A collage of newspaper tabloid headlines: Branson Manson! Tru Is Out There! Aliens Snatch Two More on Texas Farm!

All of it copies printed from the official Branson case file, which I’ve reviewed dozens of times since Daddy died. I tuck all of Rusty’s presents neatly in the Betty Crocker cookbook.

I pass the turnoff for the lake and enter the blackest part of the park, where the trees crouch in tight cliques. The city has tried security lights here, but they are shot out almost as soon as they are screwed in. Mother-May-I dubbed this stretch the “Twilight Zone,” and it stuck. This is a place where trouble tends to drift and the park cleanup crew finds its best war stories.

I’m the only one, besides Rusty’s wife, who knows why Rusty is so partial to it.

Light is Rusty’s new enemy—glare from the Texas sun, the unforgiving fluorescents that extract confessions, high beams that surprise him over a hump on a country road.

It’s now such a regular thing for Rusty to wear his sunglasses in the station house that the guys refer to him as Wonder and Little Stevie.

If the shits can’t look in my eyes, they don’t know I’m human. That’s what he shoots back when his fellow cops tease him.

If you’ve got bigger stones than I do, pull them out. That’s what he drawls if they keep it up, but nobody thinks they do.

I have been keeping Rusty’s secret. Photophobia, a sensitivity to light so extreme it is physically painful. I’ve googled symptoms and treatments on my phone and read them aloud while we patrol. He says he doesn’t need a doctor, the problem is going to go away. In the meantime, he’s taking four shots of whiskey at bedtime.

Maybe it’s this relentless job combined with too many sleep-deprived nights after a surprise post-forty set of twins. “Babies are the only animals not ready to come out,” he grumbled to me at the two-month mark. “They need to stay in and cook a little longer. A calf comes out, he gets up and walks. All babies can do is scream and shit.”

Maybe Rusty can’t reconcile the crying of his own little girls in their cribs with the sobbing of the little girl we found last week kneeling by her mother, dead of a gunshot wound to the temple, who will always wonder why she wasn’t enough, or the one silent in the middle of the road still strapped in her car seat after a collision with a drunk driver.

It’s a goddamn miracle we don’t all have one leg, Rusty has muttered at me more than once.

Another mile, and my lights flash on the back of the patrol car. Except for the stone silhouette behind the wheel, it looks abandoned on the side of the road. I slowly slide my truck behind it and switch off the ignition.

We both know what this “chat” is about. He thinks he can still convince me of Wyatt’s guilt before it’s too late. It’s both sweet and patronizing that he believes he can save me from myself.

This war over Wyatt has to stop. I have to make it stop.

My footsteps crunch on the gravel. I pull open the passenger door, where I usually ride shotgun. Rusty doesn’t turn his head. He is perfectly still, even though his favorite whiskey-drinking, get-down Turnpike Troubadours song is playing, the one about hoping to sneak into heaven before the devil knows you’re dead.

His sunglasses rest on the dash. On his head, a black, department-issue baseball cap yells POLICE in big white letters. The smell is musk and testosterone, like a man on the prowl.

“Get in,” he says.

He doesn’t say where we’re going, but I know.

Our headlights smoke out three pickups snuggled up next to each other as soon as we pull up to the Branson cattle gate. Rusty blows them a squirt of siren, and the trucks ignite, pull tight U-turns, and screech out.

Their taillights disappear in our rearview. Neither of us has any interest in chasing them right now. The front and rear cameras on the car have already picked up the license plates.

Our eyes are nailed to something else—a banner stretched ten or twelve feet across the gate, painted in exaggerated, puffy letters. Streamers attached to both posts are colorful whips in the wind. It reminds me of skilled cheerleader handiwork, a run-through sign for Friday night football players. Except in this field, the players are without a coach to draw the line before someone gets killed.

“Could be a little more original,” Rusty muses. “Points off for grammar.” He reaches in his pocket, pulling out his emergency pack of cigarettes.

