Little Falls Read online

  Numb. I was numb. That’s how it is at first. First bomb. First kill. You’re scared out of your mind, scared straight. Get shit done, accomplish the mission. And then—it gets quiet. You’re out, you’re back at base. You’re safe. And then numb. It’s like floating, and nothing can touch you, nothing can make you feel. You’re floating through the day, through the tour, through life. Then someone shoots down your balloon and it’s all pain.

  Most days, I miss the desert. But what I really miss is that numb.

  * * *

  As the shadows were lengthening, a key turned in the front door.

  I was sitting at the scuffed kitchen table, staring at the property report for Jeremy Leamon’s ranch in the black binder I’d had with me on-site that morning. My hair was dry and sticking to the sweat on my neck, so it must have been awhile since I had gotten back. I leapt to my feet—bare feet—grabbed the Glock, cocked it, and held it down, but ready, my index finger hovering next to the trigger. God, I must have looked insane when the door opened and my teenage daughter walked in.

  “Uh, hi,” Sophie said and dropped her backpack on the floor.

  “Hi,” I said without breathing.

  “What’s with you?”

  Sophie sauntered into the kitchen. Hastily, I slid the Glock under the county map draped over the table.

  “Nothing.”

  Across the narrow room, Sophie raised her eyebrows. I looked away, my jaw clenched. Be calm. Be normal.

  “How was work?” I said, trying and failing.

  “Okay.”

  Sophie opened the fridge, rummaged, smacked things around until she found the last can of soda.

  “Crystal was okay?”

  “Yeah, Crystal was okay.” Sophie stood up, closed the fridge, and popped open her drink.

  “Roseann dropped you off?”

  She paused.

  “I asked if Roseann dropped you off.”

  “No,” she snapped, her back still toward me.

  I ground my teeth.

  “She had to go to Coulee City for something,” Sophie said before I could open my mouth. “She said she wouldn’t be back until late.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I got home.” Sophie hesitated, her back stiffened. “I mean, I got back okay, didn’t I?”

  And that was it, really. Home. Her home was my home: the white farmhouse I had grown up in, the same place she had grown up after I left her to join the Army and then after I came back, when it was too much for me to take care of myself and take care of her too. And it had stayed that way, me in the apartment over the mart, her and my father in the old farmhouse thirty miles away. Until he died that May. After that, home was … well, not my apartment.

  “Who brought you?” I asked as evenly as I could. “Who brought you back?”

  “A friend.”

  Sophie turned quickly and stalked past me until, like a toy tied to her with string, I sprang up and reached out to grab her. But then she stopped and the string broke. My hand snapped back.

  “Who?” I insisted, my voice cracking with the strain of holding back the fury, the anxiety and fear.

  “Just a friend.”

  “A name. Give me a name.”

  Sophie glared at me, then bent to pick up her backpack. I rushed forward and put myself in her path. Her brown eyes—flecked with gold like mine—flashed dangerously, just like her father’s had when he’d been pushed too far. Just like mine must have too.

  “Jason,” Sophie said through clenched teeth. “Jason Sprague.”

  I stared her down. “Never heard of him.”

  “You wouldn’t have,” she sneered. But then she dropped her eyes, dropped her head, and a lock of dark hair fell over her forehead.

  “Granddad thought he was okay.”

  She said it so quietly, almost reverently, her eyes so downcast that her long lashes fanned over her cheeks. Even I felt tears welling. But my father thought everyone was okay; he was everyone’s hero. And here’s the thing, here’s what I had learned about being a mother during those few months that Sophie and I had been the only ones left: your kid is the predator and you are the prey. They smell blood. They smell fear. And then—just then—Sophie was playing with her food.

  “Fine,” I said, biting off the word. “I’ll meet him next time.”

  I let her push past me. She slammed the bedroom door behind her; I stomped to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, and took it to the table.

