“Sure.”
“I mean, people were blaming him just because he’s Muslim or whatever he is. Thinking he had something to do with the bombing at the drive-in, or what happened to the water.”
“People can be like that,” Angus said. “They don’t know what to do with the anger, and they racially profile, and then that kind of thing happens.”
“Which is why I feel really bad to even mention this, but…”
“But what?”
“There was a book in his store, on the floor, right there in front of me, about poison.”
Angus stiffened, turned his head toward his wife. “A book?”
Gale nodded. “I can’t remember the exact title. But it was a kind of guide, of all the poisons that are out there. All these ways that you can kill people.”
Angus appeared to be thinking. “Just because he had a book like that doesn’t mean he’s the one who poisoned the town’s water.”
“I know. I know that.”
“Did you say anything?”
She nodded. “I picked it up and handed it to him. This was right after he’d made some comment about people being suspicious of him. And I made a bad joke of it, I guess, saying something like ‘Well, I guess you better not let anyone see you with this, then.’”
“You said that.”
“Yeah.” She screwed up her face worriedly. “You think I shouldn’t have said that?”
“I don’t know. Like you said, it’s probably nothing.”
“You’re right. It probably is.”
“Unless,” Carlson said, “it is something.”
“That’s kind of what I was thinking, too,” Gale said.
DAY TWO
FORTY-TWO
DAVID set out Sunday at daybreak. He could make it to Lake Luzerne in under an hour, he figured. And if Sam and Carl were at Camp Sunrise, that’d be fantastic, because checking all the other campsites could take several hours.
“Where are you off to so early?” his mother asked him when she found him in the kitchen. She and Don were always up before David, so it was a surprise to find him there.
“Just something I have to do,” he said.
“Is it something for Mr. Finley?” she asked.
“No.” That got him thinking that he really needed to get in touch with Randy. The man had, after all, hired him to do a job, and David had not exactly been giving one hundred percent. Despite the contempt David felt for him, he felt some measure of guilt that he wasn’t earning his salary.
He didn’t want to call and wake the man, so he decided to send him a text that Finley could discover whenever he got around to looking at his phone.
Will be away much of today but hope to connect late afternoon. Sorry about this.
David sent the text.
He was about to put his phone away when he saw the telltale dots that told him Finley was writing a reply.
Fine.
That didn’t sound like the Finley David knew. Where was the outrage? The bluster? The guilt-tripping?
Maybe, David thought, he’d been terminated. Maybe Finley’s short response meant he had found someone else to work for him. David wasn’t sure whether to be hurt or relieved. He didn’t like working for the man, but he also needed the job.
David phoned him.
“Am I fired?” David asked when Finley answered.
“I don’t know,” Finley said.
“Look, I know I’ve had some things going on, but I’m hoping to get them all sorted out. I’ve got to take a run up to Lake Luzerne today, but once I’m done up there, I can-”
“Jane’s dead.”
Finley filled him in. A stunned David didn’t know what to say beyond that he was sorry.
“I may pull out,” Finley said. “I’m thinking, the hell with it.”
“Don’t make a decision right away,” David counseled. “Take care… of what you have to take care of. Give it some time. Then decide.”
“You don’t understand,” he said.
“Don’t understand what?”
“She was the reason,” Finley said.
David started to say something else but realized Finley had ended the call.
“What happened?” Arlene asked as Don came into the room.
David shook his head and asked, “Can you look after Ethan today?”
Don asked, “Can we have coffee today or is the water still going to kill us?”
Arlene asked her son, “Do you know? Is the water safe yet?”
“They should have it fixed by now,” Don said. “I don’t know why the hell they can’t have it fixed by now. They should have been able to flush the system. I’ve half a mind to go over to the plant myself and see what the hell they’re doing.”
“Yes,” Arlene said. “I’m sure they’d welcome your input.”
If I don’t have a job, David thought, I’ll be losing this house and moving back in with them.
“Can you look after Ethan?” he asked again.
“Of course,” Arlene said.
David was out the door.
David didn’t have GPS built into his car, or even one of those stick-on mini-nav systems that could be put atop the dashboard. But he had looked up the location for Camp Sunrise on his phone’s map app. He wasn’t expecting it to be difficult to find.
He was there in just over an hour, and along the way he had to think about just what the purpose of this trip was. Was his search for Sam solely motivated by concern for her, or was this more about him?
About half-and-half, he concluded.
He was, without a doubt, worried for her safety. Brandon was looking for her, and he wanted to be sure Sam and her son were safe, that Brandon had not found them. But he also realized Sam was no fool. The fact that she’d gotten herself and Carl out of town so quickly was evidence of that.
But that wasn’t enough for David. He had to know.
And, he admitted to himself, he wanted Sam to know he cared enough to look for her.
When he reached Camp Sunrise, he found a small, tollbooth-like structure between the entrance and exit lanes. It was designed to look like a mini log cabin, with wooden gates in the raised position on both sides. There was no one in the booth, so there was nothing to stop him from driving straight in.
It wasn’t even nine in the morning yet, and the camp was a sleepy place. Few people were out and about, but as he drove the narrow, winding roads that led through the forested grounds, he noticed exceptions. There was a man frying up some bacon on a Coleman stove set up on a picnic table. At another campsite, a woman was running an extension cord from an electrical post to a cappuccino maker resting on the top of a stump.
“Roughing it,” David said under his breath.
David didn’t see any empty campsites. This was a long weekend, and it seemed a safe bet that the place was filled to capacity. There were tents, small trailers, and those hybrid tent-trailer things, with two wheels and a metal chassis, that opened up to sleep four or more people.
Driving slowly through the camp, David did not see Sam or Carl anywhere, and even if they were still sleeping in their tent, he saw no car that looked like hers. He made his way back to where he’d turned in off the main road, and saw that there was now someone in the booth. He pulled up alongside it and powered down the window.
“Help ya?” said a man-no, more like a kid about seventeen-at the window.
“I’m not staying here,” David said. “I’m trying to find somebody.”
“Okay.”
“Samantha Worthington,” he said. “She probably checked in Thursday night. She’s with her son, about nine or ten, and they’d have pitched a tent. They don’t have a trailer or anything like that.” He thought maybe he needed a reason to be looking for them. “There’s kind of a family emergency back home and we’ve been trying to locate them.”