch each other up.”
“I’m sorry,” Calliope said. “I really wanted to see Dad.” Afternoon light slanted through the windows, and Calliope’s throat had the pleasant ache that came from a lot of talking, but she’d turned the conversation away from uncomfortable topics or stepped around the land mines of old arguments more than a few times, and it was wearing her down. Also, she was becoming increasingly conscious of the time.
“Oh please.” Her mother smiled without showing teeth—it looked more like a pained grimace. “I ought to be the one apologizing.” Her expression took on that same distant, daydreaming look she’d had earlier in the day. “When you—” There was a knock on the front door. Her mother’s eyes snapped back to the present. She looked at Calliope, the corners of her eyes tense.
Calliope’s brow creased, and a surreal sense of danger sparked in her chest. “Mom?”
Phyllis shook her head and stood up. “Better get that.”
Calliope sat alone at the table for a few moments, bemused, then pushed herself out of her chair with her good arm and moved after the older woman. “I’d be happy to just stay and wait for him to get home,” she said, her voice raised just enough to carry, “but I should get going.”
“Maybe you could hold off on that,” replied a man’s voice. Phyllis stood next to the open door, her arms crossed. She had stepped back and to the side to reveal her visitor, but Calliope had already caught sight of the broad, flat-brimmed hat over her mother’s head.
The man in the doorway rested his hands on his hips, making it look as though he was simply stretching after sitting in a car for too long, not imposing his size on the two women or putting his hand closer to the firearm hanging from his belt. “Hello, Calli. Haven’t seen you in a coon’s age.”
“Hello, Jim.” Calliope tilted her head, letting a hint of sarcasm creep into her voice to mask her nervous concern. “Or is it ‘Hello, Sheriff’ today?”
“Oh . . .” Jim Fletcher shifted and looked away from both women and out over the dry and rustling cornfields surrounding the farmstead. His breath puffed in the cold air. “I suppose sheriff is the right idea, at least for a little while.”
“Mmm.” Calliope folded her arms, unconsciously mimicking her mother’s stance. “You want to come in, or should I get my coat?”
“Oh,” her mother admonished her. “Calli, you don’t have to be—”
“How about we go for a drive,” Fletcher interrupted, with an apologetic nod to Phyllis. “No reason for me to track mud into your mom’s house.”
“Jim . . .” Phyllis breathed.
“Right.” Calliope hadn’t moved, and her face was impassive, but the adrenaline wash at the local lawman’s words made her breathing short and tight and left her hands tingling. “Am I under arrest, Sheriff?”
“Ahh . . .” The older man spoke the word as though it hurt. His face sagged. “Do you think you need to be?”
Calliope pursed her lips and tried to remember that the sheriff was a friend of her family’s—someone who’d let her off the hook on two tickets when she’d just been learning to drive, and fined her three other times when she had no good excuse and should have known better. “I really don’t,” she said, turning toward the kitchen, “but I’ll go for a drive if you like.”
He nodded after her. “That sounds about right. I just want to get things straightened out,” he added, to Phyllis.
“She hasn’t—”
“It’s fine, Mom.” Calliope pulled her coat off the back of the kitchen chair and returned to the room with it hanging over her bad arm—which conveniently gave her an excuse not to use it. She walked over to the door. “I’m assuming your car’s warm enough I don’t need to put this on.”
“Sure, sure . . .” The older man made room for Calliope to pass, holding the door as he did.
“Jim—”
“It’s fine, Mom,” Calliope repeated. She stepped through the door and started down the steps, her eyes taking in the open yard and the tracks of the car her sister had left in. She stopped, remembering the look Sandy and her mother had exchanged just before the younger woman had left. “You should probably call Sandy and tell her you stalled me long enough.”
Her mother said nothing at all as Calliope walked the rest of the way to the sheriff’s vehicle.
As the sheriff’s SUV pulled out of the driveway and headed down the gravel road that led to the highway back into town, Calliope watched the cornfield on Jim Fletcher’s side of the vehicle.
Don’t come after me, she thought. Just . . . let me work this out before you show up and eat the local police department. She didn’t expect that anyone out in that field might have heard her, but that wasn’t the point—her thoughts were more a prayer than a message.
“Something on your mind, Calli?” The sheriff had his eyes on the road, but he could obviously see the direction of her gaze out of the corner of his eye and thought she was looking at him.
“Not much,” Calliope said, sitting back and turning her attention forward. “I think we probably could have straightened things out back at the house, but it means a couple calls back to L.A., and I’d rather the long-distance fees got charged to you.”
Fletcher chuckled. “Well, thank you for not sugarcoating it for me.”
“I do what I can.” Calliope allowed herself a small smirk. Although he was taking her in to his office, the sheriff hadn’t put her in the backseat cage. In fact, he’d opened the front passenger door for her even though she’d stood next to the rear door. From where she sat, she could reach him, his gun, a vertical rack-mounted shotgun, and the steering wheel. Either he didn’t think that Calliope was really any kind of danger, or he was pulling off the mother of all con jobs to get her guard down as far as possible.
That last was a sobering thought; the only reason the sheriff would have to play that sort of game would be if he were bringing her to Walker, and the supposed special agent had shown up unexpectedly so many times that Calliope couldn’t bring herself to rule out the possibility.
She glanced at Jim Fletcher, and her misgivings faded. The older man had stoic and unreadable down to some kind of martial art—she imagined he was a terrifying poker player—but she didn’t think he was a very good liar. It was a subtle distinction, but one that mattered a lot to her, and it didn’t feel wrong.
