Yet her open face has certainly helped her today—pretending like she’s one of them, these people with no pasts. She watches them leaving the town square slowly and talking in their worried whispers about the meeting and the news and what’s happened here and what might happen yet. She wonders what it’s like to uproot yourself from everything you know, everyone you loved, everything you’d ever earned, and damn yourself by choice to a life in a place where you’ve forgotten it all. To be given the chance to forget every bad deed you’ve ever done. In a way, she’s almost envious.
Not that everyone here had a choice, of course, she understands that, too. Sometimes the decision finds you. Sometimes the decision kicks in your door or wakes you in your cell or presents itself in stark terms in a bare room with an attorney present while you’re handcuffed to a table. The decision: a lifetime of fear in prison somewhere, dreading death in every moving shadow, or a new life unburdened of all your past sins, with a new name, a new home, new neighbors, hidden away in this place. A decision that’s laid out to you in hard-to-follow legalese, as the Institute’s representative slides a silver folder across the table, with a single, unfamiliar word embossed on the cover: Caesura.
Will I remember what I did?
You won’t.
But will I know that I’ve forgotten it?
You will.
So I’ll know I did something bad, but I won’t know what it was.
You’ll know you made the decision to come to this place.
That’s the sales pitch, delivered calmly, even soothingly. Like they’re hoping to sell you a piece of land, except this piece of land is in Texas, in the desert, behind a fourteen-foot fence, and you can never come back and, by the way, you won’t even remember this conversation. Then they explain, in an effort to close the deal, that no matter where you go, you will always have a secret, and that the best way to keep a secret is to keep it from yourself. That the one thing in life you can never outrun is the guilt over what you’ve done. That follows you everywhere. Except here. Because they can make it all go away. They tap the folder.
She spots the sheriff walking away alone, breaking from his two deputies, and she scrambles to catch him. “Sheriff Cooper?”
He turns. “Can I help you, Miss—” He squints. “I’m sorry, I remember you from intake, but I left before you took your new name.”
“Burr. Bette Burr,” she says, then laughs. “Well, that sounds weird. Bette Burr.” She rolls the Rs and pops the Bs. “Bette. Burr. I guess that’s my new name now. I’m looking to meet someone.”
“You just did—Calvin Cooper,” he says. “You can call me Sheriff or Cal or Hey You, they all work fine by me.” She’s got freckles sprayed like buckshot across the bridge of her nose, he notices. Pretty. Seems friendly. From out west originally, he’d bet—her skin looks too sun-toasted to have come shrink-wrapped from the pale-faced East. Late twenties, maybe. You don’t get many people that young in this place. She definitely must be an innocent, he thinks—a victim, not a perpetrator, and a victim of something so traumatic she chose to wipe it from her memory and start fresh. “So how can I help you, Ms. Burr?”
“I’m especially curious to meet William Wayne.”
Cooper chuckles. “Oh God, you’re not a groupie, are you?”
“I just remember all the coverage he got before he came here.”
“That was ages ago. How do you even know his new name? That’s not supposed to be public knowledge.”
“Sheriff, there are entire websites dedicated to him. People drive out to the desert with telephoto lenses to try and snap pictures of him.”
“They used to. That kind of died down. And we do our best to chase those folks away, with a little help from the local U.S. Marshals office.” Cooper wonders if, in the wired world beyond their fences, there’s any such thing as a true secret anymore. “I’ll warn you that William is not much for new friends. He never comes out of his house, just gets his groceries dropped off on the doorstep. Hell, I haven’t seen him in months—and I go out of my way to check on him every so often, make sure he’s still with us.”
“I was just intrigued. I mean, imagine the stories he could tell.”
“But that’s the thing, Bette. He doesn’t have those stories anymore. That’s why he’s here. That’s why you’re all here.”
“Of course. I just thought maybe he remembers some of it.”
“Not if the Institute did its job.”
Bette smiles, like she can’t believe she’s been so silly. “Sure, it’s stupid. I shouldn’t have bothered you. I’m sure you’ve got other things on your mind.”
“I’ll tell you what, stop by the police station tomorrow and we can discuss it,” says Cooper. “I’ll tell you all about old William Wayne.”
Bette looks him over. He’s handsome, or used to be once, with a few intriguing scars, including one that descends in a faint white arc across his forehead and through one eyebrow like a falling meteor. He’s probably used to the easy attention of women. That can be a handy quality in someone you’re trying to get something from, she’s learned. The genial, vain, eager-to-save-the-day sheriff—she may have just cut her work in half.
“That would be great,” she says. “Nice to meet you in person, Sheriff.”
“Cal.”
“Cal.” She smiles again, pausing like she’s about to say something more, then she just nods, gives him a little wave, and walks away. Don’t lay it on too thick, she thinks. You’re simply here to find a door and you just need him to point the way. Once you find the door, you knock. And she has a feeling that when she does, the famous recluse William Wayne will open for her. Once he learns who she really is. Who her father is. Or was.
The knocking will be the easy part.
After that, all she needs to do, this newly christened Bette Burr, with her approachable manner and open face and irresistibly pleasant demeanor, is deliver to William Wayne the most unwelcome news of his crooked, wayward, broken, blood-soaked life.