Chapter 1 - The Curtains on Sycamore LaneThe latch of the passenger door on Mr. Greer’s 1997 Ford F-150 had a mechanical rattle that sounded like an empty brass casing rolling across an engine deck.
I sat with my knees pinned against the glove compartment, my dress shoes—black calfskin, spit-shined until the fluorescent tubes of the Greyhound depot had reflected off the toe caps like dark glass—resting on a rubber floor mat caked with thirty years of gravel dust and dried Georgia clay. My service uniform, the Army Green Service Uniform with its stiff canvas-wool blend and the double row of ribbons above my left breast pocket, felt tight across the shoulders. The ribbons carried no vanity: the Army Commendation Medal with an oak leaf cluster, the National Defense Service Ribbon, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, and the Armed Forces Service Medal.
Between my thighs sat my olive-drab canvas duffel, stenciled in faded black ink: VANCE, E. R. — CAPT — USARMY — 92A.
Through the bug-spattered windshield, 412 Sycamore Lane looked smaller than it had four years, eight months, and twelve days ago. The weeping willow on the western corner of the lot had lost its lower limbs to a windstorm; the white clapboard siding had developed that faint, chalky residue that comes when a house goes six years without a pressure wash; and the porch steps—where my father used to sit on Sunday mornings cleaning his bird guns—sagged slightly to the left.
In the second-floor window, the lace curtain twitched.
It did not open. It shifted by an inch and a half, just enough for the amber light of the hallway lamp to catch the silhouette of Diane Vance’s chin: high, sharp, tilted at that exact forty-five-degree angle she used when inspecting the silver platters at the First Baptist auxiliary bake sale.
Beside me, Mr. Arthur Greer did not cut the engine. The old 300-cubic-inch inline-six rumbled with a rhythmic, uneven valve tap that had been familiar to every child in Oakridge since the first Bush administration. His hands, thick-knuckled, spotted with sun keratoses, and permanently stained at the thumb cuticles with purple parcel-routing ink, gripped the plastic steering wheel at ten and two.
He had locked the cab using the manual chrome slider on his door panel.
"Mr. Greer," I said. My voice was raspy from forty-eight hours of Greyhound air-conditioning, diesel fumes, and the dry grease of convenience-store biscuits. "Unlock the door."
"No, Emily," he said. He did not look at me. His watery blue eyes, ringed with red veins from decades of driving rural routes with the window down in the pollen season, were fixed on the front porch of my mother’s house. "You stay in the cab. You let the glass sit between you and that lawn for five minutes."
"I have my leave orders, Mr. Greer. I have my discharge certificate in my breast pocket. I have three duffels at the depot and four thousand dollars in back pay in an account at Fort Stewart. I am thirty-one years old. I don't need to hide behind a door."
"You aren't hiding from her, girl," Mr. Greer muttered, his jaw shifting as he chewed on the inside of his cheek. "You're waiting on the witnesses. If you step out on that berm by yourself, she’ll have the narrative written before your heels hit the grass."
The siren started three blocks away, down by the feed mill near the bypass.
It was not the long, mournful wail of a volunteer fire company responding to a grass fire in the pines. It was the high-low yelp of a municipal cruiser running code three, followed almost immediately by the deeper, guttural siren of an auxiliary unit clearing the traffic light at Montgomery Street.
I looked at Mr. Greer.
"What did you do?"
"I didn't do anything that the United States Postal Service didn't authorize under its public reporting statutes," Mr. Greer said, though his voice had a slight, dry tremble that told me he had been planning this since Tuesday morning. "I’ve carried the mail on this route since 1988, Emily. I delivered your acceptance letter to the University of Georgia. I delivered your commission papers from the ROTC battalion in Athens. And for forty-four months, I carried those blue-backed international aerograms with the APO AE routing numbers down this road, twice a month, like clockwork."
He reached beneath the bench seat and pulled out an old cardboard cigar box, tied shut with frayed postal twine.
