A late February snowfall is a reminder that winter is not going to let go as easily as some might wish and often it bears down harder and longer than would seem possible. The town of Ludlow was not going anywhere: it was not on a route to some other, possibly more interesting place, and it was not itself a destination for anyone traveling on that Sunday afternoon. All that happened was that the town came to a slow, inexorable stop. People paused where they were and didn’t venture more than a hundred yards from their front door; they checked their furnaces, looked in the pantry, and made sure that they had the number for the snowplows at hand for when the storm would stop. Somehow, the shooting in the square and the murder of the doctor became only another—darker—measure of the sense of being under siege by something unknown.
For Samuel Tanner it had been a day of firsts, a day when things had been shaken up and could not be unshaken. When their father told Luke to go see to the horses, Samuel stood and followed under the pretext of helping his brother and checking on Flare. If Luke was surprised, he didn’t say anything; the play in the yard had left everyone giddy with delight, and the afternoon hours in the cabin had been quiet and mellow.
Samuel waited until they were alone in the barn, where the horses’ scent and warmth were a comfort, and he said, “Why did you say that Caleb was a liar?”
Luke almost dropped the leather halter from his hand. “Why are you looking for trouble?” he replied.
“I’m not. But you said that he was a liar, and you must have had a reason.” There was no hostility in the boy, only a steady keenness that caught his brother off balance. Luke knew how to deal with anger or deception; he could dispense with either because he was the biggest and strongest of anyone on the farm—except his father, and he would never have gone against him. Nevertheless, Samuel’s manner told him that the boy was all too aware that he might receive no answer except for a slap around the head, and still he had to ask the question.
“Why do you want to know?” Luke said.
“Because Caleb isn’t a liar.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then you tell me. What did he lie about?”
If Luke’s only power over his brother was to withhold the information he so badly wanted, then it was exactly what he would do.
“I’m not going to tell you what he lied about,” he said. “But I can tell you that he was found out and he got what he deserved.”
“When . . . how . . . ?”
“You don’t want to ask me any more about this. It’s done. It’s over. Go back inside and don’t even think about talking to anybody else about Caleb. Papa finds out about it and you’ll be in the lonely place for a month. Papa finds out and—”
Samuel nodded and stepped backward until he bumped against the door. His cheeks felt hot in the early evening air and he busied himself with a fallen fence post before going back inside. He needed time to work out what Luke had told him and what he had meant. He had hoped to find out something about Caleb and instead he had seen fear in his brother’s eyes. Hidden under his usual quarrelsome temper Samuel had seen a hint of panic, as if Luke had only just realized that he was in trouble too.
The words stayed with him all evening and all night. He got what he deserved. There was the lonely place in the yard—just a little shed that no stranger would look at twice—and there was his father’s belt when the punishment required it. Luke had been through both, and his dread had implied that much worse was possible.
Something cold and clammy settled in the middle of Samuel’s stomach: What had happened to Caleb? His mind wandered to the only safe place the boy knew. He lay on his bed, wrapped in the blankets, closed his eyes, and saw the cave’s wall. He felt it, smooth and cool, as he drew a tiny shape with his fingertip. And falling asleep, he saw the pack move like rushing shadows through the forest, and Caleb was running with them.
Joyce Cartwell went home in the middle of the afternoon because it was clear that no one would be coming by the diner and, in truth, the conversation with Brown had left her so unnerved that she wanted to be in a place where she could make sure the windows and the doors were locked and she could be alone with her thoughts.
All the years that she had spent building a life of quiet contentment were balanced on a razor’s edge. Jeb had left for college, she had married and started the diner with her husband. Jeb had come back and they had spoken to each other three times since: twice around the time of their father’s death, and once when she had bumped into him and Naomi in a store. Then her husband had died of leukemia seven years earlier, and she had found herself running the diner alone. The thought of Jeb only a few miles away had receded into a low-level kind of alarm: he was there, but he had made no attempt to contact her or be part of her life.
The only way to cope with the unwelcome proximity was to keep away and mind her own business. Few in town remembered that Jeb was her brother, and there were long stretches—months long—when she didn’t even hear a single piece of gossip about the Tanner family up on Jackknife.
Joyce had thought about it, as Brown had asked, and she had reached her conclusion: if a judge had decided that there wasn’t enough cause to give them a legal way to get their test, she was not going to upend her life and get dragged into the nightmare again. If it was right that they should go after Jeb for whatever crazy thing he had done, they would find a way. It was their job, after all—not hers.
There was soup in the fridge, and a classic movie on television. Joyce curled up on her favorite chair and tried to care about the love life of an American girl in Rome in the 1950s.
While the deputies’ list of local residents recognized in pictures and footage of the vigil had grown longer, Brown and Madison had looked into the dim corners of Ty Edwards’s life and found nothing that they didn’t already know. Nothing in the time that the man had spent on earth appeared to indicate a motive for the killing and a reason why someone would go to the length of identifying him by a medical anomaly.
