Бентли Литтл - The Disappearance

The young deputy looked at Joan, his eyes quickly taking in the T-shirt before glancing respectfully away. “Do you need shoes?” he asked. “Or a blanket? There’s an extra pair of boots in the car. They might not fit perfectly, but you could put them on.”

“Thank you,” she said sincerely.

He hurried back to the vehicle, returning a moment later with a pair of clunky hiking boots and a gray flannel blanket. She unfolded the blanket, twisted it into a type of sarong and tied it around her. She leaned on Gary while she put on the boots one at a time. They were too big for her feet and she wasn’t wearing socks, but it was better than going barefoot.

“We have a lot of questions,” the young deputy said.

Gary nodded tiredly as Joan finished tying the shoes.

“I’m going to have to ask you to come with us to the office. It’s back in Palmdale, about forty miles away.”

Joan stood and all three of them nodded their acquiescence. The older deputy had walked over to Father’s corpse and was bending down, examining it. Joan hazarded a quick look and saw that the flames engulfing the body appeared to be completely out.

Another sheriff’s vehicle pulled up, this one an SUV.

“Do you need a ride?” the young deputy asked. “We’ll probably be out here for a while, but we can take you back.”

“No, we have a car,” Gary replied.

“My car,” Reyn said.

He was crying, Joan noticed, and she suddenly wondered where Stacy was, where Brian was. In all the commotion, she had not thought to question why they weren’t there. She started to ask, but then her eyes met Gary’s, and at that moment she knew. She was filled with a sudden aching sense of loss, and she looked again at Reyn, wanting to say something, wanting to comfort him, but the expression on his face was one of such complete and utter devastation that she knew anything she said would be useless and ineffectual, would probably make things worse, so she remained silent.

“Wait by your car, then,” the deputy said. “Someone will be heading back shortly to transport the detainees. You can follow them.” He spoke into his walkie-talkie, informing the law enforcement agents who were rounding up the Homesteaders that the three of them were coming.

She felt exhausted as they started walking across the flat ground to the dirt road, the trees, rocks and walls of the canyon pulsing blue and red in time to the car lights.

Father was dead.

She was glad, but she felt no happiness. Her parents were dead, too. So were Stacy and Brian. The Home, the site of her childhood, was gone, and though she had long ago left behind Father’s teachings, seeing a curled scrap of burned paper tumble past—one of the prayer scrolls—brought home to her what was lost and filled her with a sadness she’d not expected and could not explain.

Gary was here, though, and that was all that mattered. She loved him, and he loved her, and they had survived. She glanced over at him, seeing in his shadowed, soot-covered face the older man he would become. She knew that no matter what else happened in her life, no one else could ever be there for her to the extent that he had, no one else would do anything as heroic or selfless. But she also knew that they were young, that things changed, that despite the way they felt at the moment, they might not stay together forever. Ten years from now, they might be married—or they might be strangers, living on opposite sides of the country, involved with other people, with the events of this semester having receded into memory, recalled with decreasing frequency as the years passed by.

That was tomorrow, though, and today was today, and she took his hand, held it tightly and together they followed Reyn, walking up the dirt road, into the darkness, into the future.

Born in Arizona shortly after his mother attended the world premiere of Psycho , Bentley Littleis the Bram Stoker Award–winning author of numerous previous novels and The Collection , a book of short stories. He has worked as a technical writer, reporter/photographer, library assistant, salesclerk, phone book deliveryman, video arcade attendant, newspaper deliveryman, furniture mover and rodeo gatekeeper. The son of a Russian artist and an American educator, he and his Chinese wife were married by the justice of the peace in Tombstone, Arizona.

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