“Since January, Dana,” Kyle answered, and he sounded almost sad. “For the cars. A man in my line of work needs to know who walks behind his shop.” I stood beside the rusted blue truck with the photograph of Ray shaking in my hand and looked up into the black eye of that camera. The red light blinked. Somewhere twenty miles away, on a tow call that I now understood did not exist, a man was holding a phone in his palm and watching me read the evidence of my husband. “Kyle,” I said, “what cars?” There was a long breath on the line. “You know,” he said, “I think you already know, honey.”
I did the thing that surprised me most. I did not run. I stood in plain sight of the lens, folded the photograph into my jeans pocket, and said in a bright, ordinary voice, “Well, I should let you get back to work. Avery has practice at five.” Then I walked to my car, got in, and drove away at the speed limit, humming. I did not stop humming until I had turned the corner onto Farm Road 31. Then I pulled over at a closed feed store, laid my forehead on the steering wheel, and let myself shake until my teeth rattled. I had eleven minutes before the softball field let out.
I used them. I called the only person in Gregg County who had ever made me feel safe, a detective named Carla Mendez who had taken my statement the night of the fire and given me her card at the hospital. I had kept it in my wallet for four years without knowing why. She picked up on the third ring. I told her about the glove box, the invoices, and the keys. She was silent for a moment, and then she said, in a very quiet voice, “Dana, where is Avery right now?” I felt every hair on my arms rise.
A guitar can hold a warning for four years and still keep the tune of a good man.
I drove to the softball field with my knuckles white on the wheel. Avery was sitting on the bleachers with her glove in her lap, laughing at something one of the girls had said. When she saw my face, she stopped laughing. I did not explain. I put my arm around her shoulders and walked her to the car. She asked three times what was wrong, and each time I answered, “Tell you in a minute, baby.” A black tow truck turned slowly into the lot as we pulled out. I saw its driver look straight at me through the windshield. It was Kyle.
He did not follow us onto the highway. I watched in the mirror as the truck sat motionless at the gate, and then I understood why. Detective Mendez had two unmarked cars on the road by then, and one of them was sliding in behind him, quietly, like a cat behind a bird. We drove to the office of the sheriff in Longview, where a deputy brought Avery a hot chocolate and a blanket and sat with her in a room with a toy chest. Carla took me into a small office. She spread out the invoices on the desk, one by one, and put on her reading glasses.
It was a car theft ring, much larger than I had imagined. Kyle had been buying wrecked vehicles at salvage auctions, then cloning the identification numbers onto stolen cars in Mexico and the Gulf states, and selling them to unsuspecting buyers across Texas. The shop was the front. Ray, who had spotted a duplicate number on a pickup one March afternoon, had taken photographs. He told Kyle at lunch that he would go to the state if the practice did not stop. Kyle, his friend since high school, begged him not to ruin them both.
That was where the fire came in. Kyle had waited until Ray was alone in the garage on the night of the accident, and he had cut a line in the engine bay of the car, and removed the extinguishers from their brackets, and stood in the dark outside, burning his own arms later in a performance that fooled the marshal, the hospital, and me. The four keys on the ring opened four storage units near Marshall, each filled with cars that were never meant to be driven. Carla found sixty one of them. The Texas Rangers arrested Kyle that evening at his own kitchen table.
I will not describe the trial in detail. He was convicted of murder, arson, and a federal charge of interstate trafficking in stolen vehicles, and was sentenced to life plus forty years. Three other men from the ring were convicted. At the sentencing, Kyle asked permission to address the court, and he said he was sorry, and I did not look at him. I looked at the photograph of Ray, which Carla had returned to me in a plastic sleeve, and I thought of a young man in grease up to the elbows, laughing at the way I held a wrench.
Avery learned to play the guitar of her father that winter. Her fingers bled for a month, and then they stopped, and in January she played a simple, halting version of an old Waylon song at the kitchen table while I did the dishes with my back to her so she would not see my face. I reopened the repair shop in the spring under my own name, with a young mechanic named Tomas who had apprenticed with Ray, and I hung a framed photograph over the register. The sign outside reads Pruitt Auto, Honest Work Since 1998.
Every Sunday, Avery and I drive out to the cemetery with the guitar in the back seat. She sits on the grass beside the headstone and plays for ten minutes while I pull weeds. The song changes. She is getting better. Yesterday, as the sun slid down behind the pines, she played something I had never heard before, a slow, tender melody that she had made up herself. I asked her what it was called. She thought for a moment and said, “It does not have a name yet. I am saving it until it is finished.”