Chapter Seven

seven

Snow was falling as Stan Pranke pulled up in front of Jeep’s Tavern. He’d just stepped inside when the lights flickered, sputtered out, then flashed back on even before the first chorus of oohs could be completed. Beneath the laughter that followed was a sound that might have been thunder. Lightning a week before Easter? Stan fingered the lucky rabbit’s foot Lorna had hooked to his key ring years ago. More likely it had been a car backfiring somewhere along Main. Or a freight train rumbling through on its way to the lumberyards up north, the vibrations magnified by the cold, bouncing off the flat brick faces of the downtown buildings. Or an old man’s imagination.

He heard Lorna’s voice like she was sitting right there beside him. You’re not an old man, Stan.

It sure had sounded like thunder, though. Stan sat down at the bar, caught the eye of the bartender, Fred Carpenter, old Pops Carpenter’s son. Stranger things had happened. There’d been three days in November when the temperature soared to seventy. And then all that rain and flooding along the Mississippi last spring. It was a sign of the times, Lorna said, that even the weather didn’t know how to behave. He listened, cocked his heavy head first to the right and then to the left, but he didn’t hear anything else.

Fred brought his shot of whiskey, placed it dead center on a cocktail napkin, along with a chocolate peanut cluster—owner Jeep Curry’s trademark.

“Did you hear that?” Stan asked Fred.

“Hear what, Chief?” Fred said. He’d been tending bar at Jeep’s for the past fifteen years, and he could mix up any drink you’d ever heard of without looking at the recipe. He’d even invented a couple of his own: the Bobbsey Twins; the Geraldine Ferraro. The Geraldine Ferraro wasn’t half bad, though Stan preferred his shot—just one, which he’d nurse for hours. That thing’s growin’ teeth, Chief, people would say, thumping his shoulder on their way out.

“I thought I heard something, I don’t know,” Stan said, and he took his first golden sip, held it until the soothing warmth spread over the walls of his cheeks. “Never mind.”

Technically, he was on duty, but Mel Rooney knew where to reach him. Mel was only assistant chief, but over the course of the past few months—how had it happened?—he’d assumed nearly all of Stan’s responsibilities. At first, Stan hadn’t minded: Mel never forgot things, never misplaced things, never messed up on the little details that, lately, seemed to flee Stan’s head “like rats from a sinking ship,” he’d joke, even though it was starting to worry him. Lorna tried to help, phoned him at work to remind him of things, but she hadn’t been in any great shape herself since the hysterectomy. Her pretty gray hair was different now, wiry, almost brittle. Mornings, there was as much of it on her pillow as Stan found on his. He sighed, dipped his tongue into his whiskey. Soon they’d be just another pink-skulled old couple, doddering down the sidewalk, clutching arthritic hands.

But Mel was a young man, still in his forties, capable and en ergetic, and—as Stan often had to remind himself—not a bad guy at heart. He was just ambitious, that was all, and these days you couldn’t fault a fellow for that. Mel had a degree in criminal justice from the University of Illinois. He’d worked first as a beat cop and later as a detective for police departments around the Midwest. But in 1988, he’d gotten a divorce and moved back home to Ambient. Soon after, everybody—especially Mel—was talking about how he’d be the next chief of police once Stan Pranke finally retired. The trouble was, Stan wasn’t ready to retire. After all, he was only seventy-two; the last chief, Karl Vogelstern, wore the badge till he was eighty. And Mel might understand things like computers and statistics, but Stan Pranke understood people. He could sense what they were feeling, anticipate what they’d say or do. And, recently, he’d acquired the ability to hear their thoughts as well. Not in actual words, of course, though he sensed that might be coming, the way, so he’d been told, a man who’d lost his sight would develop better hearing. For now, it was like a humming, like the sound of the bees he kept in ten frame hives behind the shed.

Take, for example, handsome Don DeGroot, sitting at the bar to his left. Don was always an emotional sort, but tonight there was something downright high-pitched about the man, sort of like a hive on an overcast day, which let Stan know old Don was itching to sting. To Stan’s right sat Glen Glenbeulah, somber as a drone; when Glen didn’t even nod or say hello, Stan understood it was only because he felt he’d be obliged to begin talking and, with seven kids at home and a day job at the plant, Glen was a man who savored silence like honey. Nights like tonight, the sound of everybody’s thoughts all together was like the close warm rumble of a healthy swarm: There was Bill Graf, who ran the funeral home; Danny Hope, who’d come home from Texas to open a chiropractic care center; Joe and Lucy Kimmeldorf; Margo Johnson—freshly divorced—with her best friend, Bess Luftig; Bob Johns; the back booth full of Kiwanis members (Jeep always waited on them himself); the twin pool tables with their ongoing games. The cloud of good-natured insults, the periodic crack of a good break. The sound of the jukebox. The way people called, Hey there, Chief! The grand busy humming of the hive.

It was enough to bring foolish tears to Stan’s eyes. But wasn’t it right for an old man to enjoy some sentimental feeling, having lived his life, a good life, mostly, among the same people in the same place? You’re not an old man, Stan, he heard Lorna say, but the truth was—and he could take it—he was even more outdated than the beloved T-bird he kept covered in the shed and drove every year in the Fourth of July parade, Lorna by his side, the latest Festival Queen perched on the seat back, tossing candy to the crowd. The only thing that hadn’t changed during the past forty years was his bees, and he loved them for that: their consistency, their doggedness, their collective sense of purpose. Workers didn’t aspire to be queens; drones never tried to be workers. Bees took care of their own, requiring no more than the nearby clover fields, a fresh supply of water. During the hot summer months, when they threatened to swarm, Stan ruptured the queen cells with his pocket knife; each spring, he added a little dry sugar, united the weaker colonies. He handled them with only a face veil and a couple-three puffs from his rusty smoker.

For the past fifty years, he’d been approaching police work the same way he approached his bees, trusting there was something inherently good and reasonable in human nature, believing that, left alone, people would order themselves in a way which would ultimately benefit them all. Goodness in some folks could be hard to see, but most had it in them like a small hard seed—all it needed was a little splash of water, a little bit of bullshit now and then. Whenever possible, he tried to let folks work things out among themselves, without the law’s interference, without jail time or fines. Then Mel Rooney came along, and Mel’s approach was—well, different.

Mel catered to the whims of the wealthier folks, the tourists and weekenders and millpond people, and they were certainly a nervous bunch, quick to scare, quicker to sue, always threatening to pack up and leave if things weren’t exactly to their liking. So if a man had a bit too much to drink at Jeep’s and laid himself down in Cradle Park to contemplate the stars, likely as not he’d be rushed, sirens wailing, to the drunk tank in Ambient. Men thumbing their way to the VA hospital in Madison, drifters passing through to the I-90/94 split—these people were given stern warnings and swift rides to the city limits. Worse still, as a member of the Planning and Zoning Commission, Mel had campaigned hard for laws that set strict property maintenance guidelines within city limits. Comfortable porches filled with old furniture, functional yards lined with cars and appliances (who knew when someone might need cheap parts?), weedy lots and overgrown thickets—any of these was enough to send one of Ambient’s finest knocking at your door. And if you had a dog, Christ almighty, it better be on a leash twenty-five hours a day.

Stan picked up his whiskey, swirled it around, teased himself with it, then put it down untouched. At first, he’d argued with Mel, tried to make him see the light of reason. It was human, he explained, to overindulge now and then, to lose track of the family dog once in a while, to accumulate things you couldn’t bear to throw away. Rules like Mel’s would only increase existing resentment between the haves and have-nots, which translated into vandalism around the millpond area: Every weekend, another family lost a mailbox or found detergent in their swimming pool, a car or boat was keyed, a newly landscaped yard uprooted. The thing to do, Stan explained, was get people mixing with each other. If you’d had a ride in that nice fast boat, or had been invited swimming in that fancy backyard pool, you might learn to look at those things in a different way. Similarly, if you’d sipped iced tea outside on that broken-backed couch with that barking dog wagging its tail at your feet, you might be more inclined to accept that there’s different strokes for different folks.