  Hours later, I was still there, trying to write my report about Leamon’s ranch on my laptop when Sophie burst out of the bedroom. Her eyes were wild, and her long black hair flew behind her as she darted to the front door.

  “Where are you going?” I demanded, rising from the table.

  Sophie was pulling on her shoes, didn’t even glance up when she said, “To Tracy’s.”

  “Why?”

  “I just am,” she said dismissively, snarling in that way that burned through all my nerves.

  “No.”

  Pulling the laces tight, her face away from me, she muttered, “Fuck you.”

  In the blink of an eye, I was standing over her, the muscles in my arms screaming against the force it took to hold back my fists. “Stop.”

  Her head jerked up: trails of tears streaked down her face, smeared mascara haloed her eyes. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she shouted.

  The heat of her anguish drove me back to the kitchen counter. Fury I could deal with, but anything else, anything more … My chest tightened, my vision narrowed, darkened. Pinholed. I closed my eyes, shook my head, pushed down all the thoughts, the impulses, and the screams. And when I opened my eyes, there was just Sophie. On the ground. Crying and tying her shoes like a child. My child. I dropped to my knees.

  “What’s going on, Sophie?” I said quietly, tentatively. “Why are you—why do you need to go to Tracy’s right now? It’s late.”

  “Because,” she wailed, then breathed deeply, the air shuddering in her chest. “Because Patrick is dead.”

  I shook my head. “Patrick?”

  “Yeah, Patrick.”

  “Okay.” I nodded. “Who is Patrick?”

  “A friend,” Sophie said impatiently. She scrambled to her feet, grabbed her bag.

  “A friend.”

  Sophie wove to push past me; I wove too, pushing back.

  “Like Jason?” I said too sharply.

  Sophie’s eyes flashed through her tears. “No. He’s my—he’s just a really good friend. From school.”

  “From school,” I repeated, trying to keep myself in check.

  Sophie rolled her eyes. “I mean, he just graduated in May.”

  What?

  “Patrick?” I whispered, looking past Sophie, looking over her shoulder into the distance where I could still see a male, his bloated body black and purple with pooled blood, patches of peach fuzz on his face, hanging at the end of a length of braided wire.

  “Yeah, Patrick!” Sophie hitched up her backpack. Fresh tears were puddling in her eyes, her shoulders were tense. “He hasn’t been around for a couple of weeks and now—” Her shoulders rose, her voice shuddered. “And now someone found him up in the hills and he’s … he’s dead.”

  My heartbeat quickened. “What do you mean in the hills? Where?”

  “I don’t know! Why would I know? Tracy just called me, okay?”

  But I couldn’t believe the kid that morning had been Sophie’s friend, that the casualty was that close. I couldn’t believe the medical examiner would have released an identification that early, that she could even know yet who the dead boy was. And why would some kid—why would Sophie’s friend—know about it anyway?

  Then everything sort of slowed down, came into focus: the tears on Sophie’s cheeks crept down to her jaw, the smell of her shampoo—green apple—filled my nostrils; the dim light from the lamp by the sofa was suddenly blinding.

  “Who found him?” I asked, my voice sounding tinny and distant in my ear
s.

  “I don’t know!” Sophie was shrieking now, her voice echoing in my brain, overloading every circuit. “How would I know?”

  “How old was he?” I said urgently. “How old was Patrick?”

  “It doesn’t matter; he’s dead!” She tore my fingers from her arms, even though I didn’t remember—don’t remember—grabbing her.

  “Tell me.”

  “Nineteen, okay?” Released, Sophie lunged for the door. “He just turned nineteen!”

  Nineteen.

  I had written nineteen on Doctor Fleischman’s yellow notepad that morning.

  “Victim is a Caucasian male, approximately nineteen to twenty-two years of age,” she had said from her perch on the ladder. “Death likely caused by asphyxiation, likely involuntary hanging, but”—she had leaned closer, peering through a magnifying glass at the discolored skin on the kid’s chest—“what appear to be electrical burns were inflicted to the torso prior to death. Two, maybe three days prior.”

