TROY SPENT A COUPLE OF HOURS at the regional office in town filling out paperwork and filing reports. He put out an AMBER Alert on the Baby Doe, using the pictures Mercy Carr had taken of her on her cell phone.
Susie Bear slept at his feet, spread out on the portable rollout pad he kept in his truck for long nights on the job. Troy could use some shut-eye himself, and planned on heading home for a nap before the inevitable 2:00 a.m. calls for drunk ATVers and lost campers started coming in. He whistled for the slumbering dog to wake up. Together they packed up their stuff—she carried her collapsible water bowl in her mouth, he carried everything else, including the laptop—and trudged to the truck. He’d finish up his reports and research at home when he got the chance.
They were about half a mile down Route 7A when a call came in from Dispatch.
“Old Man Horgan’s gone wandering again,” said Delphine. “Local PD’s asked for your help.”
Walter Horgan was an eighty-eight-year-old widower who lived on his own at home. Every day since his wife, Eileen, died eight years before, he left the white Victorian farmhouse with the blue gingerbread trim that he’d shared with her for sixty-one years of marriage and walked down West Road to the Northshire Cemetery on Main Street to visit her grave. The journey was just short of a mile each way, long enough to fulfill his physical need for a healthy constitutional every morning, and his emotional need to touch base with the woman he’d loved so much for so long. Everyone in Northshire knew Mr. Horgan and kept on eye on him as he made his way down the street, cane tapping the marble sidewalk in a staccato that announced his progress—until that turn onto Main Street crossed Route 7A and the sidewalk ended, forcing him to skirt the woods for several hundred yards.
During daylight hours this trek was manageable enough, but lately Walter had taken to roaming the cemetery after dark. Woods surrounded much of the twenty-acre park, and the worry was that he’d wander off track and get disoriented or dehydrated or worse.
“When’d he go missing?”
“His daughter says he never answered the phone tonight.”
They knew the daughter Isobel, who lived up in Burlington now and checked in on her father by phone every night before he went to bed.
“And George?”
George from Meals on Wheels dropped by around seven o’clock each evening to give Walter his dinner.
“George says he wasn’t there. And you know how much he loves Chef Pinette’s meals.”
Walter, a retired restaurant owner, would tell anyone who would listen how much better the food was since Pinette, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, had come on board.
“It’s after nine now, so he’s been gone at least two hours. What’s the Point Last Seen?”
“As far as we know, PLS was his house, where his next-door neighbor saw him get the mail around three p.m. He was wearing his usual button-down blue shirt, khakis, and his favorite Agway cap.”
“Okay. We’re on it.”
Susie Bear could find a lost old man faster than anyone else. Local law enforcement knew it, and often when a situation like this arose they turned to Troy and his dog, especially when they were preoccupied with tourists on busy holiday weeks like this one.
“You’ve already put in a full day,” said Delphine. “And you’ll be out again come midnight.”
“It’s on the way home,” he told her, and hung up before she could point out that wasn’t exactly true. But close enough.
He’d never turn down an opportunity to help find a lost individual, especially an elderly person. Nights like this were the reason he’d joined the service. His great aunt Renée had lived with his family when he was a kid. A retired botanist and devoted bird-watcher, she’d taken him on long nature walks, teaching him the names of the fauna and flora of her beloved Green Mountains. But as Alzheimer’s set in, she grew confused on her daily walks with Troy, and he would guide her home. One autumn night she slipped out of the house and into the forest that flanked their backyard. His bedroom was next to hers on the second floor, and he never forgave himself for not hearing her shuffle past his open door and down the stairs.
The next morning his mother discovered she was gone. A search was organized; villagers and law enforcement alike went looking for her. They searched all day in the woods by his house. The fall of darkness and the threat of a nor’easter cut the effort short, and everyone came home.
Everyone except the game warden, a tough outdoorsman named Frenchie Robicheaux, and his dog Bella, a sweet yellow Labrador. They ventured deeper into the wilderness and found Aunt Renée hiding in an abandoned blind more than two miles in. She was dehydrated and hypothermic, but alive.
