A Child Is Missing (14 page)

Will banged open the metal door to the stairs. He was out of things to say.

Will walked to his car with deliberate slowness. A wind made the air seem razor-cold, but in an almost perverse way Will savored the pain on his cheeks. The encounter with Carmine had pumped too much adrenaline into his blood.

He drove slowly. He stopped at the newsstand Jerry Graham had pointed out to him and bought copies of the
New York Times,
the
Bessemer Gazette,
and the
Long Creek Eagle.
He would wait until he got back to his room to see what, if anything, the editors in Bessemer had done to the story he'd filed the day before. Then he'd read the
Times
and the
Eagle
to see how his story measured up to theirs.

God, Will thought. Here I am, way on the wrong side of forty, and I'm still wondering how I stack up. When does it stop? Maybe when I get away from Bessemer.

But Will was in no mood to let those thoughts crawl through his head this night, so he pulled over when he saw the pink neon signs of a shabby bar on a corner. Inside, he recognized a few faces at a table: reporters he'd seen at the press conferences. He had no desire to join them.

He asked the fat bartender for a six-pack of Budweiser to go. As he waited for his change, Will's eyes settled on the bottles—whiskey, gin, rum, and schnapps, yes schnapps—set in rows in front of the mirror. No doubt about it: The bottles were tempting, at least in the mood Will was in now. And yes, he could appreciate how good it would taste: a shot of sweet-burning schnapps, chased by cold, slaking beer. Is this how it starts, Fran? With feelings like this?

For a moment, Will thought of having a shot at the bar. But after what had happened to Fran, after his talk with Carmine about doctored blood tests, that would be insane. Sure, he thought. Get myself picked up by the cops, and then Carmine does my blood test at the hospital. Nice, Will.…

He got his change and left. And he put the six-pack in his trunk. With the beer there, no cop could frame him. Could he?

Halfway through his second beer, he called home. Brendan answered; he and Cass were getting ready for bed. Brendan asked whether he could have a dog for Christmas. Will was evasive.

Karen came on the line. “It is getting to be that time, isn't it?” she said. “Christmas shopping, I mean.”

“Lord, yes.”

“When are you coming home?”

“Soon, I hope. Very soon.”

“That's terrible, about the threat to cut off the boy's ear. I saw the report on the six o'clock news.”

“Did the kids hear it?”

“No, God. That would have upset them.”

“Upsets me. And Jerry Graham.”

Then Will told his wife about his lingering suspicions about what had happened to Fran Spicer, and about his meeting with Carmine the lab technician. Some pride in his newfound toughness crept into his voice.

“That kind of thing isn't you,” Karen said. “It's not you.”

Stung silence. Then he said, “I felt I had to do it.”

“I don't know about that. I do know you. And what you did to that…”

“Carmine. The lab tech.”

“…with that Carmine is not you. Your strengths are research and logic. You're not—that term you use for some reporters—you're not street-smart. You're not, Will. Any more than you're handy with tools.”

That last pierced him like a dart. A couple of years before, Will had decided to cut some firewood. He'd rented a chain saw, despite (or maybe because of) Karen's anxiety over his lack of skill with tools.

The saw had hit a nail and bucked in his hands. It was sheer luck that he hadn't badly injured himself or his son, who was standing nearby.

“Bull's-eye,” he said, not trying to hide his anger.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. Yes, I did, but I shouldn't have put it that way. I was only…”

“Why explain? You couldn't have been any clearer.”

“Will, I'm your wife, and I worry about you messing with the police and this Carmine. If he is crooked in some way, you can't assume he's some harmless punk. Even if he is, he knows people who aren't.”

Will swallowed the last of his beer and waited for her to go on.

“And if you wounded this man on a personal level, Will, how do you know he won't come after you with a knife or something?”

That made him feel even worse. She was right, of course. Right about his strengths and weaknesses. He was not tough and shrewd. Even in doing what he did best—making decisions in the workaday newspaper world—he was more comfortable with stories that originated with government actions and court rulings than he was with investigative or speculative articles.

“I'll be careful,” he said.

