12

To avoid the crime scene on the way back, Cass took backroads. At Tilly’s she gathered her tools: a snow shovel, a spade, and lighter fluid. While Cass made coffee, Tilly sat on her rocking chair in the living room, chewing over her can, tracking Cass’s movements around the kitchen with skepticism. Cable news hosts gaggled on the TV behind Tilly. Cass crammed her feet into old rainboots, put her hoodie on over her sweatshirt, filled a thermos with coffee, and waited in the garage for Vick.

Rampaging winds soughed over the countryside. The grove limbs sashayed and whipped, their remaining leaves thrashing about. Rain dimpled the snow, and the driveway sluices dashed downhill, reflecting the internecine metallic-brown clouds above them. The air glowed umber as the day already long steeped in muck.

Vick parked in front of the garage and climbed out of his truck wearing black rainboots and a red raincoat and carrying a bottle of whiskey. He swallowed the last of his breakfast, a piece of buttered toast, and said, “I can tell you now this hangover of mine ain’t going away. Unfortunately, I’ll have to ride it out.”

He’d had some swigs before coming over. He offered her the bottle, but she shook her head and handed him the shovels. She tossed her hood up and pulled a stocking cap on over it. Then she slid the lighter fluid into her pouch and led him into the backyard.

Heads down, they trounced across the saturated clearing. “Don’t go where I don’t,” she told him. “A lot of traps out here.”

Once they reached the forest, she led him straight to the fence, marking their progress by familiar stunted shrubs and sprained trunks, by rapacious branches manacled by the weight of the snow atop them, by the percussive rainfall in Johnson’s field opposite. Twenty yards from the fence, she stopped and turned to face him, and he lifted his head. Rain and sweat embalmed their faces.

“The ledgers,” she said.

“Ledgers?”

“There never was nothing to them, was there? Frost’s ledgers?”

“So, you did talk to Jack,” he said. “You should’ve told him to leave.”

“I told him to not be like you.”

He gritted his teeth and looked down at his hands as he unwrapped the damp washcloth from his wound. He balled it up, put it in his pocket. “Well, I’m still living: how much more different do you want us to be? When did you talk to him last?”

“What does it matter. The ledgers?”

“No, never was such a thing.”

“You were too afraid to do it with him. You wanted him to rob the place on his own, and to do that you needed him to think it wasn’t too good to be true, that you weren’t trying to screw him over.”

“He wouldn’t do it for half the money so I told him he could have it all. He wasn’t as stupid as the other boys here, but stupid enough. Kids thinking about getting enough money to … I don’t even know what … not be so goddamn broke, I guess. Nothing too noble in it. I had similar plans once upon a time. I was gonna run a brothel up here, so I needed starter cash. God knows where the idea came from. I ain’t no mastermind—”

“Focus, you drunk. I won’t chase you down those rabbit holes of yours. You were never gonna give him any of it.”

“I wasn’t sure, Cassie. I wanted the money, but I didn’t need it. And I wasn’t afraid of getting caught stealing it, either. That wasn’t it.”

“What was the goddamn point, then?”

“It was all about her.”

“Who?”

“Delilah,” he snapped.

She stared at him, feigning shock.

“It’s true.”

“Why did it gotta be her?” she asked.

“Because she’s lovely, and don’t tell me that’s a lie because your brother would’ve answered the same way.”

She turned slowly, kept walking. He followed. They turned to the right when they reached the fence.

He shouted over the rain. “I ain’t dumb. I know she loved him. It’s proof that I didn’t want nothing bad to happen to him because she’ll love him even more now. But he kept hurting her, Cassie. He hurt her by not being what she knew he could be. The drugs and the fights and the nights in jail. Your brother was no saint, no matter how much you wanna make him out to be one. And I don’t say that to ruin him for you, just to explain my side of things. Delilah was always covering for him, too. Of course I wanted a cut of the money. I wanted the whole fucking thing, but what I wanted most of all was to have her forget about Jack. When she told me she couldn’t handle him tripping up again, I knew what I’d do. And if I could save her from him and collect the money we needed to skip town, well, bully for me.

“It’s true, I wasn’t planning on splitting the money with him. But I ain’t lying about being in love. And I don’t lie to her about it. I really have changed. She’s changed me, and I needed you and Grandma to know this before I left. That’s why I had to tell you how I felt the other day, so that you’d remember me that way eventually, in case I couldn’t come back. I wish this had all happened differently, but there was things I just had to do. In time you’ll see that. In time, our family will be stronger for all this. As fucked up as that sounds, I believe it. If you don’t understand now, you will. In time. In time, you will.”

He relented and she shook her head at the ground before her and they drudged on along the fence, subdued as exiles.

She heard the swamp before she saw it, the sonorous thrum of rainfall in the depression. It sounded like regurgitation, the earth there a gullet clogged. Peering through translucent rain, she saw the rivulets sprinting downslope to the frozen forest bottom. Then the clouds parted and the noon sun stabbed through, unchastened and fulgent and warm, lending the landscape of pines and moss the look of lime satin. Moments later the clouds closed again.

