Redemption Road(23)

“Are you family?” she was asked.

“Police.”

“Hold for surgery.”

Elizabeth held, and as she did, she watched the water. She’d grown up near the river and knew its moods: the gentle slide in August, the hard rush that followed winter storms. She’d taken Gideon fishing at times, and it was their place, their thing. But today the river felt different. She didn’t see the sycamores or the willows or the ripples in the current. She saw red banks carved away, wounds in the earth.

“You’re asking about Gideon Strange?”

Elizabeth played the cop card again and got all the information available. Still in surgery. Too early for a prognosis.

“Thank you,” she said, then crossed the river without once looking down.

*

It took twenty minutes to reach the derelict side of things, a seven-mile stretch that began with empty storefronts and ended with shuttered factories and mill houses in their second century. The textile industry had left even before the downturn, same with furniture and the bottling plant and big tobacco. Now, the east side of town was paved with empty factories and broken dreams. As a young cop, Elizabeth had cut her teeth on the east side, but it was worse now. Gangs had moved north from Atlanta, down from DC. Drugs ran up and down the interstate, and bad things multiplied with the trade. Much of the violence happened on the seven-mile stretch, and a lot of poor but decent people were caught in the middle.

That included Gideon.

Turning onto a narrow street, she worked the car between cast-off furniture and old cars until a chalk-yellow house slid past and the hill steepened. Shadows crept out the deeper she went. Cars got rustier; grass disappeared. By the time she bottomed out, the road was in full shade, a ribbon of asphalt running beside a cold stream that broke white over gray stone and bits of shattered concrete. Gideon hadn’t always lived in such a desolate place, but when his mother died, Robert Strange started drinking, and the whirl of it took him down. A good job became an occasional job. The drinking got worse. There were drugs. The only mystery was how he managed to keep Gideon in his life at all. But that, in the end, was no mystery. The system was stretched, and Elizabeth loved the boy too much to break the last bit of his heart. Every time she got social services involved, Gideon would beg her to leave him with his father.

It’s my father, he’d say. He’s all I have left.

Other than a few months in foster care, he’d gotten his wish. In exchange, Elizabeth stayed involved. She made sure his clothes were clean, that food was on the table. That worked until it didn’t. Now, Gideon was fighting for his life, and she had to face the hard question.

How much of that was her fault?

Twisting along the valley floor, she found the boy’s house on a stony patch beside the creek. It was smaller than most, a faded cube beneath a streaked, metal roof. Piled firewood made the porch sag on one side, and the cinder-block chimney leaned ten degrees out of true; but the stream was what made everything so stark in comparison, all that cold, clean water rushing off to better places.

Stepping from the car, she studied the slash of sky, the stream, the pale, pink house across the street. It was quiet in the shade, and hot. An old car rusted on flat tires. The yard was red dirt.

On the porch, Elizabeth knocked twice, but knew already that no one was home. The house had that empty feel. Inside, she stepped over liquor bottles and engine parts and old mail. She checked the boy’s room first. The bed was made, shoes lined against the wall. A single shelf was rowed with books and framed photographs. Elizabeth lifted a picture of Gideon’s mother taken on her wedding day. She wore a simple dress and a ring of flowers in her hair. She stood in front of the old church, her new husband young and clean-cut and handsome. The next two pictures were of Elizabeth and Gideon: a picnic in the park, one at the river. There were no other pictures of his father, and that felt about right. The last was of Gideon and Elizabeth’s parents. The boy enjoyed church and sang in the choir. Elizabeth would pick him up on Sundays and take him. She never went in herself—that was an old promise—but her parents loved the boy almost as much as she did. They’d have him for dinner once a month; ask after his grades; watch him in school plays. The reverend was determined to see Gideon through his childhood, and to remind the boy that his father had, once, been a fine man.

Moving through Gideon’s room, Elizabeth touched schoolbooks, a turtle shell, a jar of pennies. Nothing had changed, she thought, then she considered the outcome should Gideon die.

Nothing ever would.

Closing the boy’s bedroom door, she checked the rest of the house, then went looking for his father. Beckett was right about Robert Strange. He drank and was undependable, an otherwise broken man who loved the boy as best he could. He worked part-time for a shade-tree garage far out in the county. The owner was a drunk, which meant Robert could drink, too. He worked off the books, mostly on American cars, mostly for cash. That’s where he would be, she thought, at the garage and useless and drunk.

It took eighteen miles of country road to get there, the route twisting past the quarry, the gun range, the ruins of an old theater. She drove past dairy farms and plowed-under fields, turned left, and ran under heavy trees that swayed with the breeze. Two miles into the last stretch of gravel road, she turned onto raw dirt and followed the track to a corrugated shed that sat on a high bank in the last bend of the river. She turned off the engine and stared for long seconds through the glass. Hot cars and stolen tires weren’t the only illegal things this far out in the county. There were meth labs and cockfights and trailer-park brothels run by large men with long hair and swastika tattoos. People went missing this far out, and not too many years passed without hunters finding the remains of one poor soul or another. So, Elizabeth took a good, long look around and checked the gun at her back before she stepped from the car.