Safe Keeping. Barbara Taylor Sissel

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СКАЧАТЬ as if she had somehow crawled outside her own skin. In her mania, she went out to the beach to dance, alone, putting herself in even worse jeopardy as it turned out. She was fortunate, later, to escape behind the locked door of the bathroom, and when she spied the telephone hanging on the wall near the toilet, she did the only thing that seemed reasonable; she dialed her dad’s office number. Thankfully—it still gave her chills to remember her luck—it was Evan who answered, Evan who came to retrieve her. Who knew what her dad might have done? He might have brought a gun or the police or both. He might have killed her, given his temper. He didn’t often lose it, but he could, if the right trigger was pulled.

      Instead, it was Evan who walked her up and down the beach along the water’s edge, while she jabbered like a madwoman until the stuff left her system. He took her to an all-night café and bought her orange juice and a doughnut, too, and suggested she was probably not good drug-addict material, and then he drove her home. At some point before that, he called Tucker and alerted him. Lissa remembered now that it was Tucker who covered for her with their parents, who waited up for her.

      It was usually the other way around, Lissa taking care of Tucker.

      She sat at the I-45 intersection, waiting for the light to change, thinking of him waiting at her house to tell her God knew what. It wouldn’t be anything good, not if the police were looking for him. When she had called Evan back and told him she was headed home, that Tucker was there, he said he would come, but as much as she might long for his support, she told him no. It was bad enough that she was missing work. She thought of her foolish behavior all those years ago, how she could so easily have fallen into harm’s way and, instead, had fallen— She paused. Not in love with Evan, she thought, not at first. Something better, richer. It had been more like falling into deep and abiding friendship and gratitude. Love, the full-out passionate, can’t get enough of you lust—Lissa’s face warmed—that came later; it had been a slow, sweet progression, like the unfolding of a flower’s petals into a fuller bloom. That long-ago day in Galveston, she hadn’t had a clue about what she and Evan would come to mean to each other.

      She’d still been woozy when he handed her carefully through the door to her little brother. Tucker had been all of fourteen, or fifteen, maybe. Lissa could see him in her mind’s eye, hustling her up the stairs, leading her quietly by their folks’ bedroom. He’d been upset with her, that she’d been drunk and strung out with people—men—she didn’t know. Any one of whom might have been a psycho, he said. He brought her an aspirin and a glass of water, and because he wanted to make a point about the danger she’d put herself in, he gave her a folder full of newspaper clippings he’d been collecting about the girls from communities near Galveston who had been found dead around there. So many, dating as far back as the 1970s, that there were rumors of multiple serial killers working in the area.

      Lissa knew of Tucker’s interest in crime. During his short college career, he talked about studying criminology, but she didn’t know much about the I-45 serial killings, or his fascination with them before that summer night when he took out all the contents of his folder and spread them around her on the bed and on the floor at her feet. There were photos of the victims and of the crime scene locations, most of which were strung along a battered stretch of I-45 the locals called the Gulf Freeway, an approximately fifty-mile stretch of the interstate that connected the unraveling southern edge of Houston to the Galveston Causeway. The land the highway bisected was riddled with tree-clotted, snake-infested bayous and the skeletal remains of oilfield equipment that sat forgotten and rusting in the mean shadows of smog-choked refineries. There were roads, too, old service roads made of chipped asphalt covered over with hard-packed dirt. They crisscrossed the terrain, and when the night wind was right, the smoke from the nearby refineries drifted down their rutted tracks like ghosts.

      It was a murderer’s paradise, the perfect dumping ground, one that over the years became known collectively as the killing fields. And the four-lane stretch of interstate that roped the crime scenes together, the Gulf Freeway, was referred to in other less flattering terms as the Highway to Hell, or the Road to Perdition, or the Killing Corridor.

      Lissa remembered being spooked by Tucker’s stories that night. She remembered thinking that while his interest did seem a bit obsessive and a little unusual for a kid his age, it hadn’t struck her as weird. Not given his worry about her, that in her inebriated state she might have fallen prey to some monster killer. He told her he’d been reading up on the FBI, everything about criminal profiling he could find. John Douglas was his hero, he said, and when Lissa shrugged in ignorance, Tucker said, “Are you kidding? He’s the guy who profiled the Green River Killer. That’s how the FBI got him.”

      Tucker dreamed of being like John Douglas, of doing what Douglas did. Lissa thought he could have, too; he’d been one of the smart kids, at least through elementary school. But he’d also been labeled emotional, high-strung, ADD—whatever name the teacher du jour chose to assign to him, as if the label alone would be adequate to explain his behavior. Her parents sought help for him. Tucker was tested and counseled, but no one could come up with a diagnosis that was definitive. It was frustrating, especially for her folks, but for Tucker, too.

      He was a mystery even to himself.

      Lissa pulled into her driveway now and parked behind the dented, yellow VW, eyeing it as she passed by, wondering about the girl it belonged to. Not a nice girl. Nice girls weren’t in the habit of picking up stray guys from the side of the road in daylight, much less at night. Lissa was judging—she knew she was—but Tucker had a reputation for attracting the wrong sort of women, the kind who would lean on him and look up to him. He liked helping them; he liked it when they took his advice.

      She found him in the kitchen sitting at the table. “Hey,” she said, shrugging out of her jacket.

      “Hey yourself.” He found her gaze but let it go after only a moment.

      “Evan says you were in Austin? You couldn’t call?”

      “Can you spare me the lecture, Liss? I already know I’m a fuckup, okay?”

      She hung her jacket on the back of a chair, not saying anything, feeling her jaw tighten. Be something else, then, she wanted to say. Please...

      “Look, I know you’re pissed because I missed the meeting with Pederson, but I went by the office and gave Evan the plans, so it’ll be fine now.”

      “God, Tucker, you’re such an idiot! We were already behind schedule out there. We’re losing money hand over fist. Dad got hold of the books—he’s about to have a coronary.”

      “What’s that got to do with me? It’s not like I work there anymore.”

      Lissa closed her eyes and took a breath. The work wasn’t the issue. None of this—the schedule, Dad having the ledger, the fact that Tucker had been fired again—was important. But it was as if in some part of her mind she entertained a fantasy that if she concentrated on something else, she could hold off the calamity she could sense was shaping itself just beyond the periphery of her vision.

      She watched Tucker’s feet dance under the table. He looked rough, as if he hadn’t slept or had a decent meal in any one of the twelve days he’d been gone. Mud rimmed the sole of one tennis shoe, the hem of one leg of his jeans. She noticed a cut beneath his right eye, a tiny, upside-down crescent moon inked in blood.

      She leaned against the counter. “What were you doing in Austin?”

      “Helping out a friend.”

      “What friend?”

      “You don’t know him. Guy’s got a band—he’s looking for a bass guitarist. I might go on the road with them.”

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