She ought to agree, Lily thought, but her mind wouldn’t obey. Her tongue sat heavy and unmoving in her mouth.
“Becca and I were friends—since junior high,” Shea added.
“Do you know where AJ is?” Lily was wary now, remembering Paul’s admonition to question Shea herself. “When did you last see him or speak to him?”
“I saw him last Sunday before I left Dallas to come here to my mom’s,” Shea said. “We talked last night. He called me when he left work.”
“Are you sure he was at work? Because Detective Bushnell told Paul he missed his shift.”
“AJ wouldn’t lie to me, Mrs. Isley. Sergeant Bushnell better check again.”
Lily. Call me Lily, she thought but didn’t say, although she had said it before, a number of times.
Another small silence teetered on a tight wire.
“What if he’s—” Shea began.
“No.” Lily cut her off. She didn’t want a thing to do with it, the idea that AJ might be hurt, a victim himself, even though it was clearly conceivable, and she’d brought it up to Paul. She’d know if something terrible had happened to him, wouldn’t she? She would feel it. She was AJ’s mother, and regardless of her mistakes, that tie was implicit, with its own infallible means of communication. Hadn’t she always heard that?
“I’ve been calling everyone I know from school,” Shea said. “No one’s seen him or heard from him. I don’t know what to do. I think we should make flyers and post them in Dallas, around AJ’s apartment. We need to get the word out here, too, around town, in case—”
“Tomorrow,” Lily said. “Let’s not do anything until tomorrow.” She was thinking if AJ was close by, if he saw the police, it would drive him away. He would be remembering last time; he would know what he was in for, how it could play out. Even in his innocence, he wouldn’t risk his freedom. Ending the call, Lily stowed her phone in her purse.
“She know anything?” her dad asked.
“I’m not sure. She seems nervous that the police suspect her. If AJ was seeing Becca, and Shea knew . . .” Lily paused when her dad raised his hand in a dismissive gesture.
“AJ isn’t the cheating kind. You know that as well as me.”
She would like to, Lily thought. But how well did anyone know another person? In her own lifetime, she had acted in ways and made decisions that in retrospect completely amazed her for their spectacular and blind stupidity. How could she judge what someone else would do, even her own son?
“Leaving AJ out of it,” her dad went on, “Shea is awfully small. She doesn’t look like much of a fighter. Does she weigh a hundred pounds?”
“Maybe just,” Lily said.
“You realize AJ could be in trouble himself.” Her dad repeated the ongoing concern, the only realistic alternative that would support AJ’s innocence, the very scenario Lily hadn’t wanted to discuss with Shea.
Should she pray for that? Lily wondered. Pray her son was endangered?
“Whoever did kill the girl—they could have him,” her dad continued. “Or he could be running scared, thinking because of all that other business back in the day—” He got up. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” Lily stood up, too.
“You’ve got your boots on. Let’s take a ride. If AJ’s around here, we need to find him before the police do.”
He echoed Lily’s plan; her intention in coming here had been to hunt for her son, but outside, when her father headed for the garage, pulling his truck keys from his pocket, she stopped, watching him. “Dad?”
He turned to her, eyes sharp, impatient.
“I thought you said you wanted to ride.”
His expression went totally blank, the way it had when she’d first arrived. It filled the space of one heartbeat, perhaps two, before his eyes cleared, but as he repocketed his keys, the pain the lapse caused him showed in the angle of his bowed head, the low, defeated curve of his shoulders.
“I’ll get the horses from the pasture and bring them to the barn,” Lily said, and her voice was so bright, he flinched.
Lily had sat on a horse before she could crawl. When she was a girl, her dad had liked to tell people that. He’d liked to say that when she rode, she was poetry in motion. It had embarrassed her even as it thrilled her, seeing his face take on the sheen of pride. He had glowed like the shiny half-dollars he’d handed her sometimes when she was a little girl and she’d done a chore to his liking. He, Lily, and Winona had taught Erik and AJ to ride, too, and for a while, until the boys graduated high school, if the five of them were together at the ranch, they’d saddle up before dawn and ride out to the east ridge to watch the sunrise. The boys had learned to rope and brand livestock and cut hay. They could mend a fence. Summers they’d entered rodeo competitions to show off. It had always made Lily and Winona smile, seeing the way they’d swagger, watching from under their hat brims to see what girl was looking. Both Lily and Win had drawn the line, though, at tobacco chewing, and been glad for it when Lily’s dad backed them up.
Lily was remembering all this as she walked her dad’s palomino, Sharkey, and her own dainty paint mare, Butternut, back to the barn. They said you could tell a lot about a person by the sort of horse they rode. She’d never questioned her dad’s choice of a stallion. He and Sharkey were a lot alike, both of them hardheaded, irascible, and determined to be in control. Sharkey was old now, nearly as old as her dad in horse years, but he still stepped sharply, and she was still wary of him.
In the barn, she handed Sharkey off to her dad, and they set about saddling the horses in silence.
Her dad broke it. “I know you’re scared, Sissy.”
She had her hands on the front cinch of her saddle, testing that it wasn’t too snug, when he said it, and she bowed her head to Butternut’s neck, listening to her blow gently through her nostrils. How long had it been since her dad had called her Sissy? Not since she’d gotten into all the trouble in Arizona. She’d been scared then, too, and in sore need of his comfort.
“You ready?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, and, mounting, they rode out into the late-afternoon light that was the color of hammered gold. The wind, an unseen hand, ruffled the long grass. The air smelled of dust and verdant spring.
Her dad said they’d ride up to the old deer stand at the far end of the north pasture. “You remember how those boys used to hide out there when they were trying to duck chores?”
Lily smiled.
Her dad broke the silence that had fallen between them. “What you told me was done to that girl—that’s the work of a maniac. Only somebody whacked-out would do a thing like that. That’s not AJ.”
“He’s not himself sometimes, Dad.” Lily bent forward and stroked Butternut’s neck, and she tossed her pretty head, as if in appreciation.
“Who would be, after the shit he went through over in Afghanistan?”
“If you could have seen him that night at the restaurant—”
“He told me about that. It shook him up. But it only happened once.”
“There have been fights.”
“A couple. So what?”