Randy had walked out of the Reid-Gruyn parking lot without running into another soul. He headed down the side of the road toward Glens Falls, but when, after fifteen minutes, he came to a Stewart’s convenience store, he figured he’d give it a shot and see if Mike was already home.
Mike picked up on the third ring. “Hey, man,” Randy said. “Can I ask you a favor? Can you meet me at the gas station just down from the mill?”
“What are you doing there?”
“Long story. I’ll tell you later. Can you come get me?”
“Sure. You got good timing-I just got back from hunting. I got my buck this morning, isn’t that cool?”
Mike was at the Stewart’s in ten minutes. Everything was humming along, right like it ought to. Randy thought of all those times he had heard somebody say, He’s getting away with murder. And now he was.
Randy hadn’t realized that “just back from hunting” translated to a freaking big bloody deer corpse tied to the hood of Mike’s car. He couldn’t stop staring at the thing, its head lolling and bouncing with every pothole they hit, its big brown eyes staring sightlessly at him through the windshield.
“So my brothers were totally whipped when I bagged him,” Mike was saying, the glow from his victory in the sibling wars still shining from his face. “Two years in a row, I got my buck first. Two years! Yeah!” He raised a clenched fist in salute.
“That’s great, man.” They bumped over a frost heave in the road, and the deer nodded in agreement. You bet! “They still out there looking to get theirs?”
“Nah. By this time of day, the deer are all bedded down. They’ll be back out there tomorrow at dawn, I bet. While I’m sleeping in, dreaming of venison steak.”
Randy wondered if anyone had found Becky Castle yet. Should he drive by later to see? What if somebody saw him? He glanced out the side window at the clear sky. No cloud cover. Cold tonight. Below freezing and then some. He and Lisa would roll tight together under their quilts, keeping each other warm. And Becky Castle?
It might be better if nobody finds her. The idea scared him. The idea of going back there scared him. But it wouldn’t go away, the dark thought, like a long afternoon shadow seen out of the corner of his eye. If she wasn’t found, there would be no need for him to sweat and worry and wait to see cops at his door, looking for him.
After all, he hadn’t meant to kill her. He hadn’t even meant to hurt her, just to get the damn camera back. If she… disappeared… there wouldn’t be anything pointing to murder. Just another person who went into the mountains unprepared and never came out again. It happened every year.
A bad pothole jolted them down and up. The deer’s head thumped and nodded on the hood, its dry eyes on Randy. Life’s hard out in the mountains. It’s easy to die.
He didn’t have to make up his mind. He could just go over there. See if she’d been found. He’d just check. He turned to Mike. “I gotta go pick up Lisa from her cleaning gig. You mind if I don’t help you get the deer off when we get back to your place?”
Mike shrugged. “I can handle it.”
“Look, would you do me a favor? If it comes up, I been with you the last hour and a half.”
Mike took his eyes off the road to glance at Randy. “An hour and a half ago I was humping the deer outta the woods.”
“There wasn’t anybody with you, was there?”
“No.”
“Did you stop to register the deer at a station?”
“Nah. I figured I’d call it in.”
“Well, there you go. Nobody can say that we weren’t together.”
Mike looked suspicious. “What’s up?”
Randy hesitated. “I don’t want to tell you. But it’s nothing that’ll come back and bite you in the ass, if you’re worried.”
“You ain’t screwing around on Lisa, are you?”
Randy’s jaw dropped. “No! I’d never do that.” He shook his head and folded his arms across his chest. “It’s got nothing to do with her.”
“Okay, then.” Mike nodded, satisfied. “You were with me.”
This would be perfect. On his way to pick up Lisa, he would cruise past the logging road where he’d left Becky Castle. See what was going on. If anyone was there-he had a vague image of a scene from CSI, with a fire truck and an ambulance and cops-he’d just keep on going. If she was still there… no one would be surprised at the sight of a hunter coming back out of the woods empty-handed.
They pulled into Mike’s driveway and stopped. The stiffening deer sagged in its ropes, as if relieved to have reached its final destination at last.
“Hey. Can I borrow that extra orange vest you got? And your orange gloves?”
Mike looked surprised. “You going into the woods?”
“Lisa’s working way up in the mountains. I figure it can’t hurt to be careful.”
Mike opened his door and unfolded himself from the tiny seat. He stretched and thumped the buck’s rump affectionately. “You got that right. Some of the guys wandering around up there? You can’t be too careful.”
To his surprise, Shaun didn’t meet Eugene van der Hoeven on his precarious ride back up the Haudenosaunee road. He roared onto the gravel drive and parked. Getting out of his car, he could see that the garage door was now shut. What the hell? There was no way the man could have left without passing Shaun.
Was there another way to the county road? Shaun studied the open space between the garage and the house. Framed by stalks and stakes from now-dead flower beds, there was enough room to drive a vehicle through, a path leading past the house and gardens into the woods. He glanced back at his Mercedes and amended that to a four-wheel-drive vehicle.
He rattled across the gravel drive and peered through the streaky, cobwebbed window at the side of the garage. The Land Cruiser was still there. He glanced at the porch. There was something about the blankness of the windows that made him think, There’s no one home. In an instant, he abandoned the garage and headed up the path. If he were a scientist, he’d examine every location, in order, to determine van der Hoeven’s whereabouts. But Shaun was a businessman and experienced, he could say without bragging, in making decisions based on a handful of facts and a gut feeling. Right now, his gut was telling him that if he wanted to buttonhole Eugene, he was going to have to find him in the woods.
Ten yards or so past Haudenosaunee’s stone-fenced backyard, the trail split. He stood, indecisive, reaching for a spark of intuition, when a faint noise to his right made clairvoyance unnecessary. He went as quickly as he could without kicking up the leaves drifted over the path. He couldn’t have said why, but silence seemed like a good idea.
The way was broad and easy. Shaun wasn’t one for botany-he left the flowers to Courtney-but even he could recognize that this branch of the trail wound through overgrown apple trees and berry bushes run wild. Cultivated land, then, or at least it had been a few decades ago. It wasn’t until he saw gray stone and charred timber through the gnarled branches that he realized where he was headed. The old Haudenosaunee. The first great camp.
He stood stock still and stared. It was like stumbling over the corpse of a dragon, its massive ribs burnt and broken, its stone skin tumbled in or scattered piecemeal on the ground. Holly and boxwood advanced across what must once have been a lawn, their hard-edged, dark green foliage an impenetrable wall. Feral rose vines clawed up the remaining walls, and through the outlines of windows and over the jagged fence of scorched timber, young hemlocks bristled out at him like adolescent giants.