Fallen mountains, p.14
Fallen Mountains, page 14
“Not today,” she said, scratching his ears.
They walked back to the truck. Some nights, they walked briskly, their faces red from the strain, their bodies growing warm beneath their layers. Laney never minded that pace, the feel of the work her body was doing. But tonight—with spring heavy in the air, and the day still warm even though the sun had set and the sky was churning pink and turquoise—tonight they walked in a dawdling, deliberate way, as if the night would wait until they returned to the truck to arrive, as if they could postpone the day’s ending. Chase reached out and hung his arm over Laney’s shoulder, and she pressed into him, content.
Despite her own happiness, and the glimpses she saw in Chase, too, Laney sensed that it wouldn’t last, that it couldn’t possibly last, so her pleasure continued to be fouled by a fear that always lurked in the backdrop of each good moment. What was happening at the farm would inevitably blow up, she knew that, and no matter how she imagined it panning out, it didn’t end well. For now, Chase and Transom were avoiding each other at all costs, but Laney felt that eventually they would come to blows about all that had happened. It was only a matter of time. And then there was the issue of her secret—her history with Transom—which had remained a secret so far, but which continued to plague her, as much as she tried to shove it down and forget about it.
In fact, now that things were spoiled between Chase and Transom, now that there was no motivation to protect Chase from the hurt that the secret would bring, Laney worried that Transom had no reason to keep his mouth shut. One day, he might spill it, spew it out like a torch, just for spite. Transom could be mean like that, saying things, doing things, for no other reason than to inflict pain.
She’d spent a good deal of time contemplating a way to get rid of him: a lie. I’m carrying your child, she could say. If you leave Fallen Mountains and never come back, I won’t tell Teresa. Would that work? The possibility of devastating Chase would no longer matter to him, she presumed, but he would, Laney suspected, care about how such information would affect his relationship with his new girlfriend. Maybe it would be enough. Maybe it would make him go away, his girlfriend, too. Laney considered asking Possum for advice—all the hints he dropped about being careful when it came to Transom, the way he’d pounded his fist on the table when she’d told him about her affair with him—maybe he would have some insights. Perhaps together, they could devise a plan. Because, of course, there was always more than one way to make a problem disappear.
AFTER
Red leaned against a desk inside the Fallen Mountains Police Station, staring out the long, store-front window. The sun scalded the pavement. The Jimmy, parked in front of the entrance in a spot without shade, sent off a glare as blinding as a spaceship. The heat seeped into the building, and big drafts of warmth flowed inside every time someone opened the door.
“You ready?” Mick asked, tucking two bottles of water under his arm.
Red nodded. He grabbed his notepad and followed Mick back the hallway into the boardroom.
“I’m not a suspect, am I?” Laney asked Red, frowning. She looked up from where she had been sitting for fifteen minutes, waiting alone. She stood up. “That’s not why I’m here, right?”
“Have a seat, Ms. Moore,” Mick Dashel said, and then added, “Please.” He placed a water bottle in front of her and eased into the chair across from her. Red followed suit, taking the seat beside him.
Laney slumped into the chair. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Mick shrugged. “Should you be a suspect?”
Laney turned and glared at Red. “What’s going on here?”
Since Red had avoided the interview with Chase, he felt that, this time, he should stick around, although the truth was, he hated this whole situation, hauling one good, familiar face after another into the station, asking people to dig up their past. Looking at private photographs, too. It was different for Mick, who didn’t know these people, who hadn’t known them since they were kids and didn’t see them at church or Wheeler’s or the grocery store—to him, they were just pictures, just pieces of a puzzle. But Red didn’t want to know who was fooling around with whom, he didn’t want to be witness to any airing out of laundry.
Mick extended a hand to Laney. “Mick Dashel,” he said. “I’m assisting Sheriff Redifer on the Shultz case.”
Laney reluctantly shook Mick’s hand. He clicked on a handheld recorder and leaned back in his chair. “Ms. Moore, do you know why you’re here?”
She shook her head ever so slightly, and stared at Red. “Sheriff Redifer called and said he needed some help with Transom’s case. So here I am. He didn’t say anything about me being a suspect.”
Red shrugged and tilted his head in apology.
“Well, Ms. Moore, we haven’t found a body yet, so no, you’re not really a suspect, but evidence is suggesting that Transom did not disappear on his own volition this time.” He paused, looking at her face. “So we’re just trying to consider every angle here.”
Mick opened a folder and took out the photographs Red had found. He slid them across the table. “We found these in Transom’s desk,” he said.
Laney took the photographs in her hand and studied them, her face burning red, her jaw clenching. “These pictures are from high school,” she said, frowning at Mick Dashel. “Fifteen, maybe sixteen years ago.” She skated the photographs back across the table to him and took a deep breath and Red felt sorry for her, for how embarrassed she was. “I hope you didn’t bring me in here just to ask me about pictures from half a lifetime ago. I was a teenager when those were taken.”
