Lake of Tears by Mary Logue

some TV with them and then they all went off to bed. So who knows. He could have snuck out after that. There has been some contact between Andrew and Tammy Lee since he’s come back. I’m not sure how much or what it means.”
    “Yeah.” The sheriff rubbed his jawline, which was rough with stubble.
    “When you hired him, did you get his service record?”
    “Sure. I mean, Andrew’s a good guy. He even got some sort of medal for courage in the line of duty. Something bad went down when he was fighting over there and a couple guys got killed, but he saved a guy’s life. I didn’t read it all—but it’s in the report they sent us.”
    Claire hadn’t known that, and she took it in. Andrew did seem like a good guy. Maybe she had been too hard on him.
    “I’d keep looking at Terry if I were you,” he said.
    “Oh, I intend to, sir, but I don’t want to overlook anything.”
    “Not worried about you doing that, Claire. Sounds like you’ve got things under control.”
    “Thanks,” she said as a nurse wheeled in a tray: broth in a bowl, a fruit cup, and skim milk. “I don’t think I’ll be staying for lunch.”
    “Go eat a hamburger for me,” the sheriff said.
    “Good luck, sir, with your surgery.”
    He waved his hand at her. “They’re going to fix me up just fine.”

    Doug remembered the smell of the old barn, fermenting hay, old wood, and a tang of rusting metal. When he was a kid it had been a working barn, used for the cows and for his granddad’s workshop. Now the roof was starting to sag and the sides were weathered almost silver-gray where the paint had worn off. He wondered how much longer it would last.
    Maybe longer than him.
    He sat down on a bale of hay and thought about how he would do this thing he planned on doing. He had been working on the plan for so long—it’s what kept him going—and now it was going to happen and then where would he be?
    He shook himself, like a horse shakes the flies from its neck. Thoughts were like pesky insects, biting in places you couldn’t reach. Put one foot in front of the other, like his granddad used to say. And look where it got him. Killed one day when the tractor backed up over him. Grandma just shook her head, said she thought he loved the tractor as much he loved anything. Now look what happened, she said.
    Doug was only six and they didn’t let him go to the funeral. He had walked around the farm, putting one foot in front of the other, while the tractor sat out by the end of the driveway with a For Sale sign hanging on the radiator.
    After that, Grandma sold off pieces of the farm when she needed money. Now all she had left was the house and the falling-down barn.
    When Doug had joined the service, he had taken out an insurance policy in his grandmother’s name. He figured it was the least he could do. No one else was watching out for her.
    He walked over to the tool chest that Granddad had built into the side of the barn. Not much of a carpenter; it was a rather shabby affair with a few assorted tools left in it. But there was a secret compartment built behind it that he had seen Granddad put the gun in one day, nearly twenty years ago. He was counting on it still being there.
    Pulling out the board, he saw that something was in there, wrapped up in an old pillowcase. When he lifted the object out of its hiding place, it was heavy and hard, cold from years of neglect.
    Turning back the pillowcase, he saw the barrel of the old gun. It was smaller than he remembered it. When he was a kid, the gun had looked huge and so powerful. He almost laughed to look at it now. Puny.
    When he thought of what he had been shooting with in Afghanistan, this was like a slingshot. He closed the chest, sat on the top of it, and looked the gun over. Not big, but a solid piece of work. It needed to be cleaned up and oiled, but it would do the trick.
    When he walked into the kitchen with the gun in his hands, Grandma had looked at the gun and then him and said,