Scratchgravel Road A Mystery

FOUR



After Cassidy Harper’s car was towed to the county garage, Otto and Josie both drove home to shower and change into fresh uniforms. Josie was struggling to keep the images of the lesions on the dead man’s arms out of her mind, and hoped that whatever killed him wasn’t now invading her own bloodstream. It would be a frustrating waiting game until the coroner came back with his results.

Driving back to the Artemis Police Department, she turned her jeep onto River Road, hugging a curve that followed the natural path of the Rio Grande on her right. From the high point in the road she could see downtown Artemis, a couple dozen businesses surrounding the courthouse in an orderly grid, and a spray of middle-income housing and shabby apartments on all four sides. She thought about the considerable risk that Macon Drench had taken when he developed Artemis, for a second time, back in the early seventies. Fed up with the excesses of the city, he had used a good portion of his oil fortune to purchase the West Texas ghost town and remake it into a place where hard work and an independent spirit could pull a family through even the roughest of times. Josie had asked him several months ago if he considered his desert experiment a success. In reply, he had said that his vision was a town where crime was nonexistent.

“Considering the nightmare across the border, and the tough economic times, I’d say you’ve succeeded,” she said.

Drench had frowned. “Napoleon Bonaparte said, ‘The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.’” He had rubbed a finger along the brim of his cowboy hat and studied Josie for a moment. “You keep that in mind. Once those bastards infect our town with their drugs and violence we’ll never get them out. They’ll infiltrate every corner, just like they’ve done all over Mexico.”

Driving down the straight stretch of River Road into Artemis, Josie thought about Drench’s words. She stared out at the rugged low-lying mountains of the Chihuahuan Desert running haphazardly on either side of the Rio, and thought it was a small miracle that anyone could settle a land that could be so unforgiving. She agreed with Drench completely, and had to force herself not to obsess over the problems when she was away from work. She would give everything she had to keep the cartels across the river, and that obsession sometimes took precedence over everything else in her life.

The cell phone in her breast pocket vibrated and startled her.

“Where are you?” Otto asked.

“Just outside of town,” she said.

“I’m pulling up to the Tamale. I’ll order your usual.”

The Artemis Police Department sat between the Gun Club and the Artemis City Office across the street from the courthouse. Catty-cornered to the PD was the Hot Tamale, Josie and Otto’s favorite spot to eat. Josie pulled her jeep beside Otto’s and parked in front of the restaurant. On the front of the building a newly painted sign read The Hot Tamale: Quick Service, Authentic Recipes, and the Most Accurate Gossip in Texas. Josie smiled at the sign. She wasn’t sure if the gossip was accurate, but it was abundant.

She walked inside and found the waitresses wiping down tables and preparing for the supper crowd. The tables and chairs were up for grabs and were moved to fit whatever configuration the current group of customers cared to arrange. The waitresses wove their way through the jumble and typically knew every customer by their first name, as well as their daily order. Josie found Otto at their customary spot in the front corner of the diner, at a table with a clear view out the large window facing the courthouse.

She sat down and discovered a Coke already waiting for her.

“You look refreshed,” she said to Otto.

“Lucy special-ordered dill kraut to go with my bologna. The woman is a saint.” He smiled and shook his head, obviously touched by her effort. “Do you know how hard it is to get quality bologna in West Texas? Let alone dill kraut!”

Lucy Ramone, owner and head cook of the Tamale, doted over Otto shamelessly. Josie wondered if Otto’s wife, Delores, realized Otto had an admirer.

“How long has it been since you and Delores went back to Poland?” Josie asked.

“Ten years. Since our parents both passed we haven’t made the effort. We need to, though.” He leaned forward in his chair and propped his arms on the table, his expression pensive. “Sometimes I physically ache for the food from my childhood. The pierogi and gnocchi, the kraut and sausage. My mother would cook for hours for Sunday dinners.”

“Delores is a great cook,” Josie said.

He sighed as if talking to an amateur. “She is, of course. But a pierogi constructed in a Polish kitchen is comfort food like no other.”

Lucy ambled out from the kitchen and pulled up a chair. She ran the back of her hand across her forehead and sighed dramatically. “You missed it. Every table filled. A madhouse in here for lunch today.”

Josie smiled and leaned back in her chair.

Lucy was not from Mexico, but she spoke a fair amount of Spanish, and she had developed an authentic-sounding accent over her twenty years of running the Hot Tamale. She was a squat woman with black hair and dark eyes that fit the Mexican persona she affected.