“Think your mom’s going to beat us into town, at this rate,” Fletcher said, interrupting her thoughts. Calliope looked in the rearview mirror on her side of the vehicle and saw her parents’ pickup closing the gap behind them. “Guess she thinks I’m not going to give you a ride home afterward.”
“Are you?” Calliope turned to look at the sheriff. “ ’Cause if you already know you’re going to, I’m not sure why we’re driving into town.”
“Oh . . .” That familiar, pained expression crossed the older man’s face again. “I guess I don’t know. It’s a little complicated.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of badges being shoved in your face.” She tried to keep her voice neutral. “That’s usually what complicates things for me.”
“Just the one,” the sheriff replied, his voice tinged with just a hint of disapproval. Calliope filed that away for later. “One’s enough, sometimes.”
“Sure.” Calliope said, pronouncing it shoore. She could hear the verbal tics and phrases of her youth creep back into her voice with almost every sentence she spoke, as though her mouth was dropping into old habits with some kind of relief. “We’ll get ’er all fixed up in town.”
“Mmm.” Fletcher’s eyes went to his own rearview, and Calliope caught the faintest of twitches at the corner of his mouth and eye. “Think your mom’d be too happy if I pulled her over for speeding?”
Calliope raised her eyebrows. “You’re the one with the gun, Jim”—she blew air between her teeth—“but I’m not sure that’d be such a hot idea.”
“You’re pr’y right,” he said, holding his poker face. “Don’t need that kind of trouble today.”
“Good,” Calliope replied. She let a few more miles scroll by in silence, then: “That badge flasher you mentioned . . .”
Fletcher didn’t obviously react, but the air around him seemed to go still. “Yeah?”
“Is he still around?”
Sheriff Fletcher motioned Calliope into a seat in his office. “We’d better make this first part quick.” He lowered himself into his chair. “I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m not going to get a Christmas card if I don’t let your mother in here pretty soon.” He raised his eyebrows and opened both his hands, palms up, in Calliope’s direction. “Unless you don’t want her in here while we talk. It’s not like I need to have your guardian present.”
“Let her sit out there all day if you want,” Calliope replied. Her voice was even, but the last few silent minutes of the ride into town had given her time to review the way her mother had played her, and cast a gray pallor over what had seemed an impossibly good reunion.
The sheriff’s eyes flickered at her tone, taking in the high spots of color that shone on her cheeks. He rested his arms on his desktop blotter. “Calli, look at me.” His tone was private and familiar—so far from his “sheriff” voice it surprised her into meeting his gaze. “When your mother came to the door,” he said, “her eyes were wet. Now”—he raised a hand to forestall Calliope’s angry reply—“maybe you’ve got good reason to be upset with her, but you need to know that if she could have wished me off her front step right then, she would have.”
Calliope opened her mouth, closed it, and turned away from the sheriff’s look. Jim Fletcher had always been hard to fool but, worse, he’d been a hard man to make trouble around—a talk with the sheriff back in high school had left Calliope feeling like she needed to apologize to everyone for being a bother.
Fletcher nodded as though she’d given him some kind of agreement and leaned back in his chair. “So . . . a couple questions before we bring everyone in?”
Calliope glanced back through the office window. Her mother stood near the dispatch desk, her arms crossed tightly over her midsection, talking with her father, who stood with his back to them.
He’s thin, Calliope thought. Thinner than the pictures.
“Sure.” She turned back to the sheriff. “Just a couple; I’d like to see my dad.”
Fletcher nodded, his lips pressed together. “Fair enough. Back at your folks’ house, you said you could straighten this out with a long-distance call. Can I have that number?”
Calliope pulled out her cell phone, scrolled to Darryl Johnson’s name, and handed it to the sheriff. “That’s the detective who was investigating my partner’s disappearance back in the city.”
Fletcher squinted and copied the number onto his blotter. “And . . . he’ll be expecting a call?” He handed the phone back to Calliope.
She shook her head, dropping the phone back into her left pocket. “Expecting it? Not really.”
The sheriff made an attempt to look confused; as a result, he looked like a police officer who was pretending to look confused. “Then how do you know he’s going to vouch for you?”
Calliope shrugged. “Don’t you know people who’d vouch for you even if you didn’t warn them ahead of time?”
The older man dipped his chin. “Sure . . .” he said, pronouncing it the same way Calliope had on their drive to town.
“So do I,” Calliope said. A small, less confident voice in the back of her head hoped she was right. She ignored it.
Fletcher gave a short chuckle that someone might have mistaken for a throat clearing. “Fair enough.”
Calliope kept her eyes on him. “He worked with Special Agent Walker for a couple of days too.”
The sheriff’s face gave nothing away, but Calliope did notice his hands pause for the barest second as he moved a paper on his desk. “That’s interesting, that you bring that name up.”
“Not that interesting.” Calliope settled into the chair, working hard not to favor her shoulder. “He’s the kind of guy who likes to push badges into people’s faces. Not very likable.”
Jim Fletcher met her eyes. “You’re not wrong about that, but that doesn’t mean he’s not someone a county sheriff has to at least listen to.” Before Calliope could answer, he picked up the handset of his phone. “I’m going to call your detective friend and run the county phone bill up a bit,” he murmured, his eyes on the number scrawled on the blotter. “Go give your dad a hug and tell Dwight we all want some coffee.”
Calliope considered any number of things she wanted to ask the sheriff about what Walker had said to him; while she didn’t think he would ask her anything she couldn’t—one way or the other—answer, in front of her parents, there were a number of things she wanted to ask him while they had some privacy. But it looked like her chance was already gone. She stood up and let herself out of the office.
Behind her, the sheriff watched her leave, his eyes sharp.
