Sheridan said, “You can’t call. She said not to call.”
Lucy glared at her sister and reached across the table and snatched the phone.
“Lucy!” Sheridan said, looking to her mother for help.
“I’m not calling,” Lucy said, opening the phone, finding the text thread in an instance, and writing a message so quickly—a blur of practiced thumbs—that she pressed SEND before Sheridan or Marybeth could wrest the phone away. Then she handed the phone back to her sister and gave one last spiteful deadeye to all of them in turn before grabbing her backpack on the way out the door.
There were a few beats of silence.
“Wow,” Joe said.
“This will take some work,” Marybeth said. “She’s got a point. We’ve got to consider the fact she’s growing up. She’s not that little girl anymore.” She looked blankly at the kitchen window. “Lucy’s growing up whether we want her to or not.”
Sheridan snorted as she read aloud the message Lucy sent:
april come back. still scared of closet. we need revenge. love, luce.
LUCY’S BLOW-UP seemed to hang within the walls of the house like a scorching odor long after she left for school. While Sheridan slumped down the hall to take a shower and get dressed—a process that would rarely take less than an hour, Joe knew—Marybeth listlessly cleared the dishes, something on her mind.
When the sound of the shower coursed through the wall, she turned to Joe and said, “Let’s go for a drive.” He nodded. By her tone and her choice of words, he knew where they were going.
They took her van to the Twelve Sleep County Cemetery, ten minutes away, in complete silence. The cemetery was on the east bank of the river, overlooking a bluff and a shallow bend. During the flash flood three years ago, the river had swollen as if suddenly hungry and had eaten into the soft dirt wall like a beast. The horrified citizens of Saddlestring formed a sandbag brigade that diverted the wall of water before it ate too deeply into the bluff and devoured the coffins. The sandbags were still there, scattered and broken and sunken into the embankment, six feet above the current benign level of the river. Looking at the river, Joe saw violence in remission, a sleeping brute capable of rearing up whenever it wanted if for no other reason than to remind them who was in control.
April’s grave was one of those nearest the bluff above the river. The headstone was small and thin, a wafer of granite, all they could afford at the time. It used to be shaded by river cottonwoods, but the trees had washed away in the flood and so had the shade, and the high-altitude sun burned the grass and whitened the stone itself, aging it well past its six years. All it said was:
APRIL KEELEY
WE HARDLY KNEW YOU
And her birth and death dates.
“We used to come here every month,” Marybeth said. “Remember? Then it turned into every few months.”
“Yup.”
“Joe, we haven’t been here for over a year. I feel really guilty about that.”
Joe nodded.
“Did we forget about her?”
“No,” he said. “Life went on, I guess. Let’s not beat ourselves up.”
They stood in silence. The only sound was a whisper of breeze high in the remaining treetops that sounded more like the river than the river itself.
She said it: “Is it possible there is someone else in the grave, Joe?”
“I was thinking about that.”
“An unknown child? It’s too painful to even consider.”
Joe said, “I didn’t see any other children in that trailer, Marybeth. Only April.”
“But we know the Sovereigns had other children with them. We don’t know what happened to them after the fire.”
Joe remembered the week after the raid when the county coroner and the team from the state Department of Criminal Investigation dug through the charred trailers in the campground. The snow had finally stopped, but in its place an incredible blanket of cold—day after day of twenty, thirty below zero—had descended on the mountains as if to punish them for what had taken place. He had purposely looked away when the investigators cleared blackened sheet metal from the site of Brockius’s trailer, when the coroner shouted out that he’d located three bodies—two adults and a child. Joe had no doubt at the time who they were: Jeannie Keeley, April’s birth mother; Wade Brockius, the leader of the camp; and April. Joe never looked at the bodies, didn’t need to. All he saw were the body bags—one stuffed full like a sausage (Brockius), one stiff and thin ( Jeannie), and one with a body so small it seemed empty. The body bags were carried by investigators to an ambulance and taken away. The autopsies of Jeannie and April were cursory—neither had dental records to match up, and the state chose not to run a DNA confirmation because at the time the process was slow and expensive and no one doubted who the bodies were. The decision was made in no small part because of Joe’s own eyewitness testimony.
“We could have the body exhumed,” Marybeth said. “I don’t know how to go about it, but I can find out.”
Joe shook his head. “It could take months. We’d need a court order. To get the order we’d need to go to a judge and explain what this is all about. We’d need to try and convince the judge that April might be out there somewhere. We’ll need more than those text messages, Marybeth. Even I can’t completely convince myself she’s alive. We need more.”
“We need her to text again,” Marybeth said.
“At the very least.”
“Joe, there’s something else.”
He knew there was. She’d alluded to it the night before, when she said she’d been doing an Internet search
