Beyond the Farthest Star

  IT TOOK STEPHEN ONLY TWO MINUTES to realize that something more than usual was wrong with Kyle—something very, very wrong indeed. Two minutes after that he spilled his concerns to Momsy and Potsy: Anne’s whereabouts, the fact that her mother and father didn’t know where she was, Kyle’s anger directed at Anne and his increasingly strange behavior …

  “He was lookin’ for somethin’ from me,” Stephen said. “Some-thin’ I can’t give him.”

  Potsy concurred. “That boy’s been wounded so deep he’s kickin’ out at everything and everybody. Best friends. People who never did him any harm. His pa, Jackson, is a mean man—worse when he’s drunk, which is most always.”

  “But even that’s not the point right now,” Momsy corrected. “Stephen, if you knew Anne’s folks are lookin’ for her, you had no right to promise not to tell them.”

  “But I didn’t know,” Stephen protested. Then he hung his head. “Yeah, I really did.”

  Momsy nodded. “And just the same way, you know what you need to do, don’t you?”

  “I’ll call her folks,” Stephen said. “But listen: if her parents agree, can Anne come stay with us awhile? I’ll move into the tack room in the barn.”

  “‘Course she can,” Potsy said in his rumbling bass. “Go back to that motel. Wait for her folks. Then bring her here if they agree.”

  Seconds later Stephen dialed the parsonage. “Missus Wells? This here’s Stephen, ma’am. I know where Anne is.”

  Adam was still outside, reviewing the shambles of his life, when he heard the telephone jingle inside. It was snatched up after only two rings. Maurene had been hovering over it, waiting for word about Anne.

  An instant later, Maurene emerged from the house in a stumbling run. She was trying to slip on a shoe and locate her car keys in her purse at the same moment.

  Still, her face reflected intense relief. “She’s all right!” Maurene gushed. “Anne’s with Calvin. I can go pick her up. I’ve got to go! I’ll be right back, Adam. I promise. We’ll both be right back.”

  But when she saw Adam’s expression, her excitement faltered and stopped.

  Silence descended.

  Maurene insisted she was too impatient to just sit beside Adam on the way to the Starlight Motel, so she drove.

  When they reached the motel’s lot, she slipped the car into Park, saying, “I’ll be right back.”

  Laying his hand on hers, Adam said the first words he’d said since she’d exited the house. “I’ll go.”

  Maurene appeared to think this over, then began digging in her purse. Producing a bottle of Anne’s pills, she handed them to Adam. “Room 215. Take these to her, please.”

  Accepting the prescription, Adam slipped out of the car, but Maurene called a question after him. “The whole time, Adam? You think she heard … everything?”

  Adam nodded.

  “I remember standing in front of the mirror in my wedding dress on our wedding day, saying to myself: ‘You’re not going to go through with this. You’re a liar, and you’re going to confess. You’re not going to let that man—you, Adam—commit his life to a lie.’ But I was an ugly, selfish liar.”

  Pausing in her confession, Maurene examined her reflection in the glass of the window. When it fogged over inside, she idly traced a star shape on the pane, then rubbed it out. “Then after—after she was born and I held her … so perfect and so profound and so helpless … Remember how much you loved her, Adam?”

  She studied him then, trying to read his thoughts. “I’m so sorry I lied to you. But I’ve never once, not ever, regretted saying yes to you that day.”

  Adam frowned and shook his head.

  With a deep sigh Maurene concluded, “We’ll work out whatever custody arrangement you want.”

  Coldly, stiffly, Adam corrected, “I have no legal right to her, Mo. None. It’s not gonna matter what I want.”

  Halfway up the stairs he turned and gazed at her. Then he ascended the rest.

  Maurene’s eyes roamed idly and nervously around the interior of the car. She was impatient to recover Anne but also fearful about the ride back to Leonard and their arrival at what would no longer be a home. And it was her fault. She was the one who had started their family’s foundation on a lie … one that had now been brutally exposed. Could Anne ever recover? Could she? Could Adam?

