She reached past her wallet, past the picture of Leonard in his high school football jersey, down to the greasy canvas wrapper at the very bottom.
She unwrapped the heavy, blued-steel Smith & Wesson .38 Special that Jesse had kept under the cash register in the front hall.
It had five lead round-nose cartridges in the cylinder and a grip worn smooth by the palm of a dead man.
She dropped the revolver into the right-hand pocket of her woolen coat, the heavy frame dragging the fabric down against her hip.
She stepped out of the car.
Her shoes sank an inch into the dust of the yard.
“Leonard?” she called out.
Her voice was swallowed instantly by the wind coming off the pasture.
No answer.
Only the rhythmic *creak-creak-creak* of the windmill behind the smokehouse, turning slow and lazy in the rising draft.
Clara walked up the three wooden steps onto the back porch.
The screen door was unlatched, hanging on a single rusted spring.
She stepped into the kitchen.
The linoleum floor was tracked with red clay and white limestone dust.
On the enamel table where she had rolled out buttermilk biscuits for forty years sat a half-eaten can of Vienna sausages, an empty bottle of Dr Pepper, and a box of 12-gauge shotgun shells, three of them missing from the green cardboard tray.
“Leonard,” she said again, her voice firmer this time.
A floorboard creaked above her head in the attic bedroom—the room where Leonard had slept until he left for college at eighteen, the room with the blue-and-white pennants on the wallpaper and the model airplanes hanging from the ceiling on fishing line.
Heavy, dragging footsteps moved toward the narrow stairwell.
A man appeared at the turn of the landing.
He was holding Jesse’s old Remington pump-gun, the muzzle pointed at the floorboards between his feet.
He had three days of gray stubble on his cheeks, his eyes were red and wet with exhaustion, and the collar of his grease-stained shirt was torn open, revealing a chest that heaved with ragged, terrified breaths.
“Ma?” he whispered.
Clara stood by the stove.
She looked at him through her bifocals, her expression as still as the water in a limestone cistern.
“Put the gun down, Leonard,” she said.
The shotgun wavered in his grip.
His arms were shaking so violently that the steel barrel rattled against the banister.
“Ma… did you see her?
Did you see the woman in the gray suit?”
“I saw her,” Clara said.
“She’s waiting by the gin with twenty men who have rifles that don’t miss.”
Leonard let out a dry, gasping sob, tumbling down the last three steps and hitting his knees on the linoleum at her feet.
He dropped the shotgun with a clatter, his hands reaching out to clutch the hem of her coat, pressing his wet forehead against her worn leather shoes just like he had done when he was five years old and had stepped on a copperhead in the orchard.
“I didn’t mean it, Ma!” he wept, his voice muffled by the wool of her skirt.
“I swear to God Almighty, I didn’t mean to hurt that man!
Cobb told me it was all arranged!
He said Hicks was dying anyway!
He said the hospital in Temple had already written him off!
He told me all we had to do was put him in the truck and turn the valve—”
“Who hit him with the iron, Leonard?”
Clara asked, her voice dropping into a register that made the man’s weeping freeze in his throat.
Leonard didn’t look up.
His shoulders hitched.
“Who swung the iron?”
Clara repeated.
“It was Veronica,” Leonard whispered into the dust.
Clara didn’t blink.
“Your wife.”
“She said… she said the coroner needed blunt-force trauma to match the accident report,” Leonard stammered, his fingers clawing at the fabric of her coat.
“She said if we just burned him, the insurance investigator would look at the teeth.
She told me to wait in the car, Ma!
I sat in the Buick with the engine running and I heard it!
I heard it through the sheet metal!
She came out with blood on her shoes and she was laughing!
She was laughing, Ma!”
Clara looked down at the back of her son’s neck.
The skin was pale, soft, the neck of an office man who sat under air-conditioning while others did the digging.
“And your daddy?” she asked softly.
“Did your daddy laugh when he took the money for the barrels?”
Leonard’s head snapped up.
His face was gray, smeared with grease and tears.
“You know?”
“The lady from Dallas told me,” Clara said.
“She told me what’s in the caliche pit.”
A terrible, cunning look flickered across Leonard’s face—a sudden, desperate twitch of the mouth that Clara had seen every time he had tried to lie his way out of a whipping for stealing eggs from the neighbors.
“She’s lying, Ma,” Leonard whispered, his voice dropping into a hurried, conspiratorial hiss.
“The lady from Dallas… she’s not with the government.
She’s with the syndicate, Ma!”
Clara’s hand rested on the heavy lump of the revolver in her pocket.
“What did you say?”
“Thorne isn’t a federal prosecutor,” Leonard said, his eyes darting toward the kitchen window, toward the darkening pasture.
“She’s the attorney for the Longview Chemical Trust!
She’s the one who drafted the original indemnification contracts for Daddy in 1988!
If she gets into that vault, she’s not going to clean it up!
She’s going to pump the rest of the sludge out into the river to wash the evidence down to the Gulf before the federal court can unseal the records!”
He scrambled to his feet, grabbing her by both shoulders, his breath hot and foul against her cheek.
“The barrels aren’t leaking, Ma!
That was the lie they used to force Cobb to sign the containment permits!
