Dark Debts by Karen Hall Page A

could have happened? It was hard to believe Cam and death could travel the same axis, much less collide. It made him think about nights when he was a kid, lying in bed, fantasizing about smothering Cam with a pillow and letting everyone think Cam had died in his sleep. His plan included comforting his mother with a theory he thought she’d buy—that the angels had decided they just couldn’t live without Cam another day. The whiskey dulled the pain in his head, but it was getting back at him in other ways. It stirred the old voices and, as always, brought him closer to the anger. Pictures flashed through his head. His father holding Cam by the hand, waving Cam’s report card like it was the goddamned flag. Looking at the rest of them like he wished the ground would open and swallow them.
    â€œAt least I’ve got one son who’s gonna amount to something. The rest of you combined ain’t worth the breath it’d take to cuss you.”
    And now the Boy Wonder was gone. Jack suddenly saw clearly what he’d known since the moment he’d heard the message. The LA County coroner would have to move on to plan B. Even if Jack had loved Cam the way he’d loved the others, he wouldn’t have been able to do it again. He couldn’t do one more funeral.
    At least he could comfort himself with the knowledge that it was all but over. There was no one left to die. No one but him. And when he died, there would be no phone call, no stricken faces, not even one ambivalent drunk wrestling with his conscience. Just a quiet end to the chain of misery.
    He drained the last of the whiskey. He put the cap back on the bottle, stared at it for a moment, then hurled it at the side of the depot, where it shattered and fell to the ground in a violent spray of a thousand pieces.

FIVE
    D riving her rented car down I-75, Randa began to feel it—the almost tangible poignancy she always felt in Atlanta, and had felt ever since she first went there on a second-grade field trip. Memories whirled over her, and she could feel her throat tighten into what she had come to think of as the Atlanta knot.
    There was a bank of black clouds on the horizon, and every now and then a streak of lightning would split them. Randa was driving right into the storm, and had to force herself not to look at it as an omen. Thunderstorms were high on the list of reasons she had left Georgia. She reminded herself of all the reassurances she’d heard about a car being the safest place to be, and how statistically slight her chances were of being struck by lightning. Those statistics never calmed her, though, since they had likewise applied to anyone who ever had been struck by lightning.
    The storm seemed to be stalled somewhere. By the time she was within three exits of Barton, it was still off in the distance. Maybe it would stay wherever it was until after she was safely back in her hotel room.
    Barton was a little town about an hour south of Atlanta. It was also the town where Will Landry had finally done his version of settling down, and the town the Landry boys had spent their youths terrorizing. Randa had never been there. It was one of those towns there was no reason to visit. Its biggest claim to fame was the country’s oldest still-standing buggy factory. Once a year everyone got decked out in antique clothes and celebrated Buggy Day by riding buggies up and down Main Street. But that event was hardly worth the time it would have taken her to drive down there when she was growing up in Gainesville, two hours north.
    Chances were slight that anyone in Barton would know where Jack lived now, but she had to start somewhere, and it seemed like the logical place. (Not that any of this had anything to do with logic.) She took the exit, followed the signs to the downtown area (such as it was), parked in one of the diagonal spaces on Main Street, and surveyed the landscape. Typical small-town Georgia. A little row of shops