  From the floor where it had been tossed she picked up the burgundy-bound songbook. Clutching it to her, Maurene closed her eyes as great tears rolled down her cheeks and plopped onto the hymnal’s cover.

  Deputy Williams piloted his patrol car along the deserted two-lane farm road. Putting his hand to his stomach, he belched softly, then fumbled on the seat beside him for the bottle of Rolaids. He should have known better than to sample the diner’s corn-chip-bowl chili with onions and grated cheese.

  It had tasted so good and so right on such a frosty, windswept night, but how he was paying for it now, especially for the extra dose of Tiger Sauce he had ladled over the top.

  How much longer till he could scoot back to the station? He picked up the microphone and keyed the transmit switch. “Two to base.”

  “Base. What d’ya got, Harliss?” Joyce’s gravelly voice sounded especially irritating right now.

  “Saw the 11:20 off at the Greyhound. No sign of the Wells girl. It’s freezin’ out here. She must be holed up somewhere. I’m cuttin’ this pass short and headin’ … What the—”

  At the sight of something on the shoulder of the road ahead, Deputy Williams slowed and angled the vehicle to bring the lights to bear.

  “Harliss? Repeat that. You there, Harliss?”

  “Stay on with me, Joy-cee,” Williams requested. “Gotta look at something.”

  Flashlight in one hand, Williams drew his service weapon with the other. As he advanced toward the misshapen mound beside the road, he held torch and pistol in tactical readiness. With each step nearer he swept the surrounding darkness.

  At last Williams was no more than a half-dozen feet away from the suspicious object. A black duster that nevertheless sparkled when the beam skipped across it covered a vaguely human form.

  And beside the deputy’s feet, extending from the canvas overcoat and lying atop a pool of blood that glistened black in the starlight, was a man’s hand. Williams nudged the fingers with his boot toe. The hand, upturned, pleaded for assistance that would never come.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  WHEN HE GOT TO THE TOP of the motel’s stairs, Adam was seized with dizziness. He’d thought the alcoholic stupor in which Maurene had found him had long since worn off, to be replaced with this dull, throbbing headache, but it seemed to have come back on him.

  Or maybe he was merely going down in a whirlpool of emotion, drowning in how quickly everything about his life was vanishing.

  Once up the steps, that much closer to Anne—and Calvin—Adam felt nauseous and wobbly.

  And he was impossibly thirsty.

  There was no way he could hold his own with the glib Calvin in his present condition.

  On the landing at the head of the flight of steps was a soda machine. Adam dug in his pocket for coins and started feeding them into the machine. Caffeine. Something with a jolt of caffeine would also maybe settle his stomach.

  Adam dropped seven quarters into the vending device, then grimaced. He was a quarter short.

  And what was worse, Calvin appeared beside him on the balcony with a suitcase in his hand. “I always thought Coach shoulda played you more,” Calvin said.

  “Is that what you thought?”

  “Seriously, Ad-man. Always bugged Coach Michaels about puttin’ you in earlier. Just because you missed a few practices. Earlier—”

  “What does she know?” Adam demanded.

  “Not when the game was already won, you know?”

  “What did you tell her?”

  Drawing in a deep breath, Calvin smiled. “She knows I’m her father. She’s always gonna know that.”

  Moving closer, Calvin fi
shed a quarter out of his pocket, dropped it in the slot, and punched a button. “And you’re gonna know it too,” he gloated. “Every time you look at her.”

  A can of Coke fell with a clunk. Calvin dug it out of the vending tray and handed it to Adam. “And you know what’s rich? What is really the frosting on the cake? I didn’t tell her … you did.”

  The world was spinning even worse than before. Adam put out a hand to steady himself but missed the railing completely. The soda can fell from his nerveless fingers. There was a roaring in his ears like a freight train passing through the Starlight Motel.

  “Gotta plane to catch,” Calvin said, retrieving his case. “She’s in the room, but I don’t think she’s gonna be too glad to see you. She was after me to take her with me.” Calvin shook his head. “Crazy thought, but that tells you what she’s thinkin’. Good-bye, Ad-man. Be seeing you.”