Lucy leaned in to the table conspiratorially. “So? Everyone talked dead bodies today at lunch.”

Otto looked at Lucy in disbelief. “Who spreads this stuff?”

“I never reveal my sources,” Lucy said. She smoothed her white apron across her thighs. “Now, fess up.”

“Lou stopped in, didn’t she?” Otto asked.

Lucy smiled, her lips pressed tightly together.

Sarah, who did double duty as short-order cook and waitress, yelled from the kitchen, “Bologna sandwich and a cold tamale?”

Josie looked up and saw her standing behind the pass-through window in the kitchen and gave her a thumbs-up.

“Five minutes!” Sarah yelled, and turned back to the kitchen.

“One body,” Josie said. “Singular.”

“I heard multiple,” Lucy said.

Josie held up a finger. “One dead body.”

Lucy considered the answer. “Okay. How many live bodies?”

Josie looked at Otto and smiled, then looked back to Lucy. “We found one dead body, and a local woman who passed out, probably from heat exhaustion. Know anything about it?”

“An illegal?” she asked, ignoring Josie’s question.

“We don’t know yet.”

“Who was the local?”

“Cassidy Harper. You know her?” Josie asked.

“Vaguely. Doesn’t come in here much. Her boyfriend does, though.”

“What do you know about him?” Otto asked.

“I know he’s a lousy tipper. A loner. Always sits by himself. Looks ready to slash his wrists most of the time.”

Sarah brought their plates out and set them down, along with a bottle of Tabasco sauce. She was in her late twenties, and wore the unofficial Hot Tamale uniform: shorts, T-shirt, and tennis shoes. She wore her blond hair in a short bob and was covered in freckles from head to toe. Josie pointed at a button pinned to the pocket of her apron that showed her son holding a T-ball bat, a proud smile revealing two missing front teeth.

“Cute kid,” Josie said.

Sarah grinned. “You should see him hit that ball and run like the wind. He’s amazing.” She sat their drink refills on the table and hustled back to the kitchen.

Lucy stood to leave. “The monsoons are supposed to start tonight. Forecaster says it’s the hundred-year flood. Calling for a foot of rain over the next couple days.” She pointed a finger at Otto, then Josie. “Mark my words. Things are about to get bad.”

* * *

After they finished eating Josie offered to start her car while Otto paid. She tried to hand him a ten-dollar bill but he refused to take it.

“You pay tomorrow,” he said.

Josie went outside to start her jeep and waited for Otto to join her, but the car was still blazing hot during the three-minute trip across town to the Trauma Center. She left her jeep running outside the emergency room entrance while they both went inside to check on Cassidy.

The Trauma Center’s wing included a nurse’s station and patient waiting area, two small examination rooms that also served as patient rooms, and a surprisingly well-equipped surgery unit. Vie Blessing was bent over a computer at the nurse’s station talking into a phone and staring intently at something on the monitor below her. She glanced up and waved, then went back to her conversation. Otto and Josie wandered over to the TV mounted on the wall in the waiting room. A woman from the Weather Channel was discussing the forecast for heavy rain across northern Mexico and into Texas and Arizona.

Vie hung the phone up and called out, “Sorry. We’re so understaffed it’s ridiculous. There are two of us on duty in the center today. Not because someone called off. Because we’re it!” She walked over to them, crossed her arms over her chest, and huffed in frustration. “Someday this town will face a lawsuit because they have a registered nurse serving in the capacity of a doctor about fifty percent of the time.”

Otto said, “Want the truth? If I was in bad shape, I’d take you over most doctors any day of the week.”

Vie winked at Otto and patted his arm. “You big suck-up. Are you here about the Harper girl?”

“How’s she doing?” Josie asked.

“She’ll be fine. Her temperature was down below one hundred when I checked about ten minutes ago. She’s a lucky girl, though. If you hadn’t picked her up when you did, she’d be dead by now. She knows it too. She’s pretty shook up.”

“Anyone been to see her?” Josie asked.

“No. She told me about finding the body. I told her she needs to talk to you. Tell you what she knows, but I don’t expect you’ll get much from her.”

“Did she give you any details?” Josie asked.

“No, nothing like that. She looks scared to death, though.”

“Any idea where the boyfriend is?” Otto asked.

“Nope.”

