I swing behind Wyatt’s rig, telling myself this is another false alarm. Ever since that incendiary documentary aired last month marking the ten-year anniversary, the emergency calls to the station have tripled.
That’s because a retired FBI agent sitting in his velour La-Z-Boy, face in half-shadow, told the world he suspected that Wyatt was a killer—a serial killer—still at work.
The lens swung from that La-Z-Boy into the eager, open faces of three bleached blondes and one redhead posed on motorcycles, groupies who chase Wyatt on long-haul trips and post his whereabouts.
One of them claimed she saw Wyatt buy a “suspicious blue dress” at a Walmart outside of Beaumont. The redhead, the prettiest, tossed her hair aside to show red marks on her throat. She said Wyatt gripped her neck during a sexual encounter in a rest stop bathroom. “I’ll never fame-bang a guy again,” she vowed earnestly, while the camera crawled down her cleavage. “The sex was hot, but I thought I was going to die.”
An Oscar-winning director teamed with a well-known journalist to make this documentary, and still they got it wrong. They got it all wrong.
I’m hoping the anonymous tipster got it wrong, too. It was one simple sentence that had me pounding the gas.
Wyatt Branson has a girl out there.
The fresh paint on the Branson place blares white noise, sticky in the heat, only three weeks old. The field is shaved as close as a groom’s face, the way Wyatt keeps it now.
I crack the car window, slowing, listening to tires crunch against gravel. It’s the only sound I hear. July is always hot and utterly still. It’s a melancholy that makes my heart ache, like grief is rising up out of the soil for every dead thing that ever lived.
I had decided no lights. No siren.
Wyatt paints the house every June 7—walls, shutters, shingles, columns. He does it “at Trumanell’s insistence” even though he says there is not enough white paint to cover up the things that went on in this house.
Wyatt’s painting ritual marks the beginning of summer. It wakes the town mourning for its missing girl. The owner of Dicky’s Hardware, not wanting to mess with Wyatt, sets out twenty-one gallons of Chantilly Lace like clockwork, forty percent discount, three rollers and two brushes for free.
Wyatt says Trumanell thumbs through the paint samples he brings home every year, but she always picks Chantilly Lace.
Not Wedding Veil white, because it depresses Trumanell that she only got to play bride walking down an aisle of corn with a daisy crown on her head. Not Seapearl, because she’s never heard the ocean roaring except in a shell that showed up in the field out of nowhere. Not Lily, because it takes her back to the odor at Mama Pat’s funeral. Not Moonbeam, because the moon wasn’t always their friend out in that field. Not Bone, because it reminds her of the sound of her brother’s arm snapping.
I shove open the car door, not trying to be quiet, figuring Wyatt already knows I’m here. When I was sixteen, Wyatt Branson told me he could hear the flutter of my eyelashes. He told me that moths, those bits of flying paper, had the best hearing on earth, and he could listen just like one. Wyatt was a good liar.
Today, I choose to believe him. He hears my eyes blink, the hard swallow in my throat, my first step up the arthritic porch.
The fields are deserted in all directions. The barn, sitting still. Wyatt hasn’t farmed the land or worked livestock or horses for at least five years.
What should appear perfectly normal sets off tiny alarms.
A woman’s dress—not blue—drifting by itself on the clothesline.
A hose curled around a jumbo-sized bottle of weed killer with a dandelion label.
Paint cans stacked in an obsessive pyramid on the porch.
Pink impatiens, Trumanell’s favorite, in a planter, sunk in rich, damp soil.
Heavy curtains that have hung in the windows since I was a kid, drawn tight.
I gently pull on the screen door to test it. Latched.
The silence, so endlessly white.
I think how life might be different if it weren’t for that bat setting the course of things.
It made me believe life could turn out all right if I tried.
Even after June 7, 2005, I still do.
I raise my hand to knock.
5
Wyatt opens up after I’ve been banging on the door a full minute. He swallows the space with the hulk of his frame, dressed in his regular uniform of white T-shirt, faded Levi’s, old boots weathered by rain, dust, and shit. Behind the screen, he’s pointing a Glock. At my head.
My view inside is almost completely blocked. He doesn’t move to unlatch the screen, shredded by wasps. One clings to the screen, its face pocked with black spots, every one of them like the black teardrop tattoos of a man who has committed murder. I knew, growing up, that wasps and prisoners were more ferocious if they were marked this way.
“Odette, what a surprise.” A smile cracks his face. “Back for seconds?”
“Put up the gun. I have to do my job. I’ve got a tip and I need to follow it. If I don’t, someone else at the station will. You should prefer it’s me.”
He says nothing, still grinning. He’s always been primal, both aggressor and protector, and the danger of not knowing which unnerves me every time. I’m well aware that my uniform squares everything off, rendering my body sexless. His eyes start to snake their way over me anyway—the dark blond ponytail with the roots stained brown with sweat; the fingernails painted black, resting on the gun at my hip; the gray rubber wedding band on my left hand that Finn insisted I wear on the job because I always abandoned the shiny gold one on the dresser.
“Oh, I definitely prefer you,” he says, tucking the gun in his jeans.
“I want to get this out of the way first. What happened last month was a mistake.” The words rush out of my mouth. “It isn’t happening again. Ever.”
“What did you think I meant by seconds? I’m referring to the couple of squares of peach cobbler left.”
“It was a mistake.”
“I got it the first time. Did you come all the way out here to tell me that? How’s Huckleberry, anyway?” I open my mouth and close it. I’m not about to tell him Finn packed a bag and left me last week, two days shy of the full five-year term he promised me.
“Somebody saw a girl in your truck when you rode through town earlier,” I continue steadily. “Do you have a girl out here, Wyatt?” I let my eyes flick to the dress on the line, drying into a brittle scarecrow.
“Are you jealous?” He unlatches the screen and pulls the door shut behind him. His body is thick and impenetrable, poised like it was when he was a high school running back, something fierce about to spring loose when the whistle blew.
Lion’s Eye. That’s what my grandmother anointed Wyatt when she saw him for the first time, at eight, his gaze fastened on the back of my head in a church pew. She told me to stay away from that boy. Her whole life, my grandmother described everyone she met with two words, like she was a chief naming Indians.
Except me. She said I was an enigma. Beating chance when I shouldn’t have. Brave when I shouldn’t be. I fought so hard to enter the world I arrived with a bruise over one eye. My mother, a fan of Swan Lake, kissed the bruise and named me Odette after a dying swan, dooming me from the start.