  She had pulled back then and shifted her attention downward. “Other indications of torture include nails missing from digits two through four of the right hand, pre-mortem bruising and lacerations on the left side of the face, including the eye …”

  Downstairs, the heavy steel door slammed.

  * * *

  I waited for Sophie to come back, waited while I was stretched out, rigid, on the couch, with my jeans on and my boots lined up on the floor by my feet. All the lights in the apartment were off, so I studied the ridges and valleys on the ceiling by the yellow light of the sodium streetlamp.

  Around two, I heard footsteps on the gravel in the parking lot, and then the door downstairs opened. She crept up quietly; I smiled because it sounded like she’d even taken off her shoes. When her key turned in the lock of the apartment door, I threw my arm over my eyes and pretended to sleep.

  Later, I crept to her door and opened it silently. Inside, the bedroom that had always been bare when it was mine was now anything but. Clothes were scattered everywhere, books were stacked in uneven piles. Sophie’s pink backpack had been slung onto the chipped wooden desk. In the middle of it all was the girly white bed my parents had bought her for Christmas one year when I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—come home. She lay on the covers, curled in the fetal position, her hair tied up in a messy bun, her hands balled up under her chin.

  I walked into the room, fighting the urge to pick up the mess, and watched her in the light that seeped through the thin, frilly white curtains that had once hung at the window of the bedroom we had both spent our childhoods in. At just barely fifteen, she still looked like the child I had watched growing up during visits two or three times a week for years. Her cheeks were thinning but were still rounded; the skin on her arms peeking out from under her T-shirt was still silky and down covered. Regret surged through my body as though it were a physical force—a shock wave. I closed my eyes to keep it in.

  When I opened them again, the first thing I saw were the freckles sprinkled over her nose and cheeks. She looked like her Colville father, like Oren, with her dark hair and pale brown skin and almond eyes. Only her freckles were me.

  Her phone, clutched in her hand, buzzed. She stirred but didn’t wake. I glanced at the screen, then did a double take. The phone background was of her and a boy. He was a little older than her, but sort of wholesome looking—if you looked past their glassy eyes and flyaway hair and flushed cheeks. I thought I recognized the boy, imagined there was some resemblance there to the kid who had been hanging in Jeremy Leamon’s barn. But then the screen went dark, and I glanced back at my daughter, her rounded cheeks not so childlike, her arms more sinew than down. And I looked past the freckles and saw a lot more of me.

  2

  I didn’t sleep that night. Every time I tried, there was heat and sand and sweat dripping in my eyes. Then a fist pounding hollowly on a door and the crack of wood breaking against the butt of an M16 and air brushing past my face, air thick with decay and cool as a tomb.

  I woke, shaking. Again and again, I woke.

  3

  Numbness fades into fear. Paranoia. Obsession.

  My brain went on repeat. During the day, the same questions—Why him? Why me? Why Sophie? Who did this?—and the same guesses, played over and over. No answers. No resolution. At night, the dream—the heat, the pounding, the stench—dozens of times, hundreds of times, cycling through until I threw myself off the sofa, pulling at my hair, choking on the scream in my throat.

  Just before five AM on Sunday, I pulled on my running shoes and flew downstairs, then across the gravel and into the road. When I reached the bottom of the hill, I was sprinting, tearing across Jim Horn’s field, the dew on the browned grass splashing onto my calves, turning the dirt to mud. While the stars winked out, while the sky colored crimson, then orange, then peach, I ran circuits around the lake until I couldn’t breathe, until my throat burned. Even then, every detail still rang inside my head: every note I took, every one of Doc Fleischman’s gory revelations, every tear streaming down Sophie’s cheeks. So I kept running until I couldn’t think.