Vie pointed and they all walked down the hallway. She stopped in front of Cassidy’s room with her hand on the door. “I told her we need to keep her under observation until supper time.”

Josie nodded and looked at Otto. “Good. That’ll give us a chance to check her car out before she leaves.”

Vie pushed the door open into a dimly lit room with two patient beds in the middle of various monitors and pieces of medical apparatus. In the first bed, Cassidy lay flat on her back staring up at the ceiling. Her face and arms were sunburnt, and her pretty red ringlets were matted around her head. She looked far older than her twenty-two years. She turned her head slowly in their direction.

Josie approached her first. “Vie tells us you’re going to be okay. You had us pretty scared for a while.”

Cassidy lifted the corner of her lip in a weak attempt at a smile.

“Do you remember us carrying you out?” Josie asked, trying to get her to relax.

Cassidy shook her head no, and then her attention shifted to Otto, who folded the flap back on his notebook and clicked a pen open.

Otto noticed her watching him. “It’s okay, kid. We just need to ask you a few questions about this afternoon.”

“What were you doing out in the desert in this kind of heat?” Josie asked. She kept her tone kind rather than accusatory.

Another shoulder shrug.

“Were you hiking?”

Cassidy looked at Josie as if deciding how to answer. “Not really. I just wanted to be outside.” Her tone was soft and timid.

“How did you end up off Scratchgravel?” Josie asked.

She shrugged again, and when Josie continued to wait for an answer she finally said, “It just looked like an okay spot.”

“For what?”

Cassidy looked confused for a moment. “For being outside.”

“Couldn’t you have gone outside at your own home?”

“Not really. We live in town. We don’t really have a yard. It’s—” She hesitated. “The grass is all dead. It isn’t very pretty.”

“How did you find the body?” Josie asked.

A shrug. “I just saw it. I was walking and I smelled something. It was awful, then I saw something behind a bush. When I saw the body, I got dizzy. Then I don’t remember anything. I guess I blacked out.”

Josie glanced back at Otto, who nodded to let her know he was getting everything. “You’re saying you were just out walking in the desert on a day supposed to hit 104 degrees?”

She nodded.

“Why?”

She shrugged.

Josie tried to keep the frustration out of her voice. “Do you know who the man was?”

Cassidy opened her mouth slightly as if she couldn’t believe the question. “You couldn’t even tell who he was. He was—” She stopped and shuddered, then closed her eyes and turned her head away.

Josie adjusted her gunbelt and stepped forward to sit on the edge of the bed. “Cassidy, I’m trying to understand why I found you lying beside a dead body. Can you help me out here?”

She opened her eyes again but kept her head turned. “I told you. I just went for a walk and I found him there. It’s not like I wanted to find him.”

“Did you touch the body?”

Cassidy’s jaw dropped and she turned to Josie. “Are you kidding? He was disgusting! Why would I touch him?” She shuddered.

Josie turned to look at Otto, who jerked his thumb toward the door.

“If you remember anything, or come across any information about the man or why he might have been out there, promise me you’ll call?”

Cassidy nodded and Josie placed a business card on the hospital table.

“We had your car towed to the county garage to get it off the side of the road. We’d like to take a look inside it. Get some fingerprints around your doors. Are you okay with that?” Josie asked.

“I don’t care.”

Otto had a consent form and pen ready and approached the bed. “We just need you to sign a consent form. Make it all official.”

Cassidy pressed the remote on her bedside table to raise the bed and used the table to sign the paper. Josie noted that she didn’t give much thought to the paper or the idea of having her car searched. She seemed more concerned with the pain of bending her arms and the sunburn.

Cassidy pointed to a folded pile of clothes atop a bureau across the room. “Keys ought to be in my front shorts pocket.”

Josie felt a piece of paper in the first pocket she looked in and resisted the urge to unfold it and read it. She found the car keys in the second pocket and took them instead. She and Otto thanked Vie and left for the garage.

* * *

The county garage was located on the east side of town, beside the Arroyo County Jail. The dark green metal garage was eighty feet long by thirty feet wide and had a poured concrete floor. Inside were several bays where the county four-wheel-drive pickup and two ancient plow trucks were parked and maintained. The plows were used to clean the roads after the monsoon hit each summer. They had been purchased by Macon Drench at a Houston auction several years ago. Before the plows were bought, the town had to rely on locals with pickup trucks and push-blades to clean up the roads. Drench had also paid for the construction of the garage himself rather than raising taxes. Josie wondered what would happen to the town if Drench ever tired of his desert experiment and headed back to the city.

