That evening at the stands, Joel took a step forward, drew back his fist and swung it at Ranger’s face, all because Ranger was right about him. Pity.
The blow hardly connected—Ranger was already turning back to snicker at Jason when Joel began to swing and so his nose avoided what would have been a nasty break. But Joel’s knuckle still cracked against Ranger’s cheek, tore loose a piece of skin. No one had warned Joel the pain in his knuckles would bite like a bear.
Ranger staggered back. He pulled up his own fist.
A pair of kids from Franklin High started to cackle in the shadow of the stands. Jason, suddenly looking panicked, murmured something urgent in Ranger’s ear.
Ranger spat out a mouthful of blood. He all but shimmered with rage. He whispered something to Jason, and the smaller boy took off jogging. Already Joel was realizing the magnitude of his mistake.
In a soft voice, with something approaching tenderness, Ranger said, “You are going to regret that, you little fucking faggot.”
Joel didn’t weep—he remembered that much. He remembered the way his knuckles throbbed, the way the crowd of feet visible beneath the walls of his toilet stall had swollen throughout halftime, remembered the grumbles as people tugged at the stall’s locked door. He ignored them. He couldn’t face another soul.
All his hard work—the twang he’d wrestled onto his voice, the stiff gait he’d spent hours practicing in front of the mirror to keep his hips from betraying him—had it accomplished nothing? What sort of future could possibly await him?
Slowly, as the little crowd shuffled out of the restroom at the start of the second half, as the sun began its endless descent and the toilet began to swell with the hot last light of the summer day, Joel forced his fear down his throat. He would have to try harder. What choice did he have? This would be his life, he realized: trapdoors, tripwires. He would always be a little frightened and a little angry, would always be conscious of the eyes appraising his every move. The men at the Egg House, the women at church, his classmates at school: he had so many people to fool if he wanted to be safe in this town. If he wanted to retain a little dignity, a little decency. If he had any hope of being loved.
He didn’t think about Ranger’s promise of revenge. He thought only of Dylan and Clark and his mother, of the people he held dearest, and of the pain they would feel if they ever were to learn how extensive his lies had always been, how crooked his heart. How humiliated they would be to have wasted so much time believing in a boy so broken.Do you love me?Clark always asked on the phone, every night before bed.More and more every day.
He rubbed his knuckles. He would have to be more careful in the future. He couldn’t risk losing control like that again.
Though God in heaven, some days all Joel wanted was an excuse to lose control.
And then Joel opened the door of the stall and saw a man standing alone at the urinal, his profile trembling in the brassy light. It was none other than Troy Clark.
CLARK
Twelve hours later, Clark stifled a yawn in the hot cruiser and wondered what armless Dylan Whitley had tried to tell her last night when he’d led her to the edge of a black hole in the ground and showed her... What? The other details of the dream had evaporated when she awoke, leaving behind nothing but a cool dread in her chest.
What was it her crazy mother used to say?“Dreams are just our souls going for a swim at night.” Jesus, Mom.If that was true, what the hell had happened to the swimming hole this week?
Mayfield caught Clark’s yawn and pressed a fist to his own mouth. “Lordy,” he said. “I ain’t slept this bad sinceIwas coming to this school.”
Clark paused, a hand on her lighter. “Are you having dreams too?”
“They’ll pass,” he said, and handed her a thick file without another word.
Clark studied the autopsy photos inside. She could handle the gore well enough; she’d seen her share of suicides and traffic pileups and had never been much bothered by them. What hurt were the little details: chewed nails, streaks from an inexpert fade in the hair. The soles of Dylan’s feet, calloused from a life spent in cleats.
Time of death was still difficult to determine, even after the autopsy, but Clark and Mayfield had settled on sometime between ten thirty Friday, when Dylan and his friends were seen leaving the game, and two o’clock Saturday morning when the storm had stopped, after which there would have been tracks near the creek where the body was found. The ME had seemed satisfied with this.
It confirmed, at least, Joel Whitley’s suspicion: whoever had texted him Saturday morning hadn’t been his brother.
The cause of death had been simple enough to establish: a blade, serrated, between four and six inches long, had opened the carotid artery. A hunting knife, most likely, which hardly narrowed it down: there were three of those in every truck and closet in Pettis County.
“Russ Tanner, the cheerleader’s dad, was apparently at some cattle function when Jones went by to confirm his daughter’s story yesterday,” said Mayfield. “We’ll try and get hold of him again this afternoon.”
Clark thought of the nervous way Bethany’s green nail hadtap-tap-tapped the table at the end of her interview. She made a note to drive by the Tanner ranch herself, see if its gate was monitored by a camera and, if so, figure out how she could obtain that camera’s footage from Friday night. She was curious to know when precisely Bethany had gotten home after the game.
There was a whistle on the practice field, and the Bison threw themselves at each other with a clatter. Clark watched as Jamal Reynolds was brought down hard by Garrett Mason, the team’s enormous defensive safety. It took Reynolds a very long time to return to his feet.
“They’re beating the shit out of that kid,” Clark said.
“It’s like they already made up their mind about him.”
“A little quickly, no?”
She’d been saying it all day and she’d say it again. Her logic was simple: Jamal’s potential motives for killing Dylan didn’t make any sense under scrutiny. The fact that Dylan had been discovered without a shirt or underwear perhaps suggested that he had been partially undressed at the time of the murder. This, combined with KT Staler’s suggestion that Dylan had a girl on the side, had brought the detectives, tenuously, to some idea that Jamal might have killed Dylan out of jealousy for this girl. A love triangle gone sour, maybe. Perhaps—perhaps—this explained the condom that Jamal had apparently asked stuttering Benny Garcia for at halftime on Friday, though Mayfield had found that tip more than a little dubious. The whole theory was built on a shaky heap of assumptions.
