“Mom?” Her lips began to tremble. Sheriff Mercer reached into his jacket and removed another sealed envelope. “There’s something else,” he said. My aunt looked as if the ground beneath her feet might suddenly disappear. Derek moved toward her. “Mom, what did you do?” She looked at him. Then at me. Finally, she whispered my name. “Rachel…” Sheriff Mercer opened the envelope. He looked down at the page inside. His expression changed. Then he spoke the one name nobody in my family had said aloud for eighteen years. “Thomas Carter.” My father dropped the barbecue tongs. And before anyone could explain another word, I understood that whatever had started in that backyard had actually begun long before Memorial Day.
The heat off the painted wooden porch floor came up through my boots, steady and dry. Gavin didn’t look back over his shoulder as he reached the cab of his cruiser. He tucked the ticket book under his left arm, slid the manila envelope deeper into his hip pocket until only the red seal caught the afternoon glare, and turned the key in the pickup’s ignition to keep the air conditioning humming for Toby. The engine idle was a low, dull vibration that traveled through the gravel drive, through the concrete footings, and right into the porch post pinned against my wrist.
My shoulder cramped. The angle was wrong; Gavin had cuffed my right arm high against the scrollwork, forcing me to lean sideways against the railing to keep the steel from biting directly into the tendon. If I sat, my weight would drag against the joint. If I stood straight, the iron loop caught the bone. "Ma," I said, keeping my voice low so it wouldn't carry across the yard to Ray. "Go inside the house."
My mother didn't move right away. She still held the plastic tea pitcher with both hands, her knuckles pale against the frosted amber plastic. She had spent thirty-eight years in this house watching my father measure timber down to the sixteenth of an inch with a steel rule, double-checking every receipt from the mill before he drove a single nail. She knew what certified paper looked like. When Ray had shown up at nine this morning with a signed quitclaim deed to Dad’s four-bay workshop on Old Wire Road, she hadn't shouted. She had simply asked to see the probate schedule from the county seat. Ray had told her the court didn't require schedules for family transfers between brothers, and Gavin had backed him up, leaning against our kitchen counter in his deputy’s starch, telling her the law was different when an estate had outstanding medical liens.
"Eli," she whispered, her voice shaking just enough to spill a drop of tea over the rim onto the porch steps. "His cruiser radio is off. He turned the squelch all the way down before he walked up the path." "I know," I said. "Go in and call the county sheriff’s desk. Don't call dispatch. Call the administrative line in town and ask for Sheriff Miller. Tell him Gavin has me restrained on private property without a booking number." "Ray took the landline off the hook in the hall," she said, her eyes shifting toward the barbecue smoker where Ray was still sitting. "He said the bell was making his head hurt. My mobile phone is on the sideboard next to his keys."
CHAPTER 4
Ray looked up then. He didn't look like a man who had stolen forty acres of commercial frontage and a five-ton hydraulic lift. He looked like an aging sheet-metal worker with sunspots on his forearms and grease ground into his fingernails. But he didn't look at my face; he looked straight at the handcuff. "Leave it alone, Martha," Ray called out from his folding chair, his tone flat and practiced, like a man quoting a warranty he didn't intend to honor. "The boy lost his temper. He came at me over a piece of scrap tin and some old drills. Gavin’s just letting him cool down so nobody gets an assault charge on their record. We’re family. We handle it in the yard."
"That shop isn't scrap tin, Uncle Ray," I said. "Dad bought the parcel in nineteen-ninety-two. The title was clear before he went into hospice." "The hospital liens took the title, Eli," Ray said, wiping mustard off his thumb with the paper napkin. "I paid fifty-two thousand dollars to the regional medical trust to keep the county from putting a tax lien on the house your mother's standing on right now. If I hadn't stepped in with cash, you wouldn't have a porch to lean against. Ask Gavin. He saw the release from the clerk's office."
Down at the truck, Gavin leaned through the open driver-side window, murmuring something to Toby. I couldn't hear the words over the drone of the radiator fan, but I saw Toby shake his head once, small and stubborn, his hands still pressed hard against the dashboard. Gavin reached into the cab, took Toby’s blue canvas backpack off the bench seat, and tossed it into the open bed of the truck, right on top of a stack of folded tarps. Then Gavin walked back toward the porch. He walked with the heavy, unhurried gait of a man who believed the uniform carried its own legal gravity.
"You're not cooling down, Eli," Gavin said, coming up the three steps. He smelled of menthol cigarettes and gun oil. He stopped two feet away, just out of reach of my free left hand. "You're still running your mouth at my dad. That makes this an active disturbance. I can transport you to the holding annex in Prairie Grove right now, leave you in intake until Tuesday morning when the magistrate sits, and let the judge sort out whether you're fit to have Toby for the summer." "You don't have a warrant, Gavin," I said. "You don't have an incident sheet. You didn't run my name through dispatch because you don't want Miller to know you're within five miles of Dad’s property."