I’ve spent the rest of my life making up for that mistake, and Cat, well, she spent most of hers tearing herself up about it, a kind of self-flagellation. Always scratching at her neck in welts like the ones that ringed Izzy’s throat, checking over her shoulder for eyeswatching from every corner, just like we’d done on the river, waiting for the hammer she was sure would eventually fall. Heaven help me, I was always there to bring her back to her senses.
Honey, just calm down, I’d said to her in the model home.
When Cat had told me, all wide-eyed at orientation, about those boys poking around at The Hollow, I had an inkling that she might start spiraling again. Then I saw that note she’d written to Iggy. I saw the scratches on her neck. When the kids found Izzy’s bones—twenty-five years of this river rising and falling had finally shaken her loose—well, that when I went to Abel for help.
Cat was always so reactive, so emotional. Every time she had tried AA, she’d get to the step of making amends, and I would need to convince her, over and over, that no good would come from the truth. The program says to make direct amends, “except when to do so would injure them or others.” How could she not see the injury it would cause? The way it would ruin our lives, our families, the way it would erase any good thing we’d ever done, so that everyone—Waylon, Hannah, my coworkers, Daddy, Mama, the people I went to church with—would all look at me and see, not sweet Melanie, not oh-you-can-always-count-on-me Melanie, not turtle cheesecakes and home visits, not every time I said yes when I wanted to say no. They would only see me for a single mistake.
I told her that there was no evidence left. There was nothing. But she refused to listen. She picked up her phone, and she was going to call Dad. She was going to tell him.
I didn’t expect the bowl to be so heavy when I picked it up. I only meant to stop her when I lifted it above my head. I still can’t quite believe it.
But, the fact is, the bowl cracked against the back of Cat’s skull, and she dropped fast, like the sandbags we used in theater, and I’m the one who did it. She didn’t move after that. There was only the blood, spilling and pooling and spreading. She didn’t twitch, didn’t make a final sound. She looked almost peaceful, finally at rest,escaped from the memories of that horrible day. Free from the pain and turmoil that had always boiled inside her. And I gasped a lungful of new air, like my insides had been wrapped up tight all this time by the secret we shared, and now I was free too.
A white-tailed doe, picking her way out of the trees to the water’s edge, freezes when our tubes come into view. She watches us with her big dark eyes, through a fringe of lashes. There is something peaceful about wild creatures, who don’t worry about the future or punish themselves for the past. They live only in this moment. She dips her head and drinks from the river.
After I’d left Cat’s, I headed straight back to the only place I could think of. Right back to Abel Sherman’s trailer.
Only, this time I had a different approach. See, I’d spent so much time with Abel by then, taking out his trash, making him biscuits and muffins, making sure he took some of his pills. And when you take care of a person, especially a person as lonely as Abel, they tend to talk to you. One time when he’d had too many whiskeys, he told me about how he’d found Izzy’s bloody headband on the bank of the river. That’s how he’d known Ben was guilty, why he suspected she was probably buried somewhere on his land.
So that night, after what happened to Cat, I told him that I’d hate if I had to tell my dad, the sheriff, that story. It would be such a shame if, after all this time, after everything they’d been through, Ben ended up getting charged with Izzy’s murder anyway.
Then I told him I had the solution that would solve all his problems, that would make sure his son stayed out of prison and would allow him to rest in peace.
He didn’t answer at first, just eyed me more than anything while he considered. Then he twisted the cork out of his whiskey bottle.I’m listening, he said, pulling a long drink.
I knew Abel, with his gruff exterior, could handle it. He was a man who liked to hear things straight.
Then I laid out the plan. I didn’t tell him to use a gun, but I did give a look over at the double-barreled shotgun he had leaning up by the door, and he looked over at it as well.Real soon, you won’t be able to go out on your own terms, Abel. You won’t even have enough strength in your hands to pull the trigger. Do you really want to die a trembling old man who left this world without paying his debts?
It was my idea for it to happen at the Amenity Center, killing two birds with one stone, screwing over the developers that had stolen his land and ruining the pageant. The rest of the details I don’t care for repeating, but when I was done stating my case, he turned his head slowly toward me, mouth agape, with a look of bewilderment that you wouldn’t believe, like he was reassessing the whole of me, inside and out. Then he just shook his head and said,God bless. He took another draw of his whiskey straight from the bottle.