But the fact was that the law supported Mel’s way of thinking, and the millpond people, weekenders and summer folks both, supported Mel. They came to Ambient to experience country living—fresh air, quiet streets, maybe a little bit of fishing—and they brought their checkbooks with them. By God, they didn’t drive all that way to encounter town drunks and radio-blasting teens and mongrels that chased them, unneutered balls bouncing happily, if they tried jogging down a scenic country road. They didn’t want to see ramshackle houses, rusty cars; they didn’t want their pretty daughters seduced by local boys’ rough talk. The latest thing they’d done was restrict public access to the millpond itself. A public swimming area remained by the Killsnake Dam, but the parking lot accommodated less than a dozen cars, and all the little streets around the millpond itself were posted No Parking. The fine was one hundred dollars, and Mel enforced it like one of God’s commandments. He himself had bought one of the lots, built a fancy house with his new wife’s money.

“These people are our bread and butter,” he said. “I’m not going to let the wildlife scare them off.”

It was true that the millpond people brought in money, but to Stan’s way of thinking, they also brought drugs and bad tempers, clogged the roads with traffic, and caused taxes to go up and up. Their homes attracted burglars as well as vandals, and the alarms they installed to protect themselves were constantly triggered by wind or whim. On a record weeknight last August, police responded to thirteen calls—all of them false alarms. That same week, three people were arrested for possession of narcotics, two men for domestic violence, another man for attempted rape. Once, Stan would have recognized the name of each person in volved, but these days everyone was a stranger. The world was getting more and more complex. Perhaps Mel was right and it was time for Stan to retire, to move over and out of the way. And yet Stan thought of Karl Vogelstern. He thought of his own mother, who’d hand-milked her last few remaining cows, mucked their stalls, and kept up with her quarter-acre garden until the day she died, at eighty-six. It seemed to him that folks were different than they used to be—not as tough, more inclined to take it easy, less inclined to help a neighbor or put in the extra hour it took to get a job done right. They were lonelier too. They didn’t rely on each other. They talked about stress. They didn’t have fun the way people used to.

An idea that had occurred to him recently—kind of a compromise between retirement and work—was how nice it would be for him and Lorna to buy one of those mobile homes and travel around the country for a while. See a few things. Enjoy themselves. Sure, he’d have to get rid of his bees. And the T-bird. (He took another itsy sip of whiskey.) And Lorna was awfully attached to the house—each morning she drank her coffee looking out over the river—plus she had all those friends in the Circle of Faith. But the house was just too big for them, now the kids were gone, and they could have it sold in two weeks for more money than they’d ever dreamed of. Outside money. Maybe Mel was right. Maybe it was pointless to go against the times. Stan searched through his pockets for his Pepto-Bismol tablets, slid one from its plastic sheaf, and tucked it in his mouth. Crunching, he looked up to see Fred Carpenter, the telephone held in front of him like a platter of cocktail wienies.

“It’s Mel,” Fred said, placing it on the bar. “Sounds important.” Stan figured it must be. Mel had never once called Stan about anything. At the police station, Stan would turn to do something and discover it had already been done. He’d pick up the phone to make a call and find out it had been made days earlier. Stan sometimes got the feeling that Mel would have been just as happy to see him spend all his duty time at Jeep’s and never come into the station at all. He put the receiver to one ear and stuffed his finger in the other.

“We’ve got a problem.” Mel’s voice was uncharacteristically nervous. In the background, Stan could hear the slamming of car doors, the fading wail of a siren. “How fast can you assemble a search party?”

“Got ’em,” Stan said, glancing around the bar. Instinctively, he reached into his pocket, grabbed his rabbit’s foot. “Where do you need ’em?”

“At the highway bridge. Some high school kids were fooling around, and a younger boy fell in the river.”

