Bitter Sun. Beth Lewis
going to tell the sheriff,’ Gloria said.
‘We’ll get in trouble,’ I said, a knot forming in my chest. ‘We moved her.’
‘Yeah, we will,’ Rudy said, his finger bouncing in the air. ‘He’s right. We moved her. They’ll think we did it.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’ Gloria’s scowl deepened.
‘All the detective books and cop shows say you don’t touch the body, Gloria, and you definitely don’t move it,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should wait until Samuels finds her himself?’
Rudy pointed at me, his arm straight out. ‘I like Johnny’s plan.’
‘It’s a stupid plan,’ Gloria said. ‘I don’t care what you say, I’m going to tell Samuels.’
Rudy grabbed the back of his neck with both hands, his elbows stuck out like sails. ‘Just wait, yeah? Just a day. Maybe do one of those anonymous tip-offs and leave us out of it.’
His voice turned small. ‘They’ll think I had something to do with it. They’ll lock me up, Gloria. I’m a Buchanan. I got bad blood, remember, and everyone in town knows it.’
Jenny put her arm through Rudy’s, held his hand and pushed her cheek against his shoulder.
‘You’re not bad,’ she said. ‘We’ll all tell Samuels the truth. You didn’t touch her and if they think otherwise, they’ll have to go through us to get to you. Right, guys?’
‘Right,’ Gloria said and took Rudy’s other hand.
I completed the circle, put my arms over Jenny and Gloria’s shoulders, pulled the four of us into a group hug.
‘We’re like a flock of birds, aren’t we?’ I said. ‘We stick together and we protect each other from eagles and eels, hey?’
I prodded Rudy’s stomach and he told me to shut up.
‘A flock. I like that.’ Jenny patted my back. ‘We’ve got a Roost after all.’
Rudy finally smiled. ‘You and your birds, Johnny,’ he said, just as quiet, then shook his head. ‘If only we were, huh? We could all fly the hell out of here.’
‘We will, one day. All four of us,’ Gloria said, then checked her watch. ‘I’ve got to go. Daddy’s taking me to the fairground in Bowmont tonight. Mom is at one of her Clarkesville society dinners and thank God she didn’t make me go to that. I’ll win you each a teddy bear.’
Gloria broke the circle and Rudy went with her, to see her home like he always did. Then he turned, walked backward a few steps.
‘We’re a flock, yeah?’ he shouted, the wince, the curl, the confusion still on his face, though he tried to put a mask over it. He smiled, flapped his arms like wings. ‘Ca-caw, ca-caw, Johnny. See you guys tomorrow.’
They waded through Briggs’ wheatfield toward town, waist-high in gold, as if their torsos were floating free. We walked everywhere. Jenny and me didn’t have bikes. No money for scrap metal that does a job your legs can do just fine, Momma always said. Rudy was fixing up a broken, rusted-up Schwinn but getting nowhere, and Gloria had a pink Raleigh she refused to ride because we couldn’t ride with her.
I let myself smile as I watched my friends. My flock.
Jenny fidgeted by my side. The calm she’d had with Rudy and Gloria had gone with them. She glanced at me, then away, then down at her feet.
I couldn’t move. Behind, the Fort and the body. Away to the left, my house, empty and sweltering. Right, Rudy, Gloria and the cops. Ahead, nothing but fields and sky. The sun burned rich orange and bled into the clouds. A swarm of starlings, black spots on gold, pulsed between power lines.
‘I’m hungry,’ I said. ‘There is still some chicken from yesterday’s dinner.’
‘How can you be hungry after that?’ she asked but I shrugged.
Jenny squinted at me, like she did when I said something stupid. Momma did it too. Where Momma might yell at me, Jenny just turned away, sighed through her teeth, and stalked across the field. The path home was well trodden, we made shortcuts of the fields, they were our highways and backways, free of grown-ups and rules.
‘Shouldn’t we go straight to the police?’ she asked. ‘Feels wrong to just leave her down there.’
‘I know but we agreed. We’ll go tomorrow. I guess we just try to forget about it for tonight.’
We walked together, silent, until we came to Three Points, a triangle of land made by three crisscrossing irrigation streams. Momma said it’d been there since they split up the land between us, Briggs, and Morton down the track. She said that idiot Briggs couldn’t count right and ended up short on one side. Caused a rift between the families for years and the swatch of land remained unclaimed. It was twenty strides end-to-end and covered in grass green as a lime candy straight out the jar. No matter the weather, no matter the heat, Three Points stayed alive. It was a rule, one of those known somehow by everyone in town, that you could say or do anything on the Points. It didn’t belong to anyone so no one was watching, no one was listening.
Jenny slowed and stopped in the middle of the island.
‘Do you think someone in Larson killed her?’ she asked.
I’d thought about it while we were walking but pushed away the idea almost as quickly as it came.
‘I don’t want to think about what that would mean.’
‘What about the Fort? Could the person who wrecked it have killed her?’ she said; her voice had an edge of fear to it, a tremor I recognised. Her eyes darted left, right, into the trees, over the fields. ‘Could … could they still be around?’
I put my hands on her shoulders. ‘No. Whoever did it is long gone. And even if they aren’t, you’ve got me and Momma and we won’t let anything happen to you.’
The tension in her eased, her shoulders dropped. ‘I know you won’t, but her? She’d probably offer me up to the killer for a bottle of bourbon.’
It needled at me when she spoke of Momma like that. I’d tried for years to be peacekeeper between them, but the barbs kept flying, the hate kept growing and resurfacing no matter what. Now my days were all about maintaining the uneasy calm.
‘Let’s go home,’ I said, straightened up and took Jenny’s hand. ‘Momma won’t be there anyway.’
Twenty minutes and two more fields brought us to the edge of our yard. We both stopped and Jenny’s grip on my hand tightened, turned my knuckles white and sore. Faded red truck parked skewed against the side of the house with two deep tyre scars in the dirt. Fresh dent in the door. The frayed rope on the oak branch swayed but not by the breeze. Momma always flicked the rope with her finger when she got home. Her mindless habit.
The sound of footsteps throbbed from inside the house. One-two, one-two, a stumble, a crash, the picture frame in the hall, dropped and broken twice this month already. A low moan, something monstrous in it, thick and slurred. A clatter of metal on enamel, the pan that cooked yesterday’s chicken, pushed into the kitchen sink.
Jenny sighed. ‘Looks like you were wrong, Johnny.’
There weren’t many reasons Momma would leave Gum’s before midnight on a Friday. It likely wasn’t to give us a new pa this time, as I couldn’t hear anyone else in the house. A Pigeon Pa, Jenny called them. They fly in, shit all over the place then fly out again, none the wiser. Momma alone in the house meant Ben Gum, owner of Gum’s and one of our years-ago Pigeon Pas, had cut her off. When that thought hit us both, Jenny’s grip on my hand turned iron.
‘I don’t want to go in