Peanut Butter and Nelly, with a bun on her head, we all want her dead, ’cause she won’t let us add some grape jelly. That’s what the boys on the playground chanted. In middle school, they shortened her name to Jelly for the round parts of her she’d never let them touch.
It’s not like Trumanell didn’t eventually win. Boys liked Trumanell.
That bun, it made Trumanell prettier. She’d stick flowers in it and the fake jewels she inherited from Mama Pat. Every girl in school started wearing a bun even when no one on TV did. That’s how much everybody wanted to be like True, how popular she was.
Trumanell looks real pretty now, worrying over Angel, with her hair falling down. Free. I wish the rest of her could feel free, too. I wish I didn’t have to bring the world in to her. She’d be good company in the truck. She’d keep me from picking up things I shouldn’t. But, no, my big sister says she’ll be here waiting for me when I get back. We both know she’s really waiting for Daddy. Ten years now since things went wrong. That makes her twenty-nine. She still looks nineteen.
Six to eight, that’s her rhythm now. Up at dawn cleaning things that don’t need to be cleaned, wandering the garden, picking peaches, humming Patsy Cline one minute and Beyoncé the next, still telling me everything will be OK.
Trumanell is the only one who believes my soul is still available to save. One hundred and ten percent, it’s not. God and I have an understanding. Our talks, His tests—that’s just us passing the time. This big white house, my purgatory.
I joke with Trumanell that I could quit trucking and turn this place into a museum. She could sit on the porch and sell sweet iced tea and Mama’s snickerdoodles folded up in Saran Wrap.
We could charge admission like the fucking LBJ Ranch, where our thirty-sixth president invited people to his brick house on the prairie like it was the Taj Majal.
I’d splatter just a hint of blood-red paint on all that relentless white on the house, because less is always more. Let the mind do the work, not the eyes. Daddy taught me that. I’d plant the wheat back and tell the real story of Peanut Butter and Nelly to the kids who make up stuff about us in the fields that touch the edges of ours. Sipping beer on their tailgates, howling at the moon, scaring the shit out of themselves, rolling up and revving their pickups at my cattle gate. I lay low every June 7, listening to them holler.
What’s in that big truck? You’re crazy as fuck!
Chantilly and Lace! Show us your face!
A decade later, nobody in town has the full picture of what happened out here at the Branson place. They just shake my cattle gate, seethe, and wonder.
Angel is back to playing dead on the couch. Trumanell is still on the floor, yawning, saying she’s ready to gown down, even though it’s the middle of the afternoon.
It’s Angel who jumps to life at the rap on the door.
For the first time, she sees my gun.
Part Two
* * *
ODETTE
Once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won’t.
—Odette Tucker’s favorite quote,
from In Cold Blood
4
The Branson place is rising up in the distance like Moby Dick out of the sea—a big white territorial whale that seems like it scared everything else away. It pretty much did.
So I don’t have a good feeling. I never do when I head out here. If the house is a killer whale, the past is a maverick shark circling its body, waiting for me.
Ten years ago, the fury at the Branson place was deafening. Machine against rock, gun against glass, metal against clay. More than two hundred men rolled over the cattle gate and stormed the farm uninvited. Grandfathers, fathers, brothers, uncles, doctors, lawyers, farmers, teachers, plumbers.
They hunted for nineteen-year-old Trumanell with shovels, backhoes, and metal detectors. They smashed windows with rifle butts, shredded crime scene tape, slaughtered wheat, dug holes until rats and snakes slithered homeless across a field turned into an apocalyptic, deeply pocked moon.
At the time, Trumanell’s father, Frank Branson, also missing, was suspect No. 1. His son, Wyatt, was No. 2. It had been twenty days. The local cops, far outnumbered, had the choice of pulling out guns and laying waste to the people they sat next to at church or standing back and watching their crime scene get destroyed.
My father was their boss. At his orders, the police stood back and let the town go to work. A wild storm came up that night after the marauders exhausted themselves. It transformed all the holes to tiny mud ponds. Remnants of crime scene tape flew for miles that night, twisting into the high branches of trees, chaotic yellow ribbons calling for Trumanell, the town sweetheart, to come home.
I still see bits of yellow plastic threaded in birds’ nests and cattails every spring and wonder if it’s tape that blew from the Branson place. I always wonder if Trumanell is sending me personal messages, instead of just torn peanut M&M wrappers, which is what it was the one time I climbed an old oak to look.
I floor the car to 80, kicking up red dust. The scanner is running its mouth like a dark comic: A squirrel is preventing a woman from entering her house. A man at 3262 Halsall says his wife is hitting him with his lucky baseball bat.
There’s no chatter about why I’m alone, scared, speeding on a prairie road with trees scattered like sailboats, thinking how my daddy, the town’s late great top cop, told me to never come back to this little Texas hellhole unless it was to bury his ashes. Don’t try to find the truth about Trumanell. Some answers are left to the by-and-by.
Yet I did come back. Five years ago, I buried his ashes by my mother’s in Holy Trinity Cemetery on the edge of town, and became a rookie cop here, falling in line behind my father and grandfather. I dragged along my brand-new husband, a Chicago lawyer named Finn, after Huck Finn, who agreed to give my hometown a five-year try. He knew how much I was haunted by June 7, 2005, the black square on my calendar. He knew how much the night Trumanell disappeared was threaded in my own story.
People weren’t surprised when the moving truck arrived and unpacked my things at my father’s house instead of hauling his away. Natives often return, especially the ones who swear they never will. Texas is a beautiful poison you drink from your mother’s breast; the older you get and the farther you run, the more it pounds in your blood.
And then there is my own legacy in this town. I’ve been told I’m special, a brave girl, ever since I was three and I climbed a ladder with a piece of Tupperware to trap a rabid bat that was thinking about taking a bite out of my eleven-month-old cousin, Maggie. I’ll never forget she was laughing and pointing at death while it spun around her head.
The truth is, I’m not brave. I’m not even that willing. I’m just more afraid of one thing happening than the other.
More afraid of my cousin dying than falling off a ladder that might as well have been a skyscraper. More afraid of not being a cop like my daddy than being one. More afraid of leaving things unfinished here than eventually going all in and finishing them.
More afraid things would go wrong today if I brought my partner, who thinks Wyatt Branson is batshit crazy and should have been locked up years ago, even though there is no proof he killed his missing sister and father. Even though Wyatt was found far from the house that night, out of his mind, down by the lake. Even though my own daddy worked the Branson case and, until the day he died, proclaimed Wyatt innocent.