"Six of them," he said, laying the box across the gearshift. "The first one came in October of twenty-two. Stamped Camp Arifjan, Kuwait. Returned to sender: REFUSED — NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS. I took it to the door myself, Emily. I stood right there on that porch, where your mother was putting out her plastic pumpkins, and I said, 'Diane, this is from the girl. It’s got the army seal on it.' "
He looked at me then. His mouth was a thin, white line.
"Do you know what she told me, Emily?"
"She told you I was gone," I whispered.
"She looked me right in the eye, took her handkerchief out of her cardigan sleeve, and said, 'Arthur, the prison system has very strange forwarding protocols for inmates who are undergoing behavioral isolation in the federal corrections annex in Lexington. Please mark it refused so we don't encourage her delusions.' "
A cold, heavy stone seemed to drop from my ribs into the pit of my stomach.
Lexington.
The Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky. The prison where the women from the county went when they were caught running methamphetamine out of the trailer parks along the Altamaha.
"She told the deacons," Mr. Greer said, his voice dropping into that rhythmic, low cadence of small-town testimony. "She told the bridge club. She told your third-grade teacher, Mrs. Gable, who cried about it during the responsive reading at Thanksgiving service three years ago. She had Reverend Mercer put you on the secret prayer list—the one they don't print in the bulletin, the one they only whisper about during Wednesday night fellowship so everyone knows how heavy the mother’s cross is."
The first cruiser turned the corner off Oak Street.
It was a white Ford Crown Victoria, ten years out of date, its blue light-bar flashing with a frantic, uneven strobe that reflected off the wet leaves of the sycamores. It jumped the concrete curb at the mouth of the cul-de-sac, its front suspension bottoming out with a sharp clonk, and skidded to a halt diagonally across my parents' driveway, cutting off Mr. Greer’s truck from behind.
A second unit—a Dodge Charger belonging to the county sheriff’s department—pulled onto the grass on the other side of the lane, its tires churning two long, brown furrows through Mrs. Gable’s prized Saint Augustine sod.
Before the dust had even settled, the front door of 412 Sycamore Lane flew open.
Diane Vance did not look like a woman who had spent forty-eight hours weeping over an errant child. She wore her church-morning best: a tailored, pale lavender two-piece suit of heavy double-knit polyester, her silver hair lacquered into that high, indestructible dome she had maintained since the Carter administration, and a three-strand necklace of faux-pearls that bounced against her collarbone as she marched down the porch steps.
She had an iPhone in her left hand, pressed hard against her ear, and her right hand was extended toward the cab of the truck, her index finger pointing directly between my eyes.
"Officer!" she screamed, her voice carrying through the glass with the shrill, penetrating clarity of an ungreased table saw. "She’s in the truck! Do not let her step onto the property! She is completely unhinged! She escaped from the transport facility in North Carolina two days ago!"
Chief Deputy Miller stepped out of the Crown Victoria. He was fifty, thick around the middle, his uniform trousers tucked into Wellington boots that were scuffed at the heels. He had his hand resting on the thumb-break of his Safariland holster, his face set in that professional, bovine squint that small-town deputies use when they are trying to remember whether the suspect has a brother who plays golf with the county commissioner.
"Diane," Miller called out, holding his left hand up like a traffic cop at a school crossing. "Stay on the porch. Arthur, turn that engine off and keep your hands on the horn pad."
Mr. Greer didn't turn the engine off. He reached down, clicked the manual lock on my door upward, and pushed the handle open with his elbow.
"Go on out, Captain," he whispered.
"Mr. Greer—"
May you like
"Get out of the truck, Emily," the old man said, his eyes glittering behind his smudged lenses. "You earned that cloth in the dirt. Don't you dare let her make you crawl through the ditch to show it."
I took my service cap—the stiff, round saucer cap with the gold eagle of the United States Army pinned to the front band—from my lap. I set it squarely on my head, two fingers above the bridge of my nose, adjusted the chin strap, and stepped out onto the asphalt of Sycamore Lane.
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