Maybe he was taking me back to Pine Valley. In the middle of the night. With no witnesses.
My pulse leapt, creeping up the back of my throat as the situation became obvious. The sheriff was friends with the Hoffman family. Good friends.
“Can you please tell me where we’re going?” I asked again, leaning forward toward the partition this time.
The sheriff laughed, but it was a humorless sound.
“Seem a little nervous back there. Worried about your homecoming?”
“Mary and I aren’t married anymore. She doesn’t want me there.” I tried to keep my voice calm.
“Imagine that.”
His glance flickered toward me in the rearview mirror, then back to the road. The cities disappeared behind us like a mirage in the night. Was he taunting me with them? It struck me that this man had learned the most intimate details of my life and I didn’t know a single thing about him. He could be married, gay, Jewish, atheist, or all of the above, but none of that really mattered. It didn’t tell me what kind of person he was.
He wasn’t wearing his hat and I noticed his age for the first time. His gray hair was meticulously trimmed above his collar where sunburnt lines creased his neck. Even though his hands held the wheel in the proper ten-two position and he sat straight in his seat, there was no undue formality in him. He looked like someone set on a course of action, with decades of right on his side.
“Would it make any difference if I told you how sorry I was?”
The reflection of his eyes in the mirror turned dark. “I don’t see how.”
I shook my head, unable to disagree. Regret didn’t change a thing.
With every passing mile my resignation increased. It didn’t replace the panic and I couldn’t help that. My body didn’t want to die. My heart thudded painfully and it was hard to get enough air in, but I made myself lean back and pressed my palms steadily into the seat on either side of me. If this was my last car ride, I wasn’t going to spend it wallowing in fear. We climbed another hill, passed through a dark thicket of trees, and descended into a valley of fields where crops reflected pale lines of moonlight, zigzagging their way back to the sky. Even in the darkness I could identify the soybeans from the corn, and a little ways farther a field was dotted with what I recognized as dairy cattle. Strange, how the knowledge was there, unattached to any memory of receiving it. Then something occurred to me.
“Was Hattie scared?”
The sheriff must have seen the tape. He had witnessed Hattie’s last moments, which I had imagined a thousand times, my horror uncontainable for not knowing the extent of hers.
He sighed, and the heavy sound of it made my muscles tense, waiting for the blow. I held my breath.
“She was,” he finally said.
“What happened?” I managed to get out.
An eternity passed before he answered and suddenly I wanted to lunge through the partition and wring the information out of him. My hands had turned to fists. I was shaking.
“Please,” I added, squeezing my eyes shut. “Please tell me.”
When he spoke, his voice was quiet.
“He surprised her with the knife. Cornered her. She was scared, but she told him everything he asked. She told him the truth. Then she tried to run and was dead before she hit the floor.”
He sighed and I didn’t trust myself to speak. I leaned into the window, out of his view, and wiped my eyes as the murder scene unfolded in my head. I watched Hattie fall. She fell over and over, never reaching the ground, caught in that last moment for infinity. My mind couldn’t make her live and wouldn’t let her die.
“It didn’t sit right.” The sheriff spoke after a few more miles, breaking the silence so abruptly I almost missed it. “Most of the pieces were there. DNA. Confession. Everything in that locker.”
His tone had changed. It didn’t sound like he was talking to me anymore, but I answered anyway.
“I thought I was doing the right thing. For once.”
He nodded slowly, eyes never leaving the road. “I suppose you did. Damn near cost us the truth.”
“So it’s my fault Tommy killed her?”
“Tommy Kinakis was no murderer. The two of you tore that boy apart. Point two-five alcohol in his blood when he hit that semi. Now his folks put their home on the market and won’t even show their faces in town. And I think . . .”
The pitch of his voice rose suddenly before cutting off. Though I could only see fractions of his face, he seemed to be reining in a flare of emotion, and when he spoke again his voice was strangled.
“. . . I think Hattie’s to blame.”
He breathed deeply, steadying himself.
“I loved that girl—I loved every cheeky, smart-ass hair on her head—but the truth is she killed him as much as he killed her. And neither of them meant to. Just stupid kids.”
A flash of oncoming headlights eclipsed his profile as he shook his head. “Stupid kids who’ll never grow up and figure out they’re better than that. Never go see the world and realize what it means to come home. That their life’s only worth the friends they find in it.”
Long miles passed with only the sound of the rhythm of the wheels over the asphalt. There was nothing to look at except the dark, burgeoning fields, no distraction from the choices Hattie, Mary, Tommy, and I all made that had brought us to this place and time. I’d confessed to something I didn’t do, thinking I could trade it off for the wrongs I had committed. Now there was no avoiding the past. I rode toward it, heart thumping in sick anticipation of the reckoning I knew I deserved.