Chapter 9 #3
He came up the drive at seven.
The house was lit and the smoke was going and Imogen came out on the porch and he knew from forty yards that something had happened, because she was standing with her arms down at her sides.
He got out.
"What."
"Nobody's hurt," she said immediately. "That's the first thing. Everybody's fine."
"Imogen."
"He came back," she said.
Joe's stomach went to ice.
"When?"
"Three hours ago. Same as before, right up the drive, hat off."
"Did he."
"He didn't do anything. He stood on the step and he asked for you and I said you were down the canyon, and he said, that's fine."
"And then?"
Imogen held out her hand.
There was a piece of paper folded in quarters in it.
"He said to give you this," she said, "and he said to tell you he's sorry about the shot on the road, and that it was the only way he could think of to find out if you'd run."
Joe unfolded the paper.
It was a page torn out of a notebook. Four lines, in pencil, in the same hand as the back of the photograph.
He read it twice.
Then he sat down on the porch step with his coat still on and read it a third time, and Imogen crouched next to him and read it over his shoulder.
It said:
YOUR WIFE'S FATHER PAID ME FOR ELEVEN YEARS.
I AM STILL ON THE CLOCK.
THERE IS A THIRD GROUP IN THIS VALLEY AND IT IS NOT MINE AND IT IS NOT CROWE'S.
THEY WILL COME UP YOUR ROAD ON THE FIRST HARD FREEZE.
Joe read it a fourth time and then handed it to Bill Tandy without a word.
Bill read it. Then Pruitt read it. Then it went around that kitchen table until every adult in the house had held it, and when it came back to Joe he laid it flat next to the photograph and the cartridge and looked at all three objects together.
"Okay," he said. "Somebody argue with me."
"About what?" said Colby.
"About any of it. I want every single hole in this that anybody can find and I want them now, because in about four days I'm going to have to make decisions based on it."
Delores went first.
"It's a lie," she said. "Front to back. He wants us watching the road for a group that doesn't exist so we're looking the wrong way when he does whatever he came to do."
"That's good," Joe said. "That's the best one. Next."
"It's half a lie," said Pruitt. "There's a third group and he's in it, and this is how he gets invited up the hill before the freeze."
"Also good."
"It's true," said Sylvie.
Everybody looked at her.
"What?" she said. "Somebody has to say it. It might just be true."
"Why would it be?"
"Because he's been here eleven days and he hasn't done anything."
Sylvie folded her arms. "He shot past Joe's ear on a road when he could have killed him. He came to the door twice and took his hat off. He walked up to the shed at four in the morning when everybody in this house was awake and looking at a sick kid and he could have done anything at all and he
stood at a window and then left."
"That's not evidence," said Bill.
"It's eleven days of evidence," Sylvie said. "That's more evidence than we have about anybody else in this valley."
Joe put his hand on the note.
"Imogen," he said. "You've been quiet."
"I've been reading the first line."
"And?"
Imogen sat down across from him.
"Eleven years," she said. "Not ten, not twelve. Eleven."
"So?"
"So my father died in 2011 and he sold the yard in 2004 because his back went. That's a seven year gap." She tapped the paper. "If somebody was on his payroll for eleven years, that's either 1993 to 2004, or it's something that kept going after the business closed."
"Which would be what?"
"I don't know," Imogen said. "But I'll tell you what bothers me. My father was not a man who paid anybody for eleven years."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning he hired and fired constantly. He had eleven guys in that yard and none of them lasted. Two years was a long run. He was difficult and he was cheap and he did not keep people."
She pushed her hair back.
"Eleven years is not an employee," she said. "Eleven years is something else."
"Like what?"
"Like a retainer," Imogen said.
The word sat there.
"For what?" said Bill.
"That," Imogen said, "is what I've been asking myself since four o'clock this afternoon, and I don't have anything, and it is making me insane."
Joe picked up the note and read the last two lines again.
"Put that aside," he said. "It's a question and I've already decided I'm not paying for questions. Let's do the part that's actionable."
"The third group," said Pruitt.
"The third group and the first hard freeze."
Bill Tandy looked out the window.
"That's the part that scares me," he said.
"Why?"
"Because it's not a threat, son. It's a forecast." Bill turned around. "A man who wants to frighten you says they're coming. A man who knows something says they're coming on the first hard freeze, and that's a specific thing, and specific things can be checked."