Calliope walked through the sheriff’s department, feeling that familiar frisson that always filled the air when strangers were around law officers in their private space. It didn’t matter if the visitors were victims or criminals—alleged or convicted; Calliope thought the simple fact was that there were strangers in perhaps the one place that an officer could feel legitimately safe, and it put them on edge. Since starting work with Josh she’d experienced—and caused—that discomfort many times. She located the deputy that Jim Fletcher had pointed out (the youngest in the room) and repeated his message, then continued toward her parents.
Her father still hadn’t turned around when she’d reached them. He was speaking to her mother in the low, steady murmur of half-spoken words and inflection that functions as a kind of impenetrable code between longtime couples. Something inherently stubborn in Calliope’s makeup kept her from walking up next to the pair; she stopped, her hands in her pockets, and waited for him to turn around. Her eyes scanned the back of his neck, looking for the scars from the cancer surgery her mother had mentioned, but the collar of his coat was pulled high and tight against his hairline.
Her position meant that she was easily visible to her mother, who had watched first Calliope, then her husband as her daughter had crossed the room. Now, her eyes—troubled in a way that Calliope found perversely comforting—found Calliope’s for a moment. She nodded in a particular way and took a half step back from the closed huddle.
Her father turned. Calliope’s first instinct—brutally suppressed—was to turn away or close her eyes. From her chair in Jim Fletcher’s office, he had looked thin, but she realized now that the jacket had given her a false impression of his remaining bulk. He was rail-thin, gangly, in the way that teenage boys were, with joints that seemed too big for their limbs. His cheekbones and jawline were far more pronounced than she remembered—even the ridge along his temples seemed to press at his skin—and his fair hair had washed out to gray.
“Your mom says you two had a good talk.” He reached his arms toward her, an invitation more than embrace.
“Yeah.” Calliope stepped into his arms and squeezed almost as tightly as she could with one arm, then squeezed once more, harder. “Where’s the rest of you?” she exclaimed. Her voice was muffled by his coat, but he chuckled and stepped back. “Oh, you know; the treatments are a pretty good diet program.” He patted his stomach with one long-fingered hand. “I’m putting it back on, though. Twenty—”
“Treatments?” Calliope shot a look at her mother. “What kind of treatments?”
He frowned in turn. “Doesn’t matter. They didn’t take long, and I’m fine.”
“You—”
“Hey,” he interrupted. His eyes met hers and matched the stone in his voice. “We’re not doing this here. It’s not why we’re standing in the sheriff’s office—we’re going to talk about that.”
Calliope glared at him, feeling a familiar obstinacy seep into her in reaction to his tone. “How about I say I’m fine and not to worry about it and not tell you anything about what’s going on? How’s that sound?”
“You two stop.” Her mother stepped forward, next to her husband, and gave the sleeve of his coat a soft slap. “No one’s been explaining anything to anyone for a long time, and it’s mostly my fault, I’m sure, so can we please just . . . stop?” She shared a quick, surprisingly pleading look with Calliope.
Calliope hesitated, her instinctively combative habits wrestling with a real, if newfound, desire to make peace. Finally, she motioned over her shoulder with her head. “Jim’s calling someone I know back in the city who can probably straighten everything out.”
“The police detective?” Phyllis asked. At her husband’s look, she explained. “She’s been working with the police on the disappearance of her friend. Partner.” She looked back at Calliope. “She works with the police a lot, as part of their business.”
That last wasn’t anything Calliope had told her, or even implied, but it wasn’t really wrong, and it felt good—if more than a little weird—to hear her mother embellishing her accomplishments on the retelling.
“And gets shot,” her father said, though low enough that Calliope didn’t think anyone else had heard.
“That”—she stepped in closer to him—“that isn’t going to help me get out of here faster.”
“If—”
“I told Mom; it isn’t anything I could get in trouble for,” Calliope interrupted. She winced inwardly, not at the falsehood, but at how easy it had become to lie to her family. “But gu— things like that automatically mean that reports need to be filed.” She indicated the rest of the officers with her hand. “At best, I’d be here filling out paperwork for most of a day. At worst, Jim would make me go back to where it happened and fill out the paperwork there.” She looked up into her father’s eyes. “I don’t have that kind of time. Not right now.” The real reason she didn’t want the gunshot wound mentioned—that the sheriff would ask who had shot her or, worse, might have a good guess—would have bad enough consequences that Calliope tried not to think about it.
“Suppose that’s true.” The muscles in her father’s jaw—far too easy to make out under his taut skin—worked. “Mostly because people getting shot are what police are supposed to take care of.”
“Dad, please.” Calliope touched her father’s sleeve.
The door to the sheriff’s office opened, and Calliope turned. The youngest deputy—Dwight—pushed himself out of his chair and headed for the break room’s coffee machine. The sheriff watched him go, shook his head a single time, then turned back to Calliope and her parents. “Whyn’t you folks come on in?”
“So as I understand it,” Fletcher began, once Calliope and her parents were seated, “your partner’s dead.”
“He’s missing.” Calliope felt her mother’s eyes on her, but her father’s gaze stayed on his friend on the other side of the desk.
“Detective Johnson said he was reported dead.” The sheriff leaned forward on his blotter. “I’m no expert on it, but that is usually how a murder investigation gets started.”
“Did he mention the answering machine message?” Calliope said. Her voice sounded high and uneven in her own ears, but no one else in the room seemed to notice.
The sheriff looked at her, his face tired. “He did.” His eyes slid to her mother, and he seemed to remember that they weren’t alone. He sat up. “It seems that Calliope’s partner, who was reported dead, also left a message on their office’s answering machine several hours after his alleged remains were found.”
“So he’s not dead?” her mother asked.
