The Missing Place (22 page)

She swallowed the bile, the contents of her stomach. She swallowed again, forcing down her shame and her fear. Her mouth tasted terrible. She'd clenched her fist so hard she'd hurt the flesh of her palm. “All right,” she said in a voice that would fool no one, a parody of calm. “And that is, the nature of that—accident—”

“Caught in the gears,” Shay said. She sounded wobbly herself, so there was that.

“Mmm-hmm. And the next one?”

Shay clicked the arrow. This one was of a windowless room full of incomprehensible machines, pipes and ladders and other parts littering the floor. It was all covered with a brownish slime. Only after staring at it for a few moments did Colleen realize that some of the debris on the floor were the bodies of two men, faint patches of yellow showing through the dirt-covered hard hats.

Mud bucket explosion
, the caption read.
Drilling mud caught fire.
“Click on that link. Please.”

The link took them to a glossary page. Colleen read:
Drilling mud—heavy drilling fluid that lubricates drill bit, keeps pressure on reservoir to prevent oil/gas escape.

Shay clicked back to the image and they stared at it together.

“That's the inside of the rig, isn't it?” Colleen said. “I mean, that's where our boys worked, right?”

“Yes.”

They cycled through the images. There were grainy videos among the photographs, heart-stopping clips of explosions, snapping chains, falling equipment. Men jumping from burning derricks, men falling from platforms.

“There's no proof these are all Hunter-Cole,” Shay finally said. “I don't think they are. The blogger's anonymous. Says he worked for Hunter-Cole, but there's no way to know. Listen. I can't look at this anymore.”

“We've seen enough,” Colleen said. “I mean, we've seen enough to know that there were a lot of accidents. Probably still are. We just don't know how much is due to negligence.”

“It wouldn't even have to be, right?” Shay said, closing the browser window. “It could be just that the company wants to keep these images from ending up in the news. Even if they're not liable, right?” She rubbed her temples. “God, I need a drink. Come on. Let's go get something to eat.”

“Listen,” Colleen said slowly. “What if I call Scott? The man I met last night. I could tell him we're having dinner, see if he'd come meet us. I could . . . I could try to find out more about how the companies are dealing with safety problems.”

Shay was already standing and putting on her coat. “What did you tell him you did?”

“I said I was with a food service company. Back before Paul was born, I worked for Slocum Systems for a while. It was just what came to mind.”

“Not sure how you can tie that into asking him about safety.”

“I'll think of something,” Colleen snapped, irked that Shay doubted her ingenuity. “Let me text him now.”

She sat down at the computer again and brought up Yelp. She
searched on Lawton bars and taverns that served food, picked the one with the highest rating. Put the address in her phone. Shay had gone to go pick up the pages she'd printed. While she was waiting in line to pay, Colleen composed a text:
Scott—Long day in the salt mines! Are u up for a drink? Headed to the Oak Door Tavern with work people now. Maybe dinner later?

She read it twice before finally hitting Send. Immediately she felt a dizzying sense of remorse. No,
fear.
What she felt was fear, and she had sworn off fear, at least while she was on this mission.

Shay was at the front of the line. Colleen reached for her purse, to get money to pay for the pages. Then she slowly put her wallet back.

Colleen could pay for thousands of copies and never even notice the effect on her bank account. Shay was struggling.

But Shay had doubted Paul. She had made it clear that they were no longer necessarily aligned.

And that made her, if not an adversary, not an ally, either.

She could pay for her own damn copies.

T.L. WAS HALFWAY
to the door when he stopped and looked again: Myron's truck in the drive, even though it was Sunday. The
third
Sunday.

The third Sunday of the month meant football if there was a game on that anyone cared about, and poker the rest of the time, over at Wally Stommar's place. Myron had taken part for the last six years, ever since he decided T.L. was old enough to mind himself at home. Myron and Wally and the other guys had known one another since they were all kids on the reservation. It was a hard thing to imagine, these full-bellied, gray-whiskered men ever having been boys, but Myron came back from these evenings in a good mood.

