Maybe my grandmother knew the right two words—she just didn’t want to lay down a curse on her only granddaughter. She let the town have the honor of nicknaming me Bat Girl instead.
By the time I was ten, my mother and grandmother were both dead of breast cancer, leaving the brethren of small-town Texas cops and their wives to help raise me. All of them and my father are now buried in the same cemetery, within a thousand feet of each other, while Wyatt and I face off on his front porch, the invisible force of them between us.
“What are you going to do, Odette?” He’s issuing a challenge. He feels me wavering. Daddy told me never to come back to this town. But he also made a silent will that he never put to paper, with Wyatt as my inheritance.
The wasp suddenly darts, buzzing against my arm. I step back and knock my heel into the pyramid of paint cans. Wyatt steadies me with a grip on my arm while I stare into eyes that make most people want to run. A lot of people think he’s capable of killing, that he’s done it at least twice, and maybe twenty times over. I think he could kill, but there hasn’t been a first time.
“If you picked somebody up while you were on the road, just tell me,” I plead. “Was it a runaway at one of the truck stops looking for a place to crash? No harm done. Or maybe the tip I got was just more trash talk? If so, let me walk the house so I can say I did. Run a flashlight in the storm shelter. I want to be the first and last one out here today.”
Wyatt’s fingers dig deeper in my skin, making up his mind—letting me know he’ll always win a game of mental gymnastics if it’s just the two of us.
“Let’s prove them all wrong, Wyatt. Let me in.” I’m urging.
His handsome face stretches into the guileless mask that has hypnotized me since I was sixteen.
“Come on in, Odette. Say hi to Trumanell.”
I nod and step across the threshold, even though Trumanell has been missing for ten years.
6
A shape is unfolding on the couch, and for the briefest and most ridiculous of seconds, I think it might be Trumanell.
My eyes struggle to adjust to the shadows of a room completely shut off from the sun. I brush against a curtain, the same one that used to hold a metal shoehorn and a six-ounce container of ground chili pepper in its hem. Weapons, Wyatt told me, when we were sixteen.
“Turn on a light,” I order Wyatt.
Shit. There is a girl. I was still hoping this was another hoax. She’s barely covered in a thin sundress, so dirty I can’t tell the color. Her face, hidden in her hands.
The first thing I do is step away from Wyatt.
The first thing I think is that she is young, barely in her teens.
I don’t want to believe he’d hurt her. I really don’t. But she has to be scared out of her mind in this Hitchcockian setup. A house in the middle of nowhere. A man who talks to a ghost.
Wyatt’s mental status is why I regularly drive out here and check in. Why people leave the cops anonymous notes and call the second they spy Wyatt’s white Silverado pickup somewhere they don’t think it should be. Why he’s everybody’s first suspect when any girl past thirteen is an hour past curfew because she’s busy getting to third base with a boy and an ounce of weed.
Sometimes I think the town could have let Trumanell go, if Wyatt had stopped talking to her. I edge a little closer. The girl squeezes herself more tightly into the couch cushions, grabbing a pillow and wrapping her arms around it.
I can’t see enough face to tell if she’s familiar, a girl from around here, or part of the grim wallpaper of missing Texas girls that is the home page on my computer. I check the list every morning, because my father did, seeking a connection to Trumanell that is nonexistent. It doesn’t make sense that Trumanell was the victim of a serial killer who hunted Texas cornfields for his victims. I mean, what serial killer takes a girl’s daddy along? Frank Branson is still just as missing as his daughter.
I kick aside a book splayed on the floor. Poetry. Pennies are scattered on the coffee table. Frank Branson had a habit of flipping coins in front of a bottle of Jack, meting out decisions accordingly. I’ve watched Wyatt do the same thing.
Nobody in this room has a good story, I think. Wyatt. The girl. Me. Trumanell, on her never-ending walk in the ether of dust and legend.
I’ve eased my gun out and am waving him over. “I don’t know what is going on, Wyatt, but you need to stand over there. By Mama Pat’s blue chair. Near the picture of Lila.”
Lila, as sharply pretty and tragic as always, has been the only photograph in this room since I can remember. I was sixteen when Wyatt first told me Lila’s story, an age when I found her fate more poetic than gruesome. I mused about whether there was a reason she chose a red ribbon to hang herself and not blue or yellow or green. Later, I thought about the physics of it, why the ribbon didn’t snap before it could break her neck.
A year ago, I convinced Wyatt to take Lila off the wall and remove the back of the frame. The pencil scratch on the back of her photograph said her name was Alice Doling, and there are no Dolings in the Branson line. Frank Branson got her out of a secondhand bin and transformed her into one of his big fat lies.
And yet, Wyatt hung her back in place. She is still the silent, constant witness to what goes on in this house, while Trumanell’s face is conspicuously absent.
Wyatt hasn’t edged any closer to the staircase.
The living room walls are starting to hum, snapping into focus. Little pieces of paper with Wyatt’s bold, slanted handwriting are taped here and there—Trumanell’s bits of wisdom whispered to him daily.
There is more quote clutter every time I step across this threshold. I wait for the day an ivy of Trumanellisms will creep over the tables and chairs and floor, up the stairs, out the windows.
My eyes are darting from the girl to Wyatt to Lila. If it was anybody but Wyatt, I would have snapped on handcuffs as soon as I saw the girl on the couch. I would have alerted my partner. I wouldn’t be the lone cop standing in this room right now, trying to make a call.
There’s so much history. So much guilt.
And, of course, my big mistake. Three weeks and two days ago. It’s why Wyatt is standing here with all the power while I’m the one pointing the gun.
The excuse-making part of me says that if cellphones didn’t exist, if Finn had opened his arms and told me to get in bed that night, if Deal or No Deal hadn’t been at such a high fever pitch that a husband of sixty-four years had to ask his wife seven times to turn it down, if Texas didn’t boil every fucking piece of reason out of the air—I wouldn’t have gone to the bar.
I wouldn’t have downed five shots of tequila.
Wyatt wouldn’t have risen out of the corner booth in the back and brushed the edge of my bare shoulder on the way out.
An accident? On purpose?
Did it matter that it had already been a day of bad romance?
That at 6 A.M., my partner and I had been summoned to a house where a husband had beaten his wife unconscious for checking her cellphone during sex?
That a few hours later, I was sliding the gun from the trembling hand of an eighty-seven-year-old man whose spouse was still upright on her faded couch, confused why her shoulder had a bullet hole in it?
My partner and I turned down the TV and temped that living room at 100 degrees, while pretty girls on TV opened briefcases with prize money no one would win.