“Jesus,” Stan said—

—and then his heart skipped a beat, the same way it had on that foggy Friday night, two years ago, when there’d been a six-car pileup on the Solomon strip—four injuries, one fatality. And the time the Tauscheck boy had been playing with his daddy’s pistol. And the time Tom Mader was killed on County O—Christ, that had been a tough one. Stan himself had been the one who’d notified Ruth. And it had been after Tom’s funeral that Ambient really started to change. Whoever had knocked Tom off the road was living right under everybody’s nose, waving hello and going to church and shopping for groceries at the Piggly Wiggly. You couldn’t believe in appearances the way you maybe once did. You couldn’t trust anyone completely. People pulled apart from each other; the new people sensed that, pulled away too. And then Mel came on board with his goddamn regulations….

“How long has the kid been in the water?” Stan said.

“Near as we can tell, since a little after nine.”

It was almost ten o’clock.

“You’re just telling me now?” Stan bellowed, and Mel said, “Now, Stan, I would have called earlier, but I didn’t want to bother you over nothing.”

“Nothing?” Christ, oh, Christ. “What’s the kid’s name, do we have ID?”

“Not yet. The high school kids, they just—you know—picked him up. They wanted to tease him a little,” Mel said, and now Stan began to understand why he sounded so peculiar.

“The same group who grabbed Sammy Carlsen and the Walvoord girl?” Stan said. “The ones you said we shouldn’t bother the papers about? Christ, Mel, this is more than a prank! If you’d taken it seriously from the start—”

“Look,” Mel said, his voice abruptly low and mean. “You wanna talk about the papers, then let’s talk about what the papers are going to say when they hear the chief of police was sitting cozy at his favorite watering hole while all this was going on. Now get your people together, sober if that’s possible, with flashlights if they got ’em. Take the River Road—we’ve coned off the J road from the bridge to County C. We’ll walk both sides of the river as soon as the chopper gets in from Madison.”

Stan slammed down the phone so hard it slid off the counter, crashed to the floor. The warble of conversation, the thoughtful humming that had cocooned it, cut off like water from a tap. Jeep, who was joking with the pool players, spun around, and even mild Fred spilled the drink he was carrying. Within the silence, the jukebox went on playing.

“Listen up,” he said, conscious of the way his voice was shaking. “Unidentified boy fell off the highway bridge. I need volunteers to search the banks, and before you say yes, think how much you’ve had to drink, and then think about how warm you’re dressed. It’s a cold night out there.”

Every man in the bar plus half the women volunteered. The women these days, they wanted to be involved in everything, and they sure got mad if you left them out. So Stan picked Margo Johnson and Bess Luftig along with eight men, assigning Danny Hope and Bill Graf as drivers. His own squad car was parked smack in front, technically in a loading zone, the same spot where old Pops Carpenter left his tractor whenever he went inside for a toot. There was little Stan liked better than to see that old John Deere chug-chugging up Main on a Friday night, the impatient line of cars headed for the millpond choked up behind it—Illinois plate after Illinois plate, doctors and lawyers and corporates helplessly blowing their horns. When Mel brought it up at a staff meeting earlier in the month, Stan had said, “People want country living? Well, here it is.” The other officers chuckled at that, but Mel didn’t even smile.

“His property is in violation, that tractor isn’t licensed for the road, and his kid costs taxpayers money each time he runs off.”

“It’s his grandkid,” Stan explained. “The boy’s being raised by Pops’ son and daughter-in-law.”

“Well, clearly they’re not keeping up with him. Contact child protection, let them handle it.”

“Oh, no, no,” Stan said quickly. “Look, Mel, I’ll go talk to them, see what I can do. Pops’ wife, God rest her, was Lorna’s second cousin—”

“If there’s neglect, you notify the state,” Mel interrupted. “You file appropriate charges. I mean it, Stan. Take care of it. Next item?”

