Wide Open (5 page)

She scanned the ground, dropped to one knee and pretended to tie her shoe, but with the sun behind a cloud once more, it was impossible to see the bit of metal or whatever it had been that caught the light earlier.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Jesus, I’m fine,” she said.

“We should go.” He touched the sleeve of her jacket. “It’ll be okay.”

It won’t,
Hallie wanted to say, but she didn’t. She was pretty sure he already knew.

“My name is Boyd,” he said as they walked to the car.

It was out of the blue, like they’d become friends somewhere along the way.

“Boyd,” she said, testing it out on her tongue. Odd name. But then, he was kind of an odd guy.

And maybe they
had
become friends … had become something. He was with her when she’d seen Dell’s body. He found her lying on the ground and hadn’t said,
Oh my god, don’t move!
Or,
Stay right there—I’m calling an ambulance.
Or, any variation of
Sit still, don’t think, I’ll take care of everything.

“Thank you, Boyd,” she said.

He looked startled.

“For bringing me out here,” she added.

He looked at her evenly. “Most people wouldn’t thank me for that,” he said.

“I’m not most people,” she told him because she couldn’t, in that moment, think of anything else to say.

Neither of them talked the final half hour drive to the ranch. Hallie because she was exhausted and Boyd because … actually she didn’t know why, but she was grateful in any case because she didn’t have it in her at the moment to make casual small talk.

Halfway there, Eddie reappeared, drifting on the seat next to her. She wasn’t sure whether it was a relief or a disappointment.

They turned onto the long drive to the ranch, and Hallie was caught by how much things had and hadn’t changed. Big round bales were stacked two high just north of the drive. Farther on, near one of the stock tanks, a small herd of cattle grazed, prepping in their own way for winter, heavier coats, eating the last of the green grass.

Boyd pulled around the last open bend, and Hallie gritted her teeth because they were here. The house, painted in three shades of brown, the big metal tractor barn with the rolling doors wide open, and the horse barn down the lane—all of it just the same as it had been when she’d left. Like nothing ever changed, even though everything had.

She sat in the car for a minute.

“I could come in,” Boyd offered.

That galvanized her. “Shit,” she said. “No.”

She unfastened her seat belt and got out, opened the back door and pulled out her duffel. She leaned back into the front seat. “I mean,” she said. “Thanks. For the drive out here. For—”

He raised a hand. His face was serious, as if what he was saying was more important than the words coming out of his mouth. “You take care,” he said.

He turned his car around and headed back down the drive. Hallie watched until he was out of sight, his red taillights winking out as he dipped below a low rise. She didn’t know why she stood there and watched; he was just a guy. She probably wouldn’t see him again.

Shadows slanted long across the yard, just beginning to fade to gray when she finally turned toward the house. Her father was standing on the back porch, waiting.

“Hey, Dad,” she said as she approached, because this wasn’t going to be emotional; that wasn’t how they did things. Her father looked the same as ever—more gray in his sandy hair, thicker in the waist, broad shoulders more rounded. But still the same—red denim shirt faded nearly pink, old jeans, and battered boots.

“Let you come home, did they?” he said.

“I called,” Hallie reminded him.

He rubbed a hand roughly across his face. “Yeah,” he said, “but I figured something would happen. Hell, it’s the army.”

They stood like that as shadows lengthened. She couldn’t make the first move. She didn’t know why. She just couldn’t. Then— Shit, this was stupid. She dropped the duffel and took a step forward.

Her father was there in two long strides, caught her up in a hug so fierce, she thought he might suffocate her, hadn’t hugged her like that since—well, in a long time.

“Jesus Christ, Hallie,” he said, his voice muffled against her hair. “Jesus Christ.”

They stood there for what must have been a long time because they would never say this in words. They just—that was how it was.

When she stepped away, he picked up her duffel, hefted it once in his hand like he was weighing it, then gestured for her to precede him into the house.

“Was that the Boy Deputy brought you home?” he asked.

It surprised a quick laugh out of Hallie. “Is that what you call him, the Boy Deputy?”

