Page 81
I didn’t see as she approached the booth, but I knew the voice.
“Excuse me,” Jenna said.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s up? Any updates on Joey’s phone?”
She shook her head. “Trisha’s passwords didn’t work. That’s why I’m here, to talk to her. Also, Jerry Smoot is going to be okay. He’ll be in the hospital for a couple days. He’s not coherent yet, but he will be. He’ll be okay.”
Tears choked my throat momentarily. I swallowed them. “That’s wonderful. Thanks, Jenna.”
“I’m heading up there to try to talk to him after I talk to Trisha. Did Jerry say anything out there?”
I told her his cryptic words. She didn’t seem impressed or bothered.
“Where’s Verro?” I asked.
“Working,” she said.
There was something about the way she answered that made me think she was being evasive. She didn’t owe me the truth, but I sure wondered what our new chief was up to.
Jenna took off to talk to Trisha as Graham and I finished our meal. He didn’t want to let me pay, but I insisted, and he relented with an “owe you one.”
He was tired too, but he walked me to my door before climbing back onto the ATV. He waved and then drove away quickly.
I made my way inside and locked the door behind me. I gathered the pendant from my pocket and hurried up to the bedroom.
I was completely exhausted, but I had a box to open.
CHAPTER
23
MEMORY CAN BE so many things. Mostly unreliable, I thought.
Something inside me knew important information. I hadn’t been able to access it, but I knew it was there, behind some locked door, inside that black hole I kept sensing. I’d known it since this started, since Calloway drove me out to the first sculpture. There was a reason he thought of me, and on a level I didn’t know existed, I got it. We both thought of me, though neither of us really knew why.
There should be no reason to hesitate to open this last box. There was no good reason unless there was something inside it that I didn’t want to face.
As I sat on the bed and looked at it, still sealed, I closed my eyes and tried to remember what I wasn’t remembering. I would have liked to have at least a tiny preview, but life didn’t generally work that way.
I knew that Wilmot’s classes had never been on my radar. I hadn’t just forgotten about them. I was sure that I hadn’t known anything about them. I hadn’t known about Silas throwing a bucket of blood inside the studio. The abomination. That all sounded traumatic enough to create amnesia, but that hadn’t been the kind of kid I was. I might have been in some shock, but I’d been a kid who’d seen so many things that others would be put off by. I’d seen dead animals, blood, gore. I’d grown up with it. It had come with the deal that was my father and his profession. Even whatever happened wouldn’t have ruined me.
But it might have ruined others.
The bigger question was: What had I been doing that ominous day? Where the heck had I been?
I looked at the old tape that still sealed shut what was unknown. Was it better kept that way?
“Open the damn box,” I said aloud.
I stuck the knife into the tape and tore through it. I lifted the panels and let my eyes digest the contents inside, hoping for some sort of epiphany to come forth.
There were things to learn from the items in the box, shocking things.
Inside were four items. A red scarf, a barbeque fork, a gold pendant etched with the bones of a hand, and, last but not least, a knife, like the one I carried these days, almost exactly like one I had when I was a kid.
“Shit,” I uttered, knowing that these items were undoubtedly tied to the skeleton sculptures in the desert. I said it again when I realized that only three of the items had been found. I wasn’t aware of anyone discovering a knife, one that happened to look similar to the one I and so many around Black Vulture carried, and almost identical to one I used to have. Was someone after me too or were knives just so commonplace around Black Vulture that they could be tied to almost anyone? To clear my mind, I shook off the wave of cold fear.
Okay. Had we missed some sculptures? Had we not searched well enough?