Josie and Otto rode together in Josie’s car and parked just inside the open garage door. Industrial-sized fans pulled air in one side of the garage and out the other. The air movement and shade from the brutal afternoon sun made the job they were facing still miserable, but tolerable.

Danny was in charge of the garage and maintenance on the trucks. The garage typically closed at five, but Danny had offered to keep it open as late as necessary so they could examine Cassidy’s car. When Josie shut her jeep off, Danny appeared from behind the engine of one of the plows, wiping his hands on a rag. He smiled widely and flipped his rag to hang over his shoulder like a dish towel. His coworker, Mitch Wilson, walked behind Danny and waved hello. He was a lanky, heavily tattooed Harley rider who had served several tours in the second Iraq war as an explosives expert with the army. With his laid-back disposition it was hard for Josie to imagine him using explosives in a war zone.

“How’s tricks?” Otto called.

“Trying to get these old rust buckets ready for the epic rains,” Danny said.

“We appreciate your help today,” Josie said.

“No problem.”

“Cassidy doing okay?” Mitch asked.

“She’ll be fine. She got lucky, though.” Josie looked back at Danny. “You and Cowan get the body unloaded at the morgue?”

He shook his head slowly. “That was some nasty business.”

He pointed to Cassidy Harper’s car, parked directly behind them in an open area on the concrete pad. “Mitch and I unhooked her from the tow truck. Car’s ready for you. We didn’t touch any of the door handles. Didn’t get inside the car.”

Josie thanked them and they wandered back to the plow truck and turned the music back up. Over the hum of the fans Josie heard George Jones singing to Tammy Wynette about the “Crying Time.”

“That’s some classic music,” Josie said. “Makes me want to find a lonely spot in the desert.”

Otto turned up his lip. “That stuff’ll put you in an early grave. You ever listen to a good polka?”

Josie got inside her jeep and turned it around so the back end faced Cassidy’s car. She opened the hatch and Otto spread a plastic tarp over the carpet inside. She opened up her evidence kit, then backed away to face Otto, hands on her hips.

“Did you forget something?” she asked.

“You have issues,” he said. “I borrowed your sketchpad and pencil. And I stuck them right back in there when I was done.”

“Right back in there isn’t where you found them. The pad and pencil don’t belong with the evidence collection. That should be obvious to you by now. There is a section in the back for files. There’s even a nice clip to hold the pencil.”

“You need to lighten up, Josie.”

“How many years have we been having this same conversation?”

“Learn to enjoy your life a little.” He grabbed the black powder and brushes and walked over to the car to take latent prints off the silver door handles.

“I would if I didn’t have to suffer a slob as a partner.”

He smiled and winked at her.

She laughed. “Delores deserves a medal. I wouldn’t put up with this at home.”

Josie got Cassidy’s keys from the cup holder in the front of her jeep and unlocked Cassidy’s trunk. She snapped pictures of the contents: a bowling ball bag with a bowling ball zipped inside, a messy collection of college math and science textbooks ranging from calculus to nuclear physics with pages and covers ripped, an oily bath towel, and torn newspapers. With the closest bowling lane thirty miles away in Marfa, she wondered about the bowling ball. She didn’t picture Cassidy or the boyfriend as the bowling league types. Josie picked up one of the newspapers and saw the date was from two years ago. She thought she ought to do the girl a favor and throw everything from the trunk in the trash.

Josie jotted down a list of the items and slammed the trunk closed. Otto was peeling the tape off the passenger-side door handle. “That’s a pretty print. That’ll run for sure.”

“You done with the back yet?” Josie asked.

“Yep. This is my last door. I got two decent prints on the front driver side. This was the best one, though.”

Josie opened the back passenger door and leaned down to examine the items on the floor.

Otto stood and stretched his back. “How about a drink break?”

“Give me a minute,” Josie said, and got down on her knees beside the open car door. She used a pair of tweezers to lift a man’s wallet off the floor and drop it into a one-quart plastic evidence bag. She also found several coins that she dropped into the bag. There was nothing else on the floor of the car except for a straw wrapper and small pieces of trash.

Otto leaned over her. “There’s a Coke machine in the corner where you can buy me a drink.”

Josie stood and wiped the sweat away from her eyes. “I might have something.”