Mick tucked the pictures into the folder. “It’s just odd, don’t you think, that Transom would hold onto them? I mean, they were in a very small stack, with just a few other pictures, like they were something he’d intentionally set aside, like they were important.” He looked at her face, searching for something there. “It’s like those photographs meant something to him.”
Laney shook her head and shrugged. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Outside, an eighteen-wheeler roared past, its brakes thundering, rattling the old windows. The air-conditioning units groaned, one on the front of the building and one on the western side, but they were not enough to cool down the building, not nearly enough.
“Tell me about your relationship with Transom Shultz,” Mick said.
Laney folded her arms across her chest. “I’ve known Transom since I was a kid,” she said. “We both spent a lot of time at the Hardy farm.” She shrugged. “That’s about it.”
“But there’s more to it than that,” Mick said. “I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks as though you may have been naked in those photos? At least from the waist up.” He took the photos out of the folder and studied them, as if to double-check.
Laney shot a glance at Red, who shifted uncomfortably. “We were involved, for a while.”
Mick nodded. “But now, you don’t like him. You don’t approve of him.”
Laney wrinkled her nose.
“Your mouth turns down a little bit when you talk about him,” Mick explained. “It’s a sign of contempt. Universally, actually.”
She shrugged. “You’re right, I didn’t like him.”
“And why’s that?”
Laney paused. “He’s selfish,” she said. “He always has been. Look at what he’s done to the farm. Jack and Maggie, they practically raised him. His parents, they were both crazy in their own ways. Trust me, I was at their house a few times when Transom and me were together. And I mean, even if Transom didn’t have enough respect for Jack and Maggie, for what they stood for, at the very least he could’ve thought of Chase. Transom was supposed to be his best friend.”
“Do you think Chase had something to do with this, then?” Mick asked.
Red shifted in his chair, took out his handkerchief, and began blotting his face.
Laney’s eyes widened. “No. I didn’t say that.” She gripped the table. “I never said that. You can’t go putting words in my mouth.” She looked at Red. “Sheriff?”
“Mr. Dashel—” Red said.
Mick nodded. “Okay, tell me. What do you think happened to Transom?”
Laney twisted her mouth to the side. She reached out and pulled the cap off the bottle of water Mick had handed her earlier. She took a drink and looked out the window, and Red followed her gaze: old Widow Ross was shuffling past, struggling to navigate the uneven sidewalk in her walker. It was far too hot for a woman in her eighties to be out.
“I’m asking you what you think happened,” Mick explained.
“You know he left before. Just disappeared, without telling anyone, without saying good-bye.” She swirled the water in her plastic bottle and crossed her feet at the ankles.
“We know that,” Mick said. “But we’ve got reason to believe that isn’t what happened this time.” He leaned back in his chair. “Tell me more about what kind of person Transom was. Who might want him to . . . disappear?”
For a moment, she was quiet, staring out the front window, watching Widow Ross. “I don’t know,” she said, finally. “I don’t know what happened to him.”
“Tell us why you hated him,” he said. He folded his hands on the cream-colored formica tabletop.
“I didn’t hate him,” Laney said. She squirmed in the old chair and glared at Red again.
“All right. Tell us why you didn’t like him. You seem like a nice person, a good person. Red has told me as much.” Mick lifted his hands from the table. “Transom Shultz, on the other hand, well, he was probably not a nice person. At least that’s the impression I get. I know his father, and like they say, the apple don’t fall far from the tree. I hear JT came to Fallen Mountains, pushed people around, took charge of the town. And then Transom did the same thing, basically.”
“I care about this town,” Laney said. “I’ve lived here my whole life. I didn’t like the way things were heading: Transom letting the oil company in at the farm, after all Jack and Maggie done for him. It just wasn’t right.” She paused, looking hard at Mick’s face. “But that doesn’t mean I did anything about it.”
Mick scribbled a few things in his electronic tablet and leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his chest. “One more thing. Where were you on Memorial Day weekend?”
Mick slid a calendar he’d borrowed from Leigh’s desk across the table to her, and Laney looked at it, frowning.
“Well, Friday night I went to the shooting match. The rest of the weekend, I stayed home. I planted my garden. I didn’t go anywhere.”
“And can someone vouch for your whereabouts?”
“I was with Chase Hardy. He was with me, he was at my house.”
“The entire weekend? You were together for the entire weekend?”
She swallowed hard, and Mick held her gaze before glancing over his shoulder at Red. “The entire weekend,” she said.
The fan swung left, then right, pulling air into the room and lifting the edge of a stack of papers with each pass. Mick Dashel scribbled something in his electronic tablet and then clicked off the handheld recorder. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Moore. You’re free to go,” he said, rising, tucking his tablet under his arm. “But don’t go far. We may need you again.”
BEFORE
It was April and the timbering at the farm was finished: the skidder, pickups and log trucks, gone. In their place was a battlefield of stumps and treetops, deep ruts from machinery, mud and ruin—a haunting reminder of what Transom had taken away.
