Page 2 of The Killing Plains

Willis learned his lesson. For two years, he kept away from the pond, at least in daylight, though sometimes he’d go after dark, when he knew he’d have the place to himself. Until the night they came for Adam’s body. Willis heard the sirens over the hill, saw the blue and red lights reflected off the low-scudding clouds.

“Stay in the cabin, Willis,” Felix, the ranch foreman, told him. “Don’t come out for nothin’.”

Willis obeyed, slipping through the door into the dim, humid herpetarium. Delilah seemed to understand his terror. She came to him and slid into his lap, then up his torso, tickling the stubble on his jaw with her flickering tongue. But he couldn’t hide forever. The police came the next morning. As they put Willis into the cruiser, his father watched through slitted eyes while Momma stood behind him, her face twisted into a grimace of fear that Willis never forgot, though twenty years had passed since that terrible day.

Willis remembered the time following his arrest as a series of rooms, cramped and windowless, some with tables and chairs, some with beds and medical equipment. All were painted the same cold gray, lit with the same cold light. There’d been a parade of police and lawyers and people in lab coats. He remembered lying still on a hard table while a machine somehow took a picture of his brain. In the cramped gray rooms, they asked him questions he didn’t know how to answer. And at the end of that time, in a bigger gray room, a judge stared down at him the way people stared into the big pit of snakes at the Rattlesnake Rodeo.

After the sentencing, his father never visited. But Momma came to see him every week, and his brothers came sometimes, too. Of his three brothers, Willis looked forward to Randy’s visits most. Russ and Lowell never had much to say. But Randy would talk to him like he used to, before the trouble. Was Willis getting enough to eat? Was anybody bothering him? Did he need anything? And he told stories about his job at theHouston Chronicle, and about his family—his wife, Colly, the detective. And their daughter, Victoria. And later on, little Satchel, Victoria’s baby boy, who was born with all the medical problems. Randy even gave him pictures to stick on the walls of his cell. He made Willis feel like he was still part of a family, one that would welcome him back if he ever came home.

But home wasn’t like Willis remembered it. His father was dead. Randy was dead. And Victoria, too. Momma was an old lady, now. And Felix, though still ranch foreman, was too arthritic to do much anymore and had handed off most of his duties to his nephew Pete, who avoided Willis and spat in the dirt whenever he saw him.

There were nieces and nephews Willis had never met—never could meet, now, the court order said—though sometimes he caught glimpses of them splashing in the pool or playing on the tennis courts behind the big house. They were all there tonight—his surviving brothers and their families—for Momma’s birthday party. Willis could hear the music drifting down the hill.

Tomorrow, when the children were gone, Momma would invite him to the house for leftover birthday cake. She would tell him all about the festivities, if the police hadn’t arrested him by then.

On Willis’s first day home from prison, Felix had told him to be careful. “Stay near the cabin—and keep away from that damn pond.”

A needless warning. Willis’s skin crawled at the mere thought of its dark water. For six months, he never went near it. Never went anywhere. And yet history was repeating itself, like a scary movie he’d seen once but was being forced to watch again.

He’d spent the day at the police station, answering the Rangers’ questions, though they never seemed to believe him. Just like before, they hooked him to a machine that could tell if he was lying. They asked if he’d killed a boy and left him by the pond—though this time the boy’s name was Denny, not Adam.

“No.” He made his voice as calm and flat as he could. But the Rangers kept asking, using different words, trying to trick him.

Finally, they brought him home. “We’ll be back with the handcuffs, soon,” they said.

“Don’t worry,” Felix told him after the Rangers drove away. “That means they don’t got nothin’.”

But Willis knew it was just a matter of time.

There was only one thing to do, now. Only with Delilah would he find some final moments of peace. The herpetarium was quiet and warm—a few cubic yards of jungle transplanted as if by magic onto the plains of West Texas. A refuge. Inside it, nothing had changed in twenty years, except Delilah herself.

“Where are you?” Willis’s breath fogged the glass. She was always hard to spot, perfectly camouflaged in the leaf litter or concealed in the shadowy branches above. She could go days without moving. But Willis always found her in the end.

After prison, it had taken him a while to relearn the trick. On his first day home, he’d rushed to the cabin and gone straight to Delilah’s enclosure. But when he put his hand on the glass door, Felix stopped him.

“Best not, till she gets to know you again. I fed her a rabbit, so she shouldn’t be riled. But still...”

Willis frowned. “I don’t see her.”

“She’s there, in them leaves.”

But Willis stared for a long time before spotting her. He’d been looking for something too small. She was no thicker than his forearm when he went away. Now, she weighed more than he did, and he’d mistaken her at first for a fallen tree. She’d become a monster. They both had.

“She’ll remember me,” Willis said, opening the door.

He was right. She came to him immediately, sliding across the ground to brush against his leg almost like a puppy, tasting him with her tongue. He could see the lump in her belly where the rabbit was. He laid a hand on the cool, dry skin of her back, the muscles constricting beneath his palm with an unhurried power that sent a shiver up his arm.

“I’ll be damned.” Felix scratched his chin and smiled. “Just you be careful. Don’t never go in there when I ain’t around for backup.”

But Willis trusted her. He always had.

Now, as he wiped the fog off the glass with his sleeve, something caught his attention. In the pool near the back of the enclosure, half-concealed beneath the lily pads, two hooded eyes were watching him. The forked tongue fluttered out, testing the air.

Willis let out a long, slow breath. “Found you,” he whispered and opened the door.

Chapter 2

March 4, 2019

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