It had to be something big to keep him home from poker. T.L. set his keys in the brass dish with extra care, making no sound. If he was quiet enough, he might gain a minute to think, a minute to consider all the things that might have happened, all the ways things could go sideways, and how Myron might have found out. This was why he'd been trying to talk to Kristine. To make sure that things that were buried stayed buried.

“T.L.?”

“Yeah, I'm back.”

T.L. followed his uncle's voice to the living room. The room was a rectangle, the furniture old and boxy and arranged in a square. Plaid sofa perpendicular to the recliner, anchored by the oak coffee
table. Bookshelf with the TV on it, a big, heavy son of a bitch—Myron had been talking about replacing it with one he could hang on the wall, he was just waiting for the prices to come down. That was a matter of unshakable faith with Myron—he believed if you just waited long enough, everything electronic got better and cheaper.

Myron was sitting in the middle of the sofa in his khaki pants and button-down shirt and a V-neck sweater T.L. had given him on Father's Day a few years back—his special occasion clothes. For once, the TV was off. There was a magazine open on the couch next to him—looked like
Autoweek
from where T.L. was standing. A mug of tea was going cold, sitting on a cork coaster.

“You didn't go to Wally's.” T.L. felt guilty, like he'd flunked a test and tried to hide it from his uncle. But all he'd ever tried to do was the right thing. He'd tried to take responsibility, to be a man, and it wasn't his fault that she'd lied to him. Nothing that had happened was his fault, and he'd been the one to suffer, and now he resented the guilty feeling even as it was replaced by dread.

“Listen,” Myron said. “Darrel called me, from over at the council office. He just wanted to talk about the merchants' association meeting, but while we were on the phone he told me they had some visitors over there today. Those two women, the mothers of those boys who went missing.”

T.L. kept his expression carefully neutral, not meeting Myron's gaze. He reached for the closest object at hand, an empty glass sitting on top of the old television. A faint film of juice stuck to the bottom. It would have been T.L. who left it there; Myron would never leave a dirty dish out. He never nagged or complained, either, just cleaned up T.L.'s messes and carried his belongings to his room—the backpack he was always leaving on the kitchen table, the shoes he took off and left in the living room.

Myron had given his life away so many times already, becoming quieter and steadier with each passing year. T.L. always suspected he'd suffered more in the Gulf than he ever let on, only to come home and have to clean up the messes his sister left behind when she died, T.L. being the biggest one of all. Myron never voiced a single regret, but if things had been different, there could have been a woman for him, a family. A different job in a different place, maybe. Instead, he had T.L. and the store, the Sunday poker and the overnight visits to Minot every couple of months, where T.L. was pretty sure he went to see a hooker.

All of that. All of that was why T.L. had lied. It wasn't to protect himself, because T.L. didn't care what happened to him. He could go to court, go to jail, and it wouldn't be so different from the life he'd been leading already, waiting for the truth to come out—that was a prison too. He hadn't painted in months, not since Elizabeth broke up with him. He didn't care what food tasted like or what the snow looked like on his windshield or what anyone said at school.

He cared about the truth, but T.L. was a realist. He doubted he could convince anyone of his version of what happened. He had thought he understood people, but it turned out he didn't—he thought Elizabeth was his, but he hadn't known her at all—but one thing he still believed was that there was an order to the world that you couldn't fight. That there were rules about how things ended up being presented in the news and online and in the conversations people had while waiting in line to buy a cup of coffee. Rules about who could be believed and who was guilty before they even opened their mouths.

In the credibility department, pretty white girls were fairly high up. Chief of police—well, that was hard to beat. As for someone like him, maybe he could walk around L.A. or New York and blend in, but up here people took one look at him and figured they knew
something about who he was and they would never let him forget it. They wouldn't trust a thing he said or did.

But Myron would believe him. T.L. had a choice to make, because whatever he said now Myron would accept it. That was how it had always been.

