Not hurt. Not rotted. Built. That is the only word. Built out of pieces that knew where they ought to go but not how to stay there. Eyes too still. Mouth moving a little after he stopped speaking. Skin not loose, exactly, but delayed. In the dream I knew the thing had studied him from outside and come close but not close enough. It wanted me to help it finish. I woke screaming. The goats screamed too. All four. They did not stop until sunup.
October 1. Holloway came. I nearly told him. Could not. He looked tired. Brought coffee. Asked if I had been sleeping. I said enough. A lie is sometimes a blanket; thin, but better than standing naked.
October 4. Found mud on the inside of the door. Not on the floor before it. Just the door. Finger marks, long. I washed them off and burned the rag.
October 7. Heard O. crying in the woods.
Wendell stopped.
He had seen men cry. Drunks. Prisoners. Fathers. Once, a boy with his hand caught in mill machinery, pleading for his mother as though she could put his fingers back. But the idea of a dead or missing husband crying outside his widow’s cabin at night touched some private place in him and left it cold.
Mabel had written:
It was near the creek. Soft at first. Then louder. I know the sound of my husband crying because I heard it once when the baby came too early in ’97 and there was nothing to bury but bloodied linen. He made the same sound tonight. I put my hands over my ears and still heard it. After a while it stopped crying and laughed once. Not like O. Like someone remembering what laughter should be.
Wendell sat back.
He had not known there had been a child.
The last entry was dated October 11.
The night before Cornelius found the cabin empty.
Wendell read it once. Then again. Then a third time, moving his lips around the words though no sound came out.
At one point he stood, crossed the room, and checked the latch on his door.
Then he returned, opened his official notebook, and copied the entry word for word because he understood with a clarity beyond reason that if he did not copy it then, he might later convince himself he had misread it.
October 11. Tonight he spoke behind me.
I was at the stove putting on the kettle. I had barred the door before dark and set the chair beneath the latch. I had checked the window. I had put the knife in my apron pocket. The room was warm. I remember the room was warm.
He said my name from three feet behind me.
I did not turn. I could not. My hand was on the kettle and the heat came through the iron into my palm but I could not let go. He said he was sorry. He said it had been a long way back. He said he was tired. He said he wanted to come home.
It was O.’s voice exactly. Every weariness. Every kindness. The small break in the word home.
Then he asked if I would open the door.
I said no.
He asked again.
I said no.
He asked again and again and each time it was softer and less like him, as if speaking wore away the part it had borrowed. The last time was not a voice. It was the sound the kettle makes before it boils, shaped around words.
I do not know how long it has been here.
I do not know if the door has ever been closed.
I am going to look behind me now.
That was all.
Below the final sentence, at the bottom of the page, was a small dark smudge.
Wendell leaned closer.
It looked like ink at first. Then like oil. Then, when he lifted the page near the lamp, it seemed for one impossible instant to possess ridges, whorls, the faint oval of a thumbprint.
Not pressed onto the page from above.
Pressed from underneath.
Wendell closed the journal.
He sat at his table until dawn.
Part 3
Sheriff Alden Voss came from Salem on October 17 with two deputies, a photographer, and a doctor who wished aloud several times that someone had explained the elevation before he agreed to travel.
Voss was fifty-three, heavy through the middle, with a silver mustache and the political instincts of a man who had survived three elections without making any clear promises. He had kind eyes when he needed them and hard ones when kindness cost too much. Wendell had served under him long enough to know both pairs.
They met at Detroit Crossing in the back room of the mercantile. Rain hammered the roof. The photographer, a nervous young man named Lyle Pettit, unpacked his equipment with the solemnity of a priest preparing relics.
Sheriff Voss read Wendell’s report.
He did not react much until he reached the copied journal entry. Then his eyes stopped moving. His jaw worked once beneath the mustache.
“Where is the original?”
Wendell placed Mabel’s journal on the table.
Voss did not touch it.
Doctor Hiram Pell, who had been warming his hands around a mug of coffee, leaned forward. “May I?”
“No,” Voss said.
The doctor blinked. “Sheriff?”
“Not yet.”
Wendell watched him. “Sir?”
Voss folded the report. “You believe this woman is dead?”
“I believe she’s missing under circumstances I can’t explain.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“No body has been found.”
“Deputy.”
Wendell felt the room narrow around him. “Yes. I believe she’s dead.”
“And Orson Thornquist?”
“Likely dead.”
“Likely?”
“We found what appears to be his boot.”
“With a tooth in it, according to this.” Voss tapped the report.
“Yes.”
“Where is the tooth?”
“In a specimen envelope.”
“And the boot?”
“In a box at my rooms.”
Voss looked weary. “You kept evidence from a possible murder scene in your rooms?”
“There isn’t a jail safe here. I didn’t want men pawing at it.”
“No. Instead you pawed at it.”
Wendell flushed.
Absalom Reeve stood near the stove, silent until then. He had come only because Wendell asked him. He had refused a chair.
“Boot should have been left where it was,” Absalom said.
Voss turned. “And you are?”
“Man who told him not to move it.”
The sheriff gave a humorless smile. “Helpful.”
“Usually.”
For a moment Wendell thought Voss would dismiss him. Instead the sheriff studied Absalom with the irritated caution of a man recognizing someone more useful than convenient.
“You tracked the site?”
“Yes.”
“No footprints leaving?”
“No.”
“No blood trail?”
“No.”
“No sign of another person approaching the cabin?”
“No.”
“You’re certain?”
Absalom’s face remained calm. “No one honest is certain in woods after rain. But there was no sign.”
Voss leaned back. “Yet a gate was torn off and carried away.”
“Yes.”
“By something that left no tracks.”
Absalom said nothing.
Voss looked at Wendell. “You see the problem.”
“I’ve been seeing it for five days.”
They went up the following morning.
The sheriff disliked the trail immediately. Doctor Pell disliked it more. Lyle Pettit nearly dropped a box of glass plates into the creek and spent the next half mile apologizing to no one in particular. Voss sweated despite the cold and used irritation as fuel. Wendell walked behind him, feeling both vindicated and ashamed, as though bringing others to Suther’s Draw might prove he had not imagined it while also exposing the inadequacy of everything he had done.
Cornelius did not come.
When Wendell stopped at his cabin before dawn, the old man had opened the door only a crack.
“I already saw it,” he said.
“The sheriff wants your statement at the site.”
“The sheriff can want.”
“Cornelius—”
“No.” The old man’s milky eye shone in the lamplight. “I’ll put my name to paper. I’ll swear on a Bible. But I’m not going back up there today.”
“Why today?”
Cornelius looked past Wendell toward the dark trail. “Because I dreamed of her last night.”
Wendell waited.
“She was standing at my door,” Cornelius said. “Not knocking. Just standing there with her back to me.”
“Her back?”
Cornelius nodded. His face seemed smaller than it had days before. “She said, ‘Don’t let them measure it.’”
“Measure what?”
The old man closed the door.
At the cabin, Sheriff Voss ordered photographs taken before anyone entered. Lyle Pettit set up his camera on the porch, beneath the window, inside the main room. Each exposure required time, stillness, and an unbearable awareness of being observed by the empty cabin. The mark on the wall photographed poorly. In person it had depth, sheen, variation. On the glass plate it became a dark vertical wound.
Doctor Pell examined it after Lyle finished.
He approached with professional skepticism, spectacles low on his nose. He scraped a tiny portion into a vial, sniffed, frowned, touched it with a gloved finger.
“Well?” Voss asked.
“Could be blood.”
Wendell felt his stomach tighten.
“Could be animal,” Pell added. “Could be old. Could be mixed with something else. I would need proper reagents.”
“Human?”
“I said I would need reagents.”
Absalom stood at the doorway and watched the trees.
Voss examined the room with methodical frustration. He measured the distance from stove to wall, bed to door, window to floor. Wendell thought of Cornelius’s dream and said nothing. The sheriff dictated notes to his deputy. He bagged the journal, Mabel’s Bible, the cup with dried tea leaves, and the knife found in the apron hanging near the stove. The knife was clean.
Then Voss turned his attention to the goat pen.
“Could a man tear this gate off?” he asked.
“Strong man,” one of his deputies said.
“Could Mrs. Thornquist?”
“No.”
“Could an animal?”
“A bear maybe.”
Absalom crouched beside the post. “Bear would break wood different.”
Voss sighed. “Everything breaks different up here, according to you.”
“Yes,” Absalom said.
They found the gate at midday.
It lay nearly a quarter mile east of the cabin, in a patch of salal beneath a fallen cedar. One of the Pruitt brothers, called back into service by the sheriff’s promise of pay, stumbled over it while searching a slope no one had covered carefully before.
The gate was intact except for the torn hinges.
