We Are All the Same in the Dark - Julia Heaberlin Page 0,21
from a comprehensive effort, but I move on.
A search for the owner of the land where Angel was found is easy but not helpful. The owner is a corporation in Saudi Arabia. This isn’t suspicious. Water and oil rights in Texas go to the highest bidder. But it will make it near impossible to get surveillance footage from any cameras in the field, if there are any.
I google fake eye. Glass eye doctor. My clumsy attempts eventually reward me with a news story headlined The Houdini of Eyes, about a Dallas ocularist. I learn that this is someone who designs an eye prosthesis, which is not made of glass.
I feel as much of an urgent need to repair this mute, mysterious girl as I do to find out why she landed in that field. I leave a voicemail for my own prosthetist, who has been on speed dial for a loose screw in my head or leg for ten years. I beg her to use her connections to get an appointment for Angel.
I impulsively pull up my email and write a quick note to the chief, apologizing for the short notice and asking for a vacation week so I can deal with a leg issue—a lie. It makes him uncomfortable to wonder what I’m hiding under my uniform pants so he never asks for details. I’m not sure he’s ever rested his eyes below my waist.
It’s likely a futile effort, but I copy my partner, Rusty, so he won’t bug me while I’m off. He suspects I keep things from him, and in this case, he’d be right. I fill out a report on Angel and the evidence I’ve gathered. I download the photos in the field from my phone. I click the save button but not submit. I hide it in a folder.
The minute hand on the wall clock has clunked around its world twice since I sat down. Midnight. I’m still wired, not so unusual.
In my off-duty hours, I have quietly followed every old lead in Trumanell’s case to a dead end, a slammed door, a patronizing glance at my leg, a you’re too emotionally involved, sweetheart.
I quit applying snug rules to my personal or professional behavior a long time ago. I’ve taken a particular interest in rescuing girls like Angel who find themselves in the crosshairs of a county where a killer might be slumbering.
My father wouldn’t like any of this.
I let my fingers travel down the silver chain around my neck until they find the dull piece of metal that used to hide in the hairs of my father’s chest. While most cops wear a St. Michael or a cross, my father chose this.
I believe objects can acquire a heartbeat. This key is one of them.
I yank off the chain. I lean over and stick it in the drawer, the only thing he ever locked.
I hope, like always, I’ll find something I missed.
12
The first thing I lift out of the drawer is a half-full bottle of Tito’s vodka. I unscrew it and take a slug, not my first from this bottle. Next, I remove a cheap shirt box with an ugly cartoon Santa Claus printed on the lid, an unholy grimace that I met first a very long time ago under our Christmas tree.
I set the box on the top of the desk with the bottle of vodka.
That’s all of it. This is what my father kept under lock and key.
The first time I tugged open the drawer—the third day I sat behind this desk—I imagined it as a tomb for something terrible. Trumanell’s bone china skull. A confession from my father or Wyatt smudged with dirt and blood that would break my heart.
Loving dark men is a seesaw. They never tell you everything. You always wonder if the tiny red spot on a shirt is really from a spaghetti dinner like they claim. But then they put a bird back in a nest. They pull a drowning kid out of the water.
And that’s all it takes. The spaghetti is not blood.
I lift the lid of the Santa box and finger through layers of letters and notes my father found worth keeping in his sixty-two years on earth. I lay out everything neatly on the desk like a case I return to again and again.
Empty redneck threats abusing their and there and you’re and your. Gushing thank-yous from mothers and grandmothers who favored cards with close-ups of bluebonnets and portraits of horses.