Chapter 7 #3
Only twenty points, but down, and the ketone strip came up the same shade as ten o'clock instead of darker.
Imogen let out a breath that seemed to come from her feet.
"It's turning," she said.
By five it was two forty and the strip was trace.
By seven, when the gray came into the window, it was one ninety eight and the strip was almost clear, and Merrit Crowe was sitting up eating oatmeal with honey in it and complaining that the honey was not enough.
Joe went out and stood in the yard in the freezing dawn and put his hands over his face and did not make a sound.
Arlan Crowe came at nine.
One vehicle. The flatbed. Two men who stayed in it.
He got out at the woodpile and stopped, and he stood there, and Joe came down off the porch and crossed the yard to meet him.
Crowe did not ask.
He stood absolutely still with his hat in his hands and he looked at Joe Henfry's face and waited, and Joe understood that this was a man who had decided he would take it standing up.
"She's fine," Joe said.
Crowe did not move.
"Say it again."
"She's fine. She had a bad night and my wife sat on the floor next to her for eleven hours and it turned around at two in the morning and she's inside eating oatmeal and complaining about it."
Arlan Crowe put his hat on.
Then he took it off again.
He stood in the yard of a man he had threatened on a radio, forty feet from a woodpile that hid a rifle rest, and something in his face came apart in a way that was very hard to look at, and he put his hand over his eyes for about four seconds.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay."
"Okay." He breathed out. "Trace or moderate?"
"Moderate at ten. Trace by five. Clear now."
"How much fluid did she get?"
"Imogen says two and a half liters."
"Jesus." Crowe laughed, wrecked. "She must have hated that."
"She complained about it for an hour."
"She complains about everything. She gets it from her mother."
He stopped.
Joe did not ask.
"Mister Henfry," Crowe said.
"Yeah."
"I had eleven men and two vehicles down at the county road all night."
Joe's stomach dropped.
"I know," Crowe said, before he could speak. "I know what that is. I want to tell you myself instead of you finding the tracks, because you'd find them, and then we'd be somewhere worse."
"Why were they there?"
"Because if my daughter died in your house last night I was going to burn it to the ground with everyone in it," Arlan Crowe said, "and I want you to know that, and I want you to know that I sat in that truck from midnight until dawn deciding not to be that man,
and I did not decide it until about twenty minutes ago when you walked across that yard."
Joe stood there.
"That's the most honest thing anybody's ever said to me," he said.
"I'm aware."
"Why tell me?"
"Because I'm done being the man who hands out true facts to watch what they do," Crowe said. "That worked when I had twenty two men and a filing cabinet and no problems. It does not work on a person my daughter's life depends on."
He looked at the house.
"Can I see her?"
"Yeah."
"Can I come in?"
Joe thought about a promise he had made on a floor at midnight.
"You can come in," he said, "and you can sit with her as long as you want. And Crowe."
"Yeah."
"The next time you put eleven men at the bottom of my road at night, you tell me first."
"Agreed."
"I'm serious. You tell me first, because if I find them and you haven't, I put a five hundred grain bullet through the block of your lead truck at four hundred and ten yards and we both live with what comes after."
Arlan Crowe looked at him with something like satisfaction.
"Good," he said. "That's the version of you I need."
He went inside.
Joe stayed in the yard.
Through the window he watched a compact man in a canvas coat go down on one knee beside a cot and a nine year old girl put both arms around his neck, and he watched Arlan Crowe's shoulders shake, and then he made himself stop watching.
He turned around.
Bill Tandy was standing at the corner of the shed with a shotgun and an expression Joe could not read.
"Bill?"
"Son," Bill said, "come look at this."
Joe came around the shed.
Behind it, in the fresh skiff of snow that had come down at four in the morning and had not been touched since, there was a line of boot prints.
They came out of the timber on the north side.
They walked the length of the back wall of the shed, past the ground mounted solar array, past the screen of cut aspen.
They stopped at the workbench window and stood there. Two prints, side by side, deep, where a man had stood still for a long time.
And then they went back into the timber.
Joe crouched and put his hand next to one of them.
Big. Lug soled. And on the right heel, worn into the tread, a notch shaped like a half moon.
"When?" he said.
"After four," said Bill. "Snow stopped at four."
Joe stood up slowly.
Four in the morning. While nine people had been awake in his front room, watching a child breathe, with every lamp in the house lit and every eye on a cot.
A man had walked up to his shed and stood at the window and watched them do it.