He got through the rest of the conversation without losing his temper. After hanging up, he cracked open another beer—is this how it starts, Frannie?—and thought over what Karen had said. Yes, he might have wounded Carmine on a personal level, might have made him hate him. For that, Will felt a tinge of guilt—and anxiety. He had been reckless in the encounter with Carmine Luna, perhaps to the point of stupidity.

He thought again of how right Karen had been, and then he remembered how he had felt with Heather Casey, how close he had come to…

Well, what? He knew which reporters cheated on their spouses when they traveled. He'd felt morally superior to them. “Hypocritical bastard,” he whispered to himself.

He forced himself to scan the newspapers. The
New York Times
account of the kidnapping was on an inside page, under a one-column headline. The
Times
article was accurate, thorough, clear, circumspect.

Will thought his own story measured up pretty well by comparison. Will skimmed the rest of the
Times,
catching up on the world.

He picked up the
Long Creek Eagle.
Even with the kidnapping, it found room for other local news: a church-renovation fund drive, complaints about smells from a landfill, a couple of drunk-driving arrests (yes, Fran's sample could have been switched), a grocery-store burglary.

Will remembered what a famous journalist had said years ago: “
All
news is local.”

I guess so, Will thought. Is there anything else happening in Long Creek? The lead obituary was on a retired steelworker who had been a gunner on a Liberator bomber in the China-Burma-India theater in World War II. And there was the Long Creek mayor, cutting a ribbon somewhere.

Besides the kidnapping, the biggest local news was from the fire department. A child had been killed because he played with matches while his mother left him alone to go to the coin laundry, and two men had perished in flames after apparently using gasoline to clean up some grease.

Was there any end to human stupidity? No, Will decided.

He got into bed. He tried not to think about Heather Casey. And just before gliding into oblivion, he had the same feeling he'd had before—that he was overlooking something obvious, even trivial, and yet terribly important.

Sixteen

The hermit awoke in the dark of night, in the dark of his soul. He knew at once that he had been having a whiskey dream, that he would be hours getting back to sleep—if he did.

Sometimes the whiskey did that to him. Other times, it let him sleep. Whenever he drank a lot of whiskey, he thought it worth the gamble.

No. It hadn't been just the whiskey dream that had roused him. Wolf had stirred. The hermit could see his form in the dark. The dog was sitting up, his ears high.

“Damn you, Wolf.”

He raised his head and saw the silhouette of the dog against the blue-black of the window. Now Wolf was standing on his hind legs, his front paws on the sill, his ears pricked and alert.

“Damn you, Wolf.” He let his aching head fall back on the pillow. “You can't sleep, either.”

The dog whined softly, then chortled.

The hermit swallowed hard against the nausea, wishing now that he had eaten more while drinking.

Wolf whined again, louder. The hermit raised his head again, saw by the silhouette that the great shepherd was looking directly at him.

“Lie still, damn you. Wolf, lie down.”

Wolf snarled, then barked loudly. The hermit sat up. Only a few times had Wolf snarled and barked in the middle of the night. Once, there had been a black bear near the cabin, another time a deer. Once, the hermit had heard footsteps (human?) in the dark.

“What, Wolf?” the hermit said, getting out of bed and walking to the window. “What, boy?” he said, putting a hand on the dog's shoulders and feeling the fur standing on end.

The hermit stared into the night, held his breath as he listened. There was nothing but the soughing of the trees. Still, he tiptoed to the corner and picked up the rifle, an old lever-action .30-30 carbine. He could open the door with one hand while holding the carbine in the other, and firing it if he had to. There was something out there; he was sure of it.

In the dark, the hermit laid the rifle on the bed, then pulled on his pants and stepped into his boots. He put on his thermal vest. “Shh, Wolf. Good boy.”

With a flashlight in his left hand and the rifle in the right, he tiptoed to the door and put his ear to it. Nothing.

Wolf sat down next to him, whined, scratched the door. Without turning on the flashlight, the hermit opened the door, felt a gust of cold wind.

“Wolf, come.”

