By morning, the fog had lifted. Over coffee that was evidently stronger than his guests were accustomed to, Jorgensen posed a question. “Would it be all right,” he asked, “if, before I give you my decision, I were to pay Mr. Davies a visit?”

“Uh, I’m afraid we’re not funded for that,” said the law professor. “Right now our budgetary constraints are somewhat-”

“Not to worry,” said Jorgensen. “I can drive, and I’ll pay my own way.”

The three of them exchanged glances. They had to have noticed his truck sitting right there in the driveway, thought Jorgensen. They must have taken him for too old, or too feeble to mix it up with off-island drivers.

“I can take you,” said the one from the court monitoring program. “There’s no need for you to make such a long trip alone.”

“No, no,” said Jorgensen, “I’d rather prefer it. Besides which,” he added, reaching down to give Jake a pat on the head, “I won’t be alone.”

There was an awkward moment of silence, and Jorgensen was about to assure them that he wouldn’t let the dog do too much of the driving, when Jessica Woodruff spoke up. “I suppose that’ll be all right,” she said. “I’ll have my staff see to it that there’s a visitor’s pass waiting for you when you get there.” They left him the file, or at least the summary they’d brought, a three-inch thick manila folder. Though he’d never handled a death case as a litigant, Jorgensen had sat on enough of them as a judge to know that by the time one of them was in its sixteenth year, the word file had become obsolete; room full of cartons was more apt to be the case.

He spent the rest of the day with the summary, rereading documents, cross-checking reports, and studying appellate opinions. But he kept coming back to the drawings. They were every bit as striking as the first three Jessica Woodruff had used to bait him. The lines were exquisite; the details real to the point where you wanted to reach out and try to touch the objects. The angles, proportions, perspectives and shadowing were all flawless - less the work of a twenty-one-year-old unpracticed amateur than an accomplished adult artist. He could almost feel the heft of the shovel; the stickiness of the tape wrapped around its handle. He could see the grave site as though he were standing at it sixteen years ago, with Boyd Davies by his side. What had happened that September day, he wondered. What had gone so wrong that it had ended up bringing nothing but tragedy to two families?

He left the following morning, just after sunup. Jake settled his butt into the passenger seat, at the same time managing to stick his nose out the side window that Jorgensen had cracked open for him, knowing that he’d hear nothing but whining if he didn’t. Anyone who might have noticed the two of them heading west over the flats and salt marshes toward the bridge that would take them to the mainland would have figured they were off to pick up a sack of groceries and the weekly paper, and maybe a tin of bait while they were at it. But then, they’d have had no way of seeing the small overnight bag wedged behind the driver’s seat, or the road atlas resting on the floor, or the three-inch-thick manila folder lying next to it. They would have noticed only an old, white-haired man and his dog, chugging along in a red Chevy pickup truck, the kind with bug-eye headlights, a split windshield, and running boards that looked to be fashioned from pure rust.

The kinda truck you couldn’t hardly get no more.

The trip would take them two full days. The truck, which had either 270,000 or 370,000 miles (Jorgensen could no longer remember which) could do sixty, so long as it was downhill with a good tailwind and the windows were rolled up, but under normal conditions, fifty or fifty-five was more like it. It got about twelve miles to the gallon; only you didn’t want to fill the tank more than halfway, because if you did it tended to leak. Which was just as well, because both the driver and the passenger were getting on in years, too, and the same could be said of them. The combination made for frequent pit stops, some at filling stations or diners, but just as many by trees or bushes. Men’s bushes, as Jorgensen liked to think of them. He didn’t know what Jake thought of them as, but whatever it was, the arrangement seemed to work.

They picked up I-77 outside of Columbia, and headed north, crossing over the state line sometime in the late afternoon. By 6:00, Jorgensen’s back was feeling it, and he pulled off the interstate a ways past Charlotte, at a little town called Cornelius. Cornelius had been the name of the wise old elephant in the Babar stories, if Jorgensen remembered correctly. He liked children’s stories: Things were simpler in them, more straightforward.

If the meatloaf and redeye gravy at the local diner were good, the mashed potatoes were a bit on the lumpy side, but nothing compared to the mattress at the Sleepy-Time Motel. Jake solved the problem by finding a spot on the floor that suited him. Jorgensen, his bones weary from the drive, slept fitfully, dreaming at one point that he was lying helpless on his back on a plate, while someone ladled gravy over him. Only when he looked closer, he could see that it wasn’t a ladle at all they were using, but a shovel - a shovel with duct tape wrapped around the handle, halfway up its length.