They found Dorne’s SUV parked at the side of the road a hundred yards from the Forest Service gate. He hadn’t made any effort to hide it, probably figuring nobody would be looking for him out here. A prickle of discovery raced up Matthew’s back as his flashlight glinted on the car’s taillights. Squatting by the vehicle, he slipped the blade of a pocketknife Scottie had given him into both rear tires, hearing the gasp of air rush out. The back of the car began to sag as they left it and stepped around the gate.
They walked single file, not speaking, the crunch of their footsteps echoing in the silent woods. A few times they froze at the sound of someone coming toward them through the pines, but it was just mounds of snow tumbling off branches and thumping to the ground. Wide flakes fell weightless from the sky, making graceful arcs between the branches. It was Christmas morning, Matthew remembered. His head felt clearer than before, but in moments the ground still folded and bucked under him. The gash at the back of his head pulsed with the effort of the hike, but at least the climb had chased the exhaustion from his limbs. In a few hours, the sun would be up. At 5:55 a.m., the plane he was supposed to be on would take off for Minneapolis, followed by his connecting flight to Fort Myers. He was going to miss both of them.
A half mile after leaving the main road, the pale stones of the train tunnel appeared in the distance like the mouth of a giant animal. It gave him a watery feeling in his knees.
“This is stupid,” Georgie said, as if she could read his thoughts. “We should go back. We know he’s here now. Let’s call the cops. Let them bring him in.”
“No,” Scottie said. “We’re going through. All of us. Right now.” He pulled off one glove and, like a scout in an old western novel, bent to feel for vibrations on the tracks. Nodding an all-clear he said, “Move quietly. No lights.”
They fell in behind him as he started inside. Georgie’s slim, sharp fingers closed over Matthew’s shoulders as the darkness took them. The temperature dropped. The blackness further fucked with his equilibrium, making him feel like they were skirting along at the edge of a steep cliff. Goose bumps covered his arms. He couldn’t quite catch his breath. This time he didn’t worry about trains. He worried about everything but trains. There was too much debris along the tracks to walk in complete silence. They blundered through crackling fields of empty snack bags, sent bottles rolling along the tracks with the toes of their boots. By the time the way ahead began to lighten, he was sure Dorne knew they were coming.
He managed to stop his legs from shaking just as the gray glow of two a.m. met them at the far end of the tunnel. Crouching behind the flagstones, they peeked out. They heard nothing, no trains coming, but Matthew saw the low flicker of a campfire on the embankment near the reservoir. Scottie waved them forward. Moving out of cover of the tunnel gave Matthew war-zone flashbacks. He thought of Rickert describing him jumping the concrete road divider and running toward the hidden gun nests in the abandoned factories of Kamaliya. Out here in the open, beginning their descent of the hill, surely Dorne could pick them off one by one if that’s what he wanted. If he was awake. If he still had his gun. If he was even still here.
At the edge of the tree line they got their first good look at Dorne’s camp. Matthew had expected something sad and desperate. He expected to see desolation and regret here, the hideout of a ruined man. Instead, the campsite was tidy and well maintained. Dorne had set up a small one-man tent upwind from the fire. The tent looked expensive and new, made of brightly colored nylon, with a rain fly pulled neatly over the top. There was a clothesline with two Smartwool shirts and a pair of socks draped over it. From a high branch in a nearby tree he spied the mesh bag where Dorne had hoisted up his food, plates, and flatware. A two-gallon jug of drinking water was wedged into the snow near the door to the tent. This didn’t look like the camp of a guy on the run. It looked like Dorne was on vacation.
Scottie held out a hand to tell them to stay back as he crept forward and poked his head under the rain fly, looking down into the mesh top of the tent. For a split second Matthew worried what he might find in there. What if Dorne had come out here to kill himself? What if Scottie looked into the tent and found his dad with his brains spilled all over his sleeping bag? But when Scottie reemerged his face was blank. The tent was empty.
“I wondered if you would know where I was,” Dorne said. “All these damn trains.”
