The Overnight Guest(74)

Her mother tried to swing the steering wheel to the right, but the truck still glanced the side of the tree. The girl heard the crunch of metal and the crack of wood, and then the road wasn’t there anymore. Her stomach swayed and the truck bounced and bucked, and suddenly the girl was upside down. She bit her tongue, and blood pooled into her mouth. Her head struck something hard and the truck spun and slid until it came to an abrupt stop.

The girl was upside down in her seat. Her mother was gone. She touched her fingers to her head and they came away red with blood. “Mama?” she called out. There was no response. The windshield was shattered, and through the prism, all the girl could see was white. The air grew colder. With aching fingers, she was able to release her seat belt and she tumbled down with a painful thump. She was sitting where the ceiling should have been. She cried out again for her mother, but all she could hear was the wind crying back at her.

She didn’t know what to do. The pain in her head was nauseating and her fingers and toes burned with cold. Her mother told her to keep going, so that was what she would do. No matter what. One of the truck doors was wedged open and she dizzily crawled through it. All around her were broken pieces of the truck, but her mother was nowhere to be seen. “Mama, where are you?” she called out, but her words were swallowed up by the snow that was falling furiously now.

Tears gathered in her eyes and spilled out onto her cold cheeks. Keep going, she told herself. She stepped forward and immediately slipped to the ground. She crawled on hands and knees until she was atop a little hill. Squinting through the storm, she saw it. Pale and weak, but it was there. She got to her feet, and moving slowly, steadily, the girl headed toward the star.



39


August 2000

The front door slowly opened and Agent Santos assessed the woman standing in front of her. She was as thin as a skeleton; her face was pale and pinched. She looked two steps from death.

“He said you’d be coming,” June said in a raspy voice.

“Where’s Jackson?” Santos asked, her eyes darting around the room.

June sat down wearily in a chair. “He’s my son. I love him,” she said simply.

Santos knew they weren’t getting any help from Jackson Henley’s mother. “You stay with her,” Santos ordered a deputy.

Santos and her team began with a cursory search of the house. Everything was as neat as a pin. Even the basement with its concrete walls and floor was swept clean. There was no sign of Jackson Henley or Becky Allen. Santos returned to the living room where June Henley sat, watching them warily.

The house, so far, was ordinary—it looked like the home of an elderly woman who had married and raised a son there. There were pictures of Jackson at various ages, of June and her husband on their wedding day. But something was missing.

Then it came to Santos. The house looked like it belonged to an ill, elderly woman, not a woman who lived with her adult son. There was no sign that Jackson slept in the house. No closet filled with his clothes or personal items.

Jackson, for all intents and purposes, did not live in the house. He had another spot, somewhere on the property where he spent his time.

Santos went to the front window and pulled aside the curtain. Outside, Sheriff Butler and his crew were searching the property and the outbuildings. Off in the distance, thick black smoke rose from the burn pile, and along with it, a sick feeling settled in Santos’s stomach.

Burning tires weren’t like burning fallen tree limbs or yard refuse. It was illegal. Had been since ’91. Jackson would know this but apparently didn’t care. Setting tires on fire wasn’t easy. They burned hot, and once ignited, they were hard to extinguish. And the smoke from tire fires was filled with noxious chemicals like cyanide and carbon monoxide.

June said Jackson knew law enforcement was coming. Being arrested for illegal tire burning would be worth it if any evidence connecting Jackson to the Doyle murders and the disappearance of Becky Allen was destroyed.

They had to put out that fire.

“Call the nearest fire department, and get them out here,” Santos ordered. “Tell them we’ve got a tire fire.”

She turned to June Henley. “Ma’am, it’s not safe for you to be here. The smoke and fumes from the burning tires will make you sick. We need to take you away from the area.”

June’s shoulders sagged in resignation, but she got unsteadily to her feet. “You’re wrong about this,” June said. “Jackson didn’t kill that family or take that girl.”

“I hope so, ma’am,” Santos said as a deputy escorted June from the house.

A sound of a gunshot cracked through the air and Santos rushed outside. The air was thick with rolling black smoke and the smell of burning rubber filled her nose and burned her eyes. She covered her mouth with her elbow and went toward the sound of the gunshot.

The fire was about a hundred yards from the house where the rubber tires were stacked. As Santos came closer, deputies, coughing and wheezing, rushed past her in the opposite direction.

Santos snagged an officer as he ran by. “What’s happening?” she asked.

“The guy’s guarding the fire with a shotgun. Won’t let anyone come near him,” he said. His eyes were red and irritated from the smoke. “We caught him tossing some guns into the fire. He’s got a shitload of them. An arsenal.”