Now Stan turned on the siren and swung around the rotary, Bill and Danny behind him with the rest of the volunteers, and they all headed south toward the highway bridge. The full moon floated in absolute darkness, illuminating the long, crooked spine of the river, heightening the hulking shapes of the new houses perched along the River Road, which ran parallel with the highway on the other side of the water. Snow rushed at the headlights, shaping swift pictures Stan could almost understand; he was still hoping that by the time they arrived, the kid would be found, already on his way to the hospital. No doubt he’d be airlifted to Madison. These days, doctors at the universities could do the most amazing things. Stan had seen on TV where they’d revived a man who’d been underwater two hours. Could it have been two hours? Well, anyway, the water had been cold, and cold water acted like a preservative. Ice water could even—

—Stan’s heart skipped again. It was a strange feeling, those skipped heartbeats. It was a taste of what was coming—the silent, empty hive. He’d lost a whole colony once; he’d never figured out exactly why. But there was nothing worse than that silence, the dried-up husks of the bodies in the outer chambers, the bloated gray corpses trapped within the soured honeycomb. Now, as he wove past the orange warning cones, he steeled himself against whatever he was about to see.

He parked on the bridge, with his headlights shining downstream; Bill and Danny did the same. Stan tapped on their windows, told them to wait while he appraised the situation. Then he approached the tight cluster of men—officers, he corrected himself—who were standing beside the guardrail. Five in all: Leroy Kulm, Pete Stahl, Buddy Lewis, Bart Todd, and the lady officer Mel had insisted they hire—Jean? June? Stan could never remember. He fingered his lucky rabbit’s foot. The set of their shoulders told him that they too expected the worst, and their expressions—hardened, silent, watchful—reminded Stan of his military years. Unlike Mel, he’d served his country with pride; he’d been twice decorated in the Second World War. Thirty years later, Mel had stayed home to burn flags and brassieres and God knows what else, yet now he was in his squad car, calling the shots as if it were his right to do so. In the old days, Stan thought with satisfaction, Mel would have been arrested. Mel would have occupied one of the very cells he loved to brag about at civic meetings.

“Evening,” Stan said. “Who wants to fill me in?”

Disrespectfulness and doubt clouded their thoughts like static; still, he was able to piece together the gist of what they were thinking. He was incompetent, out of touch. He was…it took a moment for the word to take shape; then it appeared, sudden as a knife. Lazy. Lazy? But he was always busy! He worked so hard that when he got home, he’d fall asleep smack in the middle of a conversation! Lazy. He stared at his officers, trying not to take it personally. After all, who knew what all Mel was saying behind his back? A wasp in the hive, Stan thought. But he knew what happened to wasps. The bees eventually wised up and destroyed them.

Leroy Kulm finally cleared his throat and brought Stan up to date. Three teens had been involved. The girl had been taken to Our Lady of Mercy Hospital, suffering from alcohol poisoning and lacerations from a broken bottle. The boys were at the police station, and their story was that they hadn’t meant to hurt the kid, they’d just pulled over to talk to him, maybe offer him a ride (here Leroy rolled his eyes), but the kid started running and the boys jumped out and chased him down the J road, and when they caught up with him on the highway bridge, he panicked, slipped over the edge, or maybe he jumped—the kids weren’t sure; they couldn’t remember: Everything happened so fast and they’d been drinking. One boy stayed to search the riverbank, while the other ran back to the car, where he found the girl passed out on the road, half covered in blood, and he said he didn’t know how she got that way but he just threw her in the back seat and drove to the McDonald’s for help. The only thing any of the searchers had found so far was a Snoopy flashlight, on Ruthie Mader’s land, about a quarter of a mile downstream.

“Those boys were drunk as skunks,” Buddy Lewis said. It was no secret that Mel had worked hard to put him on the City Council. “I got a buzz just talkin’ to ’em. They say they got the liquor ‘from some guy somewhere.’”

“Don’t know his name, of course,” Leroy said. “Don’t know the missing kid’s name, either.”

“So who are these boys?” Stan said, trying to keep the anger out of his voice, picturing hoodlums, young toughs, wannabe gang-bangers.

“Paul Zuggenhagen and Randy Hale,” Leroy said. The officers shook their heads at those names, and Pete Stahl said, “Christ, that Hale kid can wrestle. I saw him last year at state finals.”

“Zuggenhagen’s old man works at First Wisconsin,” Buddy said. “They moved here in ’85. Good people.”

“All three kids have clean records,” said the lady officer. Jill? Jane? What was her name?

