Page 34 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

It suddenly came to Donovan that Mason and Lori had attended high school together. They’d run with the same crowd, too—Mason, Sam, Emily, Lori, and a few others. Lori had been out there that night, drinking and laughing, before it all went sideways.

“Have you talked to him?” Donovan asked before he could stop himself. The keys jingled when her hands jerked upon hearing his question. “Since he got out, I mean.”

“No.” Lori cleared her throat, turning her key over and over, though there was nothing left to free from it. “No, I haven’t. I wouldn’t know what to say to him, anyway. At least, not after all this.”

Across the street, Mason started up the porch steps, one hand riding the rail.

“I suppose I feel guilty.” Lori’s gaze was like a magnet. She was back to staring at the man who might never find peace. “Same as the rest of us, I suppose. None of us believed it at first. Not Mason, we said. Not him. He couldn’t do something so horrible. And then came the trial, and the lawyers, and the papers, and somewhere in all of it we…”

Lori’s words caught in her throat.

Donovan shifted his weight with unease, wishing he’d never inquired about Mason in the first place. It wasn’t Donovan’s place, and he wouldn’t turn into Rena, waiting all day while working at the convenience store for a simple thread of gossip to pass along after her shift ended.

“We talked ourselves into it, I guess.” Lori paused to observe Mason open the station’s front door and eventually disappear behind it. “We decided it was easier to believe he’d done it than to keep believing the law had the wrong man. Even Hadley testified against him. Her own brother.”

Lori came up out of whatever memory had taken her to revisit the past with a small shake of her head. She then dropped her car key into his palm, and the metal was warm from her hand. He wasn’t expecting her to continue with the topic, and the whiskey in his desk drawer began to call his name once again.

“What about you, Donovan? Mason worked your daddy’s bays back in high school. Have you talked to him since he’s been back?”

“That was a long time ago, Lori.” Donovan pocketed Lori’s key before draining the rest of his coffee. When she remained standing in front of him, he attempted to close out their discussion. “It’s not like Mason is coming around looking for work. Not with that settlement money fixing to land in his lap.”

“It already landed.”

“What?”

“The settlement. It came through early.” Lori tilted her head, gesturing toward the Watering Hole. “Sam told me all about it last night.”

“Since when’s the Watering Hole your stop?”

“It isn’t.” Lori shrugged off the judgment. “I was dropping off a delivery. Warren bought something for his wife, and he wanted it gift-wrapped and topped off with a big red bow.”

“Caldwell.” Donovan grunted, the sound carrying his thoughts on the man. “Figures.”

“You never could stand him.”

“I’ll never understand how he’s gotten reelected over the years. The man never once wanted what was good for this town. He just likes to be the one holding the leash.” Donovan was grateful to be talking about something other than Mason Dawkins. He nodded at her Honda. “Let me get her up and find out what she’s been hollering about. I’ll call you as soon as I know.”

“Thank you, Donovan. Truly.” But Lori didn’t start to walk down the sidewalk toward her boutique. He’d apparently gotten ahead of himself. Instead, she adjusted the strap of her purse as the morning sun began to warm up the town. “Mind if I ask you something? It’s about the night that Reed died.”

The smell came first.

It always came first.

Burning rubber, scorched wiring, and the other unmentionable layer that lingered underneath. The one thing he had no words for and wanted none, yet human flesh being burned off the bone wasn’t something someone could ever forget. Donovan had just been proven by some higher power that there was another topic worse than Mason Dawkins.

“Do you really think that Reed’s killer is still out there? I mean, it just makes sense that Kalen Telfort killed him in an attempt not to get caught, right?”

Donovan had merely been driving home that night. Nothing more, nothing less. He’d come around the bend with his high beams swinging across the back road to find the whole edge of the world on fire.

It was then that the smell hit him.

“I don’t know, Lori. They’ve got Kalen locked up tight, and the way Hadley and the sheriff tell it, that kid had no part in Reed’s death.” Donovan glanced toward Lori’s place of business, but she didn’t seem to take the hint. “Reed was a good man. Solid. Square with everybody, square with me. I’ve lain awake trying to put a name to who’d want a man like that dead, and I come up empty every time.”

“You found him, though. Did you see anybody? Anything?”

And there it was. The question that almost everyone in town had asked in the days after he’d been questioned by Sheriff Turner. Donovan’s statement hadn’t varied in all this time. He’d been at Gus’s shooting pool. He’d then driven home, only to run into a vehicle fire. He’d called it in with his hands shaking so bad he could barely work the phone…because he’d known whose truck it was immediately.

No one had been near it, though.