Driscoll didn’t say anything for a while. He was staring at the wood backing of Gary’s desk. “Where were you last night, Gary?”
“I was actually at the Buck Blind for most of the night.”
“One more thing for me to talk to the bartender about,” Driscoll said.
“For fuck’s sake, Driscoll, just come out and say it.”
“Last night you shot me with a rubber bullet and helped Patrick escape custody.”
“Can you prove any of this?” Gary asked.
“I hope you have some sort of alibi for last night,” Driscoll said.
“You’re flying too close to the sun,” Gary said.
Driscoll winced and stood, his hand to his side. He looked around at Drake. “You should know who you’re working for. He’s just as bad as your father only he hasn’t been caught.”
Drake held Driscoll’s gaze for a long time before looking away. He heard Driscoll turn and go, the department door closing a few seconds later.
Drake ran his eyes over the office. No one but them. “How much of what Driscoll said is true?” Drake asked.
“About your father and me?”
“Yeah.”
“Not a word of it,” Gary said.
“You were at the Buck Blind last night?”
“Most of the time.”
“What does that mean?” Drake asked.
“I mean I got up to piss and I went home at some point and ate a Lean Cuisine,” Gary said. “What else do you want me to say? We’re like family, aren’t we, Bobby? You know you can trust me.”
Drake gave him a hard stare and then stood. He took off his belt and then his badge. He put them on the desk. “No offense, Gary, but I don’t think I can do this anymore.”
THREE DAYS AFTER Drake turned in his badge, he and Sheri went back east of the mountains for Morgan’s funeral. The town came out and the reception was held in the only restaurant, a barbecue and burger joint on the county highway with a single room and outside a front patio underneath a tent. Drake and Sheri shook hands with everyone and thanked them for coming. An older woman tried to give Sheri a novel she’d borrowed from Morgan but Sheri didn’t think Morgan would mind if she simply kept it.
“It was a heart attack?”
“Yes,” Sheri said. She thought of the old man she’d only met once. There and then not there at her wedding. She tried to think if she knew much more than that but nothing came.
The woman held the book for a time, sitting across from Sheri on one of the benches. And then when Drake came over to tell Sheri they were going on to the property, the woman said, “He just seemed so alive.”
“He was,” Drake said.
ALL OF MORGAN’S things were still there in the cabin when they stopped off, and Sheri watched as Drake went through the possessions. From what Sheri knew of Morgan he’d lived alone, simply, with nothing more than the woodstove and a few pots and pans to keep him company.
She watched Drake and while he read through one or two of the letters sitting out on the dinner table, she walked back into the bedroom and leafed through the books. A whole wall had been dedicated to them and the color of the bindings gave the uniform wood tones of the cabin a special quality that nothing else on that prairie seemed to have.
When she came back out of the bedroom, Drake was boxing the letters away. “You okay?” she asked.
He looked up. “I thought this place would feel different. But it feels the same.”
“Isolated?”
“Yes, I feel like Morgan is just going to come up out of the cottonwoods any moment.”
She looked away at the fields outside. The door and the window had been patched with pieces of plywood. “You worry what’s going to happen to this place once we leave?”
“No,” he said. “Not really.”
“And Patrick? There’s been no word?”
“He’s not coming back here. Morgan’s will left this place to him. It’s Patrick’s and I don’t know where he’d go but it wouldn’t be here.” He picked up the box and brought it out to the car.
While he was gone Sheri started to collect what dry goods she could find. A box of baking soda, a jar of flour, a can of Crisco in one of the cupboards next to a hidden bar of Hershey’s chocolate.
Outside she heard the car door clap shut and then a second later the split of a log. She came out onto the porch and for the next hour she watched Drake break down a collection of cottonwood sections, stacking them up in an even pile at the rear of the cabin like Morgan might come up out of the cut to use them.
It was night by the time they left. The letters the only thing they took with them.
FOR A WEEK Drake cleared brush from their orchard, pruning back the dead branches and forming the apple trees. In the mornings or in the afternoons he gave Sheri rides to work with their only car and then waited through the day for the call telling him she was ready to be picked up. Occasionally, Luke and Andy came by the house, though they didn’t have to anymore.
The two deputies helped Drake to take down the remaining bits of the old alder fence Patrick hadn’t gotten to. When they finished they helped Drake stake metal posts and run barbed cattle wire. At the front where the drive met the lake road they installed a wide metal gate that sat on a hinge and had to be unlocked with a key.
Besides the trips Drake took to the Buck Blind he didn’t speak much with anyone. Only occasionally seeing Gary when Drake came and went. It was Gary who told him about the dead calf one night while Drake sat eating a burger at the bar. The wolf didn’t kill the calf outright; it had nipped and bitten at the calf’s flanks, leaving the calf bloodied and weak by morning. The rancher noticed it all too late and the calf was dead by noon that same day. “It’s a shame about that wolf,” Gary said. “They’re saying they’ll have to shoot her now.”
“Who’s saying that?”
“Fish and Wildlife. They’re telling Ellie to use the collar and track the wolf down. But she won’t do it.”
“I’ll talk to her,” Drake said. He ate a couple more fries and then pushed the plate away. Gary sat watching him and after a while asked, “What are you doing out there at your place? Building a compound?”
“Just getting the place in order. Trying to do something with the land.”
“You’re going to sell the apples?”
“Yes.”
“And the fence Luke and Andy helped you with?”
“After everything I thought it would be nice to feel safe again. For Sheri to feel safe.”
“I can put a car out there again. If that’s it.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Drake said.
Gary looked at him and shook his head. “Talk to Ellie,” he said.
RAIN KEPT THEM out of the mountains for two days and then when the sun came out on the third day they tracked the signal up an avalanche chute, white in places with snow. The sound of the spring melt running underneath the rock. They came up onto the open ridge with sweat stains on their shirts and their thighs aching from the ascent. The GPS telling them the wolf was somewhere in the valley beyond.
The trees began again after about a hundred feet and they made their way through the trunks as they descended. Coming out into a clearing they found the wolf lying just a couple hundred feet farther on. Crows lifting from the body as they came closer and the GPS collar still attached.
Ellie came to the animal first, crouching with the backs of her thighs resting on her calves. The spring grass had grown tall through the clearing and it surrounded the wolf on all sides, stretching away toward the forest where the mountain went on dark beneath the trees.
Drake slipped the day pack from his shoulders and laid it in the grass at his feet. He took a step closer, watching the way the clearing rolled away before them. Grasshoppers flitted off, the brief clap of their wings heard as they tried to stay afloat through the air. He hadn’t realized Ellie was crying till he came closer and saw the tight pulse of her shoulder blades working beneath her shirt. He put a hand to her back and she jumped, pulling away and standing.