Wide Open (17 page)

Too restless to sleep, she spent the next several hours in her father’s cold office, while Dell and Sarah Hale drifted behind her, looking online for anything on any weather site anywhere in the world that could explain what Uku-Weber was doing. Because there had to be an explanation. No one made rain out of nothing. Or caused a fire that sounded like lightning striking.

She called a guy from her high school graduating class, majoring in meteorology in graduate school at Colorado State, who was incredibly pissy about being woken up at one o’ clock in the morning.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he said when he finally understood that this wasn’t a crank phone call.

“Lightning,” she said. “Could someone control lightning? Could they cause a fire?”

“Lightning can cause fire.” Said it slow like he was talking to an idiot. Which maybe he was.

“No, I mean specifically. Cause a specific fire.”

“No.”

“Advanced research? Like weather control research?”

“Unless it’s secret government research I don’t know about. And it’s not. Then, no. Look,” he added, “lightning is an electrical discharge. You need something huge. You’d have to be able to make thunderheads, to control the moisture and the temperature change. You’d have to control everything. No one can do that.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“Yeah, don’t call me again.”

She fell asleep at some point, sitting at the desk, and woke, shivering, as night edged into day.

She sucked in a breath and wiped her hand across her face.
Desk, ranch, home
. Because for a moment, she’d thought she was back in Kabul, because she’d been cold there, too.

It had been familiar at first, the cold. She’d grown up with that, with bright clear mornings, cold dry air, sunlight so thin, it didn’t seem real. Getting up in the pitch black? Yeah, that had been familiar, too. But the people, the way they looked at her, the constant alien, never-let-your-guard-down, this-is-what-it’s-like-in-a-war wore her down, wore them all down.

She jumped up and down a few times, trying to warm up. The only clock in the office had a dead battery or something, because it had read 4:45 since Hallie’d been home. It had to be at least six thirty, though. Her father was probably already sitting down to breakfast. Maybe he wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t ask her what she’d been doing sleeping in his office.

Yeah, and maybe pigs would fly today, too.

But her father wasn’t at the kitchen table or anywhere else. The only sign he’d been there was a note on the kitchen counter—half a grocery list, actually, and Hallie wasn’t sure whether it meant she should go to town for groceries or he had.

She checked for messages on the main phone and the cell phone—nothing. She was about to grab coffee out of the cupboard when she heard a vehicle coming up the drive.

Great.

She tucked in her shirt and scrubbed her fingers through her hair. As she stepped out onto the back porch, the old yellow dog got up from where he was lying by the battered wooden table, wagged his tail slowly at her, then retreated to the tree at the south corner of the yard.

A red older-model Jeep Cherokee pulled into the yard. It had dirt backwards from the front tires in a widening vee, but otherwise it was spotless. The engine died, the door opened, and Boyd stepped out.

“Do you live here now?” she asked.

He wore blue jeans with the hint of a crease down the center, a green plaid cotton shirt ironed with what was by now a familiar knifelike precision. He wore a plain brown leather belt, the same black watch he’d been wearing yesterday, and boots that looked freshly polished except for a scuff mark on the right toe.

“I’m off today,” he said. “I thought you might want a ride into Prairie City.” He stuck his right hand halfway into the pocket of his jeans, hunched his shoulder slightly forward, and suddenly he looked like every good-looking farm boy Hallie had ever known—fit, but lean, half-grown, and too pretty for the flat, harsh prairie.

“Shit,” she said. “I never called Tom back, not with—” She waved a hand. “—all that yesterday.”

Boyd shrugged. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll buy you breakfast.” He seemed an odd combination of more relaxed out of uniform and desperate in some deeply hidden way, visible only in how he looked at her and the way a single muscle twitched along his jawline.

“Shit,” she repeated. “Come on in the house a minute.”

He followed her as she went up the back steps. “You know it’s, like, six thirty in the morning?” she said.

“Seven.” He held the screen door open as he walked in behind her. “Saw your father over to Sally Jean’s when I stopped in for a paper.”

“In West PC?” Hallie pulled the tail of her shirt out of her jeans and started unbuttoning it. “I didn’t even know that place was still open.”

“He’s worried about you,” Boyd said.