He stepped out of the trees twenty-five yards from the edge of the camp, carrying the same pistol he’d used at the storage space. As if on cue they heard the low whimper of a train whistle coming from deep in the mountains. Dorne moved carefully to the middle of the camp, keeping them in his line of sight, and lowered himself into a camp chair near the fire. He crossed his legs and balanced the gun on one knee. Not pointing it at them. Not pointing it away from them either.
“So,” Dorne said. “What happens now?”
His voice was sad but unafraid. It was the same tone he’d used in the storage space when he ordered Matthew to climb into the freezer. There was a current of resignation in it, like he already knew he was well beyond the point of redemption. As Matthew studied him, Dorne split in two, double bodies and double chairs drifting in opposite directions. He blinked and the two came back together again.
None of them had an answer ready for his question. Dorne shook his head. “Well, I can’t say I’m an expert at any of this either,” he said. “I wish there was some way I could explain it all to you that would make sense, but I doubt I have much chance of doing that.”
“Try us,” Scottie said. “Make us understand.”
Dorne leaned back in his chair, eyes resetting into a hard glare. “Everything I did,” he said, “it was because I absolutely had to do it.”
“You had to murder that boy?” Matthew asked. “You had to hit him with the car and load him up in the trunk like an animal? You had to run away? To cover it up? No. You could have done something. You could have called an ambulance. You could’ve called the police.”
“I told you he was already dead,” Dorne said. “The police wouldn’t have done a thing besides put us in prison for the rest of our lives. It was an accident, but once it was done, it was done. Think about it. Dave and I still had so much to accomplish. We still had so much to do for the neighborhood. For the city.”
“So your lives were worth more than his?” Georgie asked. “That’s what you’re saying?”
“Goddamn right,” Dorne said. “My life and yours. And Scottie’s. And Mattie’s. That whole side of town. We were going to make it better. We did make it better.”
“So you planted the backpack,” she said. “To make it look like a random crime, and then you used it for leverage against the city.”
“You make it sound like some master plan,” Dorne said, “but that part didn’t dawn on me until a few days later. We moved the car to the storage area and were pulling the bike out of the backseat and I saw the book bag there on the floorboards. I realized how we could use it. Turn it into a positive. I waited a few nights and then snuck out and tossed it down the steps by the underpass. I figured somebody would find it and call it in. That freaked everybody out, let me tell you. After that, parents wouldn’t let their kids go outside to play. But we got the footbridge out of it. We got the traffic lights and the extra police patrols we’d been after for years. I spent the rest of my life in public service making up for that one mistake.”
“A mistake?” Matthew said. “Turn it into a positive? You’ve lost your mind.”
Dorne frowned. “I know what you’re trying to do,” he said. “You want to turn me into a monster, but the truth is I felt gutted over what happened to that child, just like your dad did. I just refused to let the guilt consume my life. We couldn’t change what happened. All we could do was move forward. I know you want me to say this ruined me and things were never the same again. In some ways, that’s true, but I found ways to cope. You go mow the lawn, go to the grocery store, take your kids to school. The police forget, everybody forgets. One day you realize even you haven’t thought about it in a while. You realize you’ve gotten away with it. Fifteen years?” He snapped his fingers, loud in the dark. “It goes like that. You have to understand, I thought this was all over a long time ago.”
“But then Abbie Green came to town,” Georgie said. “Right?”
Dorne shook his head. “The old man was the problem at first,” he said. “Turzic. About a week after we hit the Ward kid, he came to see us. He had pictures of all of it. Us out in the street. The car all wrecked. Putting the body in the trunk. We thought he was going to turn us in, but he wanted money. Can you believe that? He started talking about monthly payoffs. How he convinced himself we had any to give, I’ll never know. Burning his place down was Dave’s idea, let’s make that clear while we’re placing blame.”
“The place where the greenway ends at the street,” Matthew said. “That’s right in front of where the candy store used to be.”
“He was some kind of amateur photo nut,” Dorne said. “Did you know this? I guess he had a tripod set up in his apartment so he could take pictures of the trains. It scared the shit out of us, obviously. We couldn’t let him hold that over our heads forever.”