She walked over to the trunk of her car and Otto followed. She dumped out the evidence onto the tarp and Otto hummed beside her.

“Is that Leo’s wallet?”

Josie used a pair of large tweezers to open the wallet. “No driver’s license. But there’s cash in it.” She bent over the wallet to examine the clear windowed space for the ID more carefully. “At some point there was definitely something in this space. There’s a square ridge all the way around where the license was.”

“Looks like Ms. Harper might know more than she says,” Otto said.

“Why would she take the ID and pitch the wallet in her backseat?” she asked.

Josie used the tweezers and a gloved hand to open the bi-fold brown leather wallet. A twenty and four one-dollar bills were in the bill section. She backed up to let Otto look.

“Odd amount of money for an illegal trying to cross the border,” Josie said.

“Who would steal a guy’s driver’s license and leave the twenty-dollar bill?”

“That’s assuming the license was still in there when she took it.” Josie wiped the sweat off her forehead with her arm and sighed. She dropped the wallet into another plastic evidence bag, then put her hand in her front pocket and pulled out several dollar bills. “Come on. I’ll buy you a drink.”

They walked over to an enclosed office area with a humming Coke machine. They got their drinks and each drained half a can at once.

Josie nodded absently. “You figure Cassidy found the body and took his wallet back to her car out of some kind of morbid curiosity?”

“You hear about killers keeping items as souvenirs after they kill someone.”

“Come on. You don’t see her as the killer,” she said.

Otto nudged her arm with his own. “You being sexist? She’s a cute young girl, so she couldn’t possibly kill this guy?”

“Tell me how many cute young girls you’ve arrested for murder.”

“Not my point.”

“Besides, you know Cassidy. She’s clueless. Not a killer.”

“What’s that saying about desperate times?” he asked.

Josie ignored the question. “We’re assuming the wallet is the dead man’s. Maybe it’s her boyfriend’s. Maybe he bought a new one and switched wallets out while sitting in the car,” she said. “Just pitched the old one in the backseat.”

Otto gave her a skeptical look. “He has so much extra money that when he switched his wallet out he just left the twenty-four dollars.”

She tilted her head, conceding his point.

Josie stopped at her trunk and slipped on a fresh pair of rubber gloves. “I just can’t figure why she’d take the wallet. Think about the timing. She’d have found the body, taken the wallet, walked it all the way back to the car, dumped it in the backseat, then walked back to the body in this deadly heat, and passed out from exhaustion.”

“Maybe she took the stuff and got a guilty conscience. Decided to go back,” he said.

“Still doesn’t work. If she felt guilty she would have called the police. Why walk back to a body that was obviously dead? There’s no point in that.”

“Maybe someone else put the stuff in the car,” Otto said.

“Nope. The doors were locked. All the windows were rolled up. Her car keys were on her.” Josie opened the backseat of her jeep and pulled out her camera case. “We’ll need to check if she has another set of keys.”

Josie passed Otto the 35-millimeter camera and he nodded slowly. “Here’s another one. How’d she get the wallet? The guy is lying on his back. His body is decomposing. She had to work hard to get that wallet out of his back pocket. Fight the flies and the smell. I can’t imagine the wallet being worth that kind of grief.”

“Maybe he carried it in his front pocket, along with his pocketknife,” she said.

“I thought she looked pretty disgusted with the whole idea of the dead body. Remember her face when you asked if she could identify him? She looked ill even thinking about it. I can’t see her putting her hands into that dead man’s pants pocket.” Otto looked doubtful. “Front or back.”

“And why would she dump it in her backseat? Would you work that hard to get something and then throw it on the floor?” Josie shook her head no to her own question.

“You’d put it on the front seat, or you’d hide it,” he said.

“Let’s go back to the keys. If there’s a second set, it makes sense that Cassidy’s boyfriend would have them. What if Leo planted the evidence?”

“And why would he do that?” Otto asked.

“Maybe he’s planting evidence on her to keep the focus off him,” she said.

“Doesn’t make sense. All it does is draw more attention to both of them. If he had the evidence he’d want to hide it. Ditch it.”

“The body has been there several days. Maybe Leo drove Cassidy’s car out there and took the wallet himself. Killed the guy and took his identification. Left the wallet in the backseat,” she said.

“Although it still doesn’t make sense why he’d dump it in the backseat for Cassidy to find.”

