Shine - Lauren Myracle [13]
Maybe, maybe, maybe, and if wishes were horses, I’d gallop straight to Sheriff Doyle and hand over Patrick’s attacker. Poof, I’d be Patrick’s friend again, and poof, Patrick would wake up.
Last night as I lay in bed, I thought about Patrick lying alone in the hospital, his body broken and maybe his brain, too. I tossed and turned all night, in and out of sleep, and woke up before first light. I slipped out onto the porch, my quilt wrapped around me, and watched the sun rise from behind the mountains. It was beautiful. That’s why Daddy picked this lot, way back when.
“So your mama could be surrounded by beauty,” he told me every so often. I’d hug him on those occasions, because talking about my dead mama always made him feel blue. “You sure do call her to mind, sweet pea. My beautiful girl.”
A silver mist cloaked the peaks and valleys. Golden sunshine glowed along the horizon, shifting into rosy pinks and a striking, fiery orange as the light pierced the clouds.
I closed my eyes, and still the colors reached me.
I opened my eyes again and turned to the job at hand: to find out who hurt Patrick. I reviewed what little I knew. Patrick was working the night shift at the Come ‘n’ Go on the night he was attacked, and he was scheduled to open the store the following morning. That’s why it was lucky that man from Atlanta came along when he did, although I supposed—if I was trying to think like a detective, though the word detective made me feel foolish—that another way of looking at it was, Huh, what a coincidence he came along when he did.
Except Sheriff Doyle said Patrick’s attack occurred between two and four a.m., and the man, whose name was Dave Tuttle, said he left Atlanta at five thirty a.m. I read that in the Toomsboro Times. Every day there’d been at least one article about how the investigation was proceeding, and every article said pretty much the same thing. It wasn’t.
But in one article, Mr. Tuttle was quoted as saying that he made the drive from Atlanta to Highlands once a week, and that he always left at dawn. He had a daughter in Atlanta who didn’t go with him that Sunday, and she confirmed that yes, he left when he said he did. She could be lying, but I assumed Sheriff Doyle checked out her story, and Mr. Tuttle’s as well.
Who else might have been at the gas station late Saturday night or early Sunday morning? I needed to be open-minded. I needed to consider all possibilities. I wasn’t convinced by the theory I suspected Sheriff Doyle of pushing, the one about a gang of outsiders attacking Patrick, but I’d be doing Patrick a disservice if I didn’t give it a fair shake.
Black Creek had one of the highest illiteracy rates in the state, but if you traveled thirty miles in any direction, you’d hit a college. Not necessarily a good college, but a college. And what did college guys like to do? Besides getting laid and picking at their belly buttons, I mean?
They liked to party, and the Come ‘n’ Go on Route 34 was nearly halfway between Western State and Toomsboro Community College. When there wasn’t a kegger at one of the schools, the college boys would drive to the other, and they often stopped at the Come ‘n’ Go for snacks. Beef jerky, Monster Energy Drinks, chewing tobacco. Beer.
Patrick wasn’t supposed to sell alcohol, because he wasn’t twenty-one, but Mr. Lawson, the store’s owner, wasn’t overly concerned with that law. He was concerned with making a profit, and he told Patrick to go on and sell to anyone with a valid-looking ID.
Unlike Mr. Lawson, Patrick was a rule player, but he had a sweet job and a steady paycheck, so he didn’t argue with his boss. He took the “valid” part seriously, however. If a customer’s ID looked authentic, then cool. If it seemed sketchy—like if the name listed on the license was “Mario Mario” and the guy sliding it across the counter looked all of eighteen, then Patrick didn’t accept it, even though it would have been the easier thing to do.
“Mario Mario?” I said skeptically when my brother relayed this particular story one Saturday night, sitting out