I wasn’t sure what he’d do when I left that trailer. But Abel was reasonable, and, even if he hadn’t been, I had taken some precautions. Made sure to exit the model home out the back door, just like Cat said Abel had done when he smashed up all her cookies. Made sure to grab the doorknob with the end of my shirt sleeve. Made sure I didn’t leave any prints. His prints on that doorknob in the end were what shut Cat’s case solid.
The storm threw me for a loop, but once I knew he was out there, I opened that hallway door for him. Then Abel gave me one last surprise, mentioning me in that letter of his. I’ve never been quick on my feet, always been more of a roly-poly, tumbling over myself, curling up into a little ball whenever I get put on the spot. I guess the pageant girls were right when they nicknamed me Melon-ball, and that’s why it always stung so much to hear it. But I’m proud of myself, because when it mattered most, when everything I’ve sacrificed for others was put on the line, I was quick on my toes.
I hate that I had to lean into that ugly lie about Abel. I hate thathe left this earth believing Ben did that terrible thing to Izzy. I hate that I fibbed about the amount of time Abel had left, even if it was going to end awful for him no matter which way you sliced it. But it’s like taking care of my patients. I spend my days changing bedpans, cleaning bedsores, suctioning fluids from drainage wounds. People want life to be pretty, but sometimes it just gets messy.
We pull our tubes up onto the bank of the river, and Kennedy Claire opens the cooler to hand out lunch.
“Melanie,” Kennedy Claire says, a chastising tease to her words as she pulls out my Tupperware of chocolate chip cookies. Cat’s mother’s recipe, just modified a hair. “Girl, you are bad. You know I’m always watching my figure.”
“Baked them with monk fruit sweetener,” I tell her, always aware of what people want and what they need.
Kennedy Claire takes a bite of my cookie. “Oh, I take that back. You are good,” she says, savoring the bite.
I smile back, because it’s just the sweetest thing to hear. And my skin glows in the warm Texas sun.
CHAPTER NINETY-FOURSHERIFF RYAN
Sheriff Ryan walks along the paved street of the Sherman Ranch development. He spots a stray nail in the road, picks it up, and tucks it into the front pocket of his jeans. He likes things to be orderly. So much of the world is chaos, but it doesn’t need to be, you can make it straight and solid. A place for everything, and everything in its place. That’s how he likes to live his life. It isn’t so hard, doing the right thing, not if you make it a habit.
There are more houses here now. A handful of families have moved in, their SUVs parked in the driveways, patio furniture on the front porch, welcome mats by the door.
Someone new works in the model home now. They don’t live there; they clock out and lock up at 5PMsharp. Across the street, in the brush between the road and the river, Sheriff Ryan spots a grocery bag on the low-hanging branch of a live oak. Watching it for a moment, it fills and deflates like a lung in the breeze. When he steps off the road to collect it, his boot catches on a plastic box anchored in the brush. He recognizes the camo-painted exterior, now fading. It’s one of his and Mark Blake’s old trail cams. Cat must have set both the cameras up.
His knees pop when he squats down, and he lets out an involuntary grunt from the effort. He can’t help thinking of when he was a young man, how he took for granted the simple glide of a joint, the ease of moving a body that hadn’t yet realized it was a dyingthing. He unhooks the camera, which runs on solar panels, so the screen powers up when he hits the button. The camera was pointed directly at the model home, catching the street out front and a few dozen feet off to either side.
He rewinds, back and back, flipping quickly through footage of trucks driving by and delivery vans and that new property manager going in and out, back and back, to the night Cat died, to the window of time that the coroner had settled on, the time of Catherine Dennis’s death. And there he stops, lets it all play out. The night vision footage is black and white. There is no sound to the video. He only watches it once, double-checking the time stamp to be sure, before ejecting the SD card, and slipping it into his pocket along with the stray nail.
He collects the camera and the stake it was strapped to, and heads back to his truck. The decision on the state of things is made fast and as certain as a reflex, before he even turns over the engine. And it unmakes him then and there. It’s as if he’d only ever been sewn together with thread, as if the universe only needed to tug on the right stitch to unravel him.
When he pulls away, he does so knowing full well that the better man he thought he was is being left behind in those woods.