The sheriff blew air through his teeth, his eyebrows raised. “If he isn’t, he’s been missing more’n a week. Let’s say it raises doubt.” His eyes flickered back to Calliope. “His wife is flying out to identify the body for sure.”
“He’s married?” This last was to Calliope.
Calliope raised her eyebrows. “We just work together, Mom; we’re not—we’re friends.” She crossed her arms. “I’m just trying to see if I can find him.”
“See . . .” Sheriff Fletcher interjected. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Why would you get involved in looking for him?”
Calliope tilted her head, barely able to contain her instinctive sarcasm. “Well . . . we do find people for a living.” It was a glib truth that she hoped the others would take at face value. “And I’ve known him long enough to know where he’s likely to be, how and where he grew up. He used to live near Harper’s Ferry. First with his parents, then they died, then him and his brother and a great-aunt, then just the two of them for a while after she died, then just him, after he lost his brother.”
“Harper’s Ferry’s nowhere near here, though,” the sheriff replied. “If you were coming to visit your folks, that’s fine, but if you were in a hurry, this is out of the way.”
“On a . . . second message, he told me to talk to my mom.” Calliope’s face felt hot. “Which I know sounds weird, but I figured there might be some kind of reason.”
“Detective Johnson didn’t mention that part.” The sheriff looked at Phyllis. “Had you two met?”
“No—” Calliope braced herself, caught in an admission she couldn’t see a way to avoid. “But he came out here one time.” She wanted nothing more than to pull her head down between her shoulders, but she sat straight and kept her eyes on the sheriff. “With me.”
Her mother blinked. “You’ve never brought anyone here.”
Calliope looked her way without meeting her eyes. “I did, Mom. Three years ago.” At the confused look from her mother, she added, “I didn’t quite make it.” Her eyes moved to the floor. “We turned around about ten miles up the road and went back.”
The room was silent. Caught in the middle of something unexpected, Jim Fletcher cleared his throat and shifted his pen on the desk.
“Are we that horrible?” Phyllis whispered, her eyes fixed on her own white, intertwined fingers.
“Do you remember?” Calliope’s voice rose. “Do you even remember the last time?”
“Settle down,” her father said, his voice even, his eyes on the far wall behind Jim Fletcher.
“You . . .” Calliope turned in her chair toward him, grounding out some of her growing anger in the abrupt motion. “I’m sorry, Dad, but you weren’t there, and the one time you did actually talk to me afterward, you told me not to come back. Not to ever come back.”
“You don’t—” Her father’s eyes hardened, then flickered toward the sheriff. “You don’t do that and expect me not to say something.”
“What I . . .” Calliope’s eyes went to her mother, her chest tight as she started to see the scope of what had happened—what had been done to her family’s memory of her. “What did you tell him?”
“Folks,” the sheriff said, “I’m not sure this is a talk anyone needs to have in public.”
“Christ, Jim, you know everything,” her father said. “You’re the one who went looking for her.”
“He . . .” Calliope felt her head tip as though she’d heard the words wrong—felt the room start to tilt as well, her breath go short as the last ten years of her life rewrote themselves as she watched. “What?” No one would look her in the face.
Finally, the sheriff cleared his throat. He brought his blue eyes up and met Calliope’s. “Your mother and you had an argument,” he said, his voice even and measured, as though reciting something memorized, “one of several that year.” His eyes flickered to her mother, whose head was turned away, the fingers of her clenched fist pressed to her chin. “By some accounts, they occurred almost daily.” He cleared his throat, glancing down at his desk for a moment, then back to Calliope. “In this case, your mother was struck . . .”
I’m sorry, a small voice cried in the back of her mind. I told her I was sorry. I take it back.
“ . . . and you left—”
“I threw her out.” Phyllis sounded like she’d been holding her breath. Neither of the men said anything, but the look they exchanged told Calliope that this was the first time they’d heard the words. “I was so”—she squeezed her eyes shut—“I was so tired of fighting all the time. It was so hard. I just—”
“I’m sorry, Calliope.”
“Mom—”
“I should have done this before.” She walked out of the kitchen. “Pack, now. Get out of my house.”
The house was quiet as she pulled the door shut behind her.
“—gave up.” Calliope’s voice was barely a whisper, rough with unshed tears. The office rang with silence. “So did I.”
No one spoke for over a minute. Finally, the sheriff cleared his throat. “Your parents asked me to try to find you.” His eyes went to her father, then back to her. “When your sister got your letter, they decided to let things work out on their own, since you were already well out of the state.”
Phyllis let out a laugh that was more than half sob. “That didn’t work out so well. Our daughter hates us.”
“No.” Calliope shook her head, frowning at the sheriff’s words more than her mother’s. “No, Mom. I just . . . I got scared.”
“That—” Her father sat forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose with both index fingers. “Your logic makes my head hurt, little girl.”
The childhood phrase brought a faint, sad smile to Calliope’s lips. “Josh didn’t really understand either.” She glanced at her parents. “He really wanted to meet you. After we got back home, we—he broke up with me.”
Phyllis frowned. “But you started working with him in Sept—”
“It’s complicated, Mom,” Calliope cut in. “The band wasn’t working after he left, so I decided to get into the new business with him. He offered.” She sat back in the chair and crossed her arms, feeling defensive. “It’s complicated.”
“That’s a pretty good word for it,” the sheriff said. His voice was too loud in the tension of the room, but it served to shift attention away from the revelations of the last few minutes. “The thing is, with a history like that—if you hadn’t had about the best alibi you could have, ‘complicated’ would have turned into ‘suspicious’ as soon as your partner was reported missing.” He looked at his desk, then back up at Calliope. “As it stands, it’s just curious as all hell.”
Calliope watched Jim Fletcher’s face, looking for a sign that she had another enemy to worry about. “You jumping in on the investigation of the case, Sheriff?”
“Calli—” her mother began.
“No.” The sheriff raised his hands. “It’s a fair question, though I think the answer’s pretty obvious.” He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his desk, unconsciously mimicking her father, and looked at Calliope. “I’ve got a badge waving in my face, as you put it, telling me I should give someone a call if I get any word of Miss Calliope Jenkins anywhere in my jurisdiction.” He glanced sidelong at Phyllis, but returned his attention to Calliope. “The person you’re looking for is an ex-boyfriend, who’s now your business partner; which might be a problem except you’re only into the company for ten percent, and his ninety percent goes to his wife if he’s declared dead, according to Detective Johnson.” He sat back in his chair. His eyes were still on Calliope, but rather than meeting her gaze, he seemed to appraise her. “Then Calliope Jenkins shows up at her parents’ house, who are friends of mine—and I hope still are after all this—and she’s looking a little cat-dragged and a little wild-eyed and”—his lips narrowed—“she’s favoring her right side the way someone does when it hurts like merry hell but she doesn’t want the sheriff to notice.” He leaned forward again, lacing the fingers of his hands together, but leaving them lying on his desk. “I’m not working on your case, but I suddenly have a situation dumped in my lap that could turn into a hell of a mess if I just ignore it.”
Calliope felt as though the bandage wrap had tightened around her chest again. “What do you want me to tell you, Sheriff Fletcher?” Her voice was soft, not out of any particular self-control or consideration, but simply because she couldn’t force any more air out. “I just want to see if I can find my friend. I only came here to see my parents. I wasn’t causing any trouble, and I’m still not.”
“You have to see—” Fletcher began.
“Everything you said is right,” Calliope continued, “and everything I just told you, you already know.” She spread her hands, palms up, in her lap. “You called Detective Johnson, and he told you everything he knew, it sounds like. That’s all I’ve got. There’s no dark secret or big truth I can pull out to make everything come clear.”
“Who shot you?” her father asked.
For several seconds, Calliope continued to look at the sheriff, hoping she’d somehow dropped into one of the surreal dreams that had dogged her since the start of this trip. Jim Fletcher’s eyes tracked to her father, then back to her, and he tilted his head slightly. Waiting.
Keeping still simply to contain the frantic, nervous energy in her chest, Calliope turned her head toward her father. “What?”
He didn’t return her look. His eyes were on his hands, his thumb rubbing along a callus on the outside edge of his left index finger. “Who shot you?” he repeated, almost talking to himself. “Seems like that’s the only big thing we don’t know.” The corner of his mouth drew up in a humorless smile. “Seems kind of important to me.”
“Oh,” Calliope replied. She turned back to face the sheriff, though her eyes were focused on nothing in particular. This is where it ends, she thought. I’m not going to find Josh, or . . . anything. There was a finality—almost release—to the thought. I lose.
“Calli—” the sheriff began.
“Walker.” Calliope lifted her head, looking him in the eye. She heard a kind of wordless, confused sound from her mother. “Special Agent Walker shot me. In the shoulder. With his service piece.”
It was Jim Fletcher’s turn for his eyes to go wide. After a few seconds, they resumed their typical hooded expression, and he looked down at the small pile of notes between his hands. “When was this?” His jaw firmed, and he looked back up at Calliope.
“Two days ago.” Calliope felt cold—detached from her own body. “In Colorado. Castle Rock.”
The sheriff nodded. Sounds from the outer office seeped in to fill the empty space between the room’s four occupants. “Guess I need to ask for your personal effects, Calli. For safekeeping.” He glanced up at her, then back at his desk. “Figure you know the deal.”
“I do.” Calliope pushed herself up out of her chair and dug in her pockets. She felt numb, detached from herself. After everything that she’d gone through, the enormity of what this meant for her—for Josh—was simply too much to process.
“What—” Her mother seemed to choke the word out around her own surprise. She looked at the sheriff, then Calliope, then back to Fletcher. “What are you doing?”
“It’s fine, Mom.” Calliope dumped her keys onto the sheriff’s desk and pulled out her wallet. “That’s pretty much everything I have on me,” she said to Fletcher.
“It’s not fine.” Phyllis turned to her husband.
Her father cleared his throat. “You gonna hand my daughter over to the man that shot her, Jim?”
“Dad—”
“No . . .” The word seemed to come out of the sheriff’s mouth reluctantly. He shook his head, looking away from all three of them. “No, I don’t suppose I am.” His gaze moved back to her father and settled on Calliope. “I can still lock her up for a couple days, though.”
Calliope blinked, trying to keep up with the sudden shift in the conversation. “What?” Her voice sounded remarkably similar to the way her mother’s had only a few seconds ago.
The sheriff leaned back, considering. “Might not be such a bad idea.”
“Excuse me?” Calliope turned to look at her father, but his eyes were still on his hands; it seemed to Calliope that he didn’t want to look up and see her face, or the face of his friend. She turned back to the sheriff, whose eyes were also looking away from her and her father; oddly, he was watching her mother, who sat with her arms crossed tightly over her ribs, the fingers of one fist pressed to her mouth. Calliope shook her head and picked up her keys. “No.”
“Honey—” her father began.
“Not just no, but hell no,” she cut in, glaring at Fletcher.
“Your partner’s wife comes in to identify the body in the next day or so,” the sheriff said. “Figure that you’ll be fine if you just stay out of the way until then—let that question get answered.” He sat back in the chair. “Unless you promise to stay at your parents’ house that long.”
