“Still south, but we’ve got a lot of one-way streets now, so you’ll have to zigzag. I want to show you the courthouse. It’s been completely restored.”
He turned to the right and moved over to Bowie Avenue, then drove straight south, toward the river. This was the main commercial district, he remembered. Might as well check it out. Bosque Bend could be a real find. Ordinarily he didn’t get involved with small-town properties, but it was advantageous to get in on growth areas, places on their way up but not yet at their peak.
Everything looked good so far. The copper roof of the courthouse gleamed in the harsh evening sun, and its buff-colored brick had been sandblasted within an inch of its life. They’d removed those tacky green-and-white-striped aluminum window awnings too—and landscaped the grounds. Only two storefronts on the square around it seemed to be vacant, he noticed, and there wasn’t an overabundance of those silly gift shops small towns tended to load their squares with.
The data was adding up. If Bosque Bend had the money to spend on prettying up its courthouse square, it was on the move.
Laurel was obviously relishing her job as tour guide. “Now, I want you to see what’s happening down at the river.”
He glanced at her, his eyebrows raised in surprise. “The Shallows?”
She eyes sparkled. “You’ll see. Just get to First Street—but don’t turn here!”
The warning came too late. Damn. The street was one-way now, but he was halfway through the intersection and couldn’t retreat. He’d just have to circle the block and try again. Exhaling in frustration, he swung to the left at the next intersection and stopped dead.
Smack-dab in front of him stood the setting for many a recurring nightmare: Bosque Bend High School. Tall antebellum columns marched across the front of the structure, and the slanting sun transformed the yellow brick into slabs of pure, cruel gold. The parking lot was chained shut, and the windows were boarded up with plywood.
“It’s being used as a storehouse for administration records and old equipment now,” Laurel explained. “There’s a new consolidated high school outside of town to pull in the country kids. It’s good for football. Brought us up to 4-A in Interscholastic League.”
Jase didn’t say anything, just sat at the stop sign in silence, staring at the gilded building in front of him.
This had been his school, his sanctuary. Maybe he hadn’t been the most popular guy on campus, but no one cuffed him around, the football coaches valued him, and he could fool himself that he blended into the crowd—until he got kicked out because Marguerite Shelton had a yen for teenage boys.
Laurel reached over and put her hand on his arm. “It’s all in the past.”
He didn’t reply, just squeezed her hand, flipped the turn signal, and pressed his foot on the accelerator. Then, with his jaw set so tight it hurt, he made his way toward First Street and the Bosque River just beyond.
Chapter Eleven
Why was Laurel so intent on his seeing the Shallows? The best thing that could be done for that eyesore was pave it over with cement.
Mrs. Johnson, his fourth-grade teacher, had dedicated a fair amount of her Texas history unit to the origins of Bosque Bend, so Jase knew that after the early settlers had driven out the Huacos, a peaceful tribe that had been cultivating crops on the fertile bottom land for decades, the town had been laid out in an unrelenting grid that started about a half mile above the ever-changing riverbank. That left a swampy no-man’s-land about two miles long between First Street and the Bosque to accommodate the inevitable flooding. The Shallows, as the area was called, always had a reputation for dark dealings. Its further reaches harbored a semipermanent homeless encampment, and all sorts of debris littered its shores—mattresses, condoms, broken syringes, and the occasional bloated corpse. Every spring, Jase recalled, the Methodist Sunday school would spend a couple of weekends cleaning up the area, but, come the next flood, the Shallows would be business as usual.
The aura of danger, of course, was a surefire lure to any teenage boy worth his escalating testosterone. Jase’s teammates used to talk about driving across the county line to Beat Down and loading their trunks full of Growler’s booze for weekend beer busts in the Shallows. It was even more exciting if the cops showed up and everyone had to make a run for it.
He’d never been invited to one of the get-togethers—the guest list was limited to the upper social stratum and their dates—but it didn’t matter. There was always beer in the refrigerator at home, and getting shit-faced and playing hide-and-seek with the law was not his idea of fun.
He glanced at Laurel. “You ever go to a party at the Shallows?”
She looked at him as if he were crazy. “Me? Heavens, no. But Sarah did—once. She said it was gross. The guys got drunk, took off their shirts, and danced around the fire like lunatics, then went off into the bushes and hurled their guts out. She called her dad to come pick her up.”