Frenchie and Bella saved her from the forest, but they couldn’t save her from the disease that robbed her of her woodland wisdom. She died of Alzheimer’s eight years later. But Troy never forgot the kindness and fierceness of the warden and his dog, and decided then and there he’d follow in their footsteps.
He parked the truck at the entrance of the Northshire Cemetery, between the two tall stone angels that stood sentinel at the gate. He let Susie Bear out, slung his pack onto his back, secured his headlamp, and switched on his flashlight.
The moon was just a silver sliver in the dark now, and the stars stood out against the night sky. They passed under the solid gaze of the seraphim and into the graveyard proper, as dark and pretty as a park of the dead should be.
Northshire dated back to 1791, the final resting place for Revolutionary War heroes, poets and politicians and philanthropists, teachers and farmers and generations of Warners, including his Aunt Renée.
The headstones shone pale and ghostly in the weak glow of the crescent moon. No place lonelier than a cemetery. They said cemeteries were peaceful, but when Troy wanted peace, he went to the woods. He knew his late aunt probably felt the same way, but hoped she’d found some eternal rest in the Warner mausoleum here on the grounds.
Susie Bear started down the southerly path toward the family plot, and he whistled to call her back.
“Not tonight, girl. Tonight we’re going this way.”
He led the dog down another gravel path that cut a circuitous route through the cemetery toward its eastern boundary to the headstone that read: Eileen Gibbs Horgan, May 3, 1932 to November 25, 2010, Beloved Wife and Mother.
And librarian, he thought. Mrs. Horgan had run the local library for decades, and encouraged everyone in town to read. Troy was never much of a reader, but when she found out he wanted to be a game warden when he grew up, she’d introduced him to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, even John Irving. All the literary kings of New England, who understood the pull of the moon, the lure of the woods, and the solace of solitude. He missed Mrs. Horgan, and he wouldn’t let anything happen to her husband on his watch.
The cemetery was empty as far as he could see. At least empty of living humans. Most of the villagers were either downtown dining and drinking or safe at home watching HBO. They weren’t out visiting their dead.
Susie Bear was trained to find anything with a human scent. Troy figured the bones buried here would not distract her, because she was trained for tracking and trailing and search and rescue, looking for people who were still alive. People who were out of place, and smelled of confusion and fear. People like Mr. Horgan.
But the clever dog had done a little cadaver training as well, although she hadn’t been on any official cadaver searches yet. Unless he counted today and the bones they found in the Lye Brook Wilderness. Which maybe he should.
“Search,” he said, snapping on his headlamp.
The congenial beast bound through the grounds, past the faded granite stones, with no regard for the carefully tended paths or the bright flags decorating the graves of veterans of all wars, foreign and domestic. She was headed straight for the woods.
Troy jogged after the big black dog, lost to him in the dark, his headlamp bouncing with every stride, flashing a jagged trail as he tried to keep her dark form in sight. He plunged into the woods after the disappearing mutt, shining the flashlight along the forest floor as well. He could hear her thrashing through the brush and struggled to catch up to her.
Now that the sun had long set, the temperature had dropped sharply—down to the forties—and Old Man Horgan would be cold. He remembered his aunt and pushed on, toward the crashing racket that was Susie Bear on the run.
The clamor stopped suddenly, and Troy knew she’d found him. Like a good search-and-rescue canine, Susie Bear knew better than to rush the lost and confused. She would run back to Troy and lead him to Mr. Horgan. Flashlight in hand, he tracked the dog along the visible trail she’d blazed through the trees and thickets, hoping to meet her halfway.
But she was faster than he was. The Newfie mutt leapt toward him, barked once, and then turned sharply, fur flying, and headed into a small clearing. He followed her and found her sitting there, her great paws forward, facing a huge fallen log lying at the base of a copse of white pine. Her long plume of a tail fluttered fiercely in anticipation of her reward for a job well done.
Mr. Horgan was nowhere to be seen.
Troy wasn’t worried. Many elderly people would hide from the noise and commotion made by their rescuers, unaware that in the process they were hampering the very effort that could save them. If Susie Bear indicated that somebody was here, somebody was here. Somewhere.
