The Far Empty Read Online Free

Arlington before heading back home to Virginia. Now Murfee was all she had. Her parents waited for her back east, unable to understand or accept why she hadn’t already returned. They thought it was foolish that she had remained in Texas.
    Destructive
was the word her father used, over and over again. She wanted to believe it was rebuilding.
    •   •   •
    She went to one of the open windows. From the second floor, Murfee spread out around her, so small against mountains whose names she didn’t know, painted charcoal and purple in the background. She could see the big lights of BBC’s football stadium, the long edge of an end zone upright, and caught the echo of whistles, rising and falling along with the wind. The team was practicing hard, even on a holiday. She guessed there were rules against that, but who was going to say anything out here? Tanner had already mentioned the October game with Presidio, and Murfee’s Fall Carnival, both of which sounded like big deals—
very
big deals. Murfee was a small town in every way. Sure, the mountains and the open sky gave the illusion of size—of infinite, unfillable space—but take that away, and it was no different from any of the small towns around Virginia. In that way, it was
too
small for Anne—her past couldn’t help but overtake her.
    For her, no place might ever truly be big enough.
    She knew she wasn’t going to have to worry about Tanner offering her a full-time position. She’d be here a bit, try to find her bearings again . . . find herself, really, and then move on when they asked.
    Rebuild.
    •   •   •
    Dial, the only member of the Austin Independent School District’s board of trustees who never completely turned his back on her, had mentioned the sad story of Sheriff Ross’s wife when he’d called out of the blue about the job. Principal Tanner had touched on it too, just in passing—like giving away a secret he wasn’t supposed to share, but enjoyed doing anyway. Maybe he thought it would make some sort of sense to Anne, explain everything to her; as if she and the sheriff shared a tragedy that really wasn’t the same at all, not even close.
    Evelyn Ross had disappeared about a year ago, running away with or without another man—no one was sure. It was a scandal—in a place this small, everything is—and the wife had been popular and well liked. She had volunteered at the school, worked in the front office, sold concessions for football and basketball games, and handled other odds and ends. Her son was still a student, one of Anne’s.
    A good student—or at least he had been. Over the weekend she’d glanced through Ms. Garner’s gradebooks, the older woman simply refusing to use any of the new computer-based grading modules, sticking to her old Whaley Gradebooks instead. She had stacks of them neatly filed away from the last decade or more, each filled with her small, blunt writing.
    Tancy Garner had taught the missing woman’s son English for the last two years. Even though there hadn’t been a lot of grades thus far for the new semester, the pattern was pretty clear. The town might have recovered from the scandal, but Anne was pretty sure that Caleb Ross had not let his mother go.
    What did it take for a mother to up and leave her son, disappear? She’d heard of this happening, of course, but it was still hard to wrapher head around. What could be so bad to make a mother flee, run off into the night, leaving everything behind?
    Maybe there was something about this wild and distant place that made such an idea acceptable, even possible, at the outer edge of so much emptiness.
    October wind brushed her hair, stung her eyes. She stared down mountains both faraway and close at the same time. She didn’t know their names, didn’t even know if they were in Texas or Mexico. Marc had called her
geographically challenged
, laughing at the broken compass she carried in her head—her inability to remember directions or