Outside now, he closed the door quietly and listened. There were only the tree noises. No, there was something else: a scraping sound. The darkness and the wind played tricks; the sound could have been a stone's throw away, or way over the next ridge.

Suddenly, Wolf bolted and ran. The hermit turned the flashlight on, caught Wolf in the beam thirty yards away. The dog paused, looked back at him, his eyes red and huge. Then the dog turned and ran.

The hermit followed.

Stepping high so as not to trip in the dark, he trotted behind the dog. He tried to keep the flashlight steady, but the beam danced helter-skelter as it poked into the blackness. About every fourth step, the light picked up Wolf trotting ahead as though drawn to something.

“Wolf!” The hermit hissed as he stopped to catch his breath. The light caught Wolf's red eyes staring back at him. “What the hell is it with you? Stupid dog.”

The hermit trotted on, catching Wolf in the beam. The dog was farther ahead, eager. Going back the way they had come earlier. Almost to where he had been digging earlier. Was that what this was all about?

“Wolf, wait! Damn you.”

An impatient bark from ahead.

“All right, god damn it.”

Then he heard the sound, like an echo from far away. Christ, don't let me be hearing this. I ain't been drinking so much that I deserve this.

He heard the sound again—a moan, a scream, an echo—and dropped to his knees, letting his carbine and flashlight fall. He put his hands over his ears. He held his breath and uncovered his ears.

Again the sounds. Hard to make out, tumbled by the wind, but boy sounds. Real. He was too awake from the cold for it not to be real. Wolf barked. The echo-moan came again; Wolf barked again, went on barking.

Yes, there it was. From deep in his memory came the cries of the son he had never had, the one he had let die in Jo's belly.

“Mom-MY … Dad-DY…”

He knelt on the chill bed of pine needles.

“Help me.…”

Once, the hermit had managed to get the rifle muzzle almost to his face. It was after a really bad whiskey dream, and he had almost convinced himself that if he could get the muzzle into his mouth and pull the trigger before he had time to think about it, he could see Jo again. And the baby? At least he'd be with them, wherever that was.

But he hadn't been able to do it. He'd been afraid of the pain if he didn't die right away, afraid to die slowly in the woods. He'd even been afraid how the gun oil and old cordite of the muzzle would feel on his tongue.

“Jo, I'm sorry. I couldn't. I couldn't.” What did the trees and the night care?

Maybe this time he could really do it. Shoot Wolf first? No, let him have his chance. If any dog could make it in the woods, he could.

He stood up and almost fell back down. The whiskey had taken a sledgehammer to his head, and, while the night had sobered him, it had not deadened the pain inside his skull. A drunk like this was enough by itself to make him want to die. Why not fire a bullet into his head. His brain was mush, anyhow. It couldn't even tell what was real anymore.

There came the sound again, a child's moaning. It sounded near and yet far away.

If he did it tonight with the rifle, would the sound of the child follow him?

Whiskey. There was some left in the cabin. He would swallow it all and go back to sleep—forever, if he was lucky.

The wind shifted; it was in his face now, and he breathed deeply to clear his head. And now the wind brought a scraping sound. Yes, there it was. It was real. Just then, he heard the unmistakable
ping
of metal on metal.

Again, he heard the moan of a child, followed by Wolf's bark. Wolf went on barking, and the moan rose to a shout, a scream. “Dad-DY! Puh-LEEZE! Get me out.…”

There, over there. He flashed the light in the direction of the sounds and stumbled toward them. The hermit tried to control his own breathing, the better to hear the night sounds. There was the
ping
of metal on metal, and the scraping sound: a shovel digging into dirt. And then the sound of a man's voice, angry, cursing.

The beam of light danced crazily with his steps, catching ground, branches, treetops, Wolf's eyes. And beyond Wolf, something else: There in the light stood a man holding a shovel. Next to him was a small mound of fresh-dug dirt, and next to that a larger mound with something sticking up out of it.

Wolf snarled, moved toward the man, who raised his shovel as if to swing it.

The hermit worked the lever of the carbine to put a round in the chamber. “Wolf!”