Chapter 29

29

“Do you think she’d lie for her husband?” Stokes asked, glancing over at Annie.

He had insisted on driving this time. She had been happy to let him, though she almost hoped he would get lost, she was dreading this so. If this had gone down the way Stokes suggested, Tulsie was an accessory, voluntary or not.

“Yes. Absolutely, she would,” she said. “One: she’s scared to death of him. And two: she’s scared to death to lose everything she’s worked for.”

“What about the hired hand?”

“I don’t think she likes Cody, but she’s loyal to Tulsie. There’s nothing to say she would know anything about what went on Saturday night, though. She would have left after feeding the horses late in the day Saturday.”

“Do you think Tulsie would have told her what happened?”

“I don’t know. She’s pretty ashamed. She might not have, but we should keep them separate.”

“Agreed.”

“Let me deal with Tulsie,” Annie said. “This is gonna be really hard for her.”

“That’s why I brought you. I’m not a complete knothead.”

Annie chuckled, glad for the second of relief. “Don’t sell yourself short, Chaz.”

“Very funny.”

They pulled into the Parcelles’ driveway and up to the barn. It was late afternoon, the sun already sinking low in the west, casting the barnyard in tones of gold and sepia. A couple of horses in pens near the barn raised their heads from piles of hay to look at them with casual curiosity. The dogs came running out of the barn, barking and baying their greetings.

The white truck that had been parked in front of the barn the last two times Annie had come there was gone. As they got out of the car, Chaz nodded in the direction of the house, maybe fifty yards away and partially obstructed from view by trees. The truck was backed in under the carport next to the house.

Country music was playing in the barn accompanied by the sounds of horses getting fed—buckets rattling, hooves banging on stall doors.

Izzy Guidry looked up as they walked in, her expression blank.

“Hey, Izzy,” Annie said. “Is Tulsie around?”

“Nope. Can I help you?”

“I just have a couple more questions for her, is all. Is she riding?”

“No. She’s home sick,” she said, digging sweet feed out of a rolling cart with a big metal scoop. “She got a migraine. Been sick all day. Did you get hold of Cody?”

“That’s the thing,” Stokes said. “Cody never showed up in Houston.”

“Seriously?” She took the scoop of feed to a stall where a black horse with a blazed face stood tossing its head up and down in anticipation of its dinner. “Where’d he go, then? Did he have an accident or something?”

“We don’t know. He hasn’t been in touch?”

She shrugged and dug another scoop of feed out of the cart. “He wouldn’t call me.”

“Tulsie hasn’t said anything about him?” Annie asked.

“No.”

“I’m just gonna go on up to the house and see her,” Annie said. “It won’t take but a minute.”

“She’s sleeping,” Izzy said, going back to the feed cart. “She takes that migraine medication and it knocks her out. Can’t she just call you tomorrow?”

“Did she say anything to you about what her husband did to her Saturday night?” Stokes asked.

“No.”

“You weren’t suspicious when you saw her looking like she’d been beat up?”

“I done been over all this with her,” she said irritably, shooting Annie a look like she was a traitor or something. “She told me she got hurt getting bales down. It’s none of my business what goes on between them. I’m just the hired hand.”

“What can you tell me about that white truck up by the house?” Stokes asked.

“What about it?” she snapped, her eyes darting from Stokes to Annie as Annie stepped back toward the open door. Either she didn’t want to be left alone with Stokes, or she didn’t want Annie going to the house. Why was that? Annie wondered.

“Do you know who might have been driving that truck Sunday night?” Stokes asked.

“How would I know? Sunday’s my day off.”

Annie slipped out the door as Stokes continued his questions. A fat Welsh corgi dogged her heels as she walked up the driveway toward the house. Something felt off, she thought, her nerves raising goose bumps down her arms. Maybe Izzy just didn’t like Stokes, or didn’t like men, but she had come across as tense and anxious, which was different than the other times Annie had spoken to her.

Her own anxiety rose like a slow tide as she neared the house. There shouldn’t have been any reason for that, she told herself. It was just the Ghost of Disaster Past. The anxiety was an oversensitive alarm she had to learn how to defuse. There was nothing dangerous about Tulsie Parcelle.

But even as she told herself that, her memory brought up the last person she had wrongly considered a non-threat.

She made one circuit around the white pickup, which had a couple of stuffed black garbage bags in the back. Raising up on her toes, she looked into the cab. There was a jacket and some dirty work gloves on the passenger seat, a few pieces of mail, a couple of discarded cash register receipts. An open can of Red Bull sat in the cup holder in the center console. Nothing out of the ordinary.

She left the truck and went up the front sidewalk, climbed the prefabricated concrete steps, and rang the doorbell. No one came.

Poor Tulsie, she thought, as she rang the bell a second time. She had been inconsolable the night before, sobbing to the point of gagging herself after she had admitted Cody had beaten her Saturday night. It wasn’t any wonder she was sick. Her entire world was coming down around her, and it was about to get worse. She wouldn’t be able to deny the video evidence. If she hadn’t been in one of those trucks, then who had been?

Annie got down from the steps and went around the side of the house, peeking in windows as she went, seeing nothing of note. A typical living room with an oversize brown leather couch, a coffee table cluttered with magazines and a silver bowl overflowing with horse show ribbons. On the walls hung framed photos of horses in competition.

She went back around under the carport and climbed another set of steps to the kitchen door. Cardboard had been taped over a couple of broken glass panes in the upper half of the door. Annie peered in, getting a view of a messy kitchen. She buzzed the video doorbell, then knocked, feeling impatient. Maybe Tulsie was sleeping off her migraine medication, but she could have as easily taken an overdose and willed herself to sleep for eternity. Her life was a mess and not about to get better. It wasn’t a stretch to think she might just want out altogether.

