CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
A Flicker of Signal
It was Denny who came tearing across the pavilion two mornings later, breathless in a way I'd rarely seen from a man who generally treated urgency as something other people indulged in, waving what looked like the campground's old emergency radio unit over his head like a trophy.
"Got some part of it," he announced, to the room at large, though his eyes found Sam first. "Just a flicker, mind you, might not hold more than a minute or two, but the repeater tower must have finally thawed out enough to catch a signal again. I don't know how long it'll last."
Sam was on his feet before Denny had finished the sentence, and I followed close behind as the two of them hurried to the small equipment closet where the radio lived, Denny already fiddling with the dial, his brow furrowed in fierce concentration.
"There," he said, as a burst of static crackled through, thin and warbling but unmistakably real, the first sound from beyond Wren Lake's own walls any of us had heard in nearly a week. "Might only get one call through before it drops again. Make it count."
Sam's hands, I noticed, were steadier than I felt entitled to expect, given how much rode on whatever he managed to say in the next several minutes.
He keyed the unit, identified himself plain and clear, badge number and all, and asked, with the specific calm urgency of a man who'd spent years learning just how to sound credible under pressure, to be patched through to the sheriff's department, priority traffic.
The reply, when it eventually crackled back through the static, was faint and broken, half the words swallowed by interference, but I recognized, with a small jolt of relief, the voice of Sheriff Talbot himself, gruff and startled and plainly glad to hear from anybody at Wren Lake after this long a silence.
"Sam, that you? We've been trying to reach that full stretch of county for six days. Everybody all right out there?"
"We lost a camper," Sam said, plain, no wasted words, the signal too precious to spend on anything but the essentials.
"Everett Boyle, natural causes, heart condition, confirmed.
Body's preserved, needs the coroner once roads clear.
Listen close, Sheriff, this next part matters more than anything else I've got to tell you, and I might only get to say it once. "
"Go ahead."
"The Idella Marsh case. I've got hard evidence now, her own notes, letters going back two decades, naming Curtis Pratt directly, connecting him to the Ashford survey fraud and a pattern of altered boundary filings going back years.
Motive, pattern, her own fear of him documented in her own hand right up to weeks before she died.
" Sam's voice had gone tight, urgent. "I need you to pull whatever you can on Curtis Pratt's current whereabouts, quietly, and I need eyes kept on him the moment you're able to manage it.
If word reaches him that this evidence exists before we can get it properly into your hands, I don't trust what a man like that might do to keep it from ever arriving. "
There was a pause, static hissing thin and uncertain, and I held my breath along with everyone else who'd gathered close by that point, Walt and Marion and Deloris and Otis all crowded near the closet door, the whole room gone silent and waiting.
"Copy that," Talbot's voice came back finally, crackling.
"I'll get somebody discreet watching his place starting tonight.
Soon as roads clear enough for a vehicle to reach you, I'm sending a team out myself to collect whatever you've got and take your full statement.
" A burst of static swallowed a few words, and then his voice came back, rougher.
"Sam, listen. There's already been some noise, past couple months, county commissioner's office getting quiet questions about Pratt land holdings from some state auditor's clerk.
Nothing formal yet, but if word's already moving through channels above mine, a man like that might have his own ear to the ground too. Move careful."
"Understood," Sam said, and I saw something tighten across his shoulders that hadn't been there a moment before, some new weight settling onto what had already felt, to the rest of us standing crowded in that little closet, like more than enough weight for one crackling radio call to carry. "Any word on the roads?"
"County plows are staged and ready, first crews rolling the minute this second front clears enough to move safely.
Two days, maybe three, if we're lucky and this weather doesn't decide to surprise us twice in one week.
" Talbot's voice roughened further, warmer now, plainly relieved past whatever professional caution he usually carried.
"Glad you're all right out there, Sam. Glad Josie's all right.
