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I looked at Calloway. “She didn’t mention her to me.”
Calloway nodded at me and then put us on track, cleared his throat. “What happened after that?”
“Nothing. It was done. Over. Never to be spoken about again, until now, I guess.” He dragged his hand over the stubble again. “Look, I don’t know anything about mental health stuff, and I really didn’t know anything back then. We were kids. But knowing the little that I do know now, I would probably say that Silas had some sort of mental break. He was inconsolable, wild.”
“Can you remember anything he specifically said?” Calloway asked.
Jeff considered the question and then nodded. “Yeah. Silas said something like he hated us all and would kill us before we could kill him. I got out of there. Seeing something like that, with vicious eyes and all that blood. The best word I have for it is ‘scary.’ It was plain old scary. We were all eager to put it behind us, make that vow to never talk about it. It made it less real, and I was all for that.”
“Any chance you know what specifically prompted it, Jeff? You mentioned his father’s anger, but do you know what happened to Silas?”
Jeff sat up straighter. “Nope.”
Calloway looked at me and then back at Jeff. “Do you think Susan would know more?”
“She was the only other adult around, but, shoot, I have no idea. Maybe she made some vow too.”
I listened as Calloway asked more questions that Jeff didn’t have answers for, but not with the gusto I’d originally had.
How had my father kept all of this from me?
And what else was I going to learn about his long-ago secrets?
CHAPTER
18
SUSAN SHAW DID, indeed, live in the county, not in a trailer out in the middle of nowhere, but in a house about five miles south of Black Vulture.
Calloway and I received this information through his radio a few minutes after he called Chris and asked him to look her up.
She’d lived there for six years, but he couldn’t pinpoint where she’d come from or if she used to live somewhere else nearby.
“She never came around after Wilmot left?” Calloway asked after the information came through.
“No. I’m sure of it.”
The radio buzzed again. “Sheriff?”
“Go ahead, Chris.”
“We just got some information from the lab.”
“I’m listening.”
“They got a confident ID on the first set of bones.”
“Okay. Who?”
“Is anyone with you?”
“Affirmative, but it’s okay.” Calloway looked at me as if to ask if it really was okay. I nodded, prepared to hear that my father’s bones had, indeed, been found, even though I’d already been told they weren’t his. The hits might just keep on coming.
“The bones are confirmed as belonging to a man named Silas Reynolds, a homeless guy who lived around Tucson.”
The news landed with the heft of a silent weight in the truck. It was a lot to process, particularly since we’d just heard Silas’s name from Jeff.
“Sheriff?” Chris’s voice came through again. “You there?”
