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I’m still a block away. Too far to hear. But close enough to watch her swaying like the news coming through that phone is too much to take.
She sees me at the last second, and all of the strength in her pours out. I catch her under the arms as she grabs a fistful of my wet T-shirt, and Gabe Harris’s voice is still coming out of her phone, small and tinny.
“Lindsey? You there?”
I take the phone. “Sheriff. Travis Raines.”
“The new guy living over the shop?”
“Yes, sir. What did you tell her?”
“Crime lab finished with the car this morning.” Gabe sounds like he hasn’t slept. “Top to bottom. Trunk, seats, the ground under it. No remains. No blood. No sign anybody got hurt in that car. Whatever happened to Danielle Hayes, that car isn’t telling us.”
Lindsey is shaking against my chest. A long, hard shake, like a dog coming in out of the cold.
“Thank you, Sheriff.”
“Take care of her, son.”
I hang up and put her phone in my pocket. The rancher at the stop sign gives me a long look, then a nod, and pulls away.
“She’s not in the car,” Lindsey says into my shirt.
“No.”
Her voice hitches. “The car is empty, Travis.”
“I know, honey.”
The endearment just comes out. I didn’t plan it. She lifts her head and meets my gaze. All her pain is visible right there in her pretty eyes.
“For seventeen years,” she says, “every time somebody found anything, a hiker, a car in a lake, anything, I thought, that’s it. That’s how I find out. And now there’s a car, and it’s her car, and she isn’t in it.”
Suddenly she looks down at her feet. “I’m standing in the middle of the street. And you’re all sweaty.”
“I was running.”
This time when she looks up at me, she looks hopeful. “Will you take me out there?”
“To the ravine?”
“I need to see it. Where her car was. Where she was, or wasn’t.” Her chin comes up. “Gabe will say no. Caleb will say no. You’re going to say yes.”
I should say hell no. It’s a burned-out ravine full of ash and snags, and she doesn’t need to see it.
“I’ll get the truck,” I say.
She doesn’t talk on the drive out. That’s how I know how bad it is. Lindsey North talks to her roses and her bell and every customer who walks through her door. Now she sits in my passenger seat with her hands in her lap and watches the hills go by.
“The Hollisters used to let us ride their horses,” she says, when we turn onto North Fork Road. “Danielle and me. Every summer till we were sixteen. Mrs. Hollister made lemonade.”
I reply, “Guess that’s how she knew the ranch.”
“Everybody knew the ranch. It had the only meadow in the valley where you could lie in the hay and see every star there is.” She glides her half heart around on its chain. “She wanted to be a nurse. A pediatric nurse. She was so good with kids.”
“Maybe she is.”
Lindsey looks at me. Then she turns back to the window and holds her half heart the rest of the drive.
