“Miranda,” he said. “No. Don’t come just yet. I know. I know it is.” Cal watched Ted’s fingers twist the cord in his free hand, squeeze it as if to break a bird’s neck, then loosen to decide against it. “I’ll call you soon as I know something. Okay? Stay put. The sheriff thinks the boys might call. Goodbye. I will.”
There had been no initial sign of the boys in Claypot, but eventually Jacks sniffed out a pair of bike tracks and footprints that led through the soft dirt in the fields adjoining the Breadwin home. Jacks was a natural tracker, self-taught. It’s an interest he chose for himself. Cal could just say, “Find it, find ’em,” and his piebald dog would trot around with his nose to the dirt until he found something. Sometimes it was a skunk, sometimes a rabbit, this time the footprints of two ten-year-old boys. The boys’ tracks led across the plowed fields into marsh grass. They were headed in the general direction of Burt Akinson’s farm. The men backtracked, searched the fields with spotlights. There was nothing there. Not even coyotes. They got in their trucks and drove to Teddy’s.
Ted hung up the phone and paced the kitchen while Cal tapped the antenna of his radio against the map.
“Where,” Teddy asked himself, “did those mugs go?”
The sheriff pretended to study the map, but really he was studying Teddy. Cal had noticed over the years the way calm people could break down when problems became personal. He knew a trauma nurse who couldn’t watch her son get stitches after a spill on his bike. Maybe Cal was wrong to involve Ted in all of this. Cal did have a deputy, after all, and maybe Bobby would have to do. Maybe Teddy needed to stay home.
“And my matches,” Teddy said. “I swear I had a full book of matches in this jar right here.” He hefted the jar in his hand as if he wanted to smash it, then let it rattle to the counter. His face was red. “Something ain’t right.”
Cal decided it—he was on his own. He’d bother Teddy for a cup of coffee and that would be it. Cal studied the map again. Claypot was backed up to the north by a massive swath of forest. The few towns large enough to have their own police force were all a forty-minute drive to the south, where the soil was better and the farming communities had a chance to grow. Only two primary tracks cut through the county’s northern territory, the river and the highway. Both wove through just under ten thousand square miles of forest. Cal knew a few of the unmarked logging roads that snaked through the place. They were often washed out and grown over and hardly roads at all. The closest town on the north side of the forest was Ironsford, a paper town with a Guard armory. It was just within Cal’s jurisdiction, so he made it up that way from time to time. The drive was a lonely one, about ninety miles of pine and poplar trees, the occasional trailer home with woodsmoke coming from it, a sheet of plywood nailed up over a window. Every now and then the highway ran parallel to the river for a quarter mile or so, just close enough for the water to sparkle through the trees. Hunting cabins stood along the river. As did methamphetamine operations. A few families lived lonely sorts of lives out there, at least that’s the way they looked to Cal—a woman hanging handkerchiefs on a line, a small boy chasing a dog around a rotted garden fence. If a person got off the river or the highway, he could walk for days through cedar swamps and poplar stands and black flies and bear tracks and never feel as if he’d moved ten feet. To Cal, the forest had only one look to it, only one way of being. It was impassable, except for that river and that road. Cal once had to track a group of poachers into that forest along with some game wardens. Jacks was by his side, and Cal was thankful for the company. Though he and the wardens never separated more than one hundred yards as they traversed the swamps, the way that forest closed in made Cal feel lost in the first twenty steps. It was a difficult thing to bear for a man raised in Houston’s suburbs. He liked the southern part of Marigamie County much better, with its neat rows of corn, its bigger towns and gas stations, sidewalks and people. When the wardens eventually called off that particular search, Cal found himself walking quickly through the brambles and pine branches as if racing the sunlight, whispering, Find it, Jacks, find the truck.
Cal traced the expanse of forest on the map. If he had just killed a man and—God forbid it—kidnapped two boys, that great erasure of forest is where he would head. Cal shuddered at the thought of those boys bouncing around in the back of a truck on one of those awful logging roads, nothing but the scrape of tree limbs, the glow of brake lights. If the boys were out there, it would be hell to find them. Cal looked hopefully to the south of Claypot. Teddy said his daughter, Fischer’s mom, lived in Cedar, one of the farming towns thirty miles south where the cornfields didn’t have a cedar left in them. If the boys were on their own, if they were just