He swung the flashlight around the clearing in a slow clockwise curve, lighting every inch of the small opening in the forest. Nothing.
He skirted the large log. Susie Bear’s tail thumped wildly.
Getting hotter, he thought.
The far side of the log was hollowed out. He shined the beam of the flashlight into the cavity, and there he found the old man, folded into the close space, knees tight against his face. Bingo.
“Mr. Horgan,” he said gently. “It’s me, Warden Troy Warner. I’m your ride.”
Susie Bear leapt over the log and slid to a dead stop right at Troy’s heels. He slipped her a treat from his pocket for a job well done.
Walter Horgan leaned toward them. His hat was askew and exhaustion scored the deep lines that marked his long face, but his gray eyes were clear.
“That your animal?”
“Yes, sir.” He reached down to help him up, grabbing his liver-spotted hands with his larger, stronger ones.
“Ready?”
“Yep.”
He pulled his late librarian’s husband to his feet.
“She’s a big one.” Mr. Horgan patted the dog’s broad head, and in appreciation the dog licked his thin wrist with a thick tongue. “What’s her name?”
“Susie Bear.”
Mr. Horgan smiled. “Suits her.”
The old man shrugged off Troy’s assistance and made his way to the warden’s truck, tapping his cane as he went, the big shaggy dog at his elbow. He sat tall in the front passenger seat. Susie Bear’s head lolled between the two men as she leaned in from the cab. Troy glanced at the old man as he drove and wished there were more that he could do for him.
“I want to go home,” Mr. Horgan said.
“I promised your daughter I’d take you to the emergency room.”
The old man groaned. “No need.”
“Just to get you checked out. Isobel is on her way there now. She’ll take you home as soon the doctors say you’re good to go.”
Troy drove into the ER porte cochere at the hospital and helped Mr. Horgan into the waiting room.
“Take care of yourself,” he told the old man as the nurse called him in to see the physician.
“You, too.”
Troy grinned a goodbye and left. He climbed into his truck, scratched Susie Bear between her ears, and drove home to the fire tower on the Battenkill River just west of Winhall.
The fire tower dated back to the fifties. Obsolete in the era of satellites, the forty-seven-foot-high tower—basically an open fifteen-by-fifteen-foot room on stilts—had been scheduled for destruction when he bought it. He refashioned it into a three-story home by enclosing the lower portion of the tower and keeping the original lookout at the top intact. The ground floor housed the kitchen and the bathroom; his living space, which doubled as a bedroom, was on the second floor. He did most of the work himself, with the help of his dad and his brother Tyler, both carpenters. The living space may have been small, but the view was as big as the great outdoors.
He loved this place, and so did Susie Bear—even though at first she wasn’t crazy about the stairs. He opened the red door—the only painted surface in the all-wood structure—and the dog rushed past him into the kitchen, stopping for a sloppy drink at her water bowl, and lumbered up the steep wooden stairs that flanked the far wall to the next level. She was as eager to hit the sheets as Troy was.
And he was right behind her.
But first he climbed a final flight of stairs to the top of the fire tower. He opened the sliding glass door and stepped onto the deck. He came out here often. To drink in the spectacular view, he told himself, but it was more than that. Sure, the outlook provided a 360-degree vista of the surrounding area, a splendor of forest and river and sky. Night or day, the effect was the same. Gazing out from his fire tower always reassured him that life was bigger than his own problems. Even after his wife ran off with that flatlander from Florida.
Tonight, the jagged tapestry of treetops against the sweep of stars and a pale sickle moon moved him more than he could say. Coming home to an empty house—empty of his wife—hurt him, especially in the beginning. He’d thought of her leaving him as the beginning of the end of his marriage. Although in truth the end had begun long ago. He’d been afraid of losing her since high school.
Meeting Mercy Carr today had reminded him of that.
Troy looked up and found the North Star. He stared at the bright star for a long time before going back inside and down the stairs. Pulling the Murphy bed down out of the wall seemed like too much trouble, so he crashed on the sectional with his dog, still in his uniform, and dozed off to the comforting sound of canine snoring.