“I just can’t believe it,” Stan said.

“Well, it gets worse,” Leroy said. “The girl is Cherish Mader.”

“Aw, no,” Stan said.

Leroy made a regretful sound with his tongue. “They pumped her stomach, stitched her up. She ain’t gonna look like no Festival Queen after this, from what they say at Mercy.”

“Zuggenhagen says the kid never hit the water. Says he was there and then he wasn’t. Poof,” Buddy said.

“Alien abduction, maybe,” the lady officer said.

The group guffawed unhappily. In the distance, a freight train blew its whistle; Stan tracked its bright approach, felt the rattle of the passing cars against the cold soles of his feet. He wadded up a piece of paper from his notepad, tossed it over the edge of the bridge to check the current. Not much. The moon stared down at them all, wide-eyed and infinitely patient.

“Watch out Mel don’t write you a ticket for that,” Leroy said, deadpan, and with that, Mel got out of his squad car, approached the group at his no-nonsense pace.

“Got probable ID,” he said. “Bethany Carpenter phoned in minutes ago. Says she got back from town, went next door to collect her kid from her father-in-law, but—surprise—no kid.”

“Gabriel,” Stan said. “The boy’s name is Gabriel.”

“Well, Gabriel matches the description the Hale kid gave us,” Mel said. “Jesus.” He tossed something at Stan; by some miracle, Stan caught it. It was the Snoopy flashlight, in a plastic bag. In the distance, cars were collecting on County C, flashers winking like fireflies, and several people had started cutting across the field toward the river. It occurred to Stan that announcing the incident at Jeep’s was a little like broadcasting it over WTMJ. “All right, everybody,” Mel said. “The aunt is on her way over. Stan’s gonna wait for her, see if she can ID Snoopy. And if she can, this time Stan’s gonna charge her with neglect and reckless endangerment of a child and anything else that’s appropriate—you get me, Stan? I don’t care how far you and somebody’s poor dead wife go back. That kid was left unsupervised. The rest of you, grab a couple of volunteers apiece and we’ll all fan out along the river. Ten paces apart, half the group on either side. Chopper will be here to light us up any minute.”

“I don’t appreciate you telling me my job,” Stan said stiffly.

“If you’d called child protection like I’d told you, none of this would have happened.”

“Now wait a minute here,” Stan said, shaking the Snoopy flashlight angrily. “If you hadn’t hushed things up to keep your business buddies happy—” But at the sound of the approaching helicopter, Mel turned away from Stan to wave the volunteers from their cars. A floodlight encircled them all, and as Stan watched from the guardrail, the officers and volunteers picked their way down either side of the icy embankment, black flecks against a brilliant white backdrop. The chopper pulled back, lifted high, higher still, then began to follow their slow progress downstream. As the individual lights of the searchers became visible, forming a widening horizon like ripples moving outward from a tossed stone, Stan realized he’d been left behind. He thought about going after them. He even walked to the edge of the guardrail and considered the rough trail cutting down the embankment. But somebody had to wait on Bethany, and the fact was that Stan’s toes were already aching from the cold, despite his lined boots. The footing along the river was treacherous, uncertain. His bum hip hurt just to think about it. He said Mel’s name aloud and spat, twice, the way his granddaddy used to do. Then he put the Snoopy flashlight in his pocket and went back to the squad car. As he held his hands up to the heat vents, he eyed the cell phone, fighting an immense longing to talk to Lorna. But Lorna had had some to-do at the Circle of Faith; most likely, she wasn’t even home yet. There was nothing to do but sit tight. Wait for Bethany. Wait for the boy to be found.

The boy. Stan felt around in his pockets until he found his Pepto-Bismol tablets. He slipped three into his mouth, ground them to a creamy paste. The last time he’d seen Gabriel Carpenter was at the old farmhouse a few weeks earlier, a warrant from Mel folded up in his pocket. “By the book,” Mel had reminded Stan. But Gabriel had run off only—what?—five or six times, maybe. And he wasn’t exactly running off. He was out looking for the river angel; he’d tell anybody who asked. He’d gotten it into his head that the angel could make his daddy come back. It was no use explaining to Mel that this was just a phase, that eventually the boy would adjust and settle down. He’d be far worse off in a foster home, where he’d feel even more abandoned, where he’d miss his daddy even more.

