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by Donald Harington


  “My wife,” he said, “she’s the girl’s grandma, and I reckon I ought to go get her.”

  “We’ll send a trooper to pick her up,” the cop said. “We need you here. Have a seat.”

  The place was really filling up with all kinds of officers and the FBI besides. Somebody was even taking flash photos of that balcony and running a tape measure across it like you did when somebody has a wreck.

  Leo was mighty glad to have all those law enforcement people surrounding him for protection when Louisa arrived, or else she might’ve killed him on the spot. It took a couple of ’em to hold her back from attacking him. Her behavior was really inexcusable and was probably the reason they decided to keep him for questioning. He didn’t relish spending a night in jail but it was sure a lot better than spending the night at home with her. Either way he wouldn’t have been able to sleep a wink. It wasn’t the disgrace of being arrested that preyed on his mind as much as the fact of Robin’s disappearance. She meant the world to him and now she was gone. They could suspect him all they wanted to and it wouldn’t bring her back.

  They fed him a good breakfast at the jail and there was a TV with the morning news having a big story on Robin, and her picture broadcast for all the world to see. It wasn’t one of her best pictures and didn’t do justice to her beauty. Right soon after breakfast a feller from the state police, name of Jack Samples, who was in charge of child molesters, and two of Lieutenant Samples’ men, sat Leo down at a table and commenced asking him a bunch of questions. They had even checked him out and found his Navy rap sheet, which mentioned that he’d spent some time in the brig after being caught during shore leave with a eleven-year-old whore. That had been twenty years ago, goddammit, but they acted like he’d just been picked up last night.

  They grilled him. What was his exact relationship to the victim? What was the nature and extent of that exact relationship? Had the victim ever said or done anything inappropriate or of a sexual character during that relationship? Had he ever said or done anything inappropriate or of a sexual character during that relationship? Had he ever fondled her? Where had he touched her? Had he sat her upon his lap? When and how often and with what conclusion? What sort of kisses had he given her and received from her? Was it true that he had given her a large stuffed bear, named Paddington, whom she regularly slept with?

  Leo did a lot of sweating during this interview, but the worst had only just begun. Maybe he had given the wrong answers to the questions because by and by they started in to trying to get him to confess where he had taken her and where he was keeping her. In the trunk of his car maybe? Tied up in the woods somewhere? In an abandoned house somewhere? They promised him they would try to get him off lightly if only he would confess and lead them to the girl. Did he want to spend the rest of his life in prison? No? Then why didn’t he come clean and help them find the girl?

  Trying desperately to divert attention away from his own innocent self, Leo suddenly remembered the man from the other day, the man who Robin said had pretended to be him, the man they’d later encountered out on the road after Robin’s bike wreck who at first claimed to be her grandfather because, as he’d said later, he had suspected that Leo was a child molester and wanted to protect her against him. The sawdust began to sift away as Leo realized that man was probably the number one suspect. Maybe that man was some kind of stalker who wanted Robin specifically and had taken the trouble to follow her to the roller rink and abduct her.

  Leo told the officers all that he could remember about the man and what he had done and said. He concluded, “Maybe he was just looking for his lost dog, like he said, but that could’ve just been a excuse.”

  The officers looked at each other, and mumbled some stuff to one another, and then Jack Samples said, “Or maybe he was your partner in this deal. Maybe he was the one who actually grabbed her at the rink but you put him up to it. Huh?” All Leo could do was shake his head vigorously and keep on a-shaking it. They led him off to another room and hooked him up to a bunch of wires and stuff that was some kind of lie-detector machine. Then they asked him all kinds of questions, including all of the questions they’d already asked him, and he did his best to tell the honest-to-God truth. He told the truth when they point-blank asked him if he knew where she was. When they were all done, and he was plumb wore out, he said, “Well, did I pass?” but they didn’t say yes or no.

  Finally one of them asked him, “Do you think you can describe this man you were talking about?”

  And later that morning they brought in a police sketch artist who wanted to do something called a “composite,” and the feller started off with simple questions to Leo like age, height, weight, hair color, eye color, etc., and then got to more complicated ones like how close together the eyes was, and how long the nose was and how much the ears stuck out. Leo had a pretty hard time trying to remember just what the guy had looked like day before yesterday, and finally when the artist had come up with a sketch and showed it to him Leo had to offer his humble opinion that it didn’t look too awful much like the feller. “His eyebrows was bushier than that, and his mouth was some wider,” Leo criticized the artwork.

  By mid-afternoon they had a sketch that was a fair likeness of the guy. Jack Samples studied it and laughed and said, “Aw shit, that sort of looks like old Sog!” But nobody took the trouble to tell him who this Old Sog was. They made copies of the picture and sent ’em out to the press, and it appeared on the evening news and Leo was even a little proud, as if he’d drawed the picture himself.

  Jack Samples said to him, “Well, I guess you’re free to go, for now. Probably the girl wasn’t even abducted, she was just a runaway.”

