Safe Keeping

“Look,” she said quickly, “maybe we did overstate a bit. It’s been tough the past several months, you know that, what with the economy, and then ever since—” She stopped before she could say Tucker’s name, say how badly business had been affected by last year’s notoriety, but her dad knew what was in her mind.

He inclined his head in the direction of the Houston Chronicle and said, “Yeah, well, it looks like the shit’s about to hit the fan again.”

“You don’t know that, Dad.”

A silence fell.

Her father broke it. “Your mother tried to call the cops to report him missing this morning. She would have, if I hadn’t stopped her.”

“She wants to find him, that’s all.”

He shook his head. “She’s losing it.”

Lissa didn’t ask what he meant, whether he thought it was her mother’s faith or her mind that was going. He looked at the newspaper, but she looked at him. She thought he was the one who was losing it. He looked so distraught. But he’d caused this, hadn’t he? He’d put himself in this position.

As if he felt her gaze, her father looked at her and said, “What?” in that tone he used when he meant to prick a nerve.

“Momma said you told Tucker to get out and not come back.”

“So?”

“So, you got what you wanted.”

“He called me, his own father, a fucking bastard and said he was a grown man and could take care of himself, which I’d like to see—just once.”

“Well, he could, if he had a job, if he had a paycheck. You cut him out of the business, Daddy! You basically disowned him. What was he supposed to do, fall all over you with kisses, his heartfelt thanks?”

“You know he blew another meeting with Carl Pederson.”

She nodded. She and Evan were as irked at Tucker as her dad, as Carl himself, was. It wasn’t easy to find a good cabinet man.

“If it was anyone else, screwing up as consistently as your brother has, I’d have fired them a long time ago,” her dad said. “Even you and Evan would have. You know I’m right.”

Lissa picked at her thumbnail. He wanted her to say he was justified in cutting Tucker from the business. And maybe he was. “Tucker is your son, not just some employee,” she said.

“I’ve given him every chance, bent over backward. Like I said to your mother this morning, the boy needs to grow up....”

And if that means he has to hit the bottom... Her dad went on.

Lissa tuned him out. Some things weren’t worth fighting over.

“Where’s Mom?” Lissa waited to ask until her dad was quiet.

“Upstairs. She’s pissed because I won’t go to the lake and see about finishing the house.”

“What’s going on with that, Dad? You always said after you retired, you were going to build that house and fish until you died.”

“I’ve got no appetite for it anymore,” he said, and his voice was raw. “You get a crew out there, pull the frame down, use the material somewhere else. Tell Evan—”

He stopped, but Lissa kept his gaze while a hundred thoughts crowded her mind. She could offer him comfort, but she didn’t know how he’d take it. He’d never needed her comfort before.

He brushed his hand over his face, and the breath he took in was huge and ragged. “Go on, little girl, and check on your momma, will you? I’m worried about her.”

“Daddy?” Lissa felt a fresh jolt of alarm. She could see his eyes were filmed with tears again. Her own throat constricted.

He waved her off. “Just let me be now.”

“Tucker will come home soon. It’ll be fine, you’ll see.”

“Sure,” he said. “It always is, isn’t it?”

She eyed him a moment longer, then left, pulling the door closed behind her. When she heard the click of the lock, she looked back, and the thought came that he shouldn’t be alone now, not with all those guns, and it chilled her momentarily. She thought of asking him to let her back in, but he’d only refuse, if he answered her at all.

Her head throbbed with every step as she climbed to the second floor. She had wakened with another brutal headache this morning that had only gotten worse. She’d had a series of them recently. They had to be sinus related, she thought.

“Mom?” she called, reaching the upstairs hallway.

“Back here,” she answered.

Lissa went toward the sound of her mother’s voice and found her sitting on a footstool in the linen closet. Her mother looked up. “Honey, what’s wrong? You’re so pale.”

“Headache,” Lissa said. “I think it’s sinus. I took some Advil, but it’s not helping.”

“Dr. White gave me something good for that last time I went to see him.” Her mother went into the bathroom next to the linen closet and returned with a glass of water and a tablet. “It works, and it won’t make you sleepy.”

Lissa took the pill and a swallow of water.

“He said to remind you that you’re overdue for a checkup.”

“I know. I’ve been putting it off.” Lissa drank the rest of the water. As much as she loved Dr. White, she wished she could see someone different for her exam, a doctor who hadn’t known her since she was six. Someone who would only see her as a condition, not as a person. In case of bad news, she thought it might be easier if it were treated with clinical dispassion. Not that she felt as if she were seriously ill. It was only that she didn’t feel herself. In addition to the frequent headaches, she wasn’t sleeping, her appetite was low and, last week, she’d fainted. She kept telling herself it was stress. She wanted it to be.

