Chapter 5
The radio hissed.
Joe Henfry sat perfectly still in his own front room with a dead man's hat on the table beside him and eleven words going around in his head like a wheel.
Because I have your son.
Then he was moving.
He did not remember standing up. He was on the stairs, three at a time, and he hit the door of the kids' room with his shoulder hard enough to crack the jamb.
Two beds.
Hazel sat up like she had been shot, blonde hair everywhere, hands out.
The other bed was empty.
"Zachary," Joe said.
"Dad?"
"Where is your brother."
"He's, I don't."
Joe was already gone.
He went down the hall and threw open the door to the loft where Sylvie slept, and Sylvie came awake with a gasp, and there was no nine year old boy in that room either.
He went down the stairs so fast he came off the last four and hit the floor on his hands.
"IMOGEN."
She was up out of the chair by Tobin with her hair in her face. "What. What."
"Where's Zachary."
Her face went white in a way he had never seen on any human being.
"He was in bed at nine," she said. "I put him in bed at nine. I put him in bed myself."
"He is not in bed."
"Joe."
"He is not in bed, Imogen, the bed is empty."
And then Bill Tandy said, from the dark of the kitchen doorway, in the calmest voice anybody had used in that house in four days:
"Root cellar."
Joe stopped.
"What."
"He's in the root cellar," Bill said. "He's been down there since about ten. Came through here with a candle and a notebook and told me he had a job to finish."
Joe crossed that kitchen in four steps and hauled the cellar hatch up so hard it banged against the wall.
Zachary Henfry was sitting on an overturned bucket at the bottom of the stairs, in a nest of candlelight, with a stub of pencil in his hand and a spiral notebook on his knee and about four hundred canning lids counted into stacks of eleven around his feet.
He looked up.
"I'm not done," he said.
Joe went down the stairs and picked him up off the bucket, notebook and all, and held him so hard the boy squawked.
"Dad."
"Yeah."
"Dad, you're squishing me."
"Yeah," Joe said.
The cellar smelled like dirt and onions and candle smoke and it was the best thing he had ever smelled in his life.
Upstairs, nobody said anything for a while.
Imogen sat on the floor with her back against the cabinets and her son in her lap, and Zachary, who did not understand anything that had happened and was beginning to suspect he was in trouble, kept saying that he had only gone down to finish the lids.
"You're not in trouble," Imogen said into his hair.
"Then why is everybody crying."
"Because we're tired," she said.
Joe stood at the window with both hands on the sill.
"He was lying," he said.
"He was lying," Bill agreed.
"He was lying and I believed it for eleven seconds and I lost eleven seconds."
"That's what it's for," Bill said. "That's the whole purpose of it, son. He doesn't need to take anything from you. He just needs you to spend the night the way you just spent the last four minutes, and then he needs to come up that road at nine in the morning and talk to a man who hasn't slept."
Joe turned around.
"Then we sleep," he said.
"Joe."
"Everybody sleeps. In shifts. Two up, seven down. I want everyone in this house horizontal for at least four hours before dawn, and that is the single most important thing any of us do tonight."
Imogen looked up at him from the floor.
"That might be the smartest thing you've ever said," she said.
"Hazel said something similar yesterday."
"Hazel's right a lot."
"She's eleven."
"She's eleven and she's right a lot," Imogen said. "It's very annoying."
From the stairs, Hazel said, "I can hear you."
They did it.
It was the hardest thing Joe had ever asked of anyone and they did it, because Bill Tandy made a schedule on the back of an envelope and Delores enforced it like a prison matron, and by two in the morning there were seven people asleep under that roof and two awake at the windows.
Joe took the last watch and came down at four.
He sat in the dark by the stove with the coffee he was not going to drink and made himself think.
Here is what you know.
He said he would come at nine. He said eleven men and two vehicles.
Every single thing he says is chosen.
So what does he actually want.
Joe turned it over.
He wants Imogen. That part is probably true, because it is too specific and too humiliating to be a lie. A man does not invent a nine year old daughter with diabetes when he is trying to sound frightening. He invents something bigger.
He wants her badly enough to drive up a road he does not know, into a place he cannot see, in daylight.
Which means he is not coming to take the bench.
He is coming to trade.
And the thing he is trading with is fear, because that is the only thing he has that is cheap.
Joe got up and got the map off the shelf and spread it on the table and set a candle on the corner.
Then he started writing.
He wrote until six fifteen.
When Imogen came down at six thirty he had eleven items on a sheet of paper and a rough sketch of the second switchback with four positions marked on it.
She read the whole thing standing up, without her coffee, and when she got to the bottom she put it down and said:
"You're going to meet him."
"Yes."
"On the road."
"At the second gate. Four hundred and ten yards below the house. He doesn't get to see the bench, he doesn't get to see the roof, he doesn't get to count anybody or anything. He gets a chain across a road and me."
"And if he just drives through you."
"Then the thirty aught six is in the timber on the uphill side with Pruitt behind it, and the Ruger is with me, and the first thing that happens is that the lead vehicle stops being a vehicle."
Imogen was quiet.
"Say the rest," she said.
"There is no rest. That's the plan. That's all of it."
"Joe."
"What."
"You wrote eleven things on that page and one of them is a question mark," she said. "So say the rest."
Joe sat down.
"The rest," he said, "is that if he's telling the truth about his daughter, I don't know what to do."
"Yes you do."
"I don't."
"You do," Imogen said, "because I already decided at four in the morning, and you know exactly what I decided, and you've been sitting down here for two hours trying to find a way to make it not so."
Joe put his hands over his face.
"You are not getting in a truck with that man."
"No," she said. "I'm not. I want to be very clear about that, because I want you to hear the difference between what I'm saying and what you're afraid I'm saying."
She pulled out the chair across from him and sat.
"I will not go with him. I will not leave this house. I will not put myself in the hands of a person who executed a man in a road yesterday afternoon in front of witnesses on purpose."
"Okay."
"And," she said, "I will treat his daughter."
Joe looked up.
"Imogen."
"I will treat his daughter," she said, "if he brings her here, and if he brings her here unarmed, and if he understands that she stays and he goes, and that the terms are mine from the first minute to the last."
"He'll never agree to that."
"Then his daughter dies and that is his doing and not mine."
Imogen's voice did not waver. "Joe, I've had this exact conversation nine hundred times with nine hundred parents, and I have never once lost it, because there is only one card on the table and I'm holding it. He can shoot me. That's all he can do. He cannot make me competent.
He cannot make me willing."
"He can threaten Hazel."
"Yes he can," Imogen said. "And that's why I'm not going to be the one standing on that road. You are. Because the second he sees me, everything he has left is aimed at me, and I would rather he spend his morning looking at a man who won't move."
Joe sat with that.
"You should have been in the military," he said.
"I was in pediatrics," Imogen said. "It's worse."
They set it at eight.
Pruitt went out first, up the uphill side of the drive, and got into a blowdown eleven feet off the ground on a bench of rock with the thirty aught six and two hundred rounds and a tarp the color of dead needles.
Joe walked the sight line four times and could not find him on the fourth.
Colby went low, on the creek side, with a shotgun and one job, which was to watch the ditch and put his whistle in his mouth if anybody came up it on foot.
"Don't shoot," Joe told him. "You are not there to shoot. You are there to make a sound."
"I can shoot."
"Colby. If you shoot today, I lose. That's what shooting means today. It means I lost."
The kid swallowed and nodded.
Bill Tandy took the house with the shotgun and Delores and the children and Sylvie and a boy who could not walk.
"If it goes wrong," Joe said, "you take them out the back and up the creek to the spring house and then over the saddle to the Broken Y."
"And if it goes wrong up there too?"
"Then you keep going."
Bill nodded once.
Imogen kissed him at the mudroom door and did not say anything at all, which was correct, and Hazel hugged him around the middle and said, "Four hundred and ten," and he said, "That's right," and then he went down the drive.
He set up at the gate.
He put the Ruger Number One across the top of a stack of split rounds he had hauled down at seven in the morning for exactly this reason, so that from the road it looked like a woodpile and from where he stood it was a rest.
He loaded it with one cartridge.
Five hundred grains of soft point, and the case was long and fat and cold in his fingers and the block closed over it with a sound like a bank vault.
Then he closed the gate, and leaned on the post, and waited.
They came at nine oh four.
Two vehicles, as promised. The rust colored Bronco with no doors and the flatbed with a winch bed on the back.
They came up the switchback slow, and they stopped at eighty yards, which told Joe that somebody in one of those trucks had also thought about distances.
Men got out. He counted.
Nine, not eleven.
Which meant two were somewhere else, and that was a problem for Colby in the ditch, and Joe put it in a box and set the box down.