  Calvin’s footsteps were no more than halfway down the treads when Adam, bent over a trashcan, was violently and repeatedly sick.

  Sheriff Burns discovered the Tucker pickup abandoned beside the road. It had been nosed into the bushes as if in an attempt at concealment. But the patrol-car lights had picked up an answering gleam from the rear reflectors and given its location away.

  Remembering the recent confrontation with Kyle’s father, Burns wondered what this unexplained find could mean. The Tucker place was miles in the other direction.

  Lights and strobes flashing, Burns was just exiting his vehicle when he heard Deputy Williams’ agitated report over the radio:

  “I’m a mile outta town, Joy-cee. Farm Road 680. Just south of the Lazy T. Oh, Lord!”

  Joyce’s voice broke in. “Harliss? What’s going on, Deputy? What is it?”

  “It’s murder, Joy-cee! Jackson Tucker. Kyle’s daddy. Been shot a buncha times in the face and chest. There’s blood everywhere. Get the sheriff, Joy-cee! Call the chief!”

  Service revolver in hand, Burns yanked open the driver’s side door of the Tucker truck.

  The cab was empty. There was no sign of the driver, but footprints and some broken weeds left the barest trace as to the direction someone had taken after leaving the pickup.

  Burns fought his way through the brush lining the road. His boots slipping on the damp grass, he found a patch of gravel and scrambled along it to the top of a knoll.

  There, displayed below him, not half a mile away, was the blinking sign of the Starlight Motel.

  Anne was in 215’s bathroom, seated on the floor with her back against the tub. One elbow rested on the lowered toilet lid. In her hand was the daggerlike glass shard. She turned it over, admiring the way the light bounced and bent when it struck the different surfaces. This inspection was the sole reason she’d left the light on. She much preferred sitting in the dark, but the desire for a closer examination of the starlike crystal had changed her mind.

  She was very close, she thought. Close to learning the answer to what lay beyond the farthest star.

  Anne tested the point of the vase’s splinter on her palm. A line of red, thin as thread, but brilliantly scarlet, jumped out to paint a new crease amid the others.

  Striking through heart line and head line and life line, the new mark welled up with a trickle of blood. Anne was oddly proud of the new groove. She had not been born with it. It was no part of her mother, much less the gift of a father who had smaller use for her than for his car or his cell phone.

  It didn’t really bleed much, but farther up her arm it would be different.

  Rolling up her sleeve, Anne studied the blue furrows where she had tested such implements before. Razors were less painful, but this jagged, glistening blade was much more elegant.

  The door handle jiggled as someone tested the lock. Anne’s head jerked at the noise. It was so unfair. This moment was not to be interrupted nor rushed.

  The rattling stopped. No voice called for her.

  Who could it be? Calvin was probably halfway to Dallas by now, eager to catch a plane to a beach with sand as white and fine as sugar.

  The shadows of a pair of shoes broke up the band of light showing beneath the door. Whoever it was had not gone away but remained motionless and silent.

  Trying to trick her?

  Anne knew how to wait. All her life, it seemed, she had been waiting … waiting … for something. For how many years now? Ten? Since age six or seven or eight? She had lots of practice waiting for a surprise happy ending that never came.

  She had waited until tonight for the secret about her real father to be disclosed.

  Like the rest of her life, it was a disappointment—this one more shattering than the others.

  A voice fell on the shoes and crept under the door: “Anne?”

  It was Adam. Of course it would be.

  “Open the door, Anne.”

  There was anxiety in his voice. He was probably worried about what a scandal it would be if his daughter … Foster daughter? Stepdaughter? Anne couldn’t quite figure out the right term. Anyway, he must be fearful of the shame he would endure if the child he had helped raise killed herself.

  “Go away,” she said.

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  Something rattled, but only once, and instantly stilled, as if Adam had not meant to cause the sound.

  “I have your medicine,” he said.

  Of course!

  “Will you take your medicine, Anne?”

  “No,” Anne said.

  Now he would be angry and accuse her of being uncooperative and having a bad attitude.

