Page 6 of Blood & Bone

Luca didn’t ask. He knew what would happen if he did. Sebastian would answer with a smaller question, or he would say nothing at all, and they would stand in that kitchen until the sky lightened and they had to go upstairs. The directive would remain exactly what it was: delivered, received, unexplained.

Sebastian held the silence for three full seconds, the drip from the faucet measuring them. Then he stepped into the kitchen, his muddy boots leaving dark prints on the linoleum, and walked toward the hallway without looking at either of them.

“That isn’t a suggestion,” he said, without turning around.

The hallway swallowed him. His footsteps faded. Not the sound of a man walking away so much as its gradual absence, the house seeming to absorb him step by step. Luca listened until he couldn’t hear him anymore.

Marcus picked up the wrench. He looked at it for a moment, turning it over in his hand, then set it down again and slid back under the sink. The flashlight beam shifted. Metal scraped against metal. The drip continued its steady count.

Luca finished his water and set the glass in the sink. The ridge waited beyond the windows, black and still. Whatever Sebastian had been doing out there, whatever he’d seen or smelled or heard that had brought mud back on his boots and a new rule into the kitchen, stayed where he had put it, carried, unspoken, his alone.

The drip measured another minute. Then another. Marcus worked in silence. Luca stood at the window and watched the dark.

CHAPTER 2

The Calloway north fence line caught the early sun in barbed wire. June saw it first as a glint, then as a line, then as something to drive past on her way to the barn. She wasn’t looking for Deacon Pruitt’s truck. She found it anyway.

The mud-brown Ford F-250 sat crooked on the shoulder, nose angled hard toward the fence, veered there and stopped. Driver’s door hanging open. Engine cold. She could tell by the lack of exhaust, by the stillness of the body when she slowed and the gravel under her tires changed pitch. Morning light hit the windshield and threw it back empty. No one behind the wheel.

She told herself it wasn’t her business. Pulled over anyway.

The gravel crunched under her boots. County road quiet at six-fifteen, nothing moving but the occasional red-winged blackbird lifting from the ditch grass. June approached the truck from the passenger side, hands in her jacket pockets, hands loose, unhurried. She wasn’t in a hurry now. The thing about finding something broken on the side of the road was that it was already broken. The timetable belonged to whoever had done the breaking, not to her.

The cab smelled like coffee, work gloves and a musk that lived in Deacon’s clothes no matter how often Harper washed them. A thermos wedged in the cup holder, lid screwed tight. A single leather work glove on the driver’s seat, palm up, fingers curled, dropped there mid-task. Keys in the ignition. Radio off.

June stood at the open door and looked at the glove. Then she turned and scanned the fence line.

The ditch on the far side was shallow. Maybe three feet deep, grassed over, the kind of erosion gully that ran alongside county roads all through these hills. Deacon lay at the bottom of it, face up, boots pointed at the sky. Canvas work shirt, the kind with the button-flap pockets. Rubber-soled boots, clean at the heels. His hat was gone. His eyes were open, looking at nothing. Morning dew had settled on his collar and the cuffs of his sleeves, beading the fabric where it hadn’t soaked in yet.

He’d clearly been headed out to check on something before the sun got high. That was the worst part: the ordinary-ness of him. She hadn’t even seen the blood yet. His body had arranged itself in death the same way it had in life: practical, unadorned, taking up no more space than it needed.

June stepped over the fence. The barbs caught at her sleeve, and she unhooked herself without looking down. The grass was wet. Her boots sank into the soft earth at the bottom of the ditch; she crouched beside him, knees in the mud, and pressed two fingers to his neck.

She held them there. Carotid pulse. Absent. She knew it was absent after the first three seconds. She held for fifteen anyway, because fifteen was what the protocol called for, and June had been following protocol since she was nineteen years old and her mother’s hospice nurse had shown her how to check for a pulse she already knew wasn’t there.

She released his neck. Sat back on her heels. The ditch smelled of wet earth, cut grass and something underneathdelete, copper-sharp, that hadn’t been there a moment ago. She looked at his face. The lines around his eyes had relaxed. His beard caught the light where the dew hadn’t dried yet. His mouth was slightly open, the small parting dead mouths often fell into, and June had the sudden, useless thought that she should close it. She didn’t.

Two nights ago. The clinic. The fluorescents buzzing, the phone call from Mrs. Hadley,delete then Deacon at the back door with his hat in his hand and a prescription for Harper along with a piece of advice, delivered flat, final, without ornament, the register he reserved for anything that mattered.

Take Third Street home tonight.

She had. She’d taken Third Street home, slept in her bed, woken up to her alarm and driven to the Calloway place to look at a goat with a prolapsed eye, and now Deacon Pruitt was lying in a ditch with dew on his collar and no pulse under her fingers.

The sun moved. A shadow crossed the fence line. Cloud, maybe, or just the angle changing as the morning climbed. June reached for her radio. Stopped. Reached for her phone instead.

County dispatch picked up on the second ring. Female voice. Young, or young-sounding. Professional, with the clipped efficiency of someone who’d answered a lot of six-a.m. calls.

“911, what is your emergency?”

“This is June Callahan. I’m on County Road 12, approximately half a mile north of the Calloway property fence line. I’ve found a deceased male, approximately mid-fifties, lying in the ditch on the east side of the road. No visible trauma from my position. No signs of vehicular accident. The deceased’s truck is parked on the shoulder with the engine off and the driver’s door open.”

A pause. Keys clicking.

“Can you confirm the identity of the deceased, ma’am?”

“Deacon Pruitt. Local resident. Married. One granddaughter.”

More keys. The sound of a database being queried, or a form being filled out, or both.