  “On roller skates?” Leo said, and somehow they all thought that was funny, and laughed. But Leo wasn’t laughing. One of the cops, not Samples, had told him that in most sexual kidnappings the child is never found alive, and Leo was starting to get powerfully haunted by the notion that poor Robin could be dead and raped somewhere at this very moment. His heart poured out for her, and for his loss of her. She had been the light of his life. Such as his shitty life had been. Now some real son of a bitch who had made careful plans and carried them out had removed Leo’s darling little girl from this earth. Leo did not intend to take it laying down.

  He drove on home, prepared to face the worst yet. It’s twenty miles from Harrison to Pindall and that gave him plenty of time to think about what he would say to Louisa. But by the time he got there he realized there was only one thing he was going to say to her: “Screw you.” Honest.

  So he was even disappointed when he got there and discovered she wasn’t there for him to say that to. The car was gone. He suddenly remembered that this was Sunday and if she wasn’t at one of her constant church services or meetings or whatever, she was most likely keeping Karen company during this time of grief and anxiety and waiting.

  Leo went up to the bedroom and got his revolver out of the closet and took hold of a fistful of bullets. Then he turned right around and drove those twenty miles back to Harrison. He didn’t go to Karen’s. He went to the roller rink.

  It’s funny how things come to you. Maybe because of not having any sleep the night before and being in a kind of daze still, or maybe because without even thinking it out loud he had already determined that if need be he would spend the rest of his life searching for the girl, he suddenly experienced a flash of a minor little detail that he hadn’t even known he had noticed: that feller’s pickup didn’t hardly have no tread to speak of on the tires. They was bald.

  Leo searched the parking lot behind the roller rink until he found some bald tracks in the mud, and they went out onto the highway turning south, but he lost the tracks on the asphalt. He started driving slow down that asphalt road, watching every little side road that he came to for any sign of the bald tracks again.

  It was the slow but steady beginning of Leo Spurlock’s long, long quest.

  Chapter twelve

  How in hell was he supposed
to answer a question like that? He was struck all of a heap that she would use that word, which didn’t belong on the sweet lips of such an innocent child. And yet. And yet, he couldn’t help but be kind of excited by it, because the way she used it seemed to mean that she at least knew what it was and therefore he might not have to learn her as much as he thought he’d have to learn her.

  Even so, he choked on his coffee and needed a minute to gentle down. And then he asked, “Where’d you pick up that word?”

  “Everybody knows it,” she said, staring him straight in the eye, feisty and brash as all get out.

  “Sweet little girls don’t know it,” he said.

  “You should hear all the words Gretchen Scott knows,” she declared. “She knows all of them.”

  “Who’s Gretchen Scott?”

  “One of my best friends at school.”

  “Did Gretchen tell you what that word means? Did she explain what happens when you go to bed with somebody?”

  “Sort of,” she said. “But you’re not answering my question. Is that what you’re going to do to me?”

  “Not today,” he said, and that was all he could think to say, which was true. He didn’t intend to rush things. He wasn’t one of these here goddamn rapists. Aw, of course he knew what statutory rape was, but this wasn’t the same thing. He really hoped that whatever they did would be consensual on her part. He wasn’t never going to force her to do nothing. And besides for some strange reason he wasn’t feeling an awful lot of lust, not at the moment, anyhow. He’d thought for a while that he wouldn’t be able to hold himself back, once he got ahold of her, but now that he had her he didn’t seem to have the itch in his britches that he’d expected.

  “But tomorrow maybe?” she said. “Or sometime?”

  “Not if you don’t feel like it,” he declared, and then, because the subject was something that ought not be discussed too much but just acted upon whenever the occasion called for it, he decided to change the subject. “It’s warming up out there,” he observed. “You want to take a look at the place?”

  “I want to brush my teeth,” she said.

  “Fine and dandy. What color toothbrush do you want?”

  “Blue.”

  He got her a nice blue toothbrush out of the box of new toothbrushes, and then, because she’d never brushed her teeth without running water, which they didn’t have, he showed her the new system of using the wash basin and a gourd dipper filled with water from the water bucket. He had to hold the dipper for her at first, but she got the hang of it, and brushed her teeth and then he wanted to show her how to draw water herself. He took her out to the well, and showed her how to let the well bucket run down on its chain down and down deep into the well and then you let the bucket submerge itself and you pull it up on the pulley with the chain. She had a struggle, at first, pulling that chain with the bucket full on the other end of it, but she finally got it up and then he showed her how to pour the well bucket into the kitchen bucket and take it to the house and set it on the bucket shelf and put the gourd dipper in it.

  “See?” he said. “Nothing to it.”

  She frowned. “It’s not nearly as easy as just turning the faucet handle.”