For weeks Chase had been avoiding him as much as possible, orchestrating his schedule based on whether Transom was in Empire with Teresa or there at the farm. But one night he came home to find the Lincoln in the driveway. He craned his neck from the truck, trying to look through the kitchen window to see if he could catch a glimpse of anyone walking around. He hoped Teresa wasn’t there. Things were strained enough between Transom and him; the last thing he wanted to deal with was a run-in with her.
Teresa always put Chase on edge. She’d taken over the kitchen—Maggie’s kitchen, his kitchen—and rearranged and gotten rid of items she didn’t think were useful. Some of those items, like the Foley mill she pitched and the blue glass pitcher she took to Goodwill, had been sentimental, not just to Chase, but to Maggie. Maggie’s mother had bought her that Foley mill as a wedding present. Jack had bought the pitcher for Christmas one year. Chase had warned Teresa, hissing, gritting his teeth, that she should never again throw any of their things away without asking. She’d rolled her big, brown eyes, laughed, and told him to lighten up.
In fact, Chase couldn’t even find his way around the kitchen anymore. The spices, which he’d always arranged in such a way that allowed easy access to the most frequently used ones, were now ordered alphabetically. His favorite wooden spoon was gone. He suspected Teresa had tossed it because it was worn and stained purple from the time Maggie had used it to make raspberry jam. In the living room, Teresa added decorations: a candle, two framed photographs of Transom and her. Little by little, pieces of Chase’s life were being whisked away and replaced; he no longer felt at home.
As he sat in the driveway, he contemplated what to do. He could go back to Laney’s, which was where he’d just been, but she would understand. Still, he needed a change of clothes, so he turned off the ignition and headed toward the house. He opened the back door and walked into the kitchen, where Transom sat at the table, an array of papers spread in front of him. When Chase entered, Transom turned around to face him. He tried to make small talk—mentioned the weather, asked about Laney. He always did, acting like everything was okay between them when really, nothing was. Chase slipped his boots off and walked over to the sink. He grabbed himself a glass and filled it up at the tap, but then, when he tasted it and found that strange mud-metallic flavor he’d recently noticed, he dumped it out. He’d always loved the pure, sweet flavor of their well water.
“I got some folks coming over in the morning,” Transom said. “Machines, too.”
“Don’t see what that has to do with me.”
“Just didn’t want you to be surprised is all.”
He must’ve heard about the confrontation with the man in the skidder. “Surprised,” Chase said. “That’s an interesting word for all of this.”
“Chase.” Transom put down his pen and rubbed his eyes. “I told you there was a process to it, that you had to see it through, that you had to trust me.”
“I did trust you,” Chase hissed, the words burning on his lips. “I trusted you to take care of this place. I trusted you to be my friend.”
“Come on, Brother.”
Chase pointed a finger at him and grimaced. “Don’t you call me that. Don’t.”
He took a step closer but then stopped, turned quickly, and walked away, and he told himself that the next time he came home and Transom was there, he would not engage in any conversation. He didn’t like the feeling of rage and pain and regret that surged and boiled, the unsettling combination. It scared him, that sense that his emotions were taking over his body, swallowing his ability to control what his legs, arms, hands, would do, because he knew that feeling, from before: he remembered what it had led to.
Chase stormed to his room, gathered some belongings: a t-shirt, a clean pair of jeans, socks, underwear, from a laundry basket he had never unloaded. Maybe he would take Laney somewhere for dinner, maybe they’d drive to the next town, where they wouldn’t have to talk to people they didn’t want to talk to during their meal. And for a moment, he softened, reminded of Laney’s warmth, her kindness to him. In a time of his life when he just kept losing things that were dear to him, when he felt he could no longer trust anyone, at least he still had Laney. At least he could trust her.
He grabbed a button-down shirt from his closet and placed it on top of his small stack of belongings. He closed his bedroom door and walked briskly down the hall, his feet heavy on the wooden planks. He walked back through the kitchen and slipped on his boots. Transom was no longer at the kitchen table, but Chase could hear him talking in the other room. The door was closed. He was always talking in there, with the door closed. Making plans, scheduling his meetings, negotiating with timber companies and oilmen. Didn’t Transom feel just a little bit guilty about arranging the destruction of the farm, right there in the house where Jack and Maggie had lived, where they’d built a life together? In that same room, Jack had, for decades, sketched out his plan for the year, crunched numbers, bargained with seed companies and equipment vendors. With all his resources, couldn’t Transom have figured out some other place to work? He could’ve shown some respect, if not for Chase, then at least for Jack and Maggie. In disgust, Chase thundered out of the house, slamming the door as he went.
The next day, Chase came back to the farm, took the .308 out of the gun cabinet, and drove the four-wheeler out to the middle of the property. Transom had finished the last of Jack’s venison from the freezer, and Chase wanted the meat. At least that’s what he told himself. But as he hunkered down in a small clump of trees, a spot he’d never hunted in his life, he shifted the scope back and forth between a doe standing at the edge of the cow pasture and a group of men as they worked their way across a field of corn he’d planted the week before.
