For a number of years Morgan’s only regular connection to the world had been his son. The two sending each other letters that Morgan would sit up and read again and again by the kerosene lamp he kept on his table, or by the light of the small iron stove. The words dancing on the page as the firelight in the belly of the open stove lit the room.
The old man’s life had not been good and for a time he had felt that his son’s would be better. Only it hadn’t, and the same things that had seeped slowly but accurately into Morgan’s life had seeped into his son’s as well. Guilt and disappointment, hope for something better that never came, and a desire for relief that always seemed just beyond. This feeling of dissatisfaction the old man had come to understand, because it was how the world sometimes worked and he knew—through reading his son’s letters—his son had not yet concluded.
DRISCOLL KNEW THE girl as soon as he saw her. The neck broken and the skin bruised a deep purple just beneath her jawline. They were a quarter mile up the lake on one of the muddy logging tracks. The early morning light starting to break through the trees and slip down among the trunks into the undergrowth. To the side of the road one of Gary’s deputies was vomiting and the other stood back a ways with a roll of police tape he hadn’t yet fed across the road, but that he was supposed to.
“You recognize her?” Gary asked. He stood to the side of the open trunk, giving Driscoll his room.
“She worked at the doughnut shop in town.”
“Yes she did.” The deputy dry-heaved once more and Gary went on. “Andy’s daughter grew up with her. They graduated high school together.”
“You wanted me to see this?”
“I called you, didn’t I? You had a conversation with Bobby in this girl’s doughnut shop. I want to know what you talked about. I want specifics. I want to know why this girl goes missing the very same day.”
Driscoll could feel Gary’s eyes on him. He could feel the hate, the way the man seemed to blame him for this. Driscoll didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know if this was his fault. He just kept staring down at the girl, her chin pointed up and to the side like some sort of seabird washed up on a beach. Only it wasn’t a beach, it was the trunk of a black Lincoln Town Car.
“How far is this from Bobby’s place?” Driscoll asked. He was looking over the girl still, unable to take his eyes from her. Behind, pushed back within the shadows of the trunk was another body. A man stripped to his boxers. His face a bloody mash, the cheeks and nose so swollen that the eyes were pinched shut.
“Close,” Gary said. “It’s the next drive south of here.”
“Did you call Bobby about this? Have you seen or talked to him this morning?”
“I went by there on my way out here. No one was home. With Patrick gone I don’t blame them for keeping up the search.”
Driscoll turned and looked to where the other deputy was tying the police tape off at the side of the road. The forest to the south now visible and the shadows gathered dense between the trunks. The big pines for a hundred yards almost a singular living thing. And then, kneeling with his calves pushed into the backs of his thighs, Driscoll squinted and saw farther on the first of the apple trees in Drake’s orchard. “We need to get over there right now,” Driscoll said.
MORGAN DRAKE DID not have a phone nor any way to get ahold of him except the mail, and when he went into town for his necessities he stopped by the small post office and picked up his letters. He was a reader of books and many times when he picked up his mail there would be a number of packages from the store up in Spokane he subscribed to. His letters and packages bound together with twine usually amounted to no more than a couple inches altogether. It was only through the books that he had made his first friend in a long time. A woman who worked at the post office and who was fifteen years younger than him, a widow, who had started quizzing him about the books he received. They started an exchange in this way. Every month, talking about books on her lunch hour. Trading stories.
She’d been to his place only once and he made her a rabbit stew with wild onions and carrots he’d grown himself, browning the rabbit first in bacon grease and flavoring it finally with some of the sage that grew on his property. He’d been proud of it at the time. Though it was nothing special to him, it had made the woman very happy and they’d sat in front of the woodstove for an hour after to talk over books as they did on her lunch hour. Afterward he walked her out onto the small drive where she’d parked and for a moment he thought he would kiss her. But the moment passed and he regretted it deeply, knowing he had let something slip by that he could not replace.
It was the woman he was thinking about as he came up out of the cottonwoods, the rabbit and two prairie dogs on a string over his shoulder. He wanted to cook her something and he was planning it out in his head as he walked. Stopping to catch his breath again, he leaned a hand to the porch railing and kicked the mud from his boots before going into his house.
There was little light inside and he could see that the coals in the stove had burned themselves to white ash, almost dead except for a small pocket of red deep in the belly. He broke kindling and stoked the fire. Leaving the rabbit and prairie dogs in the sink to be skinned and washed in the next hour, he went out onto the porch and sat in a chair watching the way the road wound away from him over the rises of land. Grass everywhere turning from winter gray to something like gold.
From inside his jacket he brought up a pack of cigarettes and shook one out. He put it to his lips and lit it, letting the smoke into his lungs and watching the world around him. It was nearly as cold in the house as outside and he pushed the lapels of his hunting coat up and pulled the collar close around his neck. Holding it there with one hand and smoking with the other.
After a few minutes he went in to check on the stove, threw more wood on, and then came back outside. He liked to sit there in the morning and let the heat build inside the house as the dawn light spread through the sky. The two seeming linked in some cosmic way. He was smoking another cigarette when he saw the sheriff’s deputy car break over the far rise in the road and come down the long slope toward his house. It was a car he had seen a few times before and he only stirred slightly as it drew to a stop and the young man got out. The face older than Morgan remembered but still recognizable.
PATRICK SAT FOR an hour in the old logging truck, watching the sun crest the mountains to the east. The lake fog everywhere in the trees and a haze of it floating like a slow river over the fenced-in asphalt parking lot. Through the night he’d kept himself warm with a wool blanket he’d found in the doghouse off the back of the truck’s cab. Too worried to climb up into the bunk, he’d sat watching the road through the windshield most of the night. The Silver Lake Sheriff’s Department cruiser going past twice while he sat there, and the unmarked Impala patrolling the streets like a shark through clouded water, feeling its way around.
He hadn’t meant to run, but he had. The decision coming on him all at once, just like that, there for only an instant and then his feet moving, veering off the road into the forest, jumping thick stands of sword fern and dodging past tree trunks as he went into the darkness. The rich peat smell of the spring earth released with every step, soft and silent as his feet went. A good fifty yards gone by in only a matter of seconds before Patrick turned and watched a single golden flashlight beam spring up behind him.
It was Gary who told him about Driscoll. Both Gary and Patrick waiting for Luke to leave before they could talk. Those two men dead all those years before outside Bellingham. Something terribly wrong about the whole thing, about how it had been handled by both Patrick and Gary. And the bleak promise for the future that had been left for Gary and Patrick when it was done.