“Sixteen,” said Dale. He had to force the words out through still-dry lips. “Whatever happened to C.J. Congden, Sheriff McKown?”
McKown flashed a grin. “Oh, he ended up where most small-town bullies do. . . he was elected county sheriff here four times.”
“But he’s dead now?” said Dale.
“Oh, sure. C.J. stuck the barrel of his pearl-handled.45 Colt in his own mouth in ’97, no, the summer of ’96, and blew his brains all over the inside of his double-wide.” McKown stood. “Professor Stewart, you’re not under arrest or anything, and I’d sure love to talk to you some more, but I think it’s important that you call this Dr. Williams in Missoula. You look tired, sir. How about if you get showered and shaved, and I’ll drive you into Oak Hill? You can call from the station house. Then I’ll drive you back here myself. How does that sound?”
“Fine,” said Dale. He got to his feet like an old man.
“Would you mind if I just looked around this house for a minute, Professor Stewart?”
“Search it?” said Dale. “I don’t mind. Your deputies already went through it.”
McKown laughed. For a small man, he had a big man’s easy laugh. “No, not search it, Professor. Just look around. I’ve never been in here and. . . well, you know. We lived on a farm about four miles from here when I was growing up and between local legends and Uncle Bobby’s stories and with the crazy old lady who lived here after Mr. McBride died, this was our local haunted house.”
McKown walked into the dining room. “This looks empty, but not especially haunted.”
Dale went into the study to get some clean clothes to take down to the basement for after his shower. The computer screen had his question from the day before and another line under it.
>Am I cracking up?
>Absolutely.
The sheriff walked through the front parlor and into the hall just outside the study. Dale killed the power on the ThinkPad and closed the lid.
“I’ll just be a minute,” said Dale, heading down the stairs. “Help yourself to the last of the coffee.”
TWENTY-FOUR
FORtwo weeks after Clare had left him, Dale would call her apartment number and hang up as soon as she answered. He had blocked his number so that she could not use *69 to know who had called. After a week of almost nightly calls like this, her phone suddenly refused to accept calls from any blocked phone. Dale removed the block from his phone and called the next evening. An answering machine picked up. He called again at half-hour intervals all that night. Only the answering machine responded. Dale listened intently to the silence behind the machine’s robotic tones, beeps, and hisses, but there was no hint of Clare there. The next evening, the same thing. Dale began calling every fifteen minutes all through the third night. The phone rang. The machine picked up. Dale became certain that she was not home any of those nights.
The next day, Friday, Dale had no classes. He made a point of telling several fellow faculty members that he was going on his annual autumn camping trip to Glacier National Park. He even called his old house when he knew that Anne would be away and left a message on that machine—Anne had recorded a new message to take the place of the old one with his voice on it—telling her where, roughly, he would be camping in Glacier in case he did not return for classes on Tuesday. Leaving this information had been his practice for years—the only year he had skipped it had been the first time he had driven Clare to the park and Blackfeet Reservation—and Anne would know that it was only old habit.
Dale flew to Philadelphia and drove across the river into New Jersey and on to Princeton, arriving just before dark. He had never been there before, and he found Clare’s apartment—she had given him the address way back in July when she first found it—with some difficulty. Her apartment was in a small duplex several miles from the university campus. Dale sat in the rented car for fifteen minutes before working up the nerve to cross the street and ring her bell. She was not home. She did not come home that night. Dale knew this because he sat in the car until 4:00A.M. watching, slumping down out of sight when a police car drove by twice, urinating out the passenger side door into a lawn gone to weeds rather than drive away to find a rest room.
About ten-thirty the next morning—a beautiful, crisp, red-leafed autumn Saturday—Clare arrived in a Chevy Suburban that Dale knew was not hers. A young man in his late twenties, a blond young man with very long hair and a Nordic face, was driving the Suburban. He and Clare went into her apartment. They did not hold hands or hug, nor did they touch in any way while Dale watched them, his car hidden only by leaf shadow, but Dale could sense the intimacy between them. They had obviously spent the night together.
He sat in his car and fiddled with his beautiful Dunhill cigarette lighter and tried to decide how to confront her, confront them, what he could say without appearing like the biggest loser and asshole in existence. He could think of nothing.
Five minutes later, Clare and the blond man came out of the duplex. She was carrying the same green nylon duffel she had brought to the ranch so often and the battered rucksack she had brought with her on their first trip to Glacier and the reservation. She and the man were laughing, deep in conversation as they threw her bags in the back of the Suburban, and neither looked across the street to where Dale sat as they clambered into the big vehicle and drove off.
Dale followed them, making no effort to avoid detection. Tailing someone was easier than it looked in the movies. They drove back the way he had come from Philadelphia, took the I-295 bypass around Trenton, then drove about twenty miles south on Highway 206, eventually turning east on Highway 70. By the time the big Suburban turned southeast onto Route 72, the traffic had thinned out considerably. Dale was vaguely aware that they had entered—or were about to enter—the relatively empty part of New Jersey known as the Pine Barrens.
Clare and her lover turned south again on Route 563 and drove eleven miles—Dale clocked it on his rental car’s odometer—before pulling left into a parking lot amidst a cluster of ramshackle buildings. The sign out front saidPINE BARRENS CANOE RENTAL.
Dale drove on another mile before finding a good turnaround spot in the tiny crossroads town of Chatsworth and then drove back slowly. A river ran along the west side of the highway for this stretch, and he caught a glimpse of Clare and her lover in a canoe heading south, downriver, before they disappeared around a bend in the river. He turned into the canoe rental place and parked next to the empty Suburban. Dale walked past the main building, noted the high stack of firewood there and the chopping stump and the ax embedded in it and the pile of wood chips and unstacked wood, looking as if the owners were preparing for a hard winter, and then he was waiting for the teenaged boy in khaki pants and a green Pine Barrens Canoe Rental shirt to finish helping two women shove off into the easy current.
“Howdy,” said the boy, looking at Dale long enough to register the dress pants and street shoes and to dismiss him as a canoe rental client. “Can I help you?”
Dale studied the canoes and kayaks lined up on trailers and at the river’s edge. “How much to rent a canoe?”
“Thirty bucks,” said the teenager. “That includes life jackets and paddles. Cushions are fifty cents extra. Three bucks each for a third or fourth person. More than four people, you need a second canoe.”
“I’m alone,” said Dale, feeling for the first time how true those words were.
The boy shrugged. “Thirty bucks.”
“How far do the canoes go?”
The kid looked up from counting cash and smiled. “Well, they’d go to the ocean, but we like to retrieve them before that.”
“Well, how far is a normal trip, then? The two women who just left? How far are they going?”