the first time how the boy had stopped at the parsonage and how the pastor’s wife had not come to the door. “I was scared,” she told Edna Drooge, the coeditor of the Lone Mountain Courier. “I couldn’t see who was there, but I just felt sure something bad was about to happen.”
Grizz folded the paper and stuffed it again into the garbage. He felt a cramping along his left side and massaged the muscle. He had torn something for sure trying to take off Steve’s head with that shovel. But was it possible that what Steve said was true and that he was a friend, not an enemy? Steve served on the church council and the board of directors at the local co-op. He was the sort of man Grizz needed to keep close if he was going to understand his son’s death.
Seth’s suicide had been Grizz’s worst fear; he was such a melancholy boy, a daydreamer who sulked instead of doing his chores, but as he got older that sulking turned to anger, the anger to desperation. Grizz could almost wrap his mind around the suicide but not the sawed-off shotgun, the pockets filled with lead slugs.
He had kept Seth’s bedroom door shut since that night. A shut door meant anything could still be inside there. Seth hadn’t left any note or any clues so far as he knew, but maybe the men hadn’t known where to look.
Grizz climbed the stairs and opened the door to a chaotic scene. The sheriff’s men had torn open the drawers of Seth’s desk and dresser and left them askew. On the floor his T-shirts and jeans pooled in piles, and his bed sheets were still dimpled with the outline of his body, a faint dark impression. It felt like trespassing.
Deer antlers, polished by years of sun, were embedded along the inlaid shelves of one south-facing wall. Seth had gathered the antlers as a boy, when he was a wanderer, when Grizz had hounded him about landmarks, keeping the house in sight, and avoiding the deep limestone crevices up in the hills where a body might fall inside and never be found again.
That boy kept him up at nights. And sometimes when Grizz did sleep, his jaw ached in the morning from grinding teeth, worrying on him. Once Seth had left a collection of women’s bras and panties dangling from the antlers as a taunt, some with rust-colored stains lining the silk. All the sizes had been different, though Grizz had tried not to look too closely. Women’s things, delicate and lace fringed, maybe some from girls at the high school. Only way the boy could have had them was if he had stolen them from houses in town. A creep.
“Where’d you get these?” Grizz asked that evening. He sat in his recliner, the offending articles piled on the floor below him.
Seth just looked away. He was not a handsome boy, tall and slump shouldered, as though apologizing to the world for being made so big. This had been a few weeks after Grizz had found the pot in his sock drawer and called Will Gunderson to arrest his own child. He didn’t know what to do with him anymore, couldn’t control Seth.
“I need to know I can trust you. Tell me the truth, now. Whose are these?”
“I see you’ve been in my room.”
“Where did you get these?”
“Found ’em,” Seth said, shrugging. He met Grizz’s gaze. “You going to turn them over to the sheriff, too?”
“Should I?”
Seth swallowed his grin. “No.” A shadow passing over his features.
“Why would you keep such things?”
His eyes had gone back to mapping the floorboards. “It was a dare.”
“A dare? To do what? Who dared you? Did Kelan put you up to this?”
Seth raised his head, his eyes blazing. “Fuck you,” he said. When Grizz stood he was still bigger than his son, but if they fought the outcome was no longer sure. Seth lowered his head and came toward him but turned at the last second, only brushing past him as he went up the stairs. A moment later his door slammed, and then his stereo came on: electric guitars, a blast of drums, a voice wailing from the speakers.
A dare? His best friend had been Kelan Gunderson, the sheriff’s older boy. Kelan was a lanky, handsome child, black haired with long-lashed gray eyes the girls all swooned over. Unlike Seth, Kelan was well liked, a congenial kid who put on a smiling face for all