Hallie stopped with her shirt half-unbuttoned, the ivory of her long undershirt showing at the chest and cuffs. “He told you that? Why?”
Why is he worried? And why would he tell you?

Boyd twisted the watch on his wrist. He looked out the kitchen window, as if he expected something out there to save him from this conversation. “Because he cares about you?” he said.

Hallie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I bet that’s it. I bet he tells random people he’s ‘worried’ about me because he thinks somehow it’ll get back to me, and then suddenly life will be gumdrops and fairy tales.”

His lip quirked. “Gumdrops and fairy tales?”

“Whatever.”

She left him in the kitchen, didn’t even offer him coffee, which would have been the nice, polite country thing to do. But she didn’t feel polite. Could just imagine Boyd and her father having
poor Hallie, what should we do with her?
conversations. And she didn’t need it. Didn’t need them. That was what she told herself as she stripped off her clothes and stepped into the shower. Water pounded her head and shoulders and eased her tension.

Fire hot burn me burn me don’t kill me Jesus
. A thin whisper, like the sound of a blade on stone.

Shit.

Hallie grabbed the shower curtain and pulled so hard, she yanked it loose from two of its rings.

What was that?

But she knew what it was—the same images, the same words she’d seen in her dreams, seen once before, when Dell’s ghost had drifted through her. Fire, screaming, sunlight and moonlight. A single image lingered—Dell laughing with a bonfire behind her.

The water had turned cold, and Hallie realized that she was shivering. Again. She stepped out of the shower. The lingering wisps of a ghost drifted out the closed bathroom door. Hallie reached out and almost touched it before it disappeared completely, but drew back her hand, because she didn’t want to see that again, couldn’t get it out of her mind anyway—pain and fire. She dried herself off and went back to the bedroom, pulling random clothes from the closet.

Those images … they weren’t just images; they were fear and panic and stop ohmygod stop, as if she were inside someone’s head, as if they were the last memories of a beating heart.

And then, there was Boyd.

She should have told him to leave, should have told him she’d get her own damned truck and her own damned breakfast.

But he was so … earnest. And, in some way, both out of his depth and not. As if he knew what was coming, was braced for it, wasn’t sure he could handle it, but wasn’t going to run, all the same.

When she walked downstairs, Boyd was leaning on the sideboard, looking at the Major Felten poster, which—all right—big cats were an odd choice for dining room artwork, but they’d always been there.

“Hey,” she said.

He didn’t smile, but something relaxed around his eyes, as if he liked seeing her. Which shouldn’t have made her feel anything, shouldn’t have made her feel warmer inside. But it did.

Damn him.

They didn’t talk on the drive into town. Hallie felt the occasional chill across the back of her neck, though she hadn’t seen Dell or Sarah Hale since they’d left the house. She welcomed them, though, welcomed their icy-dry coldness. Because she finally understood, though she ought to have known when Eddie left, that they were there—had to be there—to tell her something. And she wanted it to be important, what they were telling her, wanted it to be a weapon or an answer. She didn’t have any reason to believe they were or could be a weapon, but she wanted it so badly, it felt like an ache across her breastbone. If the ghosts could just mean something, if there were a reason they were here, a reason she could see them—she could live with that.

She could.

Boyd took her straight in to Big Dog’s. Her truck was out front, all washed and shiny. Tom, the station owner, came out the open bay door, wiping his hands on a greasy rag as Hallie stepped out of Boyd’s Jeep.

“There wasn’t anything wrong with it,” he said.

“Except it wouldn’t start,” Hallie said.

Tom shook his head. “Started right up. Engine turned over just as pretty as you please. Coupla wires looked like they’d gotten a little hot and maybe that was it, maybe they shorted temporarily.” He shrugged, his big shoulders sliding easy under his loose gray T-shirt. “Come on in.” He waved his hand with the rag in it, and Hallie followed him into his cramped and tiny office. On the cluttered wall was every Valvoline Oil calendar since 1973. The invoice was already half filled out with Hallie’s name and the license plate of the truck. He jotted down the charges, added the tax in his head, tore the finished copy off, and handed it to her.

“Ten dollars?” Hallie looked at him. “Jesus, Tom, how do you stay in business?”