“You had dirt on your pants that day,” Myron said. His voice was heavy and dull, without accusation, without any emotion at all. “Your boots were soaked through. Your jacket—there was blood on it.”

“You saw it.” T.L. felt cold. He'd left the clothes on the floor of his closet, meaning to wash them himself, but Myron had gotten to them first. Later, T.L. had seen the jacket hanging from the pole in the laundry room, dripping into the tub. He'd convinced himself the stains hadn't been noticeable on the dark fabric.

“Wasn't much. Almost missed it. I didn't think anything of it at first. I thought you must have got that jacket dirty cleaning fish. I was starting the wash when I remembered you didn't bring any home. And you didn't say you'd been by Swann's. I thought—I don't know what I thought. I mean, I thought about that girl.”
That girl
—he hadn't said her name since T.L. told him, his voice cracking, that it was over, last fall.

“You thought I
hurt
her?”

“Of course not.” Myron waved his hand impatiently. “Not for a second. But I was your age once. I got into scrapes. I busted up my knuckles on another guy's face. I figured you needed to work something out, you took care of things. I figured if it was bad enough, you needed . . .”

He closed his right hand into a fist, brought it down heavy on his left. His meaning was clear. Myron trusted that if T.L. had fought someone, he'd had a good reason.

T.L. set the juice glass down carefully on top of the television
and watched his hand tremble. “Myron.” His mouth tasted like chalk. He stumbled two steps and sank to his knees in front of the coffee table. He put his hands on the scarred oak and stared at a ceramic dish he had made in second grade, which had been on the table ever since. On the bottom, he had scratched Myron's name in the wet clay before it was fired.

“It's worse than you think,” he whispered. Then he forced himself to look at his uncle's face and told the rest.

Myron rested his hands on the couch cushions while he listened, his face tight and grim. When the story was over, T.L. waited—for condemnation, for commiseration, to finally have someone tell him what they were going to do next. When T.L. had arrived at the front door of this house at the age of six, with his clothes stuffed into a dirty red suitcase that had been his mother's, he had not expected to be soothed. Living with his mother had taught him not to hope for much.

“Oh, son,” Myron finally said, his voice heavy with sadness. “Come sit with me.”

T.L. went, and Myron opened his arms and made a place for him. T.L. pressed his face against the acrylic sweater, trying to hide his tears, and Myron held him tight and murmured and rocked him, like a baby, as he had never been held before. Somehow the warmth reached the place inside T.L. where he stored all the losses and the pain, and they came out like a beating of wings and filled his chest and pressed against his lungs, making it hard to breathe. He pushed his knuckles to his eyes and tried to stop crying, but Myron held on, and finally T.L. gave up trying to keep any of it in. He sobbed and soiled his uncle's shirt with his tears and snot, holding on for dear life.

“It's over now,” Myron said softly, after a long time. But still he didn't let go.

COLLEEN DIRECTED SHAY
to the bar. They were inching through what passed for rush hour, the shift-change traffic of men heading out to start their workday as darkness enveloped the town. They were almost to the address when she glanced at a light pole and saw Paul grinning back at her.

“Oh, my God,” she said, and Shay braked, hard. The car behind them laid on the horn.

“
What?
”

But by then Colleen realized what she'd seen: the flyer Vicki had made, the one she'd ordered a thousand of and had posted all around town.

“Pull over,” Colleen said, her hand already on the door handle.

“I can't just—there's nowhere to park!”

Colleen opened the door and got out, slamming it fast. She sprinted the half dozen steps to the pole and tore down the sign. Both boys were pictured, Taylor's smiling team photo from football on the bottom, his shoulders broad and his smile confident, his jersey a brilliant green. By contrast Paul seemed to be asking the camera permission in his photo, looking a little to the side, his expression somewhere between defiance and dismay. Even his shirt, a slubbed cotton in what Colleen had thought was a beautiful shade of slate blue when she bought it, looked washed out next to Taylor.