“No!” At some level Calliope barely understood—one that might not have even existed a few days ago—she knew that she had to find Josh before Lauren saw the body; that it was, in Vikous’s words, the way it worked.
“You didn’t have any problem with this when you thought I was turning you over to Walker,” Fletcher said. “Now you do, when I’m not? Doesn’t make much sense.”
“You wanna do your job, Jim? That’s fine—I understand that.” She pushed her chair to the side and stepped away from the desk. “You want to lock me up for safekeeping? Treat me like I need babysitting? Fuck you.”
“Calliope Jenkins!”
“Oh, what, Mom?” Calliope rounded on her mother. “You want to put me in some jammies and get me a pacifier? Because I have a suggestion . . .”
“You’ll want to be real careful what you say next,” her father murmured. His voice was quiet, but it cut through the room. “That’s your mother.”
The tone of his voice, so familiar—the sound of dozens of arguments Calliope had lost as a child—cooled her ire only slightly. “What do you—”
“No.” Phyllis interrupted, shaking her head. “Calli, they’re just . . . you know they’re not going to do that.” She looked at the two men. “Jim?”
The sheriff shifted in his chair. “Your daughter’s already been shot once.” He jerked his chin toward the outer door of the department. “Guy that did it’s out there, probably not that far away, and he still has his gun. And a badge.” Her mother’s face pinched with frustration.
“So you’re going to—” Calliope shook her head, short and sharp. “You know what? Go ahead.” Calliope turned from her mother back to the sheriff. “I changed my mind; I want you to do this.”
Fletcher studied her, his own poker expression holding. “I’m not sure I believe you.”
“Oh, you can believe me.” Calliope bit off her words. “I’ll end you.”
The sheriff’s eyebrows raised slightly. “Really.”
“Really.” Calliope motioned toward the phone. “You just got off the phone with a cop who vouched for me, and cops don’t even like me. I live in the most litigious city on the planet, and I chase down alimony dodgers, parole skips, and guys sneaking out on big legal fees for a living. Lawyers fucking love me, and I can think of a half-dozen assholes who would sue not only you but the entire department into bankruptcy, for free, even if they didn’t owe me. It would be fun for them.”
Fletcher smiled slightly. “I don’t think—”
“And it will take years,” Calliope drew out the word, letting it soak up some of the anger boiling just beneath the surface. “You’ll be going to hearings for so long, it’ll feel like a second career.” She gestured at the window of the office, ignoring the pain in her shoulder. “Lock me up. Start the nightmare.”
Silence poured back into the room. Her mother was looking down at the floor, wearing a peculiar expression Calliope couldn’t identify. The sheriff continued to watch Calliope’s face, then turned toward her father, who finally looked up at his friend.
“Jesus, Jim,” her father said, his voice still pitched low. He coughed lightly, and when he pulled his hand away from his mouth, Calliope saw a wry smile. “I don’t think she likes that idea.”
The sheriff pursed his lips, shaking his head. “Doesn’t sound like it.” To Calliope, it seemed he was about to start laughing.
“You . . .” Her mouth worked open and shut several times in exasperation.
Her mother stood up. “All right, that’s enough.”
“You—” Calliope was still trying to find the words for her next assault on the smirking pair of men.
“Shh.” Her mother patted her arm. “Give your father a hug and I’ll drive you back to the house.” Calliope looked at her mother. Seeing her face, the older woman nodded, her expression a mixture of amusement and annoyance. “Yes, they’re being awful. I know. Give your dad a hug.”
A half-familiar car was waiting in front of the house when they pulled back into the yard, engine running and plumes of heated exhaust fogging the freezing air around its taillights. Her mother clicked her tongue—a mark of disapproval that Calliope thought she might not even know she did. “You should just go in the house and get your things together,” she said. “I know it’s later than you were hoping.”
Calliope gave a halfhearted laugh. “I’m so far beyond the expected time frame, Mom, it hardly matters.” She rubbed at her neck. “And I think I should talk to her, anyway.”
Her mother’s short, sharp laugh had more force behind it than Calliope’s, but less amusement. “I’m afraid I’ll have to pull you two out of a snowbank.”
“I’m not going to get in a fight, Mom.” Calliope let her exhaustion seep into her voice. “I’m not twelve.”
“No . . .” Phyllis brought the pickup to a stop behind and to the left of the car, shut it off, and swung her door open. “But it’s not just you I’m worried about. Don’t let her grab your shoulder.”
“Sure.”
The older woman shut her door and headed toward the front of the house. As she did, the driver’s-side door of the car opened and Calliope’s sister got out. She leaned forward over the door, mittened hands gripping the top, and said something to her mother—a question—that Calliope couldn’t make out. Phyllis didn’t turn her head or even look at Sandy, but Calliope heard her give a reply. The words were short and didn’t take so long to say that her mother had to slow down or stop on her way to the front door. Sandy’s eyes widened at whatever was said—mostly in surprise, it seemed to Calliope. She straightened up, her hands still resting on the top of the car door, and watched their mother stump up the stairs of the house and go inside. Only after the door closed—without a single backward glance from Phyllis—did Sandy turn her attention back to Calliope.
Their eyes met through the slowly frosting front window of the truck and the swirling fog of car exhaust, and Calliope got out of the pickup.
Cold air bit at her face. The snow didn’t crunch under her feet as she walked toward her sister; the temperature had dropped to the point where it almost seemed to squeak when stepped on, like Styrofoam. She stuffed her left hand into the pocket of her coat as she went, and let the right hang.
“Hi, Sandy.” Calliope supposed she had the right to indignation and anger and a sense of betrayal, but even the thought of mustering that kind of emotion wearied her.
