Maryville gossip provided me with all the information that I needed.
I was in the library, sitting on the floor between shelves, reading the first pages of The Blue Sword. It was an adventure, which was the kind of book I liked. That’s when I overheard the librarian talking to the chief of Maryville’s volunteer fire department. And I heard my mother’s name. The librarian said that a friend at the post office had told her that Lucy Tyler had received a letter from her sister a couple of days earlier. Between that letter and the one that was mailed back—to a bail bond company—Lucy had pulled five hundred dollars from her savings account and bought a money order.
I didn’t understand, back then, the significance of that transaction. But I did know that my mother hadn’t ever bothered writing to me. Or to Katie. Certainly, she’d never phoned us. Or sent us gifts on our birthdays or at Christmastime.
My mother didn’t care about us.
That’s what I decided that day in the library. And that’s when I tried to stop caring about her. Tried to stop even thinking about her. Because I knew the truth. Though Aunt Lucy was always telling us that our mother loved us, I’d overheard Gran say more than once that Lydia Tyler cared only about herself.
I believed Gran.
Of course, I never told Katie about the letters or my decision. I didn’t want to risk her having an asthma attack and ending up in the emergency room or maybe dying. And I didn’t want her crying all the time the way she had when Aunt Lucy had first brought us home to Maryville. So I kept quiet as Katie created soap-opera fantasies about our mother’s amnesia or her undercover work in some foreign country or her long imprisonment on false charges. Someday, Katie assured me, our mother would come and find us. Gran would forgive her. Aunt Lucy would hug her. And finally reunited, we would all live happily at the Cherokee Rose.
When, I wondered idly as I lifted the microphone from its mount on the dashboard, had Katie finally stopped believing that our mother would return? I thought about it for a minute, realized that we’d been in high school before her hope had turned to bitterness. Bitterness that had festered and spread like poison through her mind. And had finally ended in murder.
My bleak turn of thought made it easy to keep my voice serious when I checked back in with dispatch and reported that the 911 on Honeysuckle Drive had been resolved. At least for the time being. In turn, I was told that Chad had just radioed. He and the state crime-scene techs were headed to Camp Cadiz and would meet me in the parking lot.
My trip back through the forest took me along the same route that Chad’s father had traveled with his terrified family a decade earlier. Past the narrow, rutted mud road that had once led to a rotted-out single-wide trailer. A few years earlier, a gang from out of the area had set up a meth lab on the property. They’d discovered too late that—unlike many of the rarely traveled roads that crisscrossed the forest and rural southern Illinois—this particular dead-end road was regularly traveled by a big, redheaded county cop.
For a while, I watched the dense green woods flash past on both sides of the gravel road. Then I crossed the narrow bridge over Big Creek. For about a mile, the creek paralleled the road’s right shoulder, occasionally visible through the tangle of green foliage. This morning, it sparkled unthreateningly in the early-morning sun. But on the night Chad’s mother had died, the rushing current had been strong enough to carry the bleeding boy almost a mile downstream.
It was a miracle that he hadn’t drowned, I thought. But he’d managed to grab onto a branch and pull himself from the water. A county cop had found him walking down the road in the dark, headed for town, looking for help to save his mother.
Chad’s father had been arrested just after sunrise the morning after he’d killed his wife. He’d been found at home, sleeping soundly in the bed he’d shared with his wife for fourteen years. The Lord, he’d told the cops when they’d questioned him, had commanded him to punish his unfaithful wife and purge her living sin from the face of the earth. He was certain that he’d done just that. Shot her with the critter gun