THEO
SOLOMON CAREFULLY LAID one blanket at a time over his fire pit and offered the burning gifts to his deceased family to keep them warm in the coming winter months, as he did every equinox. I watched from the porch as he burned three blankets, raising his arms to the sky and chanting. Then he sat and meditated on the warmth those transported blankets would carry to his wife and their children in the heavens: still his family’s provider.
When he was finished, he walked over to my porch and said, “You burn letters?”
“Not yet.”
“Soon you climb Neahkahnie again,” he said. “Burn them there.”
“I can’t climb anymore, not with this slug in my—”
“You will.” He then took my porch blanket, a baseball, and one of my worn-out boxing gloves from the basket where I’d tossed them. “The dog will need to chew.”
“Whose dog?”
“Frank’s. He has too many to feed . . . Oz will bring the dog with big paws today.”
“Where will he stay?” I asked.
“I solve this problem you ask of me. Now you solve that problem.”
“Right.”
***
“Mornin’,” I said entering Imogene’s. Bud had set up camp.
“Mornin’,” he said. Imogene handed me a cup of coffee and went into the kitchen.
“So, is this our life now?” I asked. “Waiting for the next three a.m. call, the next move?”
“Appears it is,” he said. He laid out a map, the notes from Hansel (now in plastic evidence bags), the white Bible, the Oregon State Penitentiary file, and two new reports from the Missouri detective, who was now as convinced as Bud that Genghis Hansel was on the move and that his ‘Oregon Trail’ was as dark and bloody as the Boston Strangler’s.
“Did you know the Oregon Trail started in Missouri?” Bud asked.
“I’m sure I knew that at some point in my life . . . Is it relevant?”
“Don’t know,” he said pointing at a red line he’d drawn on the map from Missouri to Oregon. “Just that it’s interesting when you map out some similar unsolved crimes, they’re along the Oregon Trail. Check out the names of these cities and towns: Black Vermillion Crossing, The Devil’s Gate, Parting of the Ways, and Farewell Bend. He’s got a strange sense of humor.”
“He’s saying goodbye to this world.” I said. “He believes he’s going to cross over soon.”
“Yeah . . . and look at this, his mother once lived in Oregon, over in Seaside. So there is a connection after all.”
“Any living family?”
“None,” Bud said shaking his head. “Nowhere.”
“Well, the Oregon Trail ended in Oregon City, and his mother lived in Seaside, so Manzanita must be a compromise.”
“I’m guessin’ after your interaction in the pen,” he said, “he changed his course.”
“Been a moving target before.” I said. “But once a man deviates from his path, he gets lost. Things get messed up. Manzanita has nothing to do with his original mission. His emotions have taken over. He’s gonna make a mistake.”
“Yeah,” Bud said. “We can’t leave our girls alone for a minute till we settle this thing. Though I don’t think this guy’ll do anything in broad daylight.”
“I don’t know. He likes to toy with people. He drives through town in a stolen truck, he comes to the church and talks to Imogene. He leaves red shoes, Bibles, and other clues we just can’t make out. No, he’s not afraid of broad daylight. He’s not afraid of much, and worse yet, he thinks this is his last hurrah.”
“Yeah, maybe more afraid of not being seen.”
“That’s why we’re getting a dog.”
“Dog?”
“One of Frank’s puppies, for Tula, and as a bark machine.”
“Oh, Imogene’ll love that,” Bud laughed.
“It was her idea.”
“Was it her idea that a mutt like one of old Frank’s Labradors who eats and shits and smells like hell, lives in her house? Cause that don’t sound like an Imogene idea to me.”
“We haven’t worked out the details yet.”