  “You’ll feel better, and what’s important is that you …”

  She was right. He was trying to guilt her.

  “Don’t want to feel better,” she corrected. “Go away. I wanna feel the way I feel.”

  “I can’t leave, Anne, but okay, I understand.”

  “Do you? Do you really?”

  Anne heard Adam take a deep breath and sigh. He was trying to figure out what to say next, she realized.

  “I know it’s difficult, but you have to try to …”

  “To what, Adam? Try and think happy thoughts? Is that it? Happy thoughts?”

  Even without seeing his face, Anne knew she had pushed him back into a corner. Pills and happy thoughts. Was that the formula for a successful life? Anne could not resist attacking him. Hadn’t he admitted he didn’t like her? Didn’t want her around? Hadn’t he made it really, really clear that she had ruined his precious career?

  “You’re such a hypocrite,” Anne said. “You’re always wanting to make me think all these thoughts from your hymnbook. When all the time all you ever think about is how you blame me for your career and for you and her not being able to have another kid of your own and for everything. Just go away. Leave me alone.”

  Pushing the sleeve farther up her arm, Anne revealed her most prized and feared possession: a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt, fully six inches long. The welt was puckered and shiny, as if inviting Anne to explore it with the glass shard.

  When Adam spoke again, it was not about pills or happy thoughts or trying harder. Perhaps, like her, he could imagine what was hidden by the bathroom door. Perhaps he could picture the way the point of the sliver dug ever so delicately into her skin, just beside the vein. Whatever it was he visualized, it frightened him. She could tell. Because, with urgency, he uttered something unexpected: “The day you were born, Anne.”

  Then more words came with a rush: “I was thinking about the day you were born. How you were so little you could wrap all five of your fingers around just one of mine, and you never wanted to let go.”

  When did you let go of me, then? Anne wondered bitterly.

  But Adam was not finished. “And it wasn’t because I was anything great or special. It wasn’t because I prayed with the president or had my picture on magazines.

  “I was just your father, and that was all in the world that mattered to you. And I was thinking, Anne, that even if things had turned out differently in my life,
the day you were born would still be the best day of all. And being your father the source of my happiest thoughts.

  “My best day,” he repeated. “My happiness.”

  Lowering the point of the glass dagger, Anne still said accusingly, “But you’re not my father, are you? So all your happy thoughts are lies, and all you really are is someone who prayed with the president. You’re no more real than a face on a magazine.”

  “What I said, Anne? They’re not lies. And I have proof.”

  “What proof can you have when you’re not really my father? When you’re just lying—”

  “A finger painting, Anne,” Adam interrupted. “I have a finger painting. One you painted when you were little, just five.”

  Anne tried to remember. It was hard, like going back over someone else’s memories. Age five. Did she even have recollections of being five?

  “Anne doesn’t remember five,” she said.

  “I do,” Adam said firmly. Then his tone grew even warmer when he added, “And six and nine and the night you gave me this painting. And I remember the morning … the morning I … found you.”

  Something stirred inside Anne then. He was not talking about finding her as a baby, or as a five-year-old.

  He was talking about that time. Anne’s eyes traced the lightning-bolt scar and she let herself recall the day as Adam filled in the details.

  “I was holding you in my arms while we waited for the ambulance,” he said. “And I remember shaking you every time you started to sleep. I was so afraid. All I could think about was this painting. How much I loved it … and you. How I had walked out of my staff meeting because I was terrified I’d lost it and that I’d never see it again.”

  A scratching noise reached Anne’s ears. What was that?

  “I have it here with me, Anne,” Adam said. “I’ll just slip it under the door. Okay, Anne?”

  A folded scrap of paper slipped through the gap beneath the door. Anne laid the crystal knife down on the toilet lid to reach for it.

  “But here’s the thing,” she said. Regret crowded her words. Anne really, truly wished she could feel differently, but there was no use in lying. “It’ll be like somebody else drew it, won’t it?” There was the sound of shuffling beyond the panel. “Because I don’t remember five. I wish I remembered five,” she added wistfully. “But I don’t, Adam. Adam?”