C. Box - The Highway

He nodded, not very empathetic, and gulped the milk down and shivered.

“Don’t drink so fast,” she said.

He shrugged.

Before he could settle in, she guided him out of the kitchen and down the dark hall. As they passed the bedroom occupied by her mother, she heard, “Cassie? Is everything all right?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“I heard talking.”

“Ben.”

“Is he sick again?”

“Just sleepwalking,” she said. She wasn’t sure why she fudged on the answer.

“I’m not sleepwalking,” Ben whispered over his shoulder. Cassie shushed him.

“There’s cake in the fridge,” her mother called out.

“I told you,” Ben said accusingly.

“Good night, ” Cassie sang through the door to her mother.

Her mother said something else she didn’t hear, and Cassie ushered Ben to bed and tucked him in. She straightened up his blankets and quilts against the cold and kissed him good night on the cheek.

“Night, Ben.”

“Night, Mom. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

A shaft of moonlight from the window illuminated the framed photos on Ben’s dresser. Three photos of his father Jim Dewell, one in the dress uniform after basic, two in his desert fatigues. In the one Ben liked best, Jim leaned back against a wall of sandbags cradling a machine gun. He wore a pistol on his belt and a smirk on his face.

Ben didn’t actually miss his father because he’d never met him. But he knew if he said it, Cassie would always react with sympathy. Cassie knew it, too. She sometimes wondered if she’d done the right thing, raised Ben the right way. But she was new at this, and didn’t know better. She’d had no real road map from her own mother.

Ben was a boy through and through. He spent hours wordlessly disassembling his toys and putting them back together. He knew the makes and models of cars and trucks on the street, and he’d declared recently that as soon as he could he wanted to hunt deer and elk. There was a poster of Tim Tebow when he was the Bronco quarterback, on his wall despite her grandmother’s disdain for the man and his overt Christianity. Ben’s career path, he’d stated without doubt over breakfast cereal the week before, was to be an NFL quarterback, join the army, and drive tanks and later tractors. He wouldn’t get married and he’d eat elk meat for dinner. Cassie had stifled a smile when her mother reacted to the declaration with outright horror.

She closed his door and padded down the dark hallway, considered going to her own bedroom, and decided against it for now. She was still too wired. She thought of the missing Sullivan girls, Cody out there somewhere not responding, the way the sheriff had played her, and raising a boy in a home with a mother who worked too many hours and a grandmother who was crazy as a tick. She tried not to resent Jim for getting killed and abandoning her. It always bothered her that she’d never seen that gleeful smirk he showed in the photo in real life. Like he was really enjoying what he was doing and Afghanistan in general, and certainly much more than working back at the state highway shop to pay the mortgage with a fat wife and a crying baby at home.

He’d died in the Battle of Wanat in 2008 in Afghanistan. She was eight months pregnant at the time. The official letter from the Department of Defense said Jim Dewell had been killed when two hundred Taliban guerillas attacked the village in the province of Nuristan. Eight other Americans had been killed and twenty-seven wounded. An investigation launched by the government concluded that no negligence was involved and that “by their valor and their skill, they successfully defended their positions and defeated a determined, skillful, and adaptable enemy.” Words from a different era, she thought when she read them, about a battle no one had heard of in a war no one cared about.

Except Ben, of course, who idolized his father with Cassie’s encouragement. To Ben, his father was a hero and a god. No man-or Cassie-could compare with poor dead Jim. She was proud of her husband, that he’d given his life for the country. They knew she was pregnant when he shipped out. They’d married the week after she told him. And if he hadn’t been killed, he was due back for the birth. She wondered if he thought of her in his last seconds. She wondered if he thought they’d had a happy marriage. And she wondered if she did. It seemed so long ago.

Then bam! — five years. Five years with Ben as the only man in her life. Five years where she didn’t dare bring a man home who would pale in comparison with the mythic Jim Ben believed in. Not that there hadn’t been a few opportunities. Unmarried-and a few married-men at both the academy and the sheriff’s department had tried. A couple were even, maybe, okay. Not drug addicts or rednecks or total losers. Maybe there would be a right time, and a right man. When Ben could handle it, and maybe even encourage it. But Cassie couldn’t imagine when that would be.

Cassie stopped and closed her eyes and tried to picture Jim in her mind. It frightened her she couldn’t see his face anymore. And it bothered her that when she thought of him she recalled the photo on Ben’s dresser instead.

* * *

She checked her cell phone on the table for messages. There were none. Then, keeping the laptop closed, she hesitated for a moment and called Jenny Hoyt’s phone. Cassie didn’t want to get immersed again in the contents of her laptop, or speculate without evidence.

Jenny answered after one ring.

“I’m sorry to call you so late. Were you sleeping?”

“I wish I could. But it’s okay. I was just sitting here waiting and when the phone rang I thought it might be Cody.”

Cassie paused. “So he hasn’t been in touch?”

“Not for a while. Two hours, to be exact. He texted Justin and asked if he’d heard anything from those girls, and he sent me a text saying he was meeting with a highway patrolman in Emigrant. I haven’t heard anything since.”

Cassie imagined Cody drinking, spewing his philosophy and buying rounds for the local alcoholics. Forgetting to check his phone or not caring enough to do so.

“My mind just keeps conjuring up things,” Jenny said as much to herself as to Cassie, Cassie thought. “Like maybe he got into some kind of trouble. Or if he’s on another goddamned toot. I want to think that isn’t the case. I know there are dead spots down there without cell service. But…” she trailed off.

Cassie wasn’t sure what to say. “I haven’t heard from him, either.”

“I’m his wife,” Jenny said sharply. “He knows the rules. He’s supposed to check in.”

Silence.

Cassie tried to make her voice professional, to jolt Jenny out of her pique. “I’m working on the case with him. I was corresponding with him back and forth. He needs me to do background. When was the last time you called his phone?”

“Fifteen minutes ago,” Jenny said, her voice cracking. “Even though he made me promise years ago not to call him when he was on an investigation. He was always afraid he’d forget to mute his phone and the ring would create a problem. But this is an emergency, so I called. But it rang a few times and went straight to his stupid message.”

“I see,” Cassie said.

“I’m getting scared. And Justin is”-she lowered her voice to a whisper-“wrung out. He’s not sure to be mad at his father or worried about him. And this Ted Sullivan has called twice wanting to talk directly to Cody. He’s getting hysterical, like he blames us for this. He acts like I’m keeping Cody from talking to him or something. I want to tell him to piss up a rope, but I understand how he feels. I can’t even imagine what he’s going through. Or the girls’ mother.”