“The grouping of the shots was less than accidental,” Madison said to Brown.
They sat at the table with their heads together. Between them the picture of the victim taken at the scene revealed a tight cluster of gunshot wounds on the man’s chest. There had been screaming, hollering, people running every which way, Madison returning fire and emptying her magazine at the sniper.
“Shooter knew what he was doing,” Brown said.
They had thought angry farmer, but by any standards the shooter was lethally proficient.
“Are you thinking pro?” Madison said.
“Normally I would,” he said. “The killer used a silencer—you don’t pick those up for the hell of it. I just don’t see any place in Edwards’s life where that could have happened, though.”
“If the killer was a pro who dropped by to do a job, he would have left town already.”
“Maybe, but not necessarily. If someone left yesterday—out of the blue, after the shooting—people might notice.”
“He’s a pro and he’s a local?”
“I don’t know. The Florida lead is a mess, but we need to work it,” Brown smiled. “The local law didn’t make any arrest for that armed robbery, but I’m pretty sure we can solve it from here.”
“There’s a chance that someone went all the way to Florida to procure a dirty piece specifically to throw us off . . .” Madison saw the look in Brown’s eyes. “I don’t mean Tanner. Hear me out. We have someone who wants to make sure that Edwards is definitely who he says he is. Never mind that he’s a man who has always lived his life in or near Ludlow and has never put a foot wrong. Our guy really wants him and doesn’t want anybody to know that he got to him through the medical file. Is it so preposterous to think that he also made certain that the piece he used on Dennen had a history somewhere else? Something that was never going to be connected to him? Just to muddy the waters?”
“Edwards must have really ticked someone off.”
“Why the dog?”
“The dog?”
“He wants to kill the man, he can do it anytime he wants and wherever he wants: when he goes to the store, through the kitchen window, in his garden, and while he’s driving his SUV. Why did he take the dog?”
“I don’t know,” Brown said. “We should get a lineup together, get the dog to point out the shooter.”
“Sure,” Madison said. “Judge Eugene will definitely go for that.”
They had more questions than answers and—unspoken, though acknowledged—the sense that the killer was not done with Ludlow yet.
Hours later, in her attic room, Madison lay in bed watching the fire glowing in the hearth. Hockley had dropped them off at the Miller place and they had spent a quiet evening in the rambling guesthouse. They all needed a bit of space from one another—and from the only subject of conversation of the last three days—and had retired early to their rooms.
Sometimes, Madison mused, in order to understand she needed not to think. Perhaps it was a contradiction in terms, and she wasn’t even sure that it was anything more than bumper-sticker wisdom, but there it was.
The drive back had been slow and slippery, and the forecast for the following day had not brought much solace. Madison took a deep breath: the snow was pressing down on the town and every single person in it. Still, unless he had left after the shooting the previous day, the killer was still there, just as trapped as they were.
Amy Sorensen pulled one boot off, holding her cell against her shoulder. “I don’t know, honey. Soon, I hope. How was your weekend?”
She pictured her daughter in her room—a room that used to be yellow and had transitioned into pale green, with posters that Sorensen privately thought looked like mug shots.
“You did?” Sorensen laughed.
Her daughter’s voice traveled all the way across the state and lifted Sorensen away from the narrow marks on the gunmetal that she still saw, even when she closed her eyes.
Brown tried to focus on the book he had brought upstairs from the living room. After ten minutes he gave up, lay back on his pillow, and went over the events of the last couple of days.
The snowfall had hushed many of the sounds around the house, except for the pipes and the furnace. He heard a peal of laughter nearby. It sounded like Sorensen. They were lucky to have her there for however long it would take—possibly forever—to make sense of the case. Two stray thoughts collided and Brown made a note of something that he wanted to ask Chief Sangster the following day.
By then, Joyce Cartwell would have returned home from the diner. What did he really want from her? How far did he want her to go—for them, for him? Brown allowed himself a small success: he had not lied. At least he hadn’t told her that they would protect her from her brother, when they would not and could not. He had wanted to; he had felt the need to tell her rise in his chest when she had looked so upset and so vulnerable. He had been glad Madison was there then. Her mere presence had yanked him back to the fact that, once they were on their way back to Seattle, and Polly and her volunteers had locked the Miller house after them, the town would continue as it always had. And Joyce would be left alone with the consequences of her actions.
“How is Carl?” Madison said.
“Managing Greenhut Lowell within an inch of their lives,” Quinn said. “Seems happy.”
Quinn had called Madison. She had briefed him about the latest developments, paltry as they were.
“You should have seen the boy, Quinn, how brave he was to speak with me.”
Nathan Quinn knew something about the courage of boys in terrible circumstances.
“Can you do something for them?”
“Hope so,” Madison said. “Hope so.”
Madison fell asleep after his call with her cell on the pillow and her Glock within hand’s reach on the floor by the bed.
She fell asleep and into a dream of deer and knives. And the black-and-white silhouette of a man trailing a child on a snowy street.