The Bright Forever: A Novel by Lee Martin

Author:Lee Martin [Martin, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2005-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

July 6

JUST AFTER DAWN, the skies opened up, and rain fell. It came in silver sheets, falling straight down. It fell over the cornfields and the wheat fields and the soybean plants in their straight green rows. It fell over the woodlands, soaking down through the canopies of the hickories and the oaks and the sweet gums. It drummed the tin roofs of barns and grain bins. It flattened pastures of timothy and the turkey foot grass on the prairies. It pocked the White River and the lake at Shakamak. It muddied the shale roads and left them slick and black.

The searchers moved through the rain—slowly, deliberately—the way the police had told them. They were just ordinary folks, people who the day before had been wishing for this rain, who had planned, when it finally came, to be enjoying it from inside their homes, their businesses, or else cozied up in their cars, glad for the shelter, thankful that all they had to do was sit there. Nothing required of them but their slow, easy breathing as they imagined going out to their gardens later to check their rain gauges. They’d gab about the rain with their neighbors. “It was a toad strangler,” they’d say, and they’d linger in the cool air and hope that it might be the start of blackberry winter, that cold snap that always seemed to come when the blackberries were in bloom.

But now they were out in the storm, sweeping in lines across fields and meadows, disappearing into woods, down quarry roads. They were looking in ditches, barns, abandoned cars, anything that was in their path, eyes open for any clue that might lead them to Katie Mackey.

In Gooseneck, Mr. Dees watched the rain streak his windows. Down the street, Clare was watching it, too. She was standing at the back door, keeping her eyes on the policemen who were going in and out of the garage. Earlier, they had moved the burn barrel in there to get it out of the rain. They had been there all night. This was after they had taken Ray away in a police car. They didn’t even let him put on clothes. Now the police officers went in and out of the garage, and some of them left in cars and then came back. Sheriff’s officers and state patrolmen arrived, and men in suits with gleaming white shirts. Clare stayed in the house, letting the feeling sink in that nothing was hers any longer—not the house or the garage or the person she was to herself. Nothing in her life. It was all slipping free from her, attaching itself to whatever had happened that night of July 5 while she waited for Ray to pick her up. Whatever had happened then was larger, more potent than she could ever be. She knew that. She knew how Ray must have felt every time the sun overwhelmed him, everything going dark, shrinking in the glare of that bright light.

The soft-spoken policeman, who identified himself as Chief Evers, showed her a search warrant.

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