his house blazed in the falling dark. He didn’t know how long he stayed in his seat, but eventually he felt eyes on him and saw a man waving from the porch. Grizz climbed out of the cab, his legs stiff from sitting all day, and limped across the lawn to greet him. The waving hand belonged to Steve Krieger, who had cut back to part-time in the sheriff’s office, a semi-retirement. Grizz had known Steve since they were boys. Their families went way back to the founding of town, tributaries of bad blood branching between them over generations, and he didn’t care to find the man out on his porch, leaning against the banister.
“What’d he do now?” he said. From the very beginning it had been hard raising Seth alone, without a mother. Grizz was sure this new trouble had to do with drugs. It explained everything, the boy’s moody behavior, his frequent absences and trouble in school. The last time he found pot in Seth’s sock drawer he’d called the head sheriff, Will Gunderson, hoping to put a scare into Seth before it got more serious. When he saw all those squad cars on his lawn he figured Seth had gotten mixed up with dealers, Mexicans and the like, rumored to be planting marijuana in the thickly wooded river valleys and ravines, the very worst trouble he imagined a boy could find out here.
“You’d better come inside,” Steve told him in a thick voice. Steve still had black hair in his sixties and his mustache glistened with oil. He looked like he hadn’t aged a day in the decades Grizz had known him.
From upstairs rumbled the sound of boots on hardwood where a few men tromped through Seth’s room. It sounded like the house was coming apart, as if these men were set to rip right through the plaster, looking for Seth.
“Go ahead and tell me.” Grizz intended to stay standing, wanting to be at eye level when Steve said what he had to say.
“Seth shot Will Gunderson in the face,” Steve said flatly.
“What?” Grizz braced himself against the table. “No,” he said, but it was a muted protest. His mouth had gone dry and wouldn’t form the words.
“Will didn’t die right away. I want you to know that.”
“Jesus.” Grizz had grown up with Will; they had played on the same nine-man football team. When he hadn’t known what else to do with his son, Will was the one he called. Their boys were the same age, both troubled.
Steve’s ruddy face flushed a deeper red, as though the news were bleeding inside him. He kept his rheumy eyes fixed on Grizz. “The slug tore away his jaw; blew out the window. By the time people reached him Will had drowned in his own blood, and Seth was gone.”
Steve spoke in a monotone, even though the dead man he described was married to his own oldest daughter, because everyone in this place was tangled by blood in one way or the other. Grizz saw he laid stock in such gory detail and that he was angry and wanted to paint a full picture of the horror and so hurt him with it. Steve’s heavy fists, hanging at his belt, clenched and unclenched. He looked to be measuring him now, watching his face to see what he knew.
Then Grizz did sit down because his body gave him no choice. He didn’t question any of this or think to ask for a warrant. Another parent might have doubted, but he knew Seth was capable of such a thing and had in fact done it. A gap opened up inside him where the air whistled thin and tight in his lungs. “Where is Seth?” he asked when he found his voice.
“We were hoping you might tell us,” Steve said. “When did you last see him? Did anything seem unusual this morning?”
Grizz shook his head, explaining he’d left before dawn. He hadn’t spoken to his son in two days, not since Seth overturned a table in his biology lab, shattering a twenty-five-gallon aquarium filled with channel cats, bullheads, and crawdads. Seth was suspended for it, and the principal had promised to send Grizz a bill for the aquarium and dead fish, a bill he knew the Fallons couldn’t afford. This morning when he left to drive a seed truck for the co-op, Grizz had seen a light on under his boy’s door and wondered why Seth was awake so early or if he