“I guess you took care of the sheriff.” Sandy’s voice was hard and clipped, driven into a higher register by anger and other emotions that Calliope didn’t particularly want to think about. Her job with Josh had given her years of experience dealing with people in bad situations who’d been driven to the edge of what they could handle. Her sister’s voice—her whole demeanor—was uncomfortably similar. On the one hand, it gave Calliope an idea of what to expect and how to deal with it, but on the other it made the whole thing seem like someone else’s problem—not her life, at all.
“There was nothing to take care of,” Calliope said. “We visited for a while in his office. Then he called the friendly detectives back home and everything got straightened out.”
“Back home.” The corner of Sandy’s mouth twitched downward. Her face was pale and pinched, her eyes hard, bright and wet. Calliope thought that on some other day, in some other situation, she might have gone to her, offered her a hug and a few whispered words—something to ease her obvious pain. Maybe. Maybe not; she and Sandy hadn’t been close for a very long time—Calliope was only now starting to realize just how long it had been bad between them. Regardless, the maybes didn’t matter; it was cold and the sun was going down and she’d spent a lot of time in the sheriff’s office. “You mean out in the city.”
Calliope gave her a short nod, unwilling to let what she was feeling show on her face. “That’s my home, yes. I pay a mortgage and everything.” She blew air through her teeth and watched the fog spin away from her face, mixed with the exhaust fumes. “I have a job, I have friends, and I know police detectives that tell Jim Fletcher that I’m a great help and a pleasure to work with.”
“Nice trick.” Sandy’s voice shook. “Nice deal you must have made.”
Calliope clenched her jaw, then let her instinctive anger go. After the sheriff’s office, she simply didn’t have the energy for another shouting match. “It’s not a trick, Sandy.” She pushed her hair out of her face with her right hand, wincing only slightly. “It’s a life. I didn’t have to call in a favor, and I didn’t have to pay anyone off. I just let a friend speak for me.” It was strange to refer to Darryl Johnson that way, but it felt right.
“Lucky you.” Sandy made a face. “I’m sure you’ve got a whole city full of friends who think you’re just perfect.” Her voice was bitter and accusatory. “Living your perfect life with your perfect friends, doing . . . whatever you want.”
Confusion furrowed Calliope’s brow. “No. I don’t. At all.”
The laugh Sandy barked out was no kind of laugh at all. She waved her arms to either side. “Well, you never come back here, so it must be pretty. Fucking. Perfect!” The word sounded so unfamiliar in her sister’s mouth that Calliope almost laughed, but the truth of the emotion behind the words kept her sober. It was hate she heard in her sister’s voice, but also pain, and something worse.
“I’m not living some kind of dream,” she said, keeping her voice quiet and even. “I’m sorry you think that, but I’m not.” She shoved her hands deeper into her pockets. “I’m just living.”
“You’re playing detective.” Sandy sneered. “And before that, you were in a band, which you made me promise never to tell Mom and Dad, ’cause god knows what they would think.”
“I know; you were really good about controlling what information they got,” Calliope replied. “I figured out which letter you finally showed them.” She looked up at Sandy. “Once I was ‘well out of the state’? A month of getting to the mailbox before Mom, without her noticing? Must have been exhausting.” In her mind’s eye, she could see her younger self, hunched over a cheap desk in a cheaper motel in a cruddy little town, writing letter after letter, crying less and less, slowly giving up on her family. Even that only made her sad; the anger was drained out of her. Chances lost. Time wasted. Regrets.
For a moment, Sandy’s eyes went wide in shock and shame, then they hardened and went wider still. “Great!” She flung her arms over her head like a cheering sports fan. “Chalk up one more point for Calli California, Super Detective. Meanwhile the rest of us are here, at home, stuck in old houses, doing the same things we’ve always done, with the same people we’ve always done them with, where nothing ever changes and no one ever gets what they want.”
“You make it sound like it’s my fault that you didn’t get to have some other life,” Calliope said.
“I got married.” Sandy gestured at herself, her chin jutting out. “I had three kids. I didn’t get to go running off all over, or move somewhere else, or even do something else.”
Calliope made a face. “You’re absolutely right, Sandy. You got married, and you had kids. That’s your life; you did that instead of something else. If you didn’t get to do some other thing you wanted to do, it’s because that’s what you chose, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me.” She gestured at her sister. “It wasn’t the only option you had.”
“I couldn’t—”
“You wouldn’t,” Calliope continued. “I’m sorry if you want to blame me for everything in your life that you didn’t get to do, but . . . fuck off.” She waved her hand through the fogging air, shoving her sister’s sorry protests away like the trash they were, and almost didn’t notice the twinge of pain. “Your fantasy about my life works great for you, but it’s a little too Lucy Gayheart for me, so no.”
“Of course it’s not your fault,” Sandy shouted. “How could it ever be—”
“You grew up,” Calliope said. Her voice was calm, but it cut through Sandy’s and left wintry silence behind.
“Of course I did! It happens.” The angry light in Sandy’s eyes dimmed. Her gaze dropped to the snow at their feet. “It just happens.”
“Sure, but that doesn’t mean—” Calliope looked up at the cloudless, sunset-glowing sky. “It doesn’t mean giving everything up.” She dropped her head, trying to see her sister’s face. “It still doesn’t, even now.”
“Don’t—don’t lecture me.” Sandy’s eyes—stony chips of flint, like their father’s—came back up to Calliope’s. “You always have to try to fix everything, even when it’s none of your business.” Again, she gestured at herself. “I’m stuck here. We’re all stuck here. I can’t leave.”
