Here Bethany stood with Dylan at the game Friday night, one leg cocked up behind her. Here she was beaming with the other cheerleaders in the high school’s gym. Here she was with Dylan again, the two of them smiling in camouflage, posed in front of a deer stand with hunting rifles in their hands.Sharpest Shot In the West he calls me lol, read the caption.#girlslikegunstoo.
In her most recent picture, posted yesterday, Bethany lay resting against a pile of pillows, a sticker of a cartoon thermometer jutting from her pouting mouth.why does this never happen on school days haha #fever.
Joel wondered what the odds were that Dylan might be resting on a pillow beside her, cropped just out of the frame.
Joel made a lap around the kitchen. Another. He canceled his flight back to New York and emailed his team to tell them he would be in Texas for a few days longer.
He pushed open the door to his brother’s room.
Things inside were remarkably tidy for a boy Dylan’s age. Joel went to the closet, found a shirt on every hanger. He checked the drawers of the dresser and found them full of socks and underwear. His brother was traveling light.
Three posters hung on the wall: a close-up of Peyton Manning; a team photo of the Bison bearing the words STATE SEMIFINALISTS, DALLAS, TX; the back of a white jersey that read #1 CHRIST. The only other note of personality in the room Joel found resting facedown in the drawer of a small oak desk.
It was another photo, this one of a much younger Dylan—in a jersey and pads—smiling with his arm over the shoulder of Luke Evers, the muscled running back Joel had seen arguing with Dylan at the game on Friday night.“They haven’t been the same since Dylan started going out with Bethany Tanner,”Wesley Mores had said.
Joel returned the picture to the drawer, tapped his phone. A response from work, texts from tedious men in Manhattan, but nothing from Dylan. Joel had lost count of how many times he’d called his brother’s number but he called it again now. It was routed immediately to voice mail.
He dug through the other drawers of Dylan’s desk but found little of interest—iPhone charger, pencils, chewing gum. One drawer contained a dusty hunting knife, his brother’s initials written in Sharpie on the sheath. Joel slid the blade free. Long, serrated, perfectly clean, it clearly hadn’t seen use in ages. He returned the knife to the drawer.
He rose from the desk’s chair and crossed the room to check inside Dylan’s bedside table. At first he saw nothing but loose change, an exhausted tube of Lubriderm.
His eye settled on something odd: a gleaming gold Movado wristwatch. Joel held the watch to the light and wondered how Dylan (who, as far as Joel knew, had never worked a day in his life) had bought it. Paulette and Darren weren’t the type to give showy gifts, and even if they were, they could never have afforded a brand this expensive on their modest paychecks.
Very strange.
And then Joel spotted something far more troubling in the nightstand’s drawer. From far in the back he fished out an unlabeled amber vial with a dozen yellow tablets inside.
Joel googled the imprints on the sides of the pills and let out a sigh. They were Oxycodone, a powerful painkiller, and a high dose at that. POTENTIAL FOR RECREATION/ABUSE: SIGNIFICANT, read the pills’ literature.
Joel wondered what the odds were Dylan had been prescribed the pills to help with the aches and pains that must be inevitable in a game as strenuous as football. Not unlikely, but if that had been the case, then why didn’t the bottle bear an official label from a pharmacy?
Something Clark had said last night flitted through Joel’s head:“We’ve got all the usual meth crazies around here.”Oxycodone was a sedative, whereas methamphetamine, he knew, was a stimulant (a stimulant, Joel reminded himself, only a molecule removed from the Adderall currently pulsing in his own brain.)
Different drug classes, different effects, but the sight of the pricey watch waiting so near to these pills put an unpleasant thought in Joel’s mind. A thought that Dylan might be connected to something far more dangerous than the school’s athletic department.
Joel paced the room. He knew he should tell Investigator Mayfield about this discovery, should at least text Clark. Perhaps if he threw the cops a bone they would keep him abreast of the search for Dylan (assuming, of course, they were even searching at all), possibly give him some comforting news.
Joel laughed to himself. Who was he kidding? After what the Pettis County Sheriff’s Department had put him through as a boy, was he really naive enough to think they would be of any use to him now? Any news Joel gave the police would become the gossip of the town. He’d never subject his brother to that sort of pain. Hadn’t he come here to keep Bentley from chewing up yet another troubled boy? No, Joel would do his own digging, and he would keep any discoveries to himself.
Starting with these pills. He carried them into his room and stuffed them in his bag.
South Street resembled an old Western set left to blanch in the sun. Joel counted six businesses still in operation in the splintered wooden storefronts: the First Community Bank (GO #12 T-BAY BASKIN! read the marquee in the window), a CVS Pharmacy, Mr. Jack’s Steaks, Hash and Brown’s Egg House (the large fiberglass chicken suspended above the door in desperate need of a wash), Beauty Sanchez Beauty Parlor and, all but hanging off the butt end of the street, the tall polished windows of Lott’s Hardware.
Joel walked past the last store slowly, hoping he might talk to Mr. Lott—one of the few men who had been decent to Joel in the wake of the scandal—but saw instead a plain, mousy girl standing behind the counter.
When Joel stepped into the store the girl gave him only a curious glance—curious but not unkind—and looked back down at her phone.
“Excuse me,” Joel said, approaching the counter. “I’m Joel Whitley—”
“I know.” The girl finished typing a message, set down her phone, leaned back on her stool. Joel recognized her from the game. She was a cheerleader, and if Joel wasn’t much mistaken he’d seen her posing for photos with KT Staler, Dylan’s friend, in those giddy moments after the town had stormed the field.
“Are you Mr. Lott’s daughter?” Joel asked, though on second glance he saw he didn’t need to ask: she had her father’s brows and her mother’s frown. She wasn’t the prettiest person he’d ever seen—he hated himself for noticing, but the girl certainly had nothing on Bethany Tanner—and judging by her faded clothes and her frizzy heap of hair it was clear her family’s store was far from flush. But Kimbra had a spark in her eye, a slyness. Here was a girl who knew she was made for something more exciting than this.
“Kimbra.” She extended a cool hand across the counter to him. Her handshake was firm. “Dadders is away quail hunting this weekend. Do you need him?”
Joel wasn’t surprised to hear this—he’d never known Mr. and Mrs. Lott to enjoy each other’s company.
“Actually I was hoping to speak to you.” Joel lowered his voice. “You’re dating KT Staler, yes?”