A wide deck ran the length of the back side of the house, with a gas grill and dining table and chairs right outside the sliding door into the kitchen. A patio lounge chair and a couple of swivel armchairs sat on the other end outside a second slider, along with another pair of stuffed garbage bags.

Annie went to the second sliding door and looked in at what had to be the master bedroom, squinting, willing her eyes to adjust. There were no lamps on in the room. Situated on the east side of the house, the room had little in the way of natural light.

Tulsie sat on the floor in the middle of the room with her back to the glass door, head down, shoulders slumped.

Unease ran like cold rain through Annie. She knocked on the slider. “Tulsie?” And knocked again. “Tulsie? It’s Annie Broussard.”

The girl didn’t respond, didn’t move.

“Tulsie!” Annie called louder, yanking the sliding door open.

The overwhelming smell of bleach nearly knocked her backward. Coughing on it, she went into the room, her focus on the girl, but her mind grabbing images like snapshots as she went—the bed stripped down to the mattress, a shattered mirror over a dresser, items that had been swept from the dresser and scattered on the floor…

The girl sat cross-legged on the floor, holding a bloody kitchen knife in her lap, tears streaming silently down her face, her eyes blank.

Oh, shit.

Her heart racing, Annie stepped slowly, carefully around the girl and crouched down into her line of sight. Tulsie had already cut both forearms a couple of times. In the wrong place and at the wrong angle to get the job done, but she was bleeding heavily nonetheless.

“Tulsie, put the knife aside,” Annie said firmly but quietly. “You don’t need that. I’m here to help you.”

Tulsie didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge her. In her peripheral vision, Annie could see damage done to one wall from what looked like a shotgun blast, and blood spatter someone had smeared on the drywall in an unsuccessful attempt to scrub it away. The mattress was stained. Sections of the carpet had been cut out and removed. That was probably what was in the garbage bags, she thought, bloodstained carpet and other evidence of violence.

“Tulsie, why don’t you give me that knife and tell me what happened?” she said, holding out her hand. “I know you probably think there’s no way out of this, but that’s not true.”

“I can’t do anything right,” Tulsie murmured, looking down at her bloody arms. “Cody always says I mess everything up, and he’s right. Look at me.”

“Cody’s an ass,” Annie said. He was almost certainly a dead ass, though in the moment Annie couldn’t begin to feel bad for him. He had beaten this girl senseless—more than once. And now his adoring little wife sat there, abused physically and emotionally, ready to end her own life over a man who had systematically destroyed her.

“Cody’s dead,” Tulsie murmured. “It’s my fault.”

“You have a right to defend yourself, Tulsie,” Annie said. “A good lawyer will argue self-defense, and I don’t know who in their right mind would blame you.”

“I made him mad. I shouldn’t have made him mad.”

She was as pale as milk, and her eyes had a glassy sheen. She was going into shock.

“This isn’t your fault,” Annie said. It didn’t matter if it was or it wasn’t. All that mattered now was getting the knife away from her and getting her out of this house. “Let me help you, Tulsie. Set that knife aside, and we’ll go get those cuts looked after.”

“Everything is so messed up, Annie. I’m gonna lose everything. Everything I worked for.”

“You’re not gonna lose your life,” Annie said, reaching out a hand for the knife. “Everything else can be fixed or replaced. It doesn’t matter.”

She tried to put the story together in her head. Tulsie had come home from Outlaw as ordered. Cody had come home and laid into her. She already knew this from what Tulsie had told them the night before. But that story had ended with Cody packing up and leaving for Houston the next day, when instead he had almost certainly died in this room that night.

“Let me have the knife, Tulsie.”

“No. No. No…”

Annie leaned an inch or two closer. Tulsie pulled the knife up as if she might use it. Annie leaned back, her mind racing. What if this girl just snapped? What if Tulsie came at her with the knife? Could she get out of the way quickly enough? Would she draw her weapon? Would she use it?

Suddenly, splitting up with Stokes looked like a stupid, reckless decision. She had expected to find Tulsie ill and helpless, but desperate people did desperate things. They found wells of violence and self-preservation deep within. They tapped into physical strength they never knew they had. She had experienced that firsthand and had the scars to prove it.

Focus, Annie. Focus . She needed her full attention on the moment and did her best to shove her anxiety to the side.

“Put the knife down, Tulsie,” she said. “Whatever happened, I’ll help you.”

Who else had helped her Saturday night? she wondered. Cody had to outweigh Tulsie by a good eighty pounds or more. And deadweight always seemed twice as heavy. Tulsie could never have moved him on her own. She had to have called someone to help her. Two trucks had gone out to that spot where the body had been dumped.

Stokes’s theory had Cody killing Marc for messing around with Tulsie. Maybe he had the right puzzle pieces in the wrong order. Maybe Marc had done the deed and carried the weight. Maybe Marc was the one who had headed for parts unknown. They would sort that out later. Now the only thing that mattered was getting this girl the help she needed.

“Put the knife down, Tulsie,” she said. “I’ll help you any way I can.”

The girl looked up at her, puzzled. “But what about Izzy?”

“What about Izzy?”

“She was only trying to help me,” she said. She had begun to shiver. “She told him before…If he hurt me again…”

“Izzy shot Cody?” Annie asked.

“And I’d damn well do it again.”

Annie looked up. Izzy Guidry stood on the deck in the open doorway, a handgun pointed straight at her.