Page 143 of The River We Remember

From where he’d shoved it in the waist of his jeans, Del took the pistol he’d carried with him all day. He looked at his friend, eyes like ice. And Scott knew that was exactly what he intended to do.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

IN HER CAR, Charlie followed Connie Graff as he maneuvered along the roads to the Bluestone farmstead. He went fast, his concern for Kyoko giving his driving a reckless edge. Noah Bluestone’s land lay in the shadow of Fordham Ridge, four miles north of the Quinn farm. Graff crossed the Alabaster on County 13 with Charlie close behind and turned up the long dirt lane that led to the farmhouse and outbuildings. He skidded his truck to a stop in the bare dirt in front of the little barn. He leapt out and ran to the house. Charlie parked and hurried to where he was pounding on the front door and calling Kyoko’s name. By the time Charlie joined him, Kyoko still hadn’t answered. Graff threw the door open and rushed inside, Charlie hard on his heels.

“Kyoko!” he called.

“Kyoko!” Charlie echoed.

The house was empty.

Outside, the last light of the sun bathed the land and everything on it in a blood-red hue. The pigs, blood red in their muddy pen, seemed restless and milled about and gave out grunts like disapproving old men. In the chicken yard, blood-red hens ran about in pointless lurchings, as if startled by things Charlie couldn’t see. She and Connie Graff called Kyoko’s name again and again, looked in the barn and in the loft. With each failure in finding her, they grew more afraid.

Graff said, “I’m going to call Brody on the radio, see if anybody’s got anything.”

There didn’t seem much use in this, but Charlie figured Graff needed to do something and that was it. Charlie walked around to the back of the house because it was the only place they hadn’t looked yet. The tiny orchard was there, the apple trees where Graff and Brody had dug up the tarp with Quinn’s blood on it. Charlie had always thought of the orchard as a symbol of promise. Noah Bluestone and Kyoko had planted it with the idea that it would bear fruit for many years, and they would be there, year after year, for the harvest. For a long time, neither of them had had a place they called home, but this was going to be it.

The people of Black Earth County had never been welcoming of the Bluestones, Charlie thought. Many, in fact, had carried in their hearts a deep enmity from wounds that neither Noah nor Kyoko had had any part in delivering. These weren’t bad people. They simply did not forgive easily. In Charlie’s experience with human beings, that was the rule, not the exception.

As she stood looking out across the rows of young trees, she heard a long, low keening, like a mother cat calling for her lost kittens. She saw movement on the ground at the far end of the orchard. She began to walk toward it. Then she began to run.

Kyoko lay in the short grass that had grown beneath the fruit trees. She’d been beaten. The shirt she wore was torn open. Below her waist, her body had been stripped bare of clothing. It was clear to Charlie what had happened.

Kyoko stared up into the evening sky and sobbed uncontrollably.

Charlie spoke gently: “Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Graff came loping toward them. Charlie wore a light beige sweater over her blouse. She removed the sweater and, as best she could, covered that part of Kyoko’s body that was bare and had been violated.

Graff slowed as he neared. Charlie looked at him and saw the devastation in his face. He knelt beside Kyoko. “Who?” he said. When she didn’t respond, he said, “Creasy?”

The young woman closed her eyes, as if the name itself conjured an image she couldn’t bear to see. “He said hateful things about my husband. He said he was going to ruin us both.”

“We need to get you somewhere to be treated,” Graff said.

“I don’t want to see anybody.”

“A doctor—” Charlie began.

Kyoko shook her head, violently flinging tears off her face. “No one. I want to see no one.”

“All right,” Graff said, soothing. “All right. But let’s get you back to the house, okay?”

Her jeans and underpants lay thrown in the grass. Charlie said, “Turn away, Connie. I’ll get her dressed.”

They helped her to the farmhouse and inside to the bedroom, where she lay down.

Graff stepped back. “I’ve got to call this in.” There was raw menace in his voice. He left and went outside to his truck and its radio.

Kyoko had finally stopped crying but wouldn’t speak. Although the window was open, not a breath of wind came through. Outside, the land reflected the light that had spread across the sky, a rash-red hue that put Charlie in mind of contagion. Inside that small room, the air felt too dark and too close.

Graff returned. “Brody’s on his way.”

There’s a hardness in men that Charlie had always wondered at. A part of them seemed always stone or ready to turn to stone. An evolutionary necessity, perhaps, in the face of all that a hostile world might throw at them. To stand before the walls of Troy and hack away at another man or be hacked at required, Charlie supposed, a certain granite resolve. And that’s what she saw in Connie Graff on his return. His face was a mask of gentleness, for Kyoko’s sake, Charlie figured, but in his eyes, she saw the stone look Achilles must have given Hector before slaughtering him and dragging his body ignominiously around the city walls. She knew that Tyler Creasy, if Graff were the one to find him, stood no chance of surviving that encounter.

Charlie’s heart went out to Kyoko, but she understood that Bluestone’s wife was resilient, because that’s what a woman had to be to survive. What Charlie knew when she looked at Connie Graff was that his own heart was broken. And that was the problem with stone. It could not yield. It simply shattered.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR