Chapter One

Chapter One

Shannon Reynolds’s ragged breath filled the little car as she drove past the live oak with the yellow scrap of crime scene tape. Even after five years, the dirty and tattered piece of plastic still waved a solemn greeting from her dead friend’s house.
 Her belly began to gurgle. She hitched the wheel to the left and pulled the little rental car to the curb. Her foot shook itself off the clutch and the car lurched to a stop. From the end of a long tunnel a crimson wave of red rushed toward her.
Shannon dropped her face into her hands. Did I make a mistake in coming back? Hot tears leaked through her fingers and trailed down the backs of her hands. Before her eyes swam the vision of Barbara DeBreaux, lying in a pool of her own blood.
 All the blood. She came to standing over her friend who stared up at her from the garage floor. I need to find out if .… It was too awful to think about.
Shannon Reynolds had spent the past five years building a dam with torn and ripped scraps of her past. Cemented with sticky yellow fear and coated with a sheet of black rage, it had served her well. Now, it breached. … I don’t know if I can do this….
Her gut cramped and felt bottomless. Sobs scraped her throat. Opening the door of the Escort, she stumbled, grabbed the doorpost, then pulled herself straight. With her arms wrapped around her belly, Shannon turned her back to the house and fell to her knees in the grass next to the sidewalk.
Snippets of scenes flew through her mind in a rapid blur … flashing red lights …Alisha, staring from her dead mother to Shannon …eleven-year-old shrieks bouncing off the concrete and metal in the garage. … and Wheat …No one had seen him since the night of the murder. He was there. …Did he...?...Could he? Oh, God …. Please…. I’ve got know. She bent over and covered her face with her hands until the racking sobs ebbed. Finally, she rubbed her hands over her face, took another long deep breath, then pushed out an exhale that quivered past her pursed lips. Sliding back into the driver’s seat, she leaned back and stared at the speckles of splattered bugs on the windshield. Maybe I should just turn around and head back to Red Bluff. Leave the skeletons buried.
No, Dammit! Shannon started the Escort and slammed it into gear. Screeching a U-turn, she sped out of the subdivision and headed the few blocks to town. Her well-honed strategy of cloaking her fear in anger still worked well for her. By the time she’d reached Main Street, she’d regrouped to her normal persona—cool and controlled.
She thought she’d readied herself to confront old ghosts, but after seeing the crime scene tape, memories—and dark spots where memories were hidden—jumped up and slapped her, one by one, in the face. Terror, she feared, was waiting for her on the other side of knowing.
She had managed to cordon sadness, guilt and terror into shadows of feelings. She’d dumped them into a box and snapped it shut, then pushed it way back into a dark corner of her mind.
The road became blurry as tears filled her eyes. And, Wheat. I loved him so much. Fingers squeezed the steering wheel until her knuckles where white. Bastard.
 She found a parking place down the block from Tony’s Café. The vinyl of the seat stuck to her legs as she moved to get out of the car. The little air conditioner in the Ford wasn’t up to the hot and humid late Louisiana summer. She was glad she’d changed into shorts and a gauze midriff at the airport.
 Little had changed in Plattesville. Small shops lined Main Street and displayed goods through wavy windows. Heat rose from the cracked concrete like translucent snakes. Townsfolk meandered in southern slow motion.
 Cold air smacked her skin and raised goose bumps when she entered the air-conditioned café. I forgot these hicks like to freeze indoors. The air, thick with the greasy smells of frying catfish, swept Shannon back to the tiny trailer where she’d lived with her drug addicted mother and violent alcoholic father. A tiny, trembling voice within her whispered, Don’t go there.
 Shannon selected a booth at the back of the restaurant and sidled into the corner. Along with the catfish, the clacking of dishes, scraping of chairs and ringing of the cash register created a symphony of triggers to memories of her childhood—sitting right here in one of these booths getting special treats of coke and candy while her parents drank in the bar. Sometimes she even got to sit up at the counter on a stool.
 Hattie, the big bleached-blonde waitress, shuffled up to the table and, with the corner of her mouth, blew a strand of hair out of her face. She looked down at Shannon to take her order. The woman’s wrinkled face looked as though it had caved in on itself. Grooves and wrinkles mapped her history. “What’ll ya have, suga.”
 Shannon looked up and met Hattie’s eyes in an instant of recognition neither of them wanted. Faded and jaundiced gray eyes blinked then shifted away. Shannon ordered sweet tea, then watched as the woman waddled away.
***
Good ol’ Hattie. She and her mom had spent lots of time together. The two women sat at the chrome-legged dining table in the 12 by 14 foot trailer. The gray vinyl on the seats and backs of the chairs was torn, and the padding stuck out like uncombed hair. Pieces of mottled and gray cottony material had been plastered flat against the vinyl by damp bodies, then covered with duct tape. The legs, rusty and bent, groaned when Hattie plopped her huge behind on one of them. They sat in the tiny trailer, drinking sweet tea—and sometimes wine—and laughing together. Sometimes they laughed so hard one of them would start to pee her pants and have to run for the bathroom with her hand between her legs. Shannon, six years old, would roll on the floor hooting and holding her belly.
 Then there were the other times that Hattie would come over and they would go into the bathroom together. When they came out, they would be quiet and smiling and their eyes would look different—like they just woke up from a nap. After Hattie left, Shannon would watch her mother nod off, spilling cigarette ashes all over the table. When her mom started to lean in the kitchen chair, Shannon would help her to bed.
 Those nights, when her mother passed out, Shannon would go to bed, scooch into a corner, ball herself up beneath the covers and will herself to be invisible. He always found her, though. He’d come home smelling of rotgut wine. She’d hear him open the door, then she could smell him. He’d come into her tiny bedroom and pull her from her hiding place. The rotten-vomit-wine smell of him engulfed her. “C’mere, honey….” She wanted to scream but she couldn’t. Instead, she floated to the top of the room.
                                                     ***
 Hattie returned, set the sweaty glass of iced tea on the worn Formica table and shuffled away in her lopsided, grease-and-food-stained-tennis shoes. Shannon sat on the sunken brown vinyl booth bench held together with layers of duct tape, and took a long swallow of the cold, sweet drink. She leaned back, closed her eyes and saw her mother mixing the Southern style sweet tea—two cups sugar in half gallon of tea.
 Memories flocked into a kaleidoscope of dreams with pulsing red and blue lights. Some distant part of herself began waking up. She saw the men carrying her mother out of the trailer on a stretcher. Then, the flashing lights. Then nothing. The need to know gnawed at her like the pangs of hunger. Why didn’t her mom ever come back home?
***
 With an elbow on the table, Shannon rested her chin in her hand and gazed out the grease-coated front windows. The wavy glass distorted the shapes of shops across the street, like the creepy reflections from those fun house mirrors at carnivals and fairs. Claws of foreboding clutched the inside of her gut. She sat up, leaned back and let her arm slap the table, wondering if she should have come back. I can change my ticket and leave anytime I want. The thought calmed her. She was in control and all was well. Yes, I did need to come back.
  Wheat had called her a few times over the past few months. Said he couldn’t live without her and needed her to come back to him. Said he was going to Mexico and would be back in Louisiana at the end of the summer. She’d figured he was still the drug-running, outlaw biker he’d always been. Yet, she knew, while she talked on the phone with him, that she would return to Louisiana.
 Wheat’s voice was all sugar. He never answered her whenever she asked him about her the murder or the $5000 he stole from her. He just poured more sugar.
 Beneath the surface boiled old desires. The smell of his leather, the rumble of his bike and his man-scent that roiled beneath. Could there be a chance? Yet, deeper than beneath …way deeper, she knew that a path toward those desires could be the end of her.
 The echoing crash of breaking dishes sailed out of the kitchen and brought Shannon upright. She grasped the tall, cold glass and took a long, swallow. Leaning back in the booth she exhaled and heard the quiver in her breath.
  The wrinkled vinyl on her bare skin pinched her, bringing her back to the present. She was trembling. She called on the cool, rational, part of her—that steely, quiet angry part of her that had worked so well over the years. It was her fuel.