Otto handed Josie a pair of latex gloves and grabbed himself a pair as well.

Josie absently slipped a glove over her hand, trying to make sense of the details they were collecting. “Meanwhile, we have a man with a curious mess of sores on his body, who was banged on the back of the head, then most likely left for dead in the middle of the desert.”

They spent the next twenty minutes inventorying everything in the car. It amounted mostly to music CDs, hair ties and headbands, and the items in Cassidy’s purse. The license from the man’s wallet never showed up.

Josie was packing up the evidence kit and Otto was locking the car when the first raindrops pinged off the metal roof of the garage. Within ten minutes the temperature dropped twenty degrees. They walked up to the open garage door as nickel-sized drops of rain pooled on the dry ground like water on a waxed car. The sky directly above them was still relatively clear with the setting sun casting light onto the ground in patches. Across the Chihuahuan Desert the rains were coming.

The country music stopped and Danny and Mitch ambled up to join them.

“Ain’t nothing better than the first rain of the season,” Danny said. He smiled widely and stepped out into the rain with his arms thrown wide, his head tipped back, and his eyes closed.

“Crazy shit. He’d be running through the raindrops if you two weren’t here,” Mitch said.

The sky to the south was moving fast, the clouds rolling like boiling water as the sun became completely blocked out and the light faded. The rain tapped louder and faster on the roof and Danny finally came back into the garage for shelter. They listened in silence and watched the display for a long while before Otto said they’d better get back to town. West Texas had experienced no rain in over nine months and it wouldn’t take long before the roads began to fill with mud. When the sand in Arroyo County mixed with rain it formed a frustrating combination of slick mud and concrete. Some areas received rain and compacted so hard the ground cracked when it finally dried. In other places sand mixed with soil and sediment and turned into a sludge that could turn instantly dangerous in the right conditions. Mudslides weren’t common, but they could be deadly when they hit.

* * *

In a suburb just south of town, two dozen modest, one-story homes were located around a road shaped like a race track. The center of the track, referred to as the infield by the kids in the neighborhood, was a park; mostly just a large empty lot with brown grass for a playing field that the kids used for baseball or whatever pickup game they could arrange. Most of the homes were rental units owned by Macon Drench, including the one where Officer Marta Cruz lived. Her house was located on the far end of the block, a small two-bedroom home covered in white siding with white vertical blinds covering all of the windows. A stone shrine to the Virgin Mary, surrounded by colorful plastic flowers in terra-cotta pots, decorated the front of the house. The landscaping consisted of gravel and a few cactuses. The house was clean and unassuming.

Inside, the walls were painted white, the decorations primarily religious in nature: an ornate gold cross hung on the wall above the couch, religious poems and plaques hung from the other walls. A floral couch and love seat and oval-shaped coffee table filled the small living room to capacity. The only room in the house painted anything other than white was Teresa’s. When she had turned thirteen she had insisted on a deep purple that now felt dark and overpowering, especially with the rain falling outside. She lay on her bed staring at the cracks in the ceiling. She imagined each line as a choice. She thought if she studied long enough the lines would connect and her life would make sense again.

She had never seen a dead body. She’d been to a funeral once when her grandpa died, but she’d not been allowed to walk up to the casket. But this wasn’t just a body. The man was murdered. She had seen the guy who last touched the body. She knew what the truck looked like. This wasn’t about sneaking out of the house with Enrico. Each minute she let go by without telling her mom increased her guilt. Now, two days had passed and she’d said nothing. She wondered if she might be arrested herself for something—for hiding information. She had lain awake for hours that night, listening to the soft tap of the minute hand on the clock, then the rain pounding on the roof and sliding down the windows outside her room, and still she had done nothing.

Her mother had walked into her bedroom early that morning, at the end of her shift, kissed her on the forehead, and whispered good night. Teresa had faked sleep, unable to admit what she had done. Then her mother had been called back into work that afternoon, and Teresa had said nothing. She had already waited too long. How could she tell her mother she had lain in bed, silent, knowing that a man had been killed?

She’d always imagined herself as tough, as someone who could take care of herself and stand up for what was right. But she had discovered she was a coward. Teresa closed her eyes and wondered what Enrico was thinking at that moment. When they had climbed back into his truck and driven away from the Hollow he had made her promise she wouldn’t tell her mom. At the time, she had thought it was an empty promise. She had imagined confessing everything to her mother, but now, the thought of telling her seemed impossible.