  “If you think that aint easy, let’s see if you can split some stove wood,” and he took her out to the woodpile, where a chopping stump was surrounded by a good stack of logs he’d dragged in from the woods and cut up with his chain-saw. The chain-saw was one of the few things he’d sold at the yard sale. He hated to let it go but knew they had to learn how to cut timber with just a axe and crosscut. He had some doubts about showing her how to use the axe, not that he was afraid she’d hurt herself but she might just get it into her head to take a whack at him while he was asleep or something. But that was just a risk he’d have to take, because he wanted her to do her share of helping with the stove wood. He started off with little pieces, propped steady on the chopping stump, and made sure she stood with the axe in such a way that it wouldn’t slip and hurt her. Bitch was watching them, and the girl asked him to make the dog go away. Then she missed her first few licks but got the hang of it and actually managed to split a piece in two. “Hey, you did it!” he said and tried to give her a hug, but she backed off from him. Then he showed her where the stove wood was stacked in a big wooden box beside the kitchen door. Even if she wasn’t very good at splitting wood with the axe, she could be handy at toting the wood to the wood box.

  He showed her the little springhouse, and explained it was the nearest thing they had to a refrigerator. If they had any fresh cow’s milk or butter, which they didn’t and never would, they could keep it in the springhouse. He did have some powdered lemonade mix and directly he’d show her how to mix a jar of it and get it cooled in the springhouse. “We could keep our Kool-Aid here too,” she offered, and it was the first thing she’d said that made it sound like she really wanted to participate in this life. That made him happy but he was real sorry to realize that it had never occurred to him to buy any Kool-Aid mix because he never used the stuff himself.

  “Sweetheart, I really do hate to tell ye, but it complete slipped my mind to get us any Kool-Aid,” he said.

  She looked as if she was about to cry, and he wished she would, just to prove that she still knew how to cry. “You’re not ever going to the store again?” she said and he wasn’t sure whether it was just a statement of fact or maybe a question. Either way, it didn’t need to be said.

  He showed her the rest of the place—the barn, which they wouldn’t have no use for since they didn’t have any cows or mules or any need to store hay. And it looked like it might fall on their heads anyhow, and he told her she’d better not even play around in or near the barn. That wasn’t true of the shop, which was still a pretty sturdy shed and still had all the tools and stuff that Gabe Madewell had just abandoned when he pulled up stakes. He explained to her that this had been the workshop of the barrel-maker who had lived here but hit the trail some twenty-odd years before. He showed her one of the two barrels that had been left behind and attempted to explain how the staves were cut from the white oak timber in the surrounding forests and shaped to go inside the steel bands to make a barrel that was probably used for whiskey. Madewell had also made wooden buckets and tubs and churns, and there was still one churn left behind, never used but slightly damaged. Sog showed it to her and explained how it would have been used to make butter. They wouldn’t have no use for it, but it sure was a handsome piece of woodwork to look at. “There was some kind of name for the work he did, which was a family name or something—Turner or Carver or Cutter.”

  “Cooper,” she said.

  “Yeah, that’s it! How’d you know it?”

  “I read it in a book,” she said. Then she asked, “Why did he build his house way off up here on this mountain?”

  “Well, I believe it was probably his daddy, Braxton Madewell, who was also a cooper, who built the place way back around the turn of the century. I reckon he built it here because it was handy to all the timber.”

  “How far is the nearest neighbor?” she asked.

  He started to answer but then realized it could be a trick question. “If you was a crow and could fly, and headed thataway,” he pointed toward the south, “you might fly over a house where people still lived in about three mile or so, in a place called Stay More, just a ghost town, really. But there just aint no way to go from here to there on foot.” He decided to tell her about Adam Madewell. Gabe had a boy named Adam who’d been several years behind Sog at the Stay More school, and Adam had to walk it, getting up before daylight every morning and hiking four miles over the roughest trail you could imagine and him not but a first or second grader, just a kid, hiking eight miles round-trip every day of the school year, carrying his dinner pail and his schoolbooks in places where he practically had to do mountain-climbing, until finally he’d had some kind of accident at home, helping his daddy make barrels and gashing his leg so badly he couldn’t walk on it, and they never s
aw him again at the schoolhouse. Ad Madewell had been a real smart and proud and hardworking kid at school, and the teacher, Miss Jerram, had loved him and was sorry to see him go, or rather stay, because he must’ve stayed home from school for a couple of years before they left for California and the school itself didn’t last much longer than that. But folks on the store porch—Latha Bourne’s General Store—used to kid Ad because his paw and maw never did come to town for anything. “Hey, Ad,” they’d say, “why don’t ye show ’em that trail you come in on?” Adam’s trail, which went through a lost holler with a big waterfall in it, had been washed away after he quit using it, and now there wasn’t a sign of it, although Sog had been in that lost holler one time and in fact had shot a bad man there when he was with the state police.

  “You were a policeman?” the girl asked.

  “Yeah, that’s what I did most all of my life,” he said.

  The girl was staring at him in a way that bothered him, as if she was trying to picture him in his uniform or just trying to figure out why a law-abiding officer of the law would do something illegal like stealing a little girl. “What did you shoot the bad man for?” she asked.

  “He had kidnapped a little girl,” Sog said, and felt he might even be blushing. “Yeah, I know, it sounds ironic, don’t it? As it turned out, this feller, Dan Montross was his name, just an old hermit, he was the girl’s grandfather. But I didn’t know that.”

  She fixed him with that look again and said, “Somebody is going to shoot you.” She sounded like she meant it. He hated to hear her talk mean like that.

 

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