He reaches over and grabs my forearm with a farm hand that feels like a vise. “She’s all I got,” he says, his voice raw and low at the same time.
“Tell me what happened,” I say. “I feel as if I only know parts of it.”
He stares out at the perfect rows in our field. Maybe he’d been laying down ones just like them over at his place before making the drive over here.
“I’d never locked the house at night until those other girls started disappearing,” he says. “So I know I locked up that night, and slept with my shotgun in the bedroom, which I’d taken to doing after the other girls got took. I put her to bed, and we prayed together, like always, and then I went to bed myself.”
He closes his eyes, and when he opens them back up, he says, “Somehow whoever it was got in through the kitchen door. And in the morning, when I went up to tell her to start getting ready for school, because that girl of mine sure could… surecansleep, she was just… gone.”
He sucks in thick air and says, “Somebody took my baby girl like a thief in the night.”
I take in some air myself.
“I can’t imagine what you’re going through, Leamon, I trulycan’t,” I say. “My dad had at least lived a full life before somebody took it from him. Took it fromme.But this is a child we’re talking about.Yourchild.”
He grips my arm again. “I know she’s still out there somewhere!” he says, his voice suddenly as hot as the day. “And you’ve got to help me find her.”
“Leamon…”
All I got, and as far as I get.
“I’ve come to you because I just know I would have come to your daddy if he was still with us,” he says. “He was always the biggest man in this town and now I’m asking you to be the same.”
We sit there in silence. I see him clenching and unclenching those big hands, probably not even aware that he’s doing it.
“You’re the only one who can talk to the Crocketts,” he says finally.
“Whoa,” I say. “You think they had something to do with this?”
He’s staring off again. “I do,” he says. “I rightly do. They’re pure evil and this is an act of pure evil. And if they didn’t have a hand in it themselves, they by God know who did. Briar or those two boys or all of them at once.”
“I hear you, Leamon,” I say. “I do. I hear your pain. But I’m just back here, like you said, and I’m not sure that I can do any good.”
“I used to think that your father was the only one in this town who wasn’t afraid of Briar Crockett,” he says. “He would’ve gone right at him on all the drugs being peddled in his school, and I believe he would have gone at him on this if I asked him to. And maybe even if I didn’t.”
He turns back to me again. “Talk to him, Silas,” he says. “You don’t have to accuse him of anything. Maybe you could even ask him for his help.”
“All due respect,” I say. “But why can’t you do the same?”
“Because he owns me the way he owns just about everybody else around here,” he says. “Everybody except the Tuckers.”
TWENTY-ONE
THERE’S NOTHING TO be done in the fields the next morning because of heavy overnight rain, blowing in sheets as if it wanted to blow the whole place all the way to Tennessee, making the soil too waterlogged for planting until further notice.
Charlie Hall starts to explain why, and I tell him, “Too much information.”
I work out in the gym early now that I have an unexpectedly free morning, punishing myself a little more, and even a little harder than before. After lunch, I go for a long walk, listening to my music on earbuds, losing track of the time, no real destination, pushing myself on my creaky wheels, not even sure any longer which is the good leg.
But even when I’m back at the house, EJ off getting her nails done, I’m still feeling restless. Feeling the need to move. And trying to tamp down solid the sudden feeling I have to hit somebody.
So I climb into the F-150, hoping that going for a drive might help me clear my head better than my walk did, even knowing that’s probably not going to happen, not today, and maybe not in the near future.
Just the possibility that the Crocketts are behind what feels like all the trouble in the world has made me mad as hell. Even the hint of a thought that they might know something about what happened to Holly Ridenour, Allie Gonsalvo, and Molly from the diner. I’ve got no proof of that. Neither does Leamon. And I can only assume that if the police had any real leads involving the Crocketts, they would have acted on them by now, even if it meant going up against the Crocketts.
But what I know for certain, and for real, is that these are bad things happening in Cross Rivers, and that the Crocketts are bad to the bone, and maybe all I’m doing is connecting the damn dots.
“Briar Crockett will never hear a moral alarm going off,” EJ said to me one time, “because none has ever sounded with that son of a bitch his whole life.”
