1 Chapter 1

1

A man in reasonable health with fifteen minutes to spare could walk across Crows Landing without breaking a sweat. Give the man in question an extra twenty minutes, and he could knock on the door of every house in the town, introduce himself, meet the family, accept a graciously offered glass of water, and turn down an invitation to dinner for later that night. When Dario Russo had been sixteen, he had gone to each one of those homes and knocked on each one of those doors, looking for work. He had done everything from cleaning chicken coops to mowing lawns, and never had more than a few dollars to show for it at the end of the day. He was quite sure that if he approached those doors now, he would see the same faces, only slightly changed by the passage of thirty years.

Or maybe those faces wouldn’t have changed at all. Nothing else in Crows Landing had. If ever there had been a place where time stopped, or just passed over completely, it was Crows Landing, California.

Dario walked along the side of the road, kicking up fine dirt with each step. There were no sidewalks in Crows Landing. Just dust, and asphalt with huge, gaping potholes. They looked malicious. Like somebody had taken offense to something the mayor had done and retaliated by taking a sledgehammer to the main drag. Dario thought it was a little funny how neglect and malignancy usually ended up looking the same in the end. An occasional car passed by, grumbling along its way like an old man. In the distance, a faded yellow tractor rolled along, a mongrel dog trotting contently beside it.

Anybody not familiar with Crows Landing might have thought it a ghost town. It did have the sound of the grave—dirt and wind and the occasional muted voice coming from a distance. But Dario knew better. During the day, the children would be sent to the small elementary school, and everybody else would be out in the fields. Dario didn’t expect to run into anybody.

At the center of town was a small, white building that looked newer than the rest. A luscious, closely mowed lawn rolled down from its front door, and flower beds circled its edges. The brightly colored blossoms just made the whitewash stand out more. It looked clean and cool. Welcoming. Just the sort of place you would want to be as the sun crawled higher and higher in the sky, pulling the mercury with it. Dario had never been inside of that particular building. He didn’t precisely know when it was built, except that it had to been sometime after 1979.

Sweat rolled down his brow, mingling with the dust that had been kicked up to his face. He wasn’t used to the heat, though he’d grow accustomed to it soon. He absently unscrewed the lid from his bottle of water and took a deep drink of the warm, dull water. It didn’t taste good, and it wasn’t very satisfying, but it did coat his dry tongue and wash away the feeling of dust there. Nothing inside the church moved. Chances were good that the door was locked, barring entrance to anybody who didn’t have the right to be there.

Even if he got into the church, he’d almost definitely not find what he was looking for.

The sudden shrill sound of his ringing phone was so out of place that, for a moment, Dario didn’t recognize it at all. His heart rate jumped, and he spun around quickly, searching for the source of that horrible sound. Somehow, in the city, ringing phones became a natural part of the soundscape, like engines roaring by, sirens wailing, and constant talking. Remove the phone from its most natural environment, and for a split second, it didn’t sound like anything at all.

He fumbled the phone from his pocket and pushed talkwithout glancing at the name. “Dario Russo.”

“Are you serious?”

“Ruby…”

“Don’t say my name like that.”

Dario blinked. “Like what?”

“Like you’re trying to calm me down. Like we’re friends.”

Dario thought they were still friends, and he did want to calm her down. Her voice seemed at least one octave above its normal register, and he could imagine her with eyes flashing an unearthly green as she pressed the phone to her face.

“Ruby, I thought we were done discussing it.”

“You left, Dario. You left.”

“I know. I told you…”

“You can’t just leave like that. That’s not how it works. That’s not how adults behave.”

“I told you, I have a job.”

“You turned down three other jobs to work in the middle of nowhere nearly a thousand miles away. You couldn’t even take the time say good-bye?”

“I didn’t want it to turn into a fight.” Or rather, another fight. He was done fighting with Ruby. He may or may not have loved her, but he was absolutely done fighting with her.