“I will!” Lauria shouted back the last words to her mother. Like with her father, the words “I love you” would be the last words Lorene heard from her daughter. Kathy smiled back at Lorene and slowly started to move the car forward.
The three of them made one more stop, this time at the Jack’s convenience store in Welch, owned by the grandmother of Ashley’s boyfriend, Jeremy Hurst. They picked up some soda and invited Jeremy as a last-minute decision, which he accepted.
It was to be a night of modest celebration. They settled in, with Ashley and Lauria shifting near the kitchen table by Danny, and Jeremy Hurst following shortly after. Kathy took the cake to the counter and planted seventeen candles in it, including one for luck, using it to light her cigarette. With her back to the rest, Kathy glanced over at the piece of paper on the fridge. One shot. It took her attention long enough that she didn’t notice the wax melting until she felt the heat under her face. She forced herself away from the letter, a manifesto of sorts, and set down her smoke, instructing Jeremy to turn off the lights as he came in.
The lights went out, and Kathy came with birthday cake ablaze. The flames of the candles sparkled in her beady but smiling brown eyes as she set the cake in front of her daughter. They sang “Happy Birthday to You,” Lauria singing louder than the rest, as Jeremy took a seat and playfully pinched Ashley’s side.
Ashley closed her eyes and made a wish.
The birthday candles were extinguished by breath, a breath as long as the prairie’s. Now the unlit home could not be noticed against the nighttime outside, and the cheers of her family and friends rolled in short form from the hills. It is from here, from this jumping-off point, that it is anybody’s guess as to what happened after, between a wish and the dawn’s early light when the trailer was found in flames.
I’ve driven the route between Vinita and Welch more times than I can count, more times than I’ve visited my childhood home. Each trip is slightly brighter and louder than the last, to a place where it takes time for my eyes and ears to adjust. Coming here, to where they were last seen, isn’t something I’m able to resist. I’m drawn. Obsessed. Manic. Sometimes I come up the driveway and think of the five of them here: Danny, Kathy, Ashley, Lauria, and Jeremy. Sometimes I imagine I am them. But as my senses adjust to deep, dark country, I light a smoke there on the Freeman property and imagine that I am the killer or killers who struck the first flame. I blow out my match, adding a pinch of sulfur to the pastures surrounding in the same way as Ashley blew out her birthday candles.
And then the prairie falls silent.
5
* * *
ONE BODY
* * *
December 30, 1999
The Morning of the Fire
Like the Freemans, Welchans Jack and Diane Bell lived in an area so rural that it didn’t even fall within the city limits of any existing town. Instead, it was referred to as West of Welch; what locals called “the sticks.” It was early morning, and their farmhouse was dimmed, so as not to wake their capricious teenage son. The home, only a few miles deeper into the country than the Freemans’, was all long shadows, the smell of Scotch pine sap, and the emphysemic breathing of a percolator. In the stillness at the bottom of each exhale, the outside sound of handcrafted wind chimes made of hammer-flattened spoons and forks. Every house in Oklahoma seemed to harmonize with the wind.
The pickup warmed up outside. Only a few miles south of the Kansas border, the ranching town was starry and still as the married couple got ready for work. They were employed at the Eastern State Hospital for the Insane, located about twenty miles south in Vinita, where a working farm for the patients once served as an economic factor for the county. Jack dried his chest-length yellowed beard over the woodstove’s heat as Diane fixed thermoses of chili and a side of leftover corn bread. His teeth ached that morning as he tied his beard into a single ponytail with three rubber bands, staring absently into the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree.
“Fetch the coffee,” Diane whispered through the dark. Jack went to the open kitchen and filled two large mugs with Folgers. After Jack pulled the cord of the Christmas tree lights from the wall, they left, clad in their Carhartts and long johns, going on with the hackneyed “just like any other morning.”
It was a wonder that the lightest breeze could find this town, and that morning, it crooned like a raw bow across a cello string, long and low. At approximately 5:40, Jack and Diane climbed into their Dodge pickup, not planning to fully wake until their tires reached the pavement of a God’s honest road. The leather shifted under them, the radio tuned to the local weather.
“You unplugged the tree, right?” asked Diane.
Jack grunted, not a yes or no about him at that ungodly hour, ungodly because of the way he had tossed and turned the night before, prodded by toothache. They headed south over the vast stubble that was the landscape, serenaded by the soft scrape of tires on dirt, fiddling with the heating vents. Nothing but blackness for as far as their sleep-crusted eyes could see, but for the pockets of illuminated grit caught in the truck’s headlights. Had they driven on just a little farther, they would have seen the familiar yellow signs inflamed in the lights, warning: HITCHHIKERS MAY BE ESCAPING INMATES—signs you’ll still find in the area today.
As Diane sipped her coffee, she noticed a glow in the eastern sky just beyond a hill, a moving shade of tawny blotting out the stars. She nudged her husband’s arm, pointing his attention due east to this little light that danced on the world’s edge. For a split second, she wondered if it were the first flash of day, a brief panic at the idea of being late for work, but that couldn’t have been right. Jack tilted his head and let a silent profanity fall down his ponytailed beard.
He turned the car east toward the light, his headlights streaking the hand-painted sign that read JUSTICE FOR SHANE at the end of the long driveway. The town being small enough, they knew the farm belonged to the Freemans, a family of four. A family of three now, Jack had to mentally correct himself, since the Freeman boy had been found near a ditch about ten miles west the winter before. Suddenly the couple was wide-awake, turning north up the moderate incline of the seven-hundred-foot-long driveway and edging closer. The Freeman trailer was engulfed in flames.
Jack slammed the gears into reverse and raced in the direction of the highway, stopping at the first house he saw: the Sherricks’.
Today, Wade Sherrick is a cattle rancher who lives at the end of that dirt road, he on the south end, the Freemans once at the north. “And you thought I was dead, eh?” he laughs when I mention that it took me three years to see him, because I had been misinformed; I thought he was an elderly man who’d died some years before. “Not sure what that says about me.” It was only out of curiosity that I stopped my car by his barn in early 2019 when seeing two young men doing farmwork from the sheds. I knew by their young faces that they probably didn’t have much firsthand information about the 1999 fire up the road, but I ask about the late Wade Sherrick, only to learn that Wade was alive and well, and just over there. Wade comes from the barn, winter pale from the shadows, middle-aged but still handsome in that callused-hand way you’d find around Welch. I follow him across the street to an office connected to his farmhouse, a cluttered room filled with agricultural newsletters and dusty trophies and belts from his days as a rodeo rider, a hobby that his two sons inherited (they all had a laugh at my thinking Wade was dead). I ask to wear his cowboy hat before inquiring about the morning of the fire. He and his sons are kind. Wade’s wife, Kim, a local mail carrier, is working that day.