Chapter 5
The driver’s side door opened.
Miller stepped out. He was a broad, square-jawed man in his late forties, wearing an olive-drab sheriff’s department jacket over heavy Carhartt canvas overalls. His flat-brimmed campaign hat was pulled low against the freezing drizzle.
He didn't run toward the house. He moved with the slow, deliberate, predatory patience of a man who spent five months of the year tracking wounded deer through the Brushy Mountains.
He stopped by Marcus’s open driver door. He leaned in, pulled a flashlight from his belt, and played the white beam across the empty bench seat. Then he dropped his gaze to the gravel apron beneath the door.
*The gravel.*
My stomach plummeted into an icy void.
In my panic at three in the morning, when I had hauled Marcus out of the rain and across the threshold, I hadn't carried him. I hadn't had the strength. I had dragged him backward by his collar, his heavy logging boots digging twin, irregular furrows through the wet stone.
And where his heel had caught on the bottom porch step, a wide, rusty puddle had soaked directly into the crushed limestone.
Miller’s flashlight beam lingered on the ground.
I couldn't stay in the shed. If he found me cowering behind a barrel of steaming lye, smelling of scorched hair and caustic soda, it was over.
I took three long, shallow breaths, smoothed the front of my sweatpants, and checked my reflection in the dark glass of the workbench window.
My face was deathly pale. A jagged smudge of soot crossed my forehead, and my left collarbone was scratched red. But the blood—the visible blood—was off my skin.
I unbolted the shed door, stepped out into the freezing mist, and called out before he could turn around.
“Miller!”
My voice sounded cracked, raspy, but loud enough to break the mountain silence.
The deputy whipped around, his right hand dropping instinctively toward the Glock holstered on his hip. When he saw it was me walking from the outbuildings, his shoulders dropped an inch, but his hand stayed resting on the leather grip.
“Tom,” he said, squinting through the mist. His breath drifted in a steady, gray plume beneath the brim of his hat. “What are you doing out back?”
“Checking the generator lines,” I lied, closing the distance between us with deliberate, heavy strides, trying to mimic the walk of a man worn down by thirty hours of freezing weather. “The storm ripped off half the flashing on the shed roof. I thought I heard a transformer pop behind the timber line.”
Miller didn't answer right away. He clicked his flashlight off, hooking it onto his tactical vest, but his small, gray eyes never left my face.
“Clara caught me down on the county road,” Miller said quietly. “She was half out of her mind. Said Marcus came up here last night to hash out that timber easement and never made it home.”
“I know,” I said, rubbing my temples with the back of my forearm—careful to keep my chemical-burned palms turned inward, hidden against my ribs. “She came pounding on my door twenty minutes ago. Woke me out of a dead sleep. Scared the hell out of me.”
Miller tilted his head. He glanced past my shoulder, his gaze tracing the path I had just walked from the shed, then drifted up to the roofline of my house.
“You sleeping in your work clothes?” he asked.
I looked down at the sweatpants, where the faint, pinkish halos of diluted bleach still stained the knees.
“The furnace died at two in the morning,” I said, keeping my voice flat, tired, tinged with neighborly annoyance. “The breaker box threw a spark, spilled an old can of primer in the pantry hall. I’ve been trying to keep the pipes from bursting ever since. It’s twenty-eight degrees inside that house, Miller.”
Miller nodded slowly, but his eyes dropped to the ground between us.
He took two slow steps toward the bottom porch step. The soles of his heavy tactical boots crunched against the wet limestone.
“What happened to Marcus’s truck?” he asked, nodding toward the idling F-150. “Driver’s door wide open. Battery almost drained. The front tires are buried six inches in your drainage culvert.”
“He must have hit the ice,” I said, stepping closer to position my body directly between Miller and the dark, discolored patch of gravel near the bottom step. “The sleet came down sideways around midnight. If he came barreling up the ridge in that gale, he probably skidded off the approach. I heard tires spinning around one, but by the time I got to the kitchen window, I couldn't see a damn thing through the snow.”
Miller stood right in front of me now.
He was four inches taller, his chest broad under the duty jacket. Up close, he smelled of stale black coffee, wet wool, and wintergreen tobacco.
And then he sniffed.
His nostrils flared slightly. His brow pulled together into a deep, sharp crease.
“What is that smell?” he asked.
My heart felt like it was hammering behind my teeth.
“What smell?”
“Smells like... sulfur. And burned hair.” He took half a step to the side, his boots pivoting in the stone. “Like an electrical fire that went bad.”
“The primer,” I repeated immediately. “It had lacquer thinner mixed in to cut the rust off the foundation screws. And the generator backfired twice before the fuel line froze. The whole yard stinks of it.”
Miller stared at me. His pale gray eyes were unblinking, hard as flint.
“Show me your hands, Tom.”
The words were spoken softly, almost gently, but the air between us suddenly turned to glass.
“What?”
“Your hands,” Miller said, lifting his chin. “You’ve been tucking them under your armpits since you walked out of that shed. Show them to me.”
The cold wind swept down from the hemlocks, howling through the porch rafters. In the distance, down by the southern creek bed, Clara’s frantic, reedy voice echoed faintly through the mist: *“Marcus! Marcus, answer me!”*
If I refused, Miller would draw his weapon. If I ran, he would put three hollow-points through my spine before I reached the woodpile.
Slowly, carefully, I pulled my hands out from under my arms and held them out between us, palms up.
The skin on my knuckles and the inner pads of my fingers was raw, blistering, and the violent shade of a boiled beet from the caustic lye and undiluted bleach.
Miller took a step closer, his eyes narrowing as he examined the scald marks.
“That’s chemical burn,” he said flatly.
“I told you,” I said, keeping my voice utterly level, forcing every muscle in my jaw not to twitch. “I was mopping up industrial primer with bare hands because the cold water line was frozen solid. The solvent chewed right through my skin. You want to see the bucket, Miller? It’s sitting right inside the back door.”
Miller didn't take the bait. He reached out with a leather-gloved hand, took my left wrist, and turned it over.
His thumb rubbed against a small, dark speck dried beneath my fingernail.
*Not paint.*
It was a crust of dried hemoglobin, no larger than a grain of sand, that had escaped the initial scrubbing.