 I’ll just sit and watch awhile … get used to things … calm down. She brought the glass of icy, amber liquid to her lips and watched over the rim as the front door swung open, letting in a bright slice of sun.
 A hulking silhouette filled the doorway, blocking the light. The huge shadow sauntered into the café.
 Hattie waved at the big man. “Hey, Chief.” Strings of straw-yellow hair flew helter skelter around her hair combs. She dodged his hand as it swung for her butt. He stood like a king, scanning the patrons. With the typical wary eye of a cop, his gaze swept the faces for transients and other suspicious characters. His eyes moved over Shannon, then backtracked and rested on her for a few seconds.
  A grin slid across the Chief’s face. “Shannon? Is that you, girl?”
  She pulled a stiff smile. “Yep. It’s me in the flesh, Chief.”
 Chief ruled. He’d gained that nickname during his first term as Sheriff, and it stuck. The 250-pound man stood six-feet-six inches and had a belly that overlapped his belt. His sunglasses were looped into his shirt pocket. A toothpick danced around the outside of his mouth as he chewed on the other end of it. The tan uniform had big circles of damp brown at the armpits. In twenty years, no one had ever challenged his position.
 “Git up so I kin give you a big ol’ hug.” He moved to the booth where she sat.
 Shannon got up and the Chief grabbed her in a crushing hug.
 “Hold on, Chief! You’re squeezing the life outta me.” Shannon struggled to keep the toes of her shoes in contact with the floor. She swallowed her revulsion when he put one of his big sweaty paws on her behind. She wriggled free and stretched a tight grin across her teeth. “The same big ol’ flirt, I see?”
 “Lemme set a spell.” Chief, like most cops, never sat with his back to the door, so he squeezed his huge frame into the booth beside Shannon, pinning her to the wall and pressing the bulk of his thigh to her leg.
 That embrace, pushing all the air out of her, and his bulk trapping her into the corner warned her to tread softly. She shifted her body so that there was space between her bare skin and his leg. To avoid any chance of him feeling rebuffed, she stroked him with her words. “I need to be able to see you when I talk to you.” She tossed in another grin for good measure.
 The Chief ordered himself a sweet tea, and a refill for Shannon. “Well, sis, how long you in town for?”
 “Not sure. Maybe about a week or so. I’ll be staying at Katherine and Bill Stones’.”
 “Oh, yeah, the Stones.” He furrowed his brow and clenched his teeth so that the muscle on the side of his face twitched.
 “What’s up with the scowl?”
 The Chief waited until the waitress set their tea down and left.
 “Those Stone kids are still a pain in the ass. Especially that Jonathon. Nothin’ but trouble. He’s gonna say the wrong thing to the wrong person one day and get his clock cleaned but good. That drunken SOB of a dad of his is no better.”
 Shannon looked down into her tea and stabbed at the ice cubes with her straw. She didn’t want to get on the wrong side of the Chief, so didn’t defend her pseudo-family.
 “I drove by the DeBreaux’s place. Saw a little piece of crime tape still on the tree. Whatever came of the Barbara DeBreaux’s murder, Chief?” Shannon knew, through letters from Katherine Stone that the investigation had been dropped and no one spoke of the gruesome killing or the machete slashing in the cemetery, just six months before the murder.
 “Some transient done that woman in. Probably the same bum who attacked the kids in the cemetery. The case went downtown. Haven’t heard anything for a coupla years.”
 “You never had a suspect?” She twirled her glass, then felt the Chief’s stare. Was Wheat a suspect? He was there that night, along with Barbara, Shannon and a few other people partying, doing coke, smoking marijuana and drinking beers and shots of Southern Comfort. Her belly crawled. She had no idea what had happened.
 Shannon had come to at 5:00 a.m., standing in the garage, looking down at Barbara’s beaten and bloody body. Alicia, Barb’s 13-year-old daughter, came through the kitchen rubbing her eyes and stood at the open door from the kitchen to the garage. Shannon could still hear the girl’s screams as they bounced off the concrete and metal in the garage. Then, Shannon watched as the blonde-haired girl disappeared in speech, mind, and thought.