Page 46 of Cut Off from Sky and Earth
“Bathroom’s that way.” She points.
I race down the hall and throw up into her toilet bowl. After my stomach is empty, I cup my hands under the stream of water in the sink and splash my face, rinse out my mouth. I spare a glance in the mirror. I look every bit as shitty as I feel.
When I walk back into the living room, she gives me a concerned look. “Feeling better?”
“No,” I tell her. “I realized something. There aren’t two stabbings where Tristan’s the common denominator. There are three.”
“Three?” she echoes.
I nod. “There was a murder in Little Sweetwater last week, where we live. A twenty-year-old woman was murdered last week. Her roommate found her.”
“Stabbed to death?” Her voice shakes.
“Yes. And Tristan’s working on the case.”
My stomach heaves, but I know there’s nothing left to vomit. So I force down my nausea and say, “And just like you and me, Giselle Ward was a redhead.”
We stare at each other for a long wordless moment. I don’t know what she’s thinking, but I’m thinking it’s possible my husband’s a killer.
Twenty-Six
Tristan
* * *
For months after Tate showed up and beat the shit out of me, I waited to hear that he’d been arrested. I was sure my anonymous tip would help the police connect him to Dana Rowland’s murder. But the news never came.
Now, I put aside the conversation with my mother and what I’m sure is Tate’s latest gambit—faking his death—and take a long overdue, clear-eyed look at what happened in Arizona. Mom isn’t the only one who hasn’t been completely forthcoming.
Less than two weeks before the dust storm, before Dana Rowland’s brutal stabbing, I got a card in the mail. There was no return address, but it had a Tempe postmark. I didn’t recognize the spiky printing on the envelope. I took it to my bedroom to open it.
It was a sixteenth birthday card, which was weird because I’d had my birthday in January, more than a month earlier. Weirder still, the image on the front was two cartoonish males sitting in a convertible. A speech bubble over the passenger’s head read “Happy Birthday, little brother! Time for you to take the wheel!”
My throat was tight and dry as I flipped the card open. Inside, in that same jagged handwriting, there was a more personalized message:
I wasn’t much older than you are now when Dad showed me what it meant to be a man. That pussy Mom married can’t demonstrate, so it’s up to me to be a role model. Meet me at the ASU bookstore on Saturday at 3:00.
My stomach heaved, and I gagged but managed not to puke. “Not on your life,” I muttered as I ripped the card in half, then fourths, and continued to rip the thin card and the envelope into smaller and smaller pieces until they were nothing more than two large handfuls of confetti. I crept to the hall bathroom, tossed the scraps into the toilet, and flushed it.
On Saturday, I went for a long trail run up through the mountains. I ran for miles, to the point of exhaustion. I ran until my spent body and tired mind were too worn out to worry about Tate’s overture and what it meant. I thought I could forget about it, and him. Then he showed up at the house days later.
I never told my mother about the card. Initially, I kept it from her because I knew the fact that Tate had tracked us down would upset her. And later, after the haboob, I kept it to myself because I suspected the card, my failure to meet him, or perhaps the combination of the two played a role in Dana Rowland’s death.
One line from the note ran through my head in a nonstop loop for months, afterward: “I wasn’t much older than you are now when Dad showed me what it meant to be a man.” I could only guess what that initiation into manhood had entailed, but I knew for sure that I didn’t want to be the kind of man my father had been and my brother had become.
What I didn’t know—and still don’t know now—is exactly how much responsibility I bear for Dana Rowland’s murder. Was his plan always to kill her or did he do it to send me a message?
I click through the cold case files until I find what I’m looking for. Transcripts of the call providing tips and information about the Rowland case. I search through until I spot Tate’s name and then read the follow-up: When the homicide detectives gathered university personnel for interviews, they did ask to speak to him, but he hadn’t shown up for work since the day of the dust storm, not even to pick up his final check. Tate Weakes simply vanished.
I continue to read through the chronology. To their credit, the detectives did attempt to track Tate down. But a seasonal laborer moving on without leaving a forwarding address isn’t, in itself, a red flag. They were understandably focused on suspects they could find—Dana’s boyfriend, an old coworker who had a crush on her, a fraternity brother who’d harassed her at the university fitness center. Although none of these leads panned out, it’s not surprising Tate fell off the detectives’ radar.
What is surprising is that I didn’t fall off Tate’s.
January 2017
Wichita, Kansas
* * *