I focus my gaze ahead, past the sign. The night has thrown a dirty blanket over the Branson place, about a quarter mile up. Not even the porch light flickers to give us a marker.

If Wyatt’s up there, he’s watching this movie from his couch—phone flickering with night-vision images from his security cameras, hand resting on the shotgun across his legs, mind considering what to do about Your a Murderer! screaming off his cattle gate.

Rusty snaps off the radio. “Odette, do you know what Wyatt told me in the interview before your husband shut him up?”

All the way here, Rusty hadn’t said a word, waiting me out. “Finn and I don’t discuss his cases,” I say stiffly. “And I haven’t spoken to Wyatt again.”

“He told me that he killed Trumanell.”

“I’m going to bet he didn’t say that.”

“He said it was his fault. Closest thing he’s said yet.”

“Wyatt spent his whole life trying to protect his sister, and one night he failed. He failed, and he can’t remember how he failed. How many times can we argue this?”

“Until you say I’m right, that’s how long. I’ve watched every interview tape with him on it. Three, four times. He never said he doesn’t remember. He just doesn’t say what happened. He square-dances all around it. The thing is, Odette, I get the sense that’s about to change. He seems ready to bust a gut. We seem to agree on one thing. It’s high time to bury Trumanell.”

I unsnap my seatbelt. “Are you going to help me take down that sign?”

“I’d rather just correct the grammar.”

I shove open the door, bracing my leg and body against the wind. The wind out here on this flat prairie holds me back like a bully, no obstacles in its way. It tried and failed on June 7, 2005, when I tore off in my truck and left Trumanell behind.

I run my flashlight along the sign, hate well-constructed.

Perfectly measured, so it won’t rip when the gate swings open and shut. Vinyl, not paper, so it won’t bleed in the rain. Red, white, and blue duct tape, so God-fearing Americans.

The wind keeps tugging. Why don’t I hate Rusty? Report his behavior, his little “gifts” on my chair, as harassing? After five years of this, why don’t I ask to be moved to another partner?

Instead, it’s him I want at my back, squinting, half-blind, regularly offensive, thinking I lie to him, knowing he lies to me.

I pull the knife out of my boot.

A hand lands on my shoulder. I jerk around.

“Shoot a bullet out here and it could go a mile on its way to hitting something innocent,” Rusty drawls.

“Your point?”

He takes one more deep drag on his cigarette before crushing it with his heel. “Life is vast and unfair. That’s my fucking point. Let’s wait on cutting down the sign. Head up to the house first. Make sure we didn’t come in on the ass end of something. Make sure our sign-makers didn’t do more than make signs.”

29

On all sides, the land is a pressing black tide, ravenous and ready to drown us.

It’s a mysterious and specific sound when corn whispers on a silent night. It’s loud in my ears, even though I know the field at my back is mowed flat, the way Wyatt has kept it for a decade.

Rusty’s head knocks against an old wind chime made of forks and spoons that has hung on Wyatt’s porch since I can remember. It sets off the tuneless melody of a lost flute.

It feels like my father’s heart pounding in my chest, the same as when he stood on this porch terrified that a delicate red handprint on the doorframe was mine. Instead, I was parting ways with my leg a mile away in a bloody Jackson Pollock drive-by.

At least I got to keep you, Daddy had whispered, bent over my hospital bed.

I can’t look at a refrigerator door that holds a kindergartner’s Thanksgiving drawing, a turkey traced around a tiny flat hand, without thinking of Trumanell’s fingers on this door, wide and panicked, her heart banging like a hummingbird.

A hummingbird’s heart beats a thousand times a minute, Wyatt had told me, his ear to my chest after the first time we made love. A whale’s only beats eight.

“Police! Open up!” Rusty hammers on the door with his fist in the same spot where Trumanell’s hand lies under layers of white paint.

I first saw a photograph of her palm print in my father’s study, mixed up in the clutter of his desk. An electric bill, an old Christmas card with a white-glittered church, Trumanell’s bloody stamp on her door.