"So check it," Joe said. "Why the freeze?"
Nobody spoke.
Then Colby, of all people, said, "The creek."
Everybody turned.
"What?"
"The creek," Colby said. "Down in the bottom, where the state road crosses. That whole flat down there floods every spring and it's soft as pudding, and I got a truck stuck in it in September and it took two hours."
Pruitt sat forward slowly.
"He's right," he said.
"Say it plain," Joe said.
"There's two ways into this valley," Pruitt said. "The county road, which comes up past the elevator and past Crowe's yard and past four occupied houses and a gate. And the river bottom."
"Which nobody uses."
"Which nobody uses because it's a bog eleven months of the year."
Pruitt stood up and went to the map on the wall.
"But it's flat. It's flat all the way from the state road to the base of this mountain and it comes out about a mile and a half below your gate, on the creek side, below where anybody's watching."
He put his finger on it.
"And when it freezes hard," he said, "it's a road."
The kitchen went absolutely silent.
"How hard?" Joe said.
"Two nights in the low teens," said Bill. "Maybe three. Once that ground sets up you could drive a loaded truck across it and never know there was water underneath."
Joe stared at the map.
"So a man who knows this valley," he said slowly, "knows there's a back door that opens in November and stays open until March."
"And closes again in the spring melt," said Pruitt.
"Which means whoever's coming has one window and they know it."
Joe put both hands on the table and leaned on them.
"That's the most useful sentence anybody has said in this house in three weeks," he said. "And it came out of a note from a man we don't trust."
"That's how it works," said Imogen. "That's exactly how it works. He gives us one true thing that's expensive for us to verify, and now we spend the next month building around it, and if it's a lie we've spent the month."
"And if it's true?"
"If it's true we live."
Joe went out on the porch alone at ten.
It was cold. Properly cold, the first real cold of the year, the kind that dried the inside of his nose on the first breath.
He stood there with his hands in his pockets and looked at the sky.
Clear. No cloud at all, and the stars were hard and sharp and there were more of them every week as the air got drier.
Clear sky in November meant radiational cooling.
Clear sky in November meant the freeze was not four days out. It was maybe two.
He went back inside and got the map.
They planned for two days straight.
Joe put everything else down, which was the hardest decision of the whole week, because the elevator was moving and Ivers was waiting on him and Harlan Batey had convened a board that expected a man to show up.
He sent Sylvie and Bill instead.
"I can't be in two places," he told them. "You're the two people in this valley that board wants to see anyway. Go be Joe Henfry for four days."
"And what'll you be doing?" Sylvie asked.
"Building a wall."
They did not build a wall.
They built something better, and the idea came from Zachary, which Joe would tell people about for the rest of his life.
They were standing at the map. Joe and Pruitt and Ivers, who had stayed on, and Imogen with her arms crossed.
The problem was stated and it was ugly.
"A mile and a half of open bottom," Joe said, "coming out onto the base of this mountain below everything we watch. I've got nine people, four of whom are children or elderly. I cannot cover a mile and a half."
"Can you block it?" Ivers said.
"With what? You'd need a hundred yards of ditch in frozen ground."
"Trees," said Pruitt. "Drop timber across the approach."
"They've got chainsaws. Crowe's got chainsaws, so somebody else does."
"Not if they don't have gas."
"Everybody's got a little gas."
They went in circles for an hour.
And Zachary, who had been sitting under the table with the canning lids because that was where he liked to be, said:
"Why don't you just make them come up the front?"
Joe stopped.
"Say that again."
Zachary came out from under the table.
"You said there's two doors," he said. "You said you can't watch the back door. So make the back door bad."
"Bad how?"
"I don't know." He shrugged. "When Hazel and me play hide and seek in the timber, we don't block the paths. We just make some of them worse than the others and then people take the good one."
Joe looked at Pruitt.
Pruitt looked at Joe.
"Out of the mouth of a nine year old," Ivers said.
They spent the next forty eight hours making the back door bad.
Not blocked. Bad.
That was the whole discipline of it and Joe repeated it about eleven times a day, because everybody's instinct was to try to stop things and stopping things was impossible.
They did not build a barricade.
They dropped four aspen across the bottom track at the narrowest point, at a bad angle, so that a vehicle could get around them but only by turning off the frozen track and onto ground that was maybe frozen and maybe not.
Then they went upstream four hundred yards and broke a beaver dam.