“Ah, we didn’t even have to tow it,” Tom said. “Drove over here, tested a few things, and had Jake wash it. Didn’t take but fifteen minutes. Besides—” His gaze flickered over to the 1990 calendar. “—you’ve been … over there.” He cleared his throat. “Maybe it’s different for you gals—people keep telling me it is—but I can’t see why it would be. And I’ve been there.” He shrugged again.

Hallie didn’t know what to say, wasn’t sure she ever would. “Thanks,” she finally said. “I mean—well, thanks.”

She’d turned to leave, when he said, “Hey, you going out with—” He gestured toward the flyspecked front window. “That deputy kid. You dating him or something?”

Hallie frowned. “Why?”

“Heard things.”

“Things?” she asked. “I’m not dating him,” she added.

“Oh, not bad things,” Tom said. “Just … you know he’s from Iowa, right?”

Hallie laughed.

“Yeah, but why is he here?” Tom asked, his voice pitched low, as if to suggest that the mere fact of Iowa was reason enough for suspicion.

“Because he wanted to leave home? Strike out on his own? Make a difference? Because the job was here?”

“Hey, I’m just saying,” Tom said.

“Yeah,” Hallie said. “I know. Thanks for taking care of my truck.”

19

Boyd was talking to one of the mechanics when Hallie came back outside. The mechanic was a tall, skeletally thin man with shoulder-length hair, scraggly at the ends. He looked familiar to Hallie, but she didn’t know or couldn’t remember who he was. Boyd and the mechanic stood in a narrow slice of shade cast by the propane storage, and Hallie could see a ghost—turned away from her so that she couldn’t see its face—hovering at the mechanic’s elbow. As Hallie watched, the ghost stretched a finger out and touched the man’s arm just below his rolled-up sleeve. The mechanic shrugged, like flicking off a fly. It was the first time Hallie had seen anyone but herself respond to a ghost. She approached, intrigued.

“Hey.” The mechanic greeted her, two fingers tapping his temple, like a half-assed salute. That gesture was familiar, too, a reminder of rodeos or cattle auctions or some completely different context from grease and cars and gasoline. The ghost drifted between them, its face still turned away.

“Never expected to see you again, Hallie Michaels,” the mechanic said. “Sorry it had to be under the present circumstances.”

Good Lord, his voice—baritone deep, had been since eighth grade, she remembered. He’d been big in high school, though—tall, like he still was, but broad shoulders, barrel chest, star halfback on the football team, three years ahead of her. “Jake Javinovich.” She shoved her hands deep into the front pockets of her jeans. “Never expected to see you here,” she said. She’d expected him to—well, she didn’t know—to be a graduate of South Dakota State, to be selling cars or insurance or shares in a gold mine in Rapid City or Omaha. She expected him to want big things and settle for small ones, all the time telling himself that what he had was what
big
was all about.

Jake shrugged. “Yeah. S’a good place here. I always liked cars, you know.” He tilted his head. “I was sorry to hear about the fire. On top of … well, everything,” he said. “You and your dad, though, you’re okay, right?”

“Yeah,” Hallie said. “It’s all fine.”

Jake nodded. “There were a bunch of fires like that, oh … six, eight months ago. Toby vanDerWal’s garage over in Thorsen, that church just north of Old Prairie City, and that old school out past the Seven Mile.” He nodded at Boyd. “You remember,” he said. “They thought those kids from Box Elder were out here setting things on fire for fun. But they never did prove anything.”

“Huh,” Hallie said. She looked at Boyd, who seemed intensely interested in the toe of his left boot. “Isn’t that interesting?”

“Jake, look,” Boyd said. “If you see that truck again, let me know.” He said it in the way people said things if they thought the other person had gone on long enough. He said it like saying,
Someone’s at the door,
or
My other phone is ringing,
or
My god, look at the time.

Hallie scowled at him.

“You ready?” he asked. “We should— It’s past eight.”

Like we have somewhere to be,
Hallie thought. Which they didn’t, and it was a problem, because it was already day seven. And she still didn’t know anything—what had happened to Dell or why. But she could come back and talk to Jake later, without the Boy Deputy around, because maybe she had only a couple of days left, but she was still going to figure this out.