Sten was up next and he was to be followed by the real draw of the night, Rob Rankin, the county sheriff, who was going to have to do a whole lot of explaining and lay down a soft smooth wrinkleless carpet of reassurances. And then take questions. Which, judging from the mood of the crowd, could be an occasion for some real bloodletting. At any rate, Sten took the podium to a groundswell of applause and after eulogizing Carey in a way he hoped went beyond the usual — Carey truly cared, not just about the environment but about democracy and the legacy we were leaving our children, and he’d actually gone out and done something about it, patrolling the woods to make us all safer — and then reminded everybody present that nothing had been established yet aside from the fact that whoever had committed this crime was armed and dangerous and not to be trifled with. The sheriff was doing his best to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice. In the meanwhile, it was imperative — he’d actually dredged up and dusted off the word, his officialese come back to him like a second language — that everybody just stay calm.
He’d paused at that point and gazed out on the crowd. “We are not vigilantes,” he said, “and we are not going to fly off the handle and take matters into our own hands because that’ll do nobody any good, least of all Carey Bachman. Respect him. Respect his memory.” Another pause. Nobody believed him, he could see that. Senior Citizen Kills Tour Thug. All right. He’d done his best. He wasn’t principal, he wasn’t mayor, he wasn’t the sheriff. What he was was an American citizen, a senior citizen, and he felt immeasurably tired all of a sudden. The auditorium seemed to swell and recede. His back ached. He felt a headache coming on. The thing was, everything just seemed so hopeless, so utterly, blackly, irremediably hopeless.
“And now,” he said, his voice echoing in that acoustic desert till it came back to him as the last desperate gasp of a man withering under the sun that wasn’t the sun at all but the 1,500-watt theatrical spotlight installed by Rainier Holcomb, the deaf electrician, now dead, under Sten’s own mandate, “I’ll hand the mike over to Sheriff Rankin.” He nodded at the radiant bald head and glittering badge of the loose-limbed man in uniform sitting amongst the twelfth graders in the front row. “Who’ll say a few words and then take your questions.” Then, gathering himself up, he went on back to find his seat beside Carolee.
The rest turned into a kind of drowsy meditation, the auditorium overheated, the sheriff droning on in a sleepwalker’s voice, the questioners by turns timid and outraged but performing their roles just exactly as expected, Should we keep our doors locked? Is it safe to be out at night? Why don’t you arrest them at the supermarket, tell me that? You want perpetrators, I’ll show you perpetrators! Twice he felt the sharp reminder of Carolee’s index finger probing his ribs and realized he’d drifted off, an embarrassment at any time but doubly so now, here in the high school auditorium with Carey dead and people looking to him to provide guidance and support. Problem was, he didn’t want to provide guidance and support. He just wanted to go home. To bed.
Finally, as things were winding down — the sheriff had been asked the same question for the sixth or seventh time and gave the same tired answer, to wit, “We’ll know more when the facts are in,” and somebody said, “So you don’t advise going out in the woods right now, for any purpose?” and the sheriff said, “No, not really, not until we clear this thing up”—Sten felt himself come awake in a way he’d never been awake before, as if he was an animal seized in the jaws of a bigger animal and shaken helplessly. The woods. Out in the woods. He’d actually placed a call to Cody Waters’ parents — yesterday, with Carolee fretting and all the shit raining down around them — and got Cody’s cellphone number and gone outside where she wouldn’t hear and punched it in. A voice answered—“Digame”—and he thought he had the wrong number but persisted anyway. “Cody?” he’d said. “Is that you?”
“Who’s this?”
“Sten. Adam’s father?”
A silence. Then, “Yeah?”
“Was that Spanish you were talking?
“I guess.”
Another silence.
“Listen, I was calling because I wanted to ask if you’ve seen Adam lately. You know he moved out of the house by the river, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“We just, well we haven’t heard from him and we were wondering if maybe he was up there with you—”
“No, no, he’s not here. I haven’t seen him in like a month maybe.”
There was static on the line, a faint sizzling in the background. “Did he say what his plans were? Where he’s living?”
He could picture the boy on the other end of the line, the sharp slash of his nose, the sloped shoulders and Don’t-Even-Ask look, the dreadlocks he and Adam used to wear before they gave up reggae for rap and then death metal and shaved their heads, before they went military and developed attitudes and started pushing the buttons of the police and everybody else too. When they were kids. Just kids.
A sigh. The sizzle of static. “I don’t know,” Cody said finally. “In the woods, I guess.”
23
THERE ARE THE NAMELESS fears and there are the named ones too. When he was a child his nightmares weren’t of ghouls or monsters or people chasing him with knives and axes and decapitated heads, but amorphous things, neither human nor animal, the fear that sat in your stomach, inside you, and you couldn’t define it or shake it either. That was what this was like. He didn’t say a word to Carolee, but the morning after the meeting he was up early, earlier than usual — first light — and he didn’t bother with breakfast because if he started fussing around in the kitchen she’d wake up and ask him where he was going and he’d just have to lie to her. His daypack — water in a bota bag, granola bars, binoculars, Swiss Army knife, matches stuffed in a plastic pill container to keep them dry, foil space blanket and GPS beacon for emergencies — was hanging on the coat tree where he always put it when he came in from one of his surveillance hikes. He pulled on a baseball cap — Oakland A’s, how about that? — patted down his pockets to make sure he had his wallet, keys and cellphone, and then headed out the door.
He drove up the north road, slowly, rolling over pinecones, fist-sized rocks, sticks and twigs and scraps of vegetation that had been pulverized by the tires of the emergency vehicles, looking for the spot where it had happened. Art had told him it was by the spring up there, no more than a thousand yards off the road, just follow the creek on up and you can’t miss it. Well, he couldn’t have missed it anyway because the tracks of the ambulance and the sheriff’s four-wheel drive came together there, crosshatching the road where they’d had to make their three-point turns to return with the body and whatever evidence they’d discovered. Which thus far was being kept secret. He’d tried to get Rob Rankin to tell him but Rob just shook his head. “Can’t disclose that. Sorry, Sten. Ongoing investigation.”