He walked through the school halls with his head down, his eyes not straying from the buffed floor. He took his seat at the back of the class, mute to the whispers. Teachers did not call on him or question why he sat for fifty minutes without picking up his pen.
The principal called him in and asked how he was doing, and then mentioned the war and how good men were forged from fear and bravery. This was his chance.
He walked out of the office and the school, and on Main Street he saw Mr. and Mrs. Roberts heading into Lacey’s Diner for lunch. At their house he took their spare key from beneath the mat, stole into their guileless home, and snatched the keys to their mustard Aspen. He sat on cream leather seats and stared at his own home through the windshield.
He’d pulled his mother’s Fairlane into the driveway more times than he could count, slipped the Robertses’ new car into first and eased down the street.
He drove to the public library in Panora.
An old lady peered over her glasses, mercifully offered a smile and some help using the microfiche. The screen was large, the case heavy, and the focus out a little. For two hours he trawled missing persons reports from every newspaper within a thousand miles, sorting by date.
So many gone and never found, and no one ever charged. Sometimes they ran follow-up pieces and Patch noted the toll taken, the parents who could not stay together in their shared agony, and so carried their infections and poisoned new partners but drank from their comfort, the only pain they had known so paling it did not count at all.
The girls outnumbered the boys fifty to one. They varied in appearance but were one and the same. Young. Mostly too young to realize they were birthmarked with targets that only boldened with time, invisible to begin with, taking shape through formative years and burning red hot through puberty and into their teens.
Saint slid into the seat beside him.
He noticed smells more now.
Flowers and mud and drugstore soap.
“My grandmother’s route passes by here,” she said.
He stared at The Morning Star. The girl was Callie Montrose. In the grainy black and white she was smiling, weight on one foot, hip pushed out. Everything to see but nothing he could place.
“She was taken after me?” Patch said.
“The girl…Grace, when did she arrive?”
He could not know.
“Callie Montrose. It could be her,” Saint said.
He wrote down the name like he could forget it.
Patch moved to the next photo, and they looked at an Asian girl of thirteen. A couple of pages later were shots from her funeral.
“You came to the woods that day,” he said.
She nodded.
“You stole your grandfather’s Colt?”
Another nod.
“You got brave when I was gone,” he said, and finally turned to look at her.
“I was…I was scared. There wasn’t room for anything else.”
“Tell me about Eli Aaron,” he said.
She told him what he already knew, what he had demanded the state cops tell him. That the man photographed girls and maybe went after the ones he liked most. That they were still searching his land, but it was so vast they might never finish. That there were prints from a dozen vehicles. That maybe he didn’t work alone. That the three bodies were found with rosary beads wrapped around their throats.
“That’s the Robertses’ new car out front,” she said. “If I give Nix the keys, say I found them on the street, it won’t be so bad. Maybe he’ll think it was dumped and he won’t look all that hard for who took it.”
He reached into his pocket and placed the keys on the desk.
She breathed again.
“I have a camera now,” she said and felt suitably lame. “I caught a shot of a barred owl. You want to come see?”
He did not reply.
“I mean, it was dead, but still…” she said, making it worse.
He finally looked up at her. “When you see Nix, you should tell him that if he won’t look for the girl then I will.”
Saint saw him then.
He stood. “And I’ll burn everything in my path till I find her. I won’t hesitate. I won’t even look back at the ashes.”