Page 61 of The Bright Lands
“You have to go somewhere, Jamal. He’s going to do something crazy.”
At the sight of the bruises, Jamal slung his bag over his shoulder with a strange cold calm. Fine, he thought. Running seemed to be working fine for KT. Bentley could keep its dreams and its nightmares. Jamal had never much liked it here anyway.
Only when he reached the parking lot did Jamal remember that his Explorer was still at the auto shop—the trip to Bethany’s place this weekend had finally overtaxed his SUV’s spotty alternator and the part was, of course, on back order.
He started dialing his mother out of habit. He stopped. What would he say?Can you drive me to the airport and buy me a ticket to Colombia?Why, he wondered now, had he never thought to get a passport?
A moment later he heard the sirens, saw the flashing lights flying down the highway. The cars headed straight for him. Some distant sense of self-preservation made Jamal replace the phone in his pocket so no one could imagine it was a gun.
He supposed, in the end, he had dug this hole himself.
CLARK
Ten minutes earlier, Clark had been on her way to the station, so jittery she could barely drive. She and Joel hadn’t even bothered trying to sleep the night before. They’d stayed up comparing notes over the phone, and by the time Joel had finished telling her his side of Dylan’s story Clark’s tired mind had been kicked into overdrive.
“They were gay,” Joel had said, and Clark had sunk into her chair.
Dylan had set up Bethany with Jamal because he hadn’t slept with her in months. It made a sort of sense to Clark. Bethany, Joel said, had had suspicions about Dylan for years, had wondered if Dylan might not be something the girl called “bisexual-ish,” but, last May, Dylan had come to her and said he couldn’t pretend anymore: he loved her, but he was hopelessly, “totally gay.”
“I have to tread so careful around here, Star.”
“And Troy?” she’d asked.
The line went silent. Joel finally said, “You mean you never guessed about all those afternoons?”
“Was that the only reason you dated me? To get near my brother?” She was surprised to hear how coolly she asked it. How little it had even upset her to consider the question. Maybe it was all the rum.
“I don’t think so. I’d had a crush on him for ages but—Listen, can we talk about this later?”
“Did Troy take those pictures of you?”
“No.”
“Was he the other man at the park? The one that got away?”
Joel had hesitated, but Clark had been willing to wait all night for his answer. The identity of “the other man” had long been a subject of speculation in Bentley. Deputy Grissom, the officer who’d arrested Joel, had stated repeatedly that Joel had been “in the act” when he was discovered but the other man involved had escaped before Grissom could get a good look at him.
Finally, Joel said only, “No.”
“Joel, I don’t mean to sound closed-minded but if that wasn’t Troy in those bushes how many queers do we have here in Pettis County?”
“Look, I need your help.” The anxiety in his voice was unmistakable—she let her question pass. “This can’t be a coincidence, Clark. Two Bentley Bison, both closeted gays, both vanish. One turns up dead, the other’s still missing a decade later. Be honest—does the sheriff’s department actually have any evidence against Jamal Reynolds?”
“Are you suggesting we’re railroading him?” she said, as if she hadn’t been asking the same thing all day yesterday.
“I’m suggesting this investigation is a lot more complicated than you thought. If news of my brother gets out nobody will care what happened to him. It’ll be just like the pictures of me all over again. I wasseventeen, Clark—those photos were child pornography and the department hardly even acknowledged they existed. There must have been witnesses—you can’t stick photos inside two hundred newspapers and not leave some kind of evidence. But it went nowhere. All anybody cares about here is something to gossip over. Clark, are you—”
“After my brother disappeared, did the cops ever come to talk to you?” She couldn’t stop thinking of her interview with Mayfield at her kitchen table a decade ago.
“What are you talking about? Of course they didn’t.”
“You can’t follow every lead in a case like this,”Mayfield had said yesterday afternoon in the car, justifying the baffling fact he wasn’t pursuing the missing KT Staler more aggressively even though the boy’s disappearance set off every obvious alarm in a case like this. Why hadn’t Mayfield followed up the obvious lead that Clark had given him in the wake of her brother’s disappearance:“You could ask Joel Whitley about Troy.”
Clark suspected that Mayfield was going to regret telling her she had a knack for this work.
“Okay,” Clark said, her scalp tingling.
She wasn’t certain she agreed with every step in Joel’s logic, wasn’t certain he’d even told her the entire truth about that night in the park, but it was enough for now. She wanted to find Dylan’s killer, of course she did, but Clark was wise enough to know her motives weren’t entirely altruistic. If Joel was right and Dylan’s deathwasconnected to Troy’s disappearance then maybe—maybe—she would find something in Dylan’s case she could use to finally staple closed her brother’s. She was willing to try.
