Chapter 6
Stuart did not say anything for four seconds.
He did not say anything for a great deal longer than four seconds, and he was aware of Camille standing six feet off and the two other men behind her and the flat dead light on two and a half miles of snow,
and he knelt there on a bench in January with his hands on his knees and looked at a piece of leather.
"Do not pick it up," Camille said.
"I wasn't going to."
"You were going to."
"I was going to," Stuart admitted.
She came around and crouched on the other side of it and put her face down close to the snow and looked at the way it lay.
"It was under him," she said.
"Under him."
"Look at the crust. It is pressed into the crust and the pressing is his weight. That collar was on the ground before he was and he was put down on top of it."
Stuart made himself breathe out.
"So it did not come off the dog here."
"It did not come off anything here." Camille sat back on her heels. "There is no buckle mark in the snow. There is no place where an animal shook its head. That collar was carried here in a hand or a mouth and it was laid down flat, and a man was laid on top of it."
"That's not possible."
"I am telling you what is in the snow," Camille said. "You can decide later what is possible."
Gil Pruitt said, from behind them, "What is it?"
Stuart stood up.
He looked down at the collar, at the split seam and the crooked quarter inch stitches going the whole length of it, and he thought about a woman sitting in a kennel behind a brick wall for eleven years with hands that had been broken and set wrong, taking a night and a half apiece.
"It's a mailbag," he said.
"A what?"
"Never mind. Gil, go back to the town. Go at whatever speed you have got and do not stop for anybody, and tell Davey exactly this and nothing else. Tell him we have followed it two and a half miles onto the Hartung bench and we have found a dog collar and no body and no blood,
and tell him I am asking for four more people and a sledge and I am asking for Maddie."
"Maddie?"
"Maddie."
"Mr. Redman, there's no body."
"There is not one yet," Stuart said. "Go."
He went.
Sorenson stayed, because Stuart told him to, and the three of them stood on that bench in the gray for a while and did not touch the collar.
"Camille."
"Yes."
"Is it empty."
She looked at him.
"You have been standing there four minutes not asking me that."
"I have."
"Why."
"Because once I know, I cannot go back to not knowing," Stuart said, "and I have found in five years that a man gets about ninety seconds in his whole life to stand still before a thing like that and I have been taking mine."
Camille put out two fingers and turned the collar over without lifting it off the snow.
The seam had been opened again.
Not by a needle. The stitches on the underside had been cut, four or five of them, clean, with something sharp and small, and the leather gaped there about an inch and a half.
It was empty.
"Ah," Camille said.
"Yes."
"Somebody took it out."
"Somebody took it out," Stuart said, "and they took it out here, on this bench, in the last two hours, with a knife, and then they left the collar."
He looked all the way around the horizon.
The Hartung bench ran east about a mile and fell off into the creek brush on the north side and went up into scattered fir on the south, and there was nothing on it and nothing above it and nothing anywhere at all, fourteen days of dead air and a sky with no seam in it.
"There is nobody here," Sorenson said.
"There was nobody in that lane on Tuesday either."
The others came in fifty minutes and Maddie came with them, which Stuart had not entirely expected, on a sledge, wrapped in two blankets and complaining the whole way in a voice that carried across the bench.
Davey came too.
"You were told to stay in the town," Stuart said.
"I was not told anything of the kind. I run the town. The town is standing." Davey came off the sledge and looked at the snow. "Show me."
They showed him.
He walked the whole of it twice, the churned place where five animals had stopped at nine feet, the single track east, the drag, the bench, the clear place, the collar.
Then he stood in the middle of it with his hands in his pockets.
"All right," he said. "I am going to say what I think and then somebody is going to tell me why it is wrong."
"Go."
"A man got off a table and went out a door and walked eight hundred yards further than any man in that condition has ever walked, and lay down in the snow to die on the south flat, and five dogs came out of the creek brush at a trot and stopped nine feet short of him and stood there."
"That's what's in the ground."
"And then four of them went home," Davey said, "and one of them picked him up and carried him two and a half miles to a bench and put him down on a collar that had been laid out flat on the snow beforehand."
"That's what's in the ground."