“Hell, what is he, about two?” her father said. Then he added, “Thought you’d be here before now.” Which was his way of asking,
Why did a sheriff’s deputy bring you home?

“Brett got a flat tire,” Hallie said.

Her father snorted—all this, better than talking about Dell. “She needs a decent pickup truck,” he said. “That ratty little car she’s got isn’t worth a damn.”

“Shit, Dad, I’ll tell her,” Hallie said. “Bet she runs right out and buys an F-150 just to make you happy.” It felt good and painful both at once to talk like this, like nothing had changed.

She opened the door to the brightly lit kitchen, her hand automatically pulling the door up to compensate for the old, loose hinges. The house smelled like she remembered it, like old coffee and saddle leather and wet boots. For a moment, she could almost kid herself. Then Dell and Eddie slid past her, rolling through the open door on a blast of winter cold.
Yeah,
she thought,
that’s right, because nothing’s changed at all.

6

Hallie’s first night home passed in a blur, sleeping hard, then waking, confused, not quite remembering where she was. When she slept, she dreamed of explosions and fire and blood and fear. Some of it felt real, like she’d been there before. Some of it felt wrong—not her—not her yelling, not her blood, not her death.

The next morning, after almost ten hours of badly needed sleep, Hallie took care of the remaining arrangements for the funeral while her father did ranch chores. She called people she hadn’t talked to in years—her father’s friends, mostly—and asked them to be pallbearers. One guy called her, someone she’d never heard of before, said he ate breakfast with her daddy every Tuesday down at the Silver Dove. Figured they’d be needing him to help out, said she should tell him the time and the place and he’d be there. Which she did, because it would be one less awkward conversation she’d have to initiate.

In between, people came, like Dell hadn’t already been dead three days, like they’d just been waiting for Hallie to get home. It reminded her of the days after her mother died, when Hallie and Dell had sat outside under the spare pin oaks and said mean things to kids from town while women organized the kitchen or the laundry or feed for the horses, and men walked across the fields, looking for her father so they could lean against fences and never say a word.

After her third conversation with Art Stephens about how many people she expected at the funeral, currently scheduled to be graveside at the cemetery, Hallie slammed the kitchen phone down harder than necessary and went outside with no idea in mind except to get out. She’d been home almost exactly twenty-four hours, and it felt both as if she’d never left and as if everything were so foreign, she would never understand it again.

But she had to understand, and she had to do it quickly because she had only seven days. Seven days. Counting today, which was already half gone. Seven fucking days to figure this out. And she didn’t even know yet what there was to figure out. Didn’t know anything except Dell’s ghost and a symbol on her body. And Dell. Because Dell would never kill herself.

The sky was clear when she stepped out the back door, though dark against the western horizon, thunder rumbling in the far distance. She couldn’t tell if the storm was headed toward the ranch and didn’t much care.
Let it come,
she thought.

The old yellow dog, which her father had gotten from a neighbor ten years ago as a puppy, circled her as if there was an invisible wall circumscribed around her at twenty feet. Eddie’s ghost floated beside her, had hardly left her side since she’d gotten to the ranch, had been there so long, the cold hardly even bothered her anymore. Dell’s ghost, on the other hand, kept disappearing then reappearing. When she was present, she spent her time alternately staring at Hallie and at the door.

She’d barely reached the lane down to the horse barn when she heard the sound of a vehicle coming up the drive.

Shit
.

She recognized the dark blue Suburban immediately. Cass Andersen. Hallie’s aunt. Her mother’s sister. Double shit. But it had to be faced. Like everything. Because that’s what this trip was all about—suck it up and face it, because it was never going away.

Cass pulled into the yard on a swirl of dust from the drive. She was out of the Suburban in a heartbeat, grabbing Hallie into a tight hug without ever saying a word. Hallie hugged her back, even though she hadn’t meant to, had to blink back tears—again—because what good was crying, anyway?

They stepped apart.

Cass Andersen was a big woman dressed in old jeans, a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a pair of battered lacers. A cowboy hat with a crunched-up brim covered salt-and-pepper hair caught back in a thick braid that ran halfway down her back. “This is a goddamned hell of a thing,” she said.

A quick three-stroke flash of ice right through her skull left Hallie feeling like she’d been flash-frozen and left in the arctic sun. Cass grabbed her arm. “Are you all right?” she asked, her gaze sharp and penetrating.

“No, I’m fine.” Hallie took a step backwards, shoved her hands in her pockets. She felt stupid and slow and cold to the bone.

“I’m glad you’re home,” Cass said.

“I’m—” Hallie rocked back on her heels. She wanted to say something, wanted to say the right thing, but she wasn’t sure what that was.

Cass clapped her on the shoulder. “Come on,” she said. “I’ve got stuff in the back. Help me carry it up to the house.”

“Did you talk to her?” Cass asked when they were halfway across the yard, arms laden with boxes filled with bread and pans and paper towels.

Hallie stopped. “What?”

“Dell,” Cass said impatiently, her normal way—brisk, impatient, sharp—also kind, compassionate, and generous. “She said she was going to call you. I told her I didn’t see how that’d be possible. But you know Dell.”

Hallie wished it were pain all the time instead of the sharp stab like a stiletto every time she thought about Dell here doing whatever it was she’d been doing, about Dell dying. But this—

“She wanted to talk to me?”

“That’s what I said. Yes.” Like Hallie needed to make more effort to keep up with the conversation. “I don’t know,” she continued. “Something was bothering her. Wouldn’t talk to me about it.”

“Shit,” said Hallie.

“That’s about right,” Cass agreed.

Before Hallie could even think about what that meant, that Dell had tried to call her, the phone rang from the kitchen and Hallie went to answer it. It was the funeral home—not Art Stephens but his assistant—with some idiotic question about the program for the service. When she hung up from that, there was a call from the weekly newspaper in West Prairie City wanting to confirm something about something, and Hallie just told them yes even though she wasn’t actually sure what they were asking.

When she hung up from
that,
more people had arrived. Cass served them iced tea in red, blue, and yellow plastic glasses that Hallie’s mother had gotten as part of a promotion for calf starter twenty years ago at the feed store.

“Sorry.”

“Damn sorry.”

“Awful shame. Just awful.”

They clapped her on the shoulder or shook her hand. Some of them hugged her. Hallie would have escaped to the horse paddock or around the side of the big equipment shed to sit in the weeds and stare at the horizon, except she knew they’d talk about her after she was gone. Which seemed worse, for some reason, than sticking around.

So, she sat at the table and drank too much coffee and listened to them talk about the weather.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Tel Sigurdson said. “Five lightning strikes one right after the other. All in the same spot. Or near enough. Burned it black as pitch. And the smell? Holy shit. I tell you what.”

“Been a lot of lightning strikes this fall,” Sammy Sue Vogt said. “The Lutheran church in Templeton’s been struck twice.”

“Been a lot of
storms
this fall,” Pat Sigurdson said. “I practically got flooded off the road coming out of West PC last Tuesday. When I got home? Dry as a board.”

“Was a good summer, though, overall,” Cass said as she set another pitcher of iced tea on the table. “Best weather I can remember in—hell—probably twenty years.”

Nods around the table.

Pat Sigurdson got up and started cutting pieces of the cherry pie she’d brought and offering them around. Dell had dated Pat and Tel’s son Brian for a year in high school, which was a long time for Dell, a whole year with the same guy. Hallie wondered where he was now, what he was doing, if he even knew Dell was dead.

She might have asked, any topic being better than the weather, but someone chose that moment to bang on the back door, which stopped the conversation cold as everyone turned to look.

“I got a … delivery.” He was younger than Hallie, dressed like a drunken cowboy with his shirt half-untucked and battered boots with worn-down heels. Hallie hoped it wasn’t a uniform. “This is the Michaels ranch, right?” he asked, peering around Hallie into the kitchen.

When Hallie told him it was, he said, “Shit, I been looking for you all day. Never had a delivery this far from the City before.”

“Huh,” Hallie said, signed her name where he pointed on his sheet, and in return accepted a basket so big, she had to carry it in two hands.