“How so?”
“I don’t know. It was just her way. Sometimes she’d say she wanted to go for a drive. She’d want me to go with her. Said we were going for a ride in the country, which was kind of funny because we already lived in the country. Then we’d drive by all the fields we could find that had horses and we’d name the horses and see which one of us could come up with the best names. One day she stopped alongside a field and got out of the car. She climbed over the barbed-wire fence and walked right up to this Thoroughbred. I sat in the car and watched. The horse didn’t even run from her. Then she walked back, climbed over the fence again, and got in the car. She said she’d thought the white spot on the horse’s forehead had looked like an oak leaf and that she’d been going to name him Acorn, but when she’d gotten a closer look, she’d been wrong. She said the marking looked like the star of Bethlehem.”
“So what did she name him?” Farrell asked.
“Bethlehem,” Amy Raye said. “And from then on when we drove by the field and the horse was out, we’d roll down our windows, and we’d wave to him and call out his name.”
Farrell hugged Amy Raye closer and laughed. “Sounds like something you would do.”
But these had been the days before Amy Raye had found her mom crying and sitting naked on the bathroom floor, and perhaps there was blood on the floor, as well. Before the days her mother would call in sick to work and stay in bed all day in a dark room, when she no longer stopped by the farm to see her parents, and cried each time she took communion in church.
“I think I would have liked your mom,” Farrell said.
But then Amy Raye turned quiet. “I don’t know,” she said. “People change.”
—
As Amy Raye lay with her face upon the cold rock, as she looked to the sky and waited for the helicopter to return, the wind shifted and blew through her hair and down her back like a gentle stroke of her mother’s hand. Amy Raye searched the stars. She found Ursa Major, or the Great Bear, as some of the Native American cultures called it. She thought upon all the stories her mother had read to her of the Great Bear, how it was the guardian of the western lands, the people’s spirit protector. And she thought upon the day her mother climbed the fence and named the Thoroughbred that had been grazing in the McAllisters’ pasture, and by remembering she felt the moment happening all over again. And maybe the fence wasn’t barbed wire. Maybe it was only cedar. Maybe the horse trotted away from her mom at first. Amy Raye couldn’t be sure. But none of that mattered. What mattered was the way the light shone on her mom’s face as she stood in the field and looked upon the deep brown horse, as she brushed aside the mane from his forehead. What mattered was the way her mom smiled, and that beautiful aching moment of how the world could be.
PRU
Several weeks had passed since Amy Raye had gone missing. Thanksgiving had come and gone. Dean had picked up Amy Raye’s laptop, and while Colm pored over her cell phone records, a specialist with the Garfield County agency worked on the computer.
“The husband’s not going to like what we found,” Colm told me. We were grabbing a beer together at the VFW one night after work. “Of course, I don’t see how he couldn’t have known.”
“Does this have anything to do with Kenny?”
“It has to do with Kenny and Aaron. From what we can tell, she was involved with both of them at one time or another.” Colm and I were sitting at the bar. He took a slow swallow from his beer. “That’s not even the half of it,” he said. “We found dating sites, chat rooms, illicit emails. I got text messages coming and going. We know of at least two men she’d been seeing within the month of her disappearance.”
I shook my head and ordered another beer. I kept seeing Amy Raye’s husband, the pictures of the children. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t wrap my mind around what Colm was telling me.
“And I got to tell you,” Colm went on. “This whole thing’s got me thinking more about that gun. It seems pretty goddamn interesting that Kenny was the only one who knew about Latour going off to some tree stand we never found. Then, only after we find the gun does Kenny decide to tell us it’s his, and by the way he loaned it to her, seeing as how it’s got his prints all over it. And I find it goddamn interesting that neither he nor that friend of his thought to mention their involvement with Latour.”