He gave her a skeptical look.
“Why don’t you just write your book?” she asked, her tone flustered, as though his stalling was cramping her style. “You wanted to move here, right? Because this house is, like, you know . . .” She waved a hand in the air. A crime scene. “Just do what you came here to do and forget about it.”
Do what you came here to do. That was easier said than done. Lucas dropped his toast onto his plate and leaned back in his seat. He glared at the table’s wood grain, contemplating whether this would be the right time to discuss future plans—the possibility of the book not getting done at all, the potential of him getting a job other than writing full-time, of doing something else for a while.
“What?” She could see the trepidation on his face.
“I was just thinking that maybe this whole thing isn’t the best idea.”
Jeanie stared at him.
“You know that guy I was supposed to talk to? The one in prison?”
She gave him a pensive nod.
“Now he won’t talk to me even though he said he would. He completely bailed on me.”
“So you’re just going to give up?”
Lucas grimaced. “You’re not hearing me. I don’t know that I have any other real option, kiddo.”
She looked away from him, stared down at her hands. A moment later, she was gathering up her bowl of half-eaten cereal and trudging toward the sink. She stood there for a while, peering out the window at the orchard just beyond it. It reminded him of how Caroline had acted the night he had told her that he wanted to move to Washington to write, how she had gripped the edge of the sink before turning to give him a look of disbelief.
“Let’s go somewhere today,” he told her, his fingers crossed for a truce. “We can go down to the beach, see what’s going on . . .”
Jeanie didn’t respond. He watched her shoulders slump as she continued to stand there, seemingly transfixed by the copse of cherry trees. Just when he was sure she wasn’t speaking to him again, she turned and frowned at him from across the kitchen.
“I think you should try harder,” she said. “Giving up isn’t going to get Mom back.”
He sat in stunned silence as he watched her step out of the kitchen, hardly able to believe what he’d just heard. Jeanie was prone to bouts of moodiness, but her statement right now had been unusually cruel.
That angst is going to be fun, Caroline had warned. Back at the airport, he had been sure that he and Jeanie shared a bond that Caroline didn’t understand. He’d been certain that, no matter how cranky Jeanie got, she’d spare him the worst of it. Sitting at the breakfast table with half-eaten toast decorating his plate, he realized that he had been dead wrong. Welcome to the teenage years, pal.
But Jeanie was right no matter how much it stung. He couldn’t just give up. He still had a week and a half left to reach out to Jeff, to get into Lambert and get that goddamn interview.
You’re a writer, Lou.
He had to try harder, couldn’t allow himself to lose sight of the point: he wasn’t doing this for himself, he was doing this for them. If he gave in now, it was like telling his kid that even the most precious things weren’t worth fighting for.
And there was nothing more precious than family.
27
* * *
EVERY NUMBER LUCAS tried for his final lead, Sandy Gleason, came up dry. The first two were disconnected. The third belonged to a person who claimed to have never heard of Sandy at all. The fourth was Sandy’s place of employment—a small mom-and-pop dog groomer that had gone out of business a year before. As if he might get a different answer the second time around, Lucas tried all three disconnected numbers once more before slumping back in his seat.
Scoring an interview with Sandy Gleason would have almost been as good as talking to Jeffrey Halcomb himself. Lucas wanted to know about Jeff’s attempt to get her pregnant. He wanted to figure out if Halcomb’s advances toward Sandy had been a onetime thing, or whether he had a thing for trying to knock girls up. He also wanted to know if Jeff had mentioned anything about the Veldt, Kansas, incident that resulted in his excommunication. Had Halcomb mentioned a belief of being able to bring people back from the dead? Had he somehow convinced his small tribe of followers of that very idea, resulting in the suicide of eight? Or had the whole back-from-the-dead thing been made up by Veldt to excuse Pastor Gregory Halcomb of any wrongdoing . . . because what kind of a man exiles his own son from the town of his birth?