“So you tried to kill him,” Matthew said. “Or scare him.”
“We tried to destroy the evidence is what we did,” Dorne said. “I was actually surprised how well it worked. Everything the guy had on us went up in the fire. He ended up having a bunch of strokes not long after that and I convinced myself he wasn’t a threat anymore. Then Abbie shows up out of nowhere. I had no idea who she was until she confronted me during my office hours last year during the first week of school. Can you imagine? The door wide open? People walking past?”
“What did you do?” Matthew asked.
“Denied the whole thing, of course,” Dorne said. “She’d gotten some letter from Turzic. I told her it was just an old man playing games. She cried, shouted at me, pounded her fists on the desk, but I kept telling her I didn’t know what she was talking about. I sold it well enough to make her doubt her own convictions, but after that she became like my shadow. She signed up for a bunch of my classes. I used to see her driving past my house. I think she even tried to shake Scottie down, see if he knew anything.
“After the hundredth time I saw her creeping around my place, I opened the front door and invited her inside. She marched right in, which blew my mind. Abbie was bold like that. Reckless. I poured her a double bourbon and told her she was wasting her time. It became like a game with us. She would show up someplace—once while I was on a date, even—and start asking questions. We even met for drinks a few times. Eventually I think I almost had her convinced she was on the wrong track.”
“So, what tipped her off?” Georgie asked. “How did she find out?”
“Dave,” Dorne said. “Abbie finally tracked him down up at the lake. She got him drunk and pried it out of him. The whole story. He called me right after she left. It had been a few months since I’d heard from him. He was just out of his mind—drunk, blubbering. I could barely understand what he was talking about. He kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, Chris, I’m sorry.’ Finally, he told me what he’d done. He referred to it as his ‘unburdening.’ Then he killed himself.”
“And you killed her,” Matthew said.
“I had to, don’t you see?” Dorne said. “Before she said anything to anybody. It took a week or two to find a time when I knew she would be alone. In the end, it was her who came to me.”
“Why didn’t she go straight to the police,” Georgie asked, “once she had Dave’s confession?”
“Ah,” Dorne said. “See, she wanted to find her brother. That was her whole thing. She invited me to Cheryl’s house the first night she was staying there and confronted me with what she’d found out. Told me if I would just tell her where to find the body, she would let me have the tape. We both could get what we wanted, she said. It was a ploy, of course. A stupid one. You should have seen her, though, feeling cocky. She thought she finally had the upper hand on me, but she was wrong about that. She didn’t know what I really had in mind. Didn’t know I had my goofy disguise and gas can stashed in the backyard.”
“And Carson Ward’s body,” Matthew asked. “What did you do with it, really?”
“Dumped it. Right here,” Dorne said, eyes drifting out over the surface of the reservoir. “Dave and I hauled him up here in an old duffel bag—one of the ones you boys used to use for your old baseball equipment—and he’s been out here ever since. At the bottom of all that muck.”
They all let that sink in. “What about Phan?” Georgie asked.
“That was just bad luck,” Dorne said. “I never found any tape of Dave’s confession. Not at Madigan’s house that night. I thought it might be at her apartment, so I went there trying to find it. I hadn’t been there five minutes before the cop showed up. Never got that tape either. For all I know, it was just another of her bluffs.”
Matthew was surprised how little emotion he felt now to know the truth, to see his whole life pivoting. It was like seeing a landmark in the distance, using it to chart your path, and then realizing when you got close to it that it was something different than you first thought. The sun turns out to be a cave at the top of a hill. An oasis disappears as a mirage. You stood there wondering why you came all this way.
“It was all a lie,” he said. “Your whole life. All the so-called good things you did, it all came out of a lie. From a little kid getting killed.”
The gun bounced on Dorne’s knee. He was getting impatient. “A long time ago I did a bad thing,” he said. “A horrible thing. I didn’t plan it, but it happened and afterward I was the only person who had the guts to deal with it. Then, starting a couple weeks ago, I had to do more bad things. In between, I did a million good ones. I don’t know what to tell you other than that. Call it what you want. I’m through talking about it.”