Complete department's been worried sick, not knowing. "
"We're managing," Sam said, and I heard, underneath the plain words, everything he wasn't saying about the past week, Everett's death and the grief that had followed it, Idella's letters and the year of patient searching that had at last paid off, all of it folded down small enough to fit inside two words meant for a man three counties away who couldn't have carried the weight of the fuller story even if there'd been time to give it to him.
"It wasn't just me," Sam said, and I saw him glance toward me across the small crowded room, something warm and grateful passing between us even in the middle of everything else.
"Idella Marsh and Everett Boyle did the hard part, years ago, at real cost to both of them.
We're just the ones lucky enough to finally be standing here to finish it. "
The signal dropped, then, static swallowing the last of Talbot's reply entirely, and Denny worked the dial a long, tense minute trying to coax it back before eventually shaking his head, resigned.
"That's it. Tower's gone soft again. Might be hours before it flickers back, might be another full day.
" He set the unit down carefully, as though it had earned some measure of respect for what it had just managed.
"But you got through. That's the important part. However brief it was, you got through."
The room seemed to exhale all at once, a low, relieved murmur moving through the gathered crowd, and I found Deloris standing very still near the back of it, her hand pressed against her mouth, and understood, watching her, exactly what those few crackling minutes had meant to her, the first real, official motion toward answers she'd been chasing alone for twenty five years.
Theo pushed his way to the front of the small crowd, notebook already open, pencil moving fast. "Does this mean it's really over?" he asked, looking up at Sam with wide, hopeful eyes. "Are they going to arrest him now, today?"
"Not today," Sam said, crouching to meet him thoroughly at eye level, the way he always did when he wanted a hard truth to land gently.
"These things take time, even once the right people know where to look.
But it means the sheriff's office knows what we know, and it means someone besides us is watching Curtis Pratt starting tonight.
That's a real step, Theo. A big one. Sometimes the biggest step in solving a piece of it isn't the arrest itself, it's making sure the right people finally have the truth in their hands. "
"I'm putting it in my notebook," Theo declared, solemn, already writing. "Case update. Evidence delivered. Suspect under watch." He looked up again, considering. "Denny's going to want to hear all of this. He said following a case all the way through is the best part of the whole job."
"Go find him, then," I said, smiling despite everything, and watched him hurry off, notebook clutched tight, already rehearsing, I suspected, precisely how he meant to tell it.
I made my way to Deloris, who hadn't moved from her spot near the back of the crowd, her hand still pressed against her mouth, her eyes bright with something caught between fear and a fragile, hard won hope.
"They're watching him," she said, quiet, almost disbelieving. "Actually watching him. After all this time."
"They're watching him," I confirmed, and reached for her hand, and felt her grip it hard, her entire body trembling faintly with something that wasn't quite relief yet but was clearly working its way there.
Sam found me a little later, alone near the window, the pavilion around us settling back into its ordinary evening rhythms despite everything that had just passed through it, and I saw, beneath his obvious relief, a cautious, watchful tension that hadn't been there before.
"You're worried," I said, not a question.
"I'm careful," he corrected, gentle, though I heard the honesty underneath it.
"A man like Curtis Pratt, cornered and frightened, doesn't always do the sensible thing, Josie.
Sometimes he does exactly the opposite of sensible, especially if word of tonight's call somehow reaches him before Talbot's people manage to get eyes on him properly.
" He looked out at the darkening snow, his jaw set.
"I'd feel a great deal better once we've got him fully in custody, and not one moment sooner. "
"The roads are still buried," I said, though I heard my own uncertainty in it. "He can't get anywhere near here, surely, not with the whole county still shut down tight."
Sam didn't answer right away, and in the hushed that stretched between us, with the wind picking back up soft against the windows and somewhere out in the dark a man who'd spent years hiding an old, ugly truth suddenly, freshly aware that the truth had at last found its way loose, I understood that whatever relief tonight's brief, crackling signal had bought us, neither of us was quite ready yet to call this particular danger fully behind us.