The Homeplace: A Mystery by Kevin Wolf

everything was fine.
    Chase pretended, too.
    For two years he pretended. When the people in Brandon talked, he pretended he didn’t hear. When alcohol fueled Big Paul and he bellowed through the house that his mother should do them a favor and die, Chase pretended he didn’t mean it. When Isabel swelled with the baby, he pretended that he couldn’t see.
    His world became basketball. The people in town praised him. He led the state in scoring. Everyone in the county came to the games. Everyone but Big Paul.
    And when they played for the championship in Denver, his mother listened on the radio by the hospital bed in the dining room. Big Paul and Isabel never made it to the game. They stayed in the hotel. Together.
    And his mother died. The favor his father demanded happened three days after the championship game. And Chase quit pretending. He moved in with Coach and promised himself he’d never go back to the ranch again.
    What do seventeen-year-olds know about forever?
    A full-ride scholarship took him to college that fall. Then four years in the pros. A year trying to make it back and three more on TV. And four lived in a blur. Billee left him, and he was alone. As alone as his father.
    He heard that Isabel moved out. And that she had a baby girl she named Dolly. Years later she married an older man named Victor and lived in Brandon until she died.
    Like the old house, Big Paul stayed alone on the prairie. Worked the farm and raised his cattle, and folks in town said he partnered up with Jim Beam. Driving by the homeplace, anyone would think it just like every other farmhouse and would never know about the filth and darkness inside.
    Chase climbed the stairs to his room. He sat on his bed and switched off the flashlight. Darkness wrapped around him. Outside an animal screamed. A barn owl swooped by the window carrying a struggling rabbit in its talons. Down the hallway, Chase heard bedsprings groan and his mother cry downstairs.
    He left the house and locked the door behind him.
    *   *   *
    Sheriff Kendall jerked awake to the vibration of his cell phone on the table by the bed. He caught the phone as the next series of hums made the phone crawl over the polished wood. As sleep left his eyes he saw the incoming number.
    He punched receive and pressed the phone to his ear. “Sheriff Kendall here.”
    He twisted in the sheets and touched the naked hip of the woman next him.
    “Good to hear from you,” he whispered into the phone.
    “I’ve cleared it with my boss. I’ll be there tomorrow, and I’m bringing a camera crew with me. Anything I should know?”
    Kendall enjoyed the woman’s voice. “Meetin’ tomorrow mornin’ at nine. Can you be there?”
    “I’ll do my best.”
    He liked the purr in her voice. “Okay. County buildin’ in Comanche Springs. See you there.”
    Kendall swung his legs out of bed and sat up. He squeezed the cell phone until his fingers hurt.
    “What it is, Linc?” the woman beside him asked.
    “Just a reporter from a TV station in Colorado Springs. Wants to interview me. About the murders.”
    “Oh, no. Don’t you have enough to do?”
    “It goes with the job,” he told his wife. And voters remember a man who’s been on television.

 
    CHAPTER TWELVE
    Most times a shower washed away the day’s troubles and put Marty at ease. This night, he stood under the stream of water until he had used every drop from the double-wide’s tiny hot water heater. He let icy cold water pound his back and shoulders while the faces of the two dead filled his mind.
    Murders didn’t happen in Comanche County.
    The last one Marty remembered was two years before. A farmworker with too much liquor in him had stuck a knife in his brother’s back. Over a woman. Paco found the killer behind the bar, cradling his dead brother’s head lying in his lap, bawling over what he’d done.
    That killing happened in a blur of whiskey and machismo. It wasn’t cold and calculated like what had happened to