Of course, Stan hadn’t needed the warrant. He’d knocked on the door of the new double-wide, discovered that no one was home. But next door at the farmhouse, Pops welcomed him in with a handshake that just went on and on. “Gabey?” he bellowed. “He’s probably in the kitchen.” And there he was, eating a bowl of frosted flakes, wearing a Green Bay Packers cap that Stan was used to seeing on Pops’ head. Stan held out his hand for Gabriel to shake, but Gabriel didn’t respond. Stan was the one Mel always sent to take him home when he ran off.

“Is he in trouble again?” Pops said, and he winked. “Or is it me this time?” He was nearly as old as Stan, yet he looked limber as a wire.

“Not yet,” Stan said. “But we need to have a chat.”

“Uh-oh,” Pops said, and he led them to the living room, seated himself in an orange beanbag chair that made Stan’s back ache just to look at it. Three cats were curled up in a cozy tangle on the floor; Gabriel came in and flopped down beside them. Stan claimed the couch.

“When’s the last time you were in town?” he asked.

Pops thought about it. “Oh, I’d say about a week ago.”

“How’d you get there?”

Pops showed all of his this-way-thataway teeth. “Now, Chief, you know the state ate my license. How else am I going to get around?”

Clumps of fur drifted through the air. Stan glanced up and wished he hadn’t when he saw all the cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. The whole house was a disaster. Still, Pops was doing better than anyone might have expected. After his young wife died, he went into a kind of depression that had lasted for years; Fred and Shawn had pretty much raised themselves. Over time, he’d come back to himself, and now he even worked a bit—serving drinks at Jeep’s when things got busy, picking up trash along the highway for the city, doing bush-hogging and snow removal for Big Roly Schmitt. And Stan could see Pops loved the boy. He could hear it in his thoughts, which were thick with devotion, like a golden retriever’s. He also knew that Bethany Carpenter, brusque though she could be, wasn’t the type to neglect a child. This was something Stan could handle himself. So he told Pops, in his best cop voice, that some changes were re quired. From now on, if he needed something in town, he should let Fred give him a lift or, better still, fetch it for him. He could use the time at home to drag some of the stuff along the highway closer to the house, or maybe even behind it, so it couldn’t be seen from the road. And above all, he and Bethany and Fred all had to keep a closer eye on Gabriel.

“From now on, we’re gonna charge a fifty-dollar vagrancy fine each time the department picks him up,” Stan said.

He was lying, of course; there was no such fine. Well, at least not yet. But it was something both Pops and Fred could understand—unlike the threat of child protection, which was too abstract to be effective.

“Fifty bucks!” Pops said. “Christ, for that I should just let you keep him.”

“You wouldn’t really do that,” Gabriel said. He’d draped one of the sleeping cats over the back of his neck like a scarf.

“That’s because there won’t be a next time—right, Gabriel?” Stan took a shiny toy badge out of his pocket. Cost him two bucks at the Wal-Mart, but what the hell. “Tell you what. If you promise me you’ll stay close to home, I’ll make you a special deputy.”

“Can I arrest people?” Gabriel said. He wasn’t so bad-looking when he smiled. Give him a few more years, Stan thought, shave about fifty pounds off of him, and he might turn out OK. Come to think of it, Shawn had been kind of a butterball himself.

“Sure, why not?” Stan said, and he beckoned the boy over so he could pin the badge on his T-shirt. After Gabriel had run off, still wearing the cat, to look in the bathroom mirror, Stan asked Pops, “Don’t he have friends at school he can play with?”

“Naw. They all give him hell—his cousins included. He says his only friend is Jesus.”

Stan had to laugh at that. “My wife would sure approve.”

That had been—what?—two weeks ago? The tractor had been seen on the road only once since. Two refrigerators, a bathtub, and most of the bashed-in TVs had disappeared from the roadside. And Gabriel stopped wandering off—or so it had seemed. Until now.