Clinging to the wire, they snuck along the swamp, and once clear of it, he said, “There’s more. She’s pregnant. Delilah is.”

“No, she ain’t.”

“She is, though. Swear to Christ.”

“It’s Jack’s?”

“She says it can’t be his, so it’s gotta be mine.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I didn’t, either, when she first told me.”

“When was that?”

“About a month ago,” he said. “You don’t know how hard it’s been to not tell you or Tilly. You see now, don’t you? You see what I was trying to do?” he begged. “The baby, the idea of another chance to be what I wasn’t for you or … Goddamnit, Cassie, it changed everything for me. You gotta see that!”

He dropped his tools in the snow and took her hand and gently spun her around to face him. He fell down on his knees, peppering her hand with kisses, crying again.

“Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for that baby. Like it or not, that’s what I’ve had in my head every second of every day since I found out. You get that, don’t you?”

She pulled her hand away and kept walking. “Stop all this, you drunk. We got work to do.”

“You know it’s true. I didn’t want Jack fucking that kid up the way I’d fucked him up. I’m gonna raise him good.”

He picked up his tools and followed her, and by the time they reached the jackpine strangled in barbed wire, he’d stopped crying.

She began to count the posts.

“We almost there?” he asked.

“And if it’s a girl?”

“What do you mean?”

“If the baby’s a girl …?”

“I’ll raise it good, then, too.”

“You’ll fuck it up either way,” she muttered.

They passed Johnson’s field, crept through the breadth of thickets nicking their hands and wrists, and emerged itchy and stinging. She scooped up snow and salved it over her hands, then dried them on her hoodie and tucked them into her pockets.

As they neared the money, she scanned the woods for Jack’s bootprints, of which there was no sign. He too looked around. For the money, she supposed.

“Tell me those two were good for one another,” he bellowed. “I may not make her happy, sure, but Jack was never gonna, either. You gotta admit it. They needed to be away from one another. I never wanted nothing bad to happen to him. I only wanted him safe, and when he wasn’t no more, I tried to save him myself. I even had dreams of Jack reuniting with us in New Mexico and all of us being a family again somehow. Somehow, with enough love, it’d work out. This bounty thing got outta control. I never thought it’d come to this. But the most important thing now is my baby. You see that, don’t you, Cassie? I led Jack down the wrong way. It means nothing to me that he made his own choices, since it was my fault to begin with. No shit, I get it. But I wasn’t gonna make the same mistake with my baby. Not this time.”

She walked on without looking back.

“Talk to me, daughter. Tell me what you’re thinking. Please, Cassie.”

“I liked you a little better back when you took what you wanted without bitching about how you had no choice but to take it. You gonna tell me who killed my brother?”

“Didn’t I already say who? Danny, the shit. At least, that’s my best guess. He had the motive and he was closest on Jack’s trail.”

“How did he do it?”

“You saw your brother.”

“But how did Danny get Jack to the highway? Jack wasn’t out for a stroll.”

“Must’ve called him and lured him out somehow. Maybe they made a deal to protect him, I don’t know. Maybe Jack went to Danny first.”

“And what are you gonna do about it?”

“Not sure yet. I’d like to cut his throat. Anyway, I blame Bloom most of all. He’s the one who put big ideas in those boys’ heads. He thought Frost was gonna extend his trade up north and was looking for someone to help him distribute. He figured it’d either be Jack or Danny and Jesse, and since he planned on getting his cut of the profits, he had a clear favorite. Even an old man can have pipe dreams, I guess. I’m telling you, it was Danny. Don’t make sense for it to be nobody else. I’ll think on it, trust me. We’ll have our revenge. On my soul, he’s a dead man. On my fucking soul, Cassie.”

She first recognized the silver maple and its extravagant net of branches, then the pocket of woods where Jack made his campfire, and, finally, the circle of humps in the snow where he scattered the remaining fire logs before leaving to make his campsite elsewhere. She walked to the middle of the circle, where the fire had been.

“Right here,” she said.

He looked at her boots.

“He buried it beneath the fire.”

“How deep?” he asked.

“Deep enough for cover. Doubt it’s much deeper than that.”

As he examined the ground beneath her, she grew colder not merely from the chill of the forest but from that of alighting upon the source of her affliction, the object of his coveting, the earth below them a crypt containing the evil which presided over their fates. In this unforeseen and disquieting stasis, they looked at each other, two clairvoyants communing in the unspoken lore that is family, those fascist bonds from which the universe offers no escape but death and without the immanent symbols and variegated fabrications of which life would be a dismal mirage.

The transaction between them was simple, she knew. He’d come to collect his treasure, she to pay her ransom. She stepped back as he shoveled away the snow atop the remnants of Jack’s fire. Forgetting her plot against her enemies for a minute, she was at peace imagining a future in which he left for New Mexico and never returned.

Then she remembered all she’d lost, all he’d stolen from her, and she set her mind on her revenge.