Flashback

—Yeah, I suppose. Probably with that fat slob of an assistant district attorney she worked for, Harvey Cohen. That whole last year, he was always picking Mom up at weird hours when the Old Man was away at work. And the Old Man was always away at work.

My mouth was very dry and my chest hurt now not from emotion but from the more alarming pain of an old man’s thrice-treacherous heart.

—So, Val, you think that Dara was having an affair with her employer, Harvey whoever, and your father found out and killed her? Or arranged for her to be killed in that automobile accident that also killed an old couple and a truck driver? Does that make sense, Val?

He glared at me now and I knew that he was sorry he’d said anything about the old cell phone. The pot and the closeness between us were wearing off.

—Yeah. And if you want to tell me that the Old Man wouldn’t hurt her, save your breath. You don’t know the Old Man. You don’t know cops.

I merely nodded at that. It was true. I’d never spent much time around police officers—or wanted to—and for all my visits when Val was a baby and I still lived in the area after Carol, my third wife, died, I really had never been comfortable talking to Detective Nick Bottom. So instead of defending a man I didn’t know, I said…

—Could I see the encrypted text?

I could feel Val’s reluctance to show the files to me, mixed with his anger at himself and me for saying as much as he had about something he’d kept secret for six years, but without letting go of the phone, he activated it, thumbed through icons, and held the screen up so I could see it in the Nevada darkness.

I looked for a long moment, only asking Val to thumb forward through the pages of text. He did so—gracelessly. Then he turned the phone off and thrust it away in his pocket. He rolled away from me, pulling the thin blanket high up on his bony shoulders, but I wasn’t quite finished with our conversation yet.

—It’s a word-or book-cipher, Val. Based on a five-letter key word.

The boy snorted.

—Tell me something I don’t know, old man.

I let the rudeness pass. Something like excitement was stirring in me. Those encrypted pages might include a message to me. Dara and I had loved sending coded messages to each other when she was little. It irritated Carol, but Dara and I continued doing so, even after Carol got sick.

—Perhaps I could help with…

But I’d let my enthusiasm show through. Val pulled the blanket higher and edged farther away on his cot, showing me his back again.

—I know the kind of words that Mom would’ve used for such a cipher. None of them work. And it doesn’t matter anyway, old man. We’re probably going to get killed in the canyon tomorrow anyway. It don’t matter. Nothing matters.

The sudden bad grammar was a parody of his father’s police-speak, although Nick Bottom didn’t speak that way either. I was tempted to say aloud the “Bullshit, you tiresome little twerp” I was thinking but stayed silent until I said softly…

—Carol.” It could be “Carol.” Her mother’s name.