“I hate you so much,” Scottie said. He’d picked up a piece of wood from a stack Dorne must have cut for his fire. A three-foot log as thick as a rolling pin. Holding it at his side like a club. Dorne saw it, too. He stood up and shifted the gun so it pointed at his son.
“Well,” he said, “I don’t think this is going anywhere productive.” He said the last few words like the final line of some long book he’d been reading.
Scottie took a step forward and Dorne raised the gun. “Stop,” he said, but Scottie didn’t stop. He took two more strides and Matthew saw the muscles in Dorne’s arm flex as though he were going to shoot. Instead, he took two steps back toward the lip of the reservoir. “Scott, please.”
Matthew called Scottie’s name, too, but Scottie kept moving toward Dorne. Finally, Dorne took the gun and pressed it to his own head and shouted, “Stop!” Scottie stopped, though he still had the log in his fist.
Dorne’s face was lit by the dam safety lights, and for the first time Matthew could see how tired he looked. His eyes were puffy and wide. Beneath them were the deep wells of a man who hadn’t slept—maybe hadn’t slept through the night in a long time. From the wet and dirty tracks on his face, he realized Dorne had been sitting in the camp chair crying silently as he talked. Now, with his arm cocked and the gun pushing into the soft hollow in front of his ear, his easy confidence was gone. Even beneath his winter jacket, he was shaking. His chest pumped up and down. In that moment Matthew understood Dorne wasn’t on the run. He had come out here to kill himself.
“Chris—” he said, but a train whistle cut him off. Its single headlight had appeared at the saddle of the mountain, the diesel engine chugging, coming closer. Matthew raised his voice in anticipation of the noise. “Put the gun down!”
Dorne’s eyes danced to him just as they heard the unmistakable sound of glass shattering inside the tunnel, followed by a muffled curse. The hazy glow of a flashlight appeared up the rise and Matthew knew Georgie had called the cops. Dorne pressed the pistol to his head with so much force that his face tipped slightly to the side. “What did you do?” he shouted at them.
Matthew raised his hands. “It’s going to be okay,” he said before Dorne took off running again. He darted into the trees, not taking his eyes off them until he was out of the reach of the firelight. Matthew lost sight of him and then Voelker and a half-dozen uniformed officers burst from the mouth of the tunnel. They came down the embankment in a broad flying V, moving fast but carefully on the slick ground. Matthew’s vision splintered again. He shielded his eyes against the glare of their flashlights. The cops were all yelling at once, telling them to put their hands up, but to him it was just a garble lost in the noise of the oncoming train.
The uniforms knocked him out of the way chasing Dorne. He stumbled but gathered himself and ran after them. He knew the cops wouldn’t catch Dorne. There were more of them, younger men, but they didn’t know the terrain like he did. They slipped and stumbled as the grade grew steeper. Matthew passed them in the trees, his legs for now obeying his instructions. He moved diagonally up the embankment, using Dorne’s tracks as footholds. He felt himself gaining on the older man and heard Rickert’s voice in his head one more time: You were fucking fast, man.
As he reached the top of the rise Dorne doubled back along the tracks, heading for the tunnel. Matthew saw the train in his peripheral vision. He yelled for Dorne to stop, to get out of the way, but was drowned out by the roar. If he had been a step or two quicker he might have caught him, but he came out of the trees just as the bright flutter of Dorne’s jacket disappeared into the tunnel.
He tried to follow, almost making it to the tracks before someone caught him from behind and pulled him away. Strong arms went around his middle, spinning him back. Together they lurched against a tree trunk and fell. The two of them landing in a heap among a snarl of roots. He saw it was Georgie on top of him. She must have run for the woods just as he did. She must have been right behind him the whole time, chasing him as he was chasing Dorne. She squeezed his chest and held him tight as the train hurtled into the tunnel a few feet away. The noise and wind stung his eyes, whipping his hair. He rested his head back in the wet snow, seeing above them the dark branches of the trees and the stars like bright bullets in the sky.