He finished his lunch, which was cold, while the owner cleaned up the vacated table. The last selection finished on the jukebox, and the only sound in the Bear Trap was the ticking of the clock and the clink of the empty glasses she gathered from the table.
He gestured toward the poster. “This kind of thing is on the news so much these days it probably doesn’t even seem real to them.”
“They didn’t even leave me a tip,” the proprietress said as she stacked the dirty plates and glasses behind the bar.
PULLING OFF the road near his mailbox, Jess got his mail and tossed it on the seat next to him. Fiona had placed a Post-It note on an envelope from the county tax assessor with the words “BETTER OPEN THIS!!!” on it.
After changing into his work clothes and replacing his new Stetson with his sweat-stained old one, Jess stuck a pair of fencing pliers in his back pocket and saddled Chile. There was a cold, heavy stone in his belly as he rode up a slate-rock ridge that overlooked the ranch hill on the north side of the near meadow.
Growing up, Jess Rawlins had explored every inch of the ranch within riding distance of the house, and the rest later, on overnights via horseback or dirt bike. He had spent most of his time alone, and he was intimate with the folds of the terrain, the stands of trees, the overhang bank along the creek where he could reach down into the water and, if he was gentle, feel the gills flutter on the three-pound trout that lived there.
The slate-rock ridge was 150 yards from his house. The teeth of the ridge could be seen against the horizon from his porch and from the road, but the slope behind it was obscured from view. It was the perfect place to see but not be seen.
As a boy, Jess had created scenarios where he went into action and saved his family from outside threats. When he was very young he used to imagine Indians attacking. Later, it was escaped criminals or Communists. Aiming down the length of a broom handle or a BB gun, he had hidden himself on the top of the ridge with slate-rock outcroppings, and picked off his targets as they moved down out of the trees into the open ranch yard below. From the outcropping, the main ranch road was in full view as it spilled out of the trees and curved down the hillside in looping switchbacks before straightening for the ranch house. From his perch behind the slate rocks, he would see his mother through the window in her kitchen, but she couldn’t see him. She had no idea he was up there saving her, saving the ranch.
Sometimes, he remembered, the situation got so desperate that he would need to counterattack. He would rise to his feet, holler a war cry, and charge down the hill, bobbing and weaving toward the house as his enemies shot at him. Sometimes they hit him, and to make the action realistic, he would splash water from his canteen on the place where the bullet hit, so he could feel the wetness of the blood. He would be practically soaked by the time he made it to the house and dispatched the last of the bad guys, despite his massive and fatal wounds.
At dinner, his mother would ask him why he was wet. He would say, “I am?”
Years later, he had shown this place to his son, Jess Jr., even urged the boy to hunker down behind the slabs of slate that poked twelve to fourteen inches through the grassy surface of the ridge like shields. Not that he wanted the boy to create scenarios of his own, but he hoped his son would simply appreciate the view the ridge afforded of the ranch, the land, the open vista bordered by dark trees. His son had looked around, then turned to Jess with a shrug, and asked how long it was until dinner.
HE PICKED his way down the slate-rock ridge, looking out at the newborn calves and their mothers, including the new arrivals from the night before, who were racing around in the fenced-off meadow, bawling, quiet only when they were sleeping or nursing from their mothers. He liked new calves. It was the only time in their lives they were ever clean, and their russet-and-white coloring was vibrant. They smelled fresh.
He rode through them, climbed the other side of the corral fence to the near meadow, and followed the fence to the top of the hill. The barbed wires had sagged between two posts, leaving enough of a gap that the calves could escape if they figured it out. Even so, they wouldn’t go far from their mothers, and both mothers and babies would make a god-awful racket trying to reunite. The desperate mothers might cut themselves up on the wire trying to get to their newborns. He dismounted, tightened the wire, and pounded new staples into the posts. After finishing, he did what he always did, which was to walk along the fence, thumping each post to make sure it was sound, making sure the bottoms hadn’t rotted away.
That’s when he saw the strip of color hanging from a barb on the second strand from the top.
Jess bent over and looked at it. The yellow strip was no wider than a half inch and an inch long. It wasn’t frayed or bleached out by the sun or rain, which meant it was new. Maybe, he thought, one of the search team members had brushed too close to his fence. He remembered the description of the Taylor girl from the poster, that she was last seen wearing a yellow sweatshirt.
Then, in the mud near his boots, he noticed two footprints. One was from a small athletic shoe. The other, slightly larger, was made by a bare foot.
He stood up and looked out over his ranch in the direction the footprints were aimed. They were headed for his barn.
Saturday, 2:50 P.M.
I HEAR someone coming,” Annie said, bending forward and clapping her hand over William’s mouth and muzzling a long complaint about how hungry he was. William squirmed in protest and reached up to pry her hand away but heard it too: crunching footfalls in loose gravel outside the barn.
IT HAD been Annie’s idea to hide in the barn the night before, after they had shinnied through the limp strands of a barbed-wire fence. They had seen the barn roof glowing in the cloud-muted blue moonlight. The barn was situated in an open area at the foot of the slope, a clearing that held back the black wall of trees. There was a house down there, too, in fact two of them, but they were dark and she didn’t want to knock on any doors. After what had happened at Mr. Swann’s, she didn’t trust anyone.
They had held hands as they crossed the ranch yard, stepping as lightly as they could through the gravel, waiting for the charge of barking, snarling cow dogs that never came. Instead, a blocky old Labrador approached them, tail wagging, and licked William’s hand.
Luckily, the barn was empty except for a fat cow that stood still and silent in a stall. Half of the barn was filled with pungent hay bales stacked up to the rafters. Annie and William climbed them using the stair-step pattern of stacked bales until they were on the top of the hay. There, she decided, was where they would stop and rest. From the top, she could look down on the floor of the barn and see all of the doors.
“We need to build a nest,” she told William.
“Let’s call it a fort,” he said. “A fort sounds better.”
“Okay, a fort.”
“I’ll protect us,” William said. “I got outlaw blood in me.”
“You mean Billy? Stop that.”
“Dad was an outlaw.”
Annie glared at him. “William, your dad was a criminal.”
“He was your dad, too.”
“I doubt it.”
William’s eyes misted, his upper lip trembled, and Annie felt bad for what she’d said.
“I’m really sorry. Never mind that,” she said. “Let’s build our fort.” “I can do it, really,” William said through a shuddering breath.
“I know you can,” she said.
The bales were heavy, but not so heavy that the two of them couldn’t lift six out of the top row by the twine that bound them and stack the bales around the hole they had formed. Their fort was two bales deep into the stack.