shut as they rooted through the barn’s contents, but from outside the half-open door, she can hear the little bastards whispering up a storm, giggling now and then like mad hyenas.
She hasn’t seen the car around town, and she’s a good thirty-minute drive from anything you might call civilization. Marjorie doubts they’ve gone to the trouble of actually casing the place. Probably just cruising the dry open country outside Amarillo looking for a place to tweak and do strange sex things and God knows what else.
Since she’d fallen asleep with most of the lights off, who knows if they could even make out the house at all?
She kicks the door open with one foot, sees the two flashlight beams inside do a jiggly dance in response, beams bouncing over the expanse of tarp and plywood she and the boys placed over the pits they dug last year. Marjorie slides the pump on her shotgun, emitting that telltale sign capable of freezing anyone’s blood, she’s sure.
One of them—a boy, it sounds like—lets out a frightened cry. She steps inside. There’s an electric lantern right inside the door. Without lowering the gun, she reaches down, flicks it on. When the kids before her see the massive shotgun in her dual grip, their hands go up and they start shaking their heads with mad energy. She was right. Tweakers, for sure, as filthy as if they’d clawed their way up and out of the mud lining the creek bed a little ways behind the barn. But they’re young. Much younger than she expected, and this gives her a bit of pause. Teenagers at the most.
But another few minutes and they might have assumed the plank flooring covered up something truly valuable, or they might have started messing with the concrete mixer and the coil of the pump’s tube resting in the corner like a sleeping anaconda. There’s nothing for them to steal, and they should have realized that right away, but they stuck around and that was stupid. Real stupid.
One of them—the girl—starts to panic, blubbering, raised hands trembling. Marjorie’s sure the girl’s trying to muster a defense of herself, but her brains are so scrambled she can’t quite make words. She sounds like a mewling bird.
Kids, Marjorie thinks, just kids, both of them. The car’s way older than they are, which means it’s stolen.
She was a kid once. Before her father was so cruelly taken from her.
But even amid that terrible loss, she never allowed herself to become a broken-down thing like this. She kept her focus. Made choices. Determined her fate. Read the signs and took the opportunities presented her.
When the boy starts talking, he sounds just as bad as the girl, but the words are starting to make sense, like the lyrics of a familiar song being played just far enough from you that when in the first minute after you notice it, all you can hear is the bass line.
“Please let us go . . . please, please . . . let us go. Please let us go. Please.”
24
Lubbock, Texas
1970
The words come ripping out of Marjorie, powered by a year’s worth of repression, further fueled by the remorseless anger on her mother’s face.
Words like “loyalty” and “betrayal” and a dozen other descriptions of the real crimes that destroyed their family, crimes her mother committed against her father. A part of Marjorie had hoped that if she ever did get the chance to say these things—and she never thought she would, but her mother hit her so damn hard there was just no keeping her mouth shut—they would overpower Momma, fill her with shame, break down her arrogance and false fealty to Christ and leave behind a woman desperate for Marjorie’s guidance and instruction. A moment similar to that night right after her father’s arrest, when the truth, spoken plain and simple, had shamed Uncle Clem out of the house.
But there’s no shame in her mother’s blazing eyes, only rage. For a split second it feels like each of them assumes the unholy wail suddenly filling the kitchen is coming from the other woman. Has she broken her mother like she hoped? But her momma’s staring at the living room window as if the madly rattling frame is the source of the awful sound.
She’s looking toward downtown, Marjorie realizes, which is where the storm sirens are located.
The sounds of the weather outside have changed in tone. They’re less chaotic, less like dozens of holes being torn open in the sky