You won’t, Calliope thought. You’re afraid. You hate everything that— Then: “Oh.”
Calliope’s expression made her sister pause. “What?”
He is standing at the very top of the blocky jungle gym. It’s his favorite place to stand because he can see so much of the playground and everyone can see him. He’s standing at the very top.
It’s his favorite thing to do. It makes him feel safe. It makes him feel important. He can see Joshua climbing up to him, shouting something. He tries to ignore it, but Josh keeps climbing, keeps getting closer, and finally he can hear him shouting to stop, to let someone else on top.
He gets mad. He doesn’t want to stop. It’s the only thing he has.
He reaches out with his foot and shoves, and Josh falls away.
Too far.
Humpty Dumpty.
Calliope pulled her gaze, gone nowhere in particular in the November sky, back to Sandy. “I . . .” She shook her head. “Just something about the . . . case I’m working on.”
“Wonderful. I’ve got to go.” Sandy turned, yanked open the car door, and got inside.
“Sandy—”
“I have kids to feed,” her sister snapped. “I have responsibilities, and it’s way too late to change any of that.”
“Then I guess you’ll always be mad about it,” Calliope replied. Her only answer was a slamming car door. The car pulled past her, sucking its exhaust along with it, and left her alone in the dusk-cold in front of her parents’ house. She didn’t watch her sister leave; as much as she knew that nothing there was fixed—maybe never would be—she couldn’t spare time on Sandy right then, couldn’t shake the feeling she was looking at a puzzle to which she might have finally found all the pieces.
Still thinking, she walked up the steps and into the house to say good-bye.
“Now . . .” Her mother walked briskly into the kitchen from the laundry room near the back of the house, carrying Calliope’s cleaned sweater and pretending she hadn’t been watching her daughters through a window. “I don’t want to get you worked up again, but are you sure you don’t want to stay here?” She raised her hand to forestall Calliope’s protest. “If your friend is out there, he’ll still be there tomorrow, won’t he?”
“He’s still in trouble, Mom,” Calliope explained. “He still needs help, even if he’s not dead.” Her hesitation before that final word was almost undetectable, even to her. “And no one else is going to help.”
“Why—” Phyllis shook her head, sniffing once and blinking her suspiciously wet-bright eyes. “Too many questions.” She held out the folded sweater to Calliope, who pressed it gently back toward her.
“Keep it. I’ll come back and get it and try to explain everything.” Calliope stepped in close and gave her a one-armed hug. “I’m sorry,” she murmured.
“I’m sorry,” her mother choked out. Calliope realized she was crying. She pulled back. “Mom—”
“You were sixteen,” Phyllis blurted out, her face a sudden mask of raw emotion. She raised a trembling hand to cover her mouth.
“I was impossible,” Calliope said.
“We were both impossible,” Phyllis replied, blinking her eyes and turning back to her laundry. “But you’re supposed to be, at that age.” She sniffed, rubbing tears from her cheek with the heel of her hand. “And I should have been better.”
Calliope forced a smile, tears on her cheeks. “Can we agree to let it go for now? Call it a tie.” She gave her mother another hug.
Phyllis squeezed back, hard. “I don’t think either one of us has ever been very good at settling for a tie,” she whispered. “But okay.” She stepped back, sniffed once more. “Okay.” She glanced at the kitchen window and the violet-to-blue horizon. “Better get going. It’s almost dark. Keep that shoulder clean and for godsakes wear a helmet with your friend’s motorcycle. Better yet, rent a truck.”
Calliope smiled. “I will, Mom.”
“Thank you for at least lying to me about it.” She smiled with tension-thin lips and walked Calliope to the door. “Are you happy out there?” she asked, the words coming in a rush.
Calliope released the doorknob and stepped back, trying to gather her thoughts. Finally, she nodded. “Yeah. I am.”
“Do you have anyone?” At Calliope’s look, she shrugged. “You said your partner friend found someone else. I didn’t hear you say you did.”
Calliope blew out a long breath. “His name is Tom and he teaches music lessons and plays in a band, so yes, I do. Sort of.”
“Sort of.”
“It’s kind of—”
“Complicated. I’ve heard that word a lot today.”
Calliope rocked her head from side to side, trying not to open up another complicated topic. “We kind of got into a fight before I left. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him.”
Phyllis crossed her arms. “Was the fight about this business with your partner?”
Calliope frowned. “No, it . . .”
She walked out of the kitchen. “Pack your stuff.”
She paused. “Maybe? About my coming out here, anyway.”
“Do you like him?”
Calliope looked up at the ceiling, trying to find a way to somehow sum up the relationship, and wondering if she could. “He . . .” She looked at her mother. “He gets up in the morning, earlier than he has to, and makes me coffee before I go to work.”
“Every day?”
“When he wants to get on my good side.”
Phyllis regarded her daughter, her arms still crossed.
Calliope’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You don’t think I should be doing this.”
Her mother shook her head. “I think you need to do what needs doing, but don’t . . .” She waved her hand, looking around the room as though searching for the right words. Calliope thought of Gerschon and hid a smile. “Don’t stop living to keep a thing from changing. Things change.”
“This place doesn’t.”
Her mother smiled as though remembering a private joke. “Do you think so?” Calliope had no answer and Phyllis opened the door. “Be safe. Come back.” Calliope leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek.
“Love you,” she whispered and stepped through the door.
Her mother watched her from the screen door until she was out to the mailbox and down the road far enough that the trees cut off vision. To Calliope, it seemed that was the way it has always been.
Watch us leave, but figure we’ll get back on our own.
The packed snow and gravel of the road stretched out ahead of her between nearly empty fields.
Hope she’s right.