"Stuart, that is not a thing that happens."
"No."
"Dogs do not carry men two and a half miles."
"No, they do not," Stuart said, "and the other thing they do not do is stop at nine feet."
Camille said, "Say that part."
"Five animals came four hundred yards downwind at a trot in a line," Stuart said, "and they stopped at nine feet and they stood. Camille says it was a long standing. Not one of them closed."
"So?"
"So a hungry dog does not stop at nine feet from a man who is down. A hungry dog goes. And a frightened dog does not come four hundred yards in the first place."
"Then what stops five dogs at nine feet."
Stuart looked at the tracks going away east.
"A word does," he said.
Nobody spoke.
"I have watched it done," Stuart said. "I have watched a girl of eleven put a half grown pup flat on the ground with a hand signal at four hundred yards, and I have watched a woman with ruined hands stop a shepherd that was already running,
and it is the most ordinary thing in the world if you have got the dog and the year to do it in."
"There is nobody in this snow," Sorenson said.
"There is nobody in this snow," Stuart agreed, "and I want everybody here to sit with that for a minute, because it means whoever did it did not come down onto that flat at all.
They stood off in the creek brush where the ice is bare and they sent five dogs four hundred yards out onto the open ground to a man who was down, and they stopped them at nine feet, and then they sent four home and put one to work."
Maddie said, from the sledge, "Then they were not there to kill him."
Everyone turned around.
"You are all standing there working out the how," Maddie said, "and not one of you has said the obvious thing, which is that if you wanted that boy dead you could have left him where he lay. He was twenty minutes off it. You do not send a dog two and a half miles for a man you want dead."
"That's right," Davey said slowly.
"Of course it is right. It is the only thing out here that is not complicated." Maddie pulled the blanket up. "Somebody wanted him alive and wanted him alive quick, and they had a means of getting him off that flat that did not require them to put one boot in the open, and they used it."
"Why not put a boot in the open," Camille said.
"Because there were eighty-seven people a quarter mile away," Stuart said, "and three of them on a platform with a long glass."
The bench went cold around them.
"They were watching the town," Davey said.
"They have been watching the town since the last week of December," Stuart said. "There was a camp on the north bench and it was there eleven days and we found it on Tuesday, and we all decided it was empty because the man on it rode north."
"You think he came back."
"I think it was never one man," Stuart said.
He turned around in the middle of the bench.
"Look at what has happened in four days. There was a rider on our north bench. There is somebody in the creek brush on our south flat with five dogs. There is a man with a knife on this bench in the last two hours.
I have been calling all of that one man on a horse because one man on a horse is a thing I know how to think about."
Camille said, "It is worse than that."
"Say it."
"The five dogs did not come from the creek brush this morning," she said.
"You cannot keep five dogs in creek brush in January. They came from somewhere with a fire and a roof and meat, and that place is not three miles from here, and it has been there long enough that nobody in your town has ever smelled one wisp of it."
Maddie made a small sound.
"What," Stuart said.
"Nothing."
"Maddie."
"It is not nothing, it is only that I am a stupid woman who has been busy," Maddie said. "The Kleiss woman came to me on the second of the month about her ear."
"Her ear."
"She said she had been hearing a dog at night. Away off south. She said it was two or three nights running and always in the small hours and she asked me was there something wrong with her ear, because nobody else had heard it."
Maddie put her hand over her eyes. "And I told her there was nothing wrong with her ear and that sound does strange things over snow in dead air, which is true, and I did not think about it again for eleven days."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"That is not your fault," Davey said.
"I know whose fault it is not," Maddie said. "I am telling you the date. The second of January. That is a week before that boy came off the field."
Stuart stood on the Hartung bench and felt the whole shape of the thing move again, the way it had moved in the Hall on Monday and in the lane on Tuesday, and he was getting very tired of it.
"Then they were here first," he said. "All of them. Not just the rider."
"And the boy walked into it."
"The boy walked into it," Stuart said, "and he knew he had, and he told me so at two in the morning on the tenth and I did not understand what he was telling me, because he said he had not been walking alone and I heard one man behind him and he meant something else entirely."
They took the collar.