  Back at the apartment, my thighs dull and heavy, my skin still steaming from the shower, I sat down to write my report on Leamon’s property, but the first paragraph was nonsense, the second unfinished. My attention kept straying to the county map, the one with Jeremy Leamon’s property. The one without a barn, without any outbuildings at all. Not that that was surprising. “No permit, no problem,” right? But there was something different about this, something I couldn’t let go. Something about the kid, about the barn. And something about Jeremy Leamon and why his reaction didn’t fit.

  “Neighbor?” he’d said. Like he knew better. Like he knew more.

  Snap. The lead in my pencil broke, splintered where I was driving it into the surface of the table. I had to get this shit out of my head, had to push the blood and the terror and the dreams back into the dark corners. To do that, I needed answers. I needed the kid to be put to rest. I called the Sheriff’s Office, but no one answered Darren’s extension. I called his cell and got no joy there either. Not like I expected him to tell me anything, even though we’d known each other since we were five. He was a professional; that much he’d made plain at the barn. So instead of trying again, I grabbed my keys.

  When I arrived at the county building just before noon, the parking lot was empty, the guard station deserted, the hallways silent. The only sound was my boots padding across the carpet, then tapping on the concrete stairs, and then on the concrete floors, until I arrived at a heavy gray door in the furthest corner of the basement. After unlocking it, I walked past the old wooden desk and the coffee cup that was always half empty, and into the rows of cabinets stacked up high.

  I pulled the map of Jeremy Leamon’s place and spread it out on the long table in the corner where snowmelt trickles in through a crack in the foundation every spring. There was the track I had driven down two days before. It started at the county road, then wound up and hugged the property line until it circled back around to where it began. Must have been a logging road once upon a time. But there weren’t any buildings alongside it, and the file didn’t include any permits for one. So I pulled the map for the neighbor’s place, lined it up alongside. And there it was, on the edge of the property, uphill from a little house and the head of a long drive going down to the county road that went past my front door: the barn where the kid had been strung up to die.

  When I left the building, the late afternoon sun stung my eyes so badly, tears seeped from the corners. Wiping them away, I got in my truck and drove north up the highway. It was thirty minutes from Okanogan to my mart, but only another ten minutes from there to Leamon’s neighbor’s place. I’d go up the gravel drive and flash my county ID if I had to in order to trek up that hill and get to that barn. I’d do it because I needed to, because I had this visceral need to know how Patrick had gotten there. But by the time I arrived, the sun was sliding behind the mountains, and the trees were
reaching over the gravel drive with long, dark fingers. Wind swept through the window of my truck and froze the sweat on my face.

  I shivered.

  I rolled up the window and stared out the windshield, watched the leaves dance in the breeze, listened to it whistle and hum through the cracks in the body of my beat-up truck. I was being stupid. I was being paranoid. I was making things up. There was nothing up there. Nothing wrong. I was wrong.

  I threw the truck into gear and drove away.

  4

  The flies. My God, the flies.

  It was dark, so dark in the passageway that the door at the end was just a darker blot in the gloom. But beyond it—so loud we could have found the door just by listening—buzzing, humming. Thousands of pairs of wings roaring, drowned out only by the pounding of a private’s M16 against the old, dry wood of the door.

  Then, crack.

  The wood splintered. The private’s foot thundered against the door and it swung open, and that smell poured out, high and thick and sweet. We filed in: one soldier from the left, two from the right, then me. All of us with rifles at the ready, pointing into the dark corners, looking for a skull to smash in.

  “Jesus,” one of them said.

  The second didn’t get anything out, just dropped his rifle onto the packed earth floor, doubled over, and puked.

  Me, I stood there, staring. Staring at him hanging from a heavy metal hook screwed into the ceiling: bloated, blackened, unrecognizable. His chest bare, his feet bare, the strings of his Army-issue pants loose around his ankles. I stared at him hanging in the beam of the third soldier’s headlamp, the soldier who stood there, transfixed, horrified, drinking it in for long, still moments before looking away. Before plunging the kid into darkness again.