When the Sky Fell on Splendor(57)

Tonight we were silent.

It only took a minute to get the video pulled up. The process of dragging the cursor back and forth in search of any significant movement took longer.

“Slower!” Arthur commanded whenever he thought Levi might’ve zipped over something, whereas Nick impatiently growled, “Faster!” every few seconds.

“Wait!” Sofía finally cried. “What was that? Go back.”

Levi dragged the cursor back a centimeter.

“Farther.”

He pulled it back until a dark blur swam onto the screen.

“It’s too dark,” Arthur said.

“It looks like this was taken underwater during a lunar eclipse,” I agreed.

Nick prodded the screen. “That’s obviously Levi. Look at those huge shoulders!”

“That person’s wearing a shirt,” Sofía said. “When we found Levi, he was a square inch of neon fabric away from butt naked.”

“He might’ve stripped afterward,” Nick said.

“That’s what I went to bed in,” Levi said. “You were there, dude!”

“You might’ve gotten sleep-dressed beforehand, then stripped afterward.”

Levi screenshotted the figure across several frames, then opened some photo-editing software and began playing with the brightness and contrast.

“Look.” He pointed to something on the figure’s shoulder. “Long hair. I think it’s a woman.”

Nick and Arthur leaned in, scrutinizing the blur that might or might not have been long, glinting hair.

“I don’t know . . .” Nick began.

“What’s that?” I pointed at a little dark rectangle on the figure’s chest a couple of inches below the clavicle. There was a hint of the same shadowy shape on the other side.

“Weird metal nipples?” Levi asked.

“I think they’re hooks,” Sofía said. “She’s wearing a jumpsuit.”

“No,” I said. “It’s overalls.”

Nick made a face. “Who wears overalls? St. James? The farmer who owns all the land that got burnt?”

Not in his interview he hadn’t, but I could think of someone who did.

I watched the realization dawning across Arthur’s freckled brow just as it was hitting me.

The person who’d witnessed the incident, the person who’d stolen the material and left the creepy I KNOW note, who was at the center of this, just like he was at the center of everything that happened five years ago.

I squeezed the nautilus shell necklace in my pocket to keep the sudden dizziness from tipping me over.

His name tasted like poison. “Wayne Hastings.”





TWENTY-ONE



IT WAS A DANGEROUS job. Everyone knew that. But the accident shouldn’t have happened. The crane that broke had been scheduled for maintenance the day before.

That was what all the papers would say, all the talking heads in the weeks following the accident endlessly pulling at the same strings, trying to find more-concrete answers in the knotted center.

The employee responsible for the maintenance had called off work that morning, for the rest of the week. The team had been short-staffed, so they’d put off the repairs.

For one day. Sixteen hours. Like fate’s evil twin had been doing the scheduling that week.

It shouldn’t have been enough time for anything to go wrong. It was like those expiration dates they put on milk: a lie for the sake of caution.

Deadlines for maintenance came long before maintenance was necessary.

But then someone—not the man originally scheduled to do the maintenance, but someone who’d had to take his place—had climbed onto the forklift to work on the crane.

The crane’s hook block had fallen off midservice.

Hook block.

There was a phrase I hadn’t known five years ago but now would never forget. I’d googled it. I could picture a hook block easier than I could picture Mark’s conscious face.

The investigation was a series of guesses; everything was too burnt, too melted to say for sure.

But they guessed that the hook block had come loose. They guessed it had hit the pot full of hot metal sitting beneath the crane. They guessed the sudden force had tipped the pot, and when the liquid iron hit the damp sand surrounding, it had triggered the explosion.

Journalists wondered whether it was possible someone could have loosened the hook block beforehand.

Some even speculated about the employee who’d called off suddenly. How could you know you were going to be sick for a week? they wondered. They shared vague quotes from private sources implying the employee might have been disgruntled, that he rarely spoke or interacted with co-workers, that he was strange and jumpy.

There were petitions, hashtags, online groups, all demanding answers, demanding further investigation.

But there was no evidence, and the news anchors were careful to never say his name.

It didn’t matter.

Wayne Hastings was in the air, thicker than the ash that fell on Splendor for days after the explosion.

The name was whispered and screamed, repeated a thousand times in the school hallways and the aisles of Kroger and the hospital waiting room.

Wayne Hastings.



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