Free Salt River by James Sallis Page A

Valentine's Day card.
    Lonnie spoke from behind me. "Milly and me, we never saw much of each other."
    One thing about living in a town this size is, you pretty much know what goes on between people without it's ever being said. One thing about living these fifty-plus years and having a friend like Lonnie is that when it does get said, you know to keep quiet.
    "Boy had a hard life," Lonnie went on. "Not making apologies, and I know he brought a lot of it on himself. But there wasn't much that was easy for him, such that you had to wonder what kept him going."
    I had been wondering that, ever since I could remember, about all of us.
    "Milly married him, she took that trouble, Billy's trouble, to herself. And now . . ." He stared at flies buzzing into covers and containers, bouncing off, hitting again. "Now, what?"
    "You sure you want to be out here, Lonnie? Shouldn't you be home with Shirley?"
    "Too much silence in that house, Turner. Too much . . ." He shook his head. "Just too much."
    In my life I've known hundreds paralyzed, some by high expectations, others by grief or grievous wounds; finally there's little difference. That's where Lonnie was headed. But he wasn't quite there.
    "Footprints out back," he said. "Two, three men. Cigarette stubs mashed into the mud."
    "Like they were there for a while."
    "Could just be friends . . . Whatever tracks there were out front are mostly gone, from the rain. Took a look around back, though. Old soybean fields out that way. And someone's been in there recently, with what looks to have been a van, maybe a pickup."
    "No signs of a search, I guess."
    "Hard to say. Milly wasn't much of a housekeeper. Picking up Cheetos bags and wiping off counters with a damp rag being about the extent of it. Drawers and closet doors open, clothes left where they fell—all business as usual."
    "Speaking of which—"
    "Clothes? No way to know. And no one close enough to be able to tell us."
    "So except for some tire tracks and a few cigarette butts that for all we know could have been a friend's, we have no indication that anything's amiss here. She could just have packed up and left."
    "Without warning, and with her entire family here."
    "People in stress don't plan ahead, Lonnie. They panic, they bottom out. They run."
    "Like Billy did."
    "As we all have, at some point."
    "True enough." Stepping up to the kitchen table, he removed the clear plastic cover of a cake with white frosting. Flies began buzzing toward it—from the entire house, it seemed. "In the bathroom. There's a bottle of antidepressants, recently refilled, and a diaphragm on the counter in there. How likely is it that she'd leave those behind?"
    We went through the house room by room. No sign of purse or wallet. There were two suitcases, bought as a set and unused, smaller one still nestled inside the larger, in a closet. In the bedside table we found the checkbook, never balanced, and beside it, nestled among a Bible, old ballpoints and chewed-up pencils, Q-tips and hairpins, we found a cardboard box in which, until recently, a handgun had made its home.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    I NEVER SAW Eldon again.
    So many people come into our lives, become important, then are gone.
    Back in college, back before the government jacked me out of my shoes to drop me in jungle boots that started rotting from day one, I had an astronomy professor who compared human relationships to binary stars endlessly circling one another, ever apart yet exchanging matter. Dr. Rob Penny was given to fanciful explanations of the sort, amusing and embarrassing a classroom filled with freshmen there only because astronomy was the easy science credit. Planetary orbits, fractals and star systems, eclipses—all met with his signature version of the pathetic fallacy. Incipient meddler in others' lives that I was even then, I often wondered about Dr. Penny's own relationships.
    Lonnie was at State headquarters co-opting their resources to do what he could about finding Milly, June