Someone was driving too fast up the J road, swerving past Mel’s orange warning cones and onto the bridge. Stan clambered out of his car just as Bethany and Pops emerged from theirs. The old man seemed confused. He stared out over the river, which was black and cold as the universe itself. “Gabriel?” he called.

“What happened?” Bethany hurried toward Stan.

“We’re not sure yet,” Stan said. “Some high school kids saw him fall off the bridge, but we don’t know the exact circumstances.”

“Off the bridge!” Bethany said.

“Gabriel?” the old man shouted, and Bethany whirled on him and said, “What on earth was he doing at the bridge? If you’d kept an eye on him like you promised—”

“He told me he was going back to your place,” Pops said, pulling at the zipper of his coat. “He said he had homework.”

“Didn’t I tell you to keep him with you?”

“Why was that?” Stan said, placing a steadying hand on her shoulder.

“He and my Robert John don’t get along. I figured it was better to split them up until I got back home.”

“And where were you?”

“Working!” Bethany said, and she shrugged off his hand. “Where else would I be? A lady at the millpond calls up, says her in-laws are coming in the morning and she’ll pay me one hundred dollars to get her house in shape—” She broke off, stared out at the distant hazy lights of the search party. “Those high school kids, they didn’t hurt him?”

“We just don’t know right now,” Stan said, as gently as he could. “They were the ones who called the police. It appears they tried their best to find him.”

“Maybe it ain’t even him,” she said. “Maybe they made a mistake.” But when Stan took the Snoopy flashlight out of his pocket, she covered her face with her hands. Pops closed his eyes and began to swear, a long string of cusses that made no sense whatsoever, and Stan swore right along with him. He could not charge either of these people with neglect. They were doing the best they could. Let Mel file his goddamn charges if he wanted. Stan would tender his resignation as soon as he got home. He and Lorna would sell the house and buy that RV and drive it all the way to Alaska. Somewhere with lots of trees and fresh, clean air. Somewhere with a little town like Ambient used to be: friendly people, safe streets, nobody bothering to lock their doors. What was the world coming to that a thing like this could happen? And as if he was thinking the same thing, Pops said, “He was just looking for the angel. He wasn’t bothering nobody. All he was doing was looking for that angel.”

And Stan said what he’d said to Ruthie Mader, and Roy Tauscheck, and family members of the one who’d died that foggy night at the strip. “He’s out of our hands and into the Lord’s. Go home, get some rest. We’ll search all night if we have to, and we’ll call the minute we know something more.”

After they’d gone, Stan radioed Mel to let him know he’d sent the Carpenters home. Then he told him he could kiss his wrinkled ass and drove to his own house, where Lorna was waiting for him, a cup of warm milk in her hand. The police had come to the meetinghouse. Anna Grey Graf had driven Ruthie to the hospital, where Cherish was in stable condition. “What in God’s name happened out there, Stan?” Lorna said.

“I don’t know,” Stan said. He took the warm milk she gave him, sat down at the kitchen desk. “Pull up a chair and write something for me?” he said, and then he handed her a pen, a yellow tablet of lined paper. He rested his chin on his hands and wept as she took down his resignation.

He learned what had happened on the morning news, just like everyone else. It had been dawn before Ruthie Mader finally came home from Our Lady of Mercy to feed and water her sheep. Her old dog was oddly anxious; he led the way to the barn. Inside, despite the dim light, she could see everything with remarkable clarity—the hens in the rafters, the golden-eyed goats, the sheep huddled in a close circle as if guarding one of their lambs. A snow-white pigeon rose from the straw, and it was then that she realized it was not a bird at all, but the source of the light that filled the air, a light so beautiful it took her breath. She watched it rise up to the apex of the barn, disappear into a tiny slice of sunlight. The boy was lying in the sheep pen, hands folded on his chest. She placed her finger to his neck. She could not say how much time passed before she walked over to the house and dialed 911.

“His body was warm when I touched it,” she said. “There was a smell like flowers. When I saw him there, I thought he was just sleeping.”