Lissa’s mother resumed her perch on the stool. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I wanted to check on you, you know, because of—”

“I’ve been rereading Dad’s old letters,” Lissa’s mother interrupted. She half lifted a cardboard box from her lap. “Did I ever show you this one?” She handed Lissa a sheet of onionskin paper, sepia tinged at the edges and covered in her dad’s cramped writing.

“‘My Dearest Em,’” her mother read, “‘my dearest one, my love, how will I tell you this news, the awful thing that has happened. I’m not the same, not your sweetest—not your sweetest honey—’” She caught her lip, took a breath. “‘I’m not sure I’m even a man anymore.’”

“Mom...” Lissa’s murmur was half in sorrow, half in protest.

She hadn’t read her dad’s letters home from Vietnam, but she knew how he’d been injured there. Her mother had told her and Tucker the story, how in the aftermath of battle, he’d rescued a four-year-old North Vietnamese boy, an enemy’s son, and run with him from a burning house, but before he could make it back to the location where his company was bivouacked, sniper fire had caught him in the meaty part of his calf below his left knee. Still, he’d kept running with the child; he’d brought the boy to safety against all odds, and sixty-one days later, they’d amputated the gangrenous, blasted remains of his lower leg. He’d nearly died from the infection.

Lissa was still in awe of the story. She couldn’t imagine the selfless act of courage it had taken. She remembered socking a kid once in third grade who called her dad a cripple. She’d been sent home that day for fighting, but she hadn’t been punished. Her mother only said the boy was probably frightened at the idea of her father having only one leg. It hadn’t made sense to Lissa. Her dad wasn’t different from any other dad with two legs. In fact, he was stronger than any man she knew. She never thought of him as handicapped. Most of her life, she’d scarcely been aware of it.

She gave her father’s letter back to her mother. “Daddy doesn’t look good, Mom. I’m worried about him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him quite so shaky.”

“That missing girl—she’s—”

“But it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, you know?”

Her mother hugged her elbows. “They don’t make linen closets with so much room in them anymore, do they? I played house in here when I was little, did I ever tell you?”

“Sure, Momma.” Lissa went along. “We played house in here, too, remember? You and me and Tucker.”

“It’s just the right size. Your grandma let me have a little table. And dishes. Such pretty dishes. I loved being in here—I still do. The way the old floor creaks and how the sunlight comes through the door, and the smell—it’s a comfort to me.” She drew in a breath, eyes closed. “Some people think it’s musty, but to me it smells safe. It smells the way love would smell, if love had a smell.”

Lissa knelt beside her. “Tucker will be home soon, Momma, or he’ll call. He always does.” The assurance sounded no better now than when she’d offered it to her dad.

Her mother touched Lissa’s cheek, lifted her fingers, trailing them across Lissa’s brow. “You and your brother are so different,” she said. “Tucker’s blond, like me, like the Winters, but you favor your father with all that wonderful dark hair. You’re strong, too, like he is.”

They shared a silence.

“I want to help him, you know? But when he hits these dark places, when he retreats and goes into himself, I— It’s hard to know what to do.”

Lissa tucked a wayward strand of her mother’s hair behind her ear. It added to her worry, seeing her parents so undone, so not themselves. Abruptly, she held out a hand to her mother. “Come with me to Pecan Grove. It will do you good to get out of the house.”

“Oh, that would be lovely, but you’ve got work to do out there, and I’m fine. Dad and I both are. Don’t worry about us.” Her mother stood up making shooing motions, then suddenly she cupped Lissa’s face in both hands. “Do you know how much I love you?” Her eyes were swimming with tears.

Lissa nodded; her own throat knotted.

“Sometimes, I think we get so focused on Tucker, we forget about you. Forget to tell you how special you are. Please say you know how much we love you.”

Lissa slid her palms over her mother’s hands. “Of course I do, Momma.”

She gathered herself and gave Lissa’s cheeks a final pat. “Don’t pay any attention to me. I just need to hear from your brother. Once he’s home, and he and your dad have mended their fences, we can get back to normal.”

“What’s normal?” Lissa asked, and she was glad when her mother smiled.

* * *

She stopped outside her dad’s office door on her way down the front hall. “Daddy?” she called softly, but he didn’t answer her, and she didn’t call out again. Passing the dining room on her way out of the house, her path was diverted when she caught sight of the collection of family photos arrayed across the top of her mother’s baby grand piano. Some were casual shots that her dad had taken back when she and Tucker were little. Others were formal studio shots. She picked one up, a five-by-seven framed in wood. It was of the four of them sitting on a sofa. Her mother was holding Tucker on her lap, and Lissa was leaning against her daddy’s good leg, smiling, gap-toothed. Tucker was in shorts and had a Mickey Mouse Band-Aid on one chubby knee.

Setting the studio portrait down, she picked up another, a shot her father had taken that her mother had framed in silver. It was from Easter Sunday. Lissa remembered the year was 1981. Tucker turned three that year, and she turned seven. They were outside on the front porch, dressed in their church finery. Lissa’s outfit, a ruffle-hemmed sheath made of pink dotted swiss, with pink patent-leather Mary Janes and a purse to match, had been a favorite. Her mother had corralled her glossy, straight, dark hair into a French braid that hung midway down her back and ended in a tied puff of pink chiffon. Lissa wore it in a French braid to this day, to keep it out of her face, especially when she was working or painting. Growing up, Tucker called the braid her donkey tail to annoy her. He’d grabbed it and held it to his chin, letting the end dangle, making a long beard of it, teasing her. She’d wanted to clobber him.

She touched the tip of her finger to the image of his face, then put the photo back. Looking at it left her feeling some nostalgic mix of happy and sad. She guessed it was because life had never been as simple again after that year.

* * *

She was almost to the interstate when her cell phone rang.

“Where are you?” Evan asked when she answered.

“Why? What’s wrong?” She knew what he would say. Still, her heart paused when Evan said, “Tucker was here, at the office, and not fifteen minutes after he left, the police showed up, looking for him.”

She put on her signal, turned right into a gas station and parked. “Do you know where he went?” she asked, and she almost couldn’t hear her own voice over the hammer of her pulse.

“He didn’t say. He wanted to see you, and I said you were at your folks’, but I don’t think he’ll go there.”

“No.” Lissa pressed her fingertips above her right eye where the pain had settled into an ache dulled by the medication her mother had given her.

“He’s driving some girl’s car, an old Volkswagen. He says his Tahoe broke down on the freeway last night, and she helped him out. He said he’s been in Austin.”

“That’s nowhere near—”

“Where the dead woman was found. Yeah, it’s a relief.”

“Can he prove it?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say, and all the cops would tell me is that they wanted to question him, but not what it was about.”

Lissa rested her head against the seatback. “Well, it could be anything. An unpaid speeding ticket. Lord knows he’s gotten a slew of those.”

“Yeah,” Evan said, because, like her, he wanted it to be that simple. They both did. And maybe it was.

“I wonder if he’s called Mom and Dad,” she said.

“I don’t think so. He lost his cell phone.”

“Figures. Is he getting another one?”

“He says he’s busted.”

“You didn’t give him any money.”

“No, and to his credit, he didn’t ask.”

“Did I ever tell you you’re my hero?” Lissa ran the tip of her finger along the lower curve of the steering wheel, biting her lip, trying not to cry.

“Yeah,” Evan said, “but I can always go for hearing it again.”

They decided Lissa wouldn’t call her parents until she knew something concrete. She was on her way to the office when her cell phone rang again. Glancing at the caller ID, she saw her own home phone number, the landline, and her heart faltered.

“Tucker?” she said when she answered, because it could only be him.

“That’s me,” he said.

“What are you doing in my house?”

“Hiding?” He laughed.

Lissa didn’t. “Not funny. So not funny,” she repeated, and the breath she drew bumped over the renewal of tears, the hot mix of relief, aggravation and outright fury that jammed her throat. If Tucker were here, she would pull off the road, she thought, and kill him.

“Can you come home?” he said. “We need to talk.”

“What is it, Tuck?” Something in his voice deepened her sense of disquiet. Even when he answered that it was nothing to worry about, she wasn’t mollified. Instead, what rose in her mind was the image of the two of them from that long ago Easter Sunday in 1981, and this time it brought with it a colder, darker memory of how quickly life could change, just the way it had then, in the space of one single, terrifying afternoon.

3

THE I-45 INTERSTATE that bisected the heart of town wasn’t really an interstate at all given that the entire length of it, some 294 miles, fell inside Texas borders. It was anchored on its northern end by the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and on its southern end by the bay-front city of Galveston. The drive down to the beach wasn’t bad. If you started out early enough, it made a nice day trip. As children, Lissa and Tucker went with their parents, and when Lissa was older, high school age, she went with her girlfriends.

The last time was twenty years ago, the weekend after her high school graduation. She wouldn’t ever forget it because it was the same weekend she realized Evan wasn’t just some guy who worked for her dad. That weekend she went with a girlfriend to a party in a bay-front condo where cocaine was heaped in a bowl on the coffee table. It scared the shit out of her, but her girlfriend was all over it.

Lissa tried it, too, one tiny line—how could she not?—and then she freaked out. She was certain she was going to die of an overdose or become an addict. She felt wild, 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.”