But looking at the time they’d spent here as a whole, forest instead of tree, it felt a lot like his life — so many good times, some pain, and it had all raced by faster than he could’ve imagined.
Roger crawled to the thicket’s edge and started up the hill, the flashlight and the Glock shoved down the back of his fleece pants.
After five minutes, he stopped to catch his breath.
He thought he’d been making a horrible racket, dead leaves crunching under his elbows as he wriggled himself under the low branches of the rhododendron shrubs. But he assured himself it wasn’t as much noise as he thought. To anyone else, to Donald, it probably sounded like nothing more than the after-hour scavenging of a raccoon.
Roger was breathing normally again and had rolled over on his stomach to continue crawling when he spotted the outline of a tent twenty yards uphill. The moon shone upon the rain fly, and in the lunar light he could only tell that it was dark in color.
He pulled the gun out of his waistband.
His chest felt tight, and he had to take several deep breaths to make the lightheadedness dissolve.
Then he was crawling again, though much slower now, taking care to avoid patches of dead leaves and low-clearance branches that might drag across his jacket.
The tent stood just ahead, a one-man A-frame. He was still hidden in shadow, but another few feet and he’d emerge from the cover of darkness into the moonlit glade.
Roger lay beside the tent and held his breath, listening for deep breathing indicative of Donald sleeping, if in fact this was even the man’s tent. He didn’t know how long he lay there. Two minutes. A quarter of an hour. Whichever it was, it felt like ages elapsed, and he still hadn’t heard a sound from inside.
Maybe Donald wasn’t in there. Maybe he’d already found a spot to hide and watch their tent. Maybe he was a silent sleeper. Maybe he’d heard Roger crawling toward him through the rhododendron and was sitting up right—
“That you out there, Roger?”
Roger jumped up and scrambled back toward the thicket.
He stopped at the edge of the glade, his gun trained on the tent, trembling in his hand.
“Would you tell me something?” Donald asked. “Was she alive right after you hit her? She was dead when the paramedics arrived.”
Roger had to wet the roof of his mouth with his tongue so he could speak.
“She was gone instantly,” he lied.
“You didn’t tell your wife, did you?”
“No.”
“She seemed surprised. Does she know you came over here? Did you discuss it with her after I left? Tell her what you’d done?”
“What were you going to do to us?”
“Not a thing.”
“I don’t believe that. How’d you find me?”
“When the police gave up, I spent thousands of dollars on a P.I. who located and investigated everyone who owned a silver Lexus in the St. Paul area. I’ve had conversations like I had with you and Sue tonight with a half-dozen other people I suspected, feeling them out, gauging their reactions.”
“You didn’t know for sure it was me?”
“Not until this moment, Roger. Not until you crept up to my tent at one in the morning with what I imagine is that Glock, registered to Sue. That pretty much convinces me.”
“Do you have a gun in there?”
“No.”
Roger glanced over his shoulder into the thicket, then back toward the tent. There was a part of him dying to just slink away.
“What do you want, Donald?”
“I already got it.”
“What?” Roger could hear Donald moving around in the tent.
“The truth.”
“So that’s it? We just go our separate ways, pretend this night never happened.”
“No, it happened. But it doesn’t have to end like I suspect it will.”
“How does this end, Donald?”
“Are you asking if I’m going to turn you in?”
“Are you?”
“What would you do? If I’d hit Jennifer or Michelle, spread their brains all over the pavement?”
“Are you threat—”
“No, I’m asking you, father to father, if you knew who the man was who’d killed your daughter, what would you do?”
“I’d want to kill—”
“Not want. What would you do?”
“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”
“Beat you to death with my bare hands. That’s what I want to do. Not what I will do.”
Roger stood up, took six steps toward the tent.
Donald said, “Roger? Where are you?”
“Right here, Donald.”
“You’re closer.”
“Listen to me,” Roger said. “I want you to know that I am so sorry. And I know it doesn’t do a goddamn thing to bring Tabitha back, but it’s the truth. I was just so scared. You understand?”
“Thank you, Roger.”
“For what?”
“Saying her name.”
Roger fired six times into the tent.
His ears ringing, gunshots still reverberating off the mountains, he said, “Donald?”
There was no answer, only wet breathing.
He went to the tent door and unzipped it and took out his flashlight and shined it inside.
Donald lay on his back, the only visible wound a hole under his left eye, and the blood looked like oil running out of it.
Roger moved the flashlight around, searching for a gun in Donald’s hand, something to mitigate what he’d done, but the only thing Donald clutched was a framed photograph of an auburn-haired teenager with a braces smile.
Three days later, seated at the same table they’d occupied a week before at the Grove Park Inn’s Sunset Terrace, they watched the waiter place their entrees before them and top off their wineglasses from a bottle of pinot noir.
The August night was cool, even here in the city, like maybe summer would end after all.
Near the bar, a tuxedoed man was at a Steinway playing Mozart, one of his beautiful concertos.
“How’s your filet?” Sue asked.
“It’s perfect. Yours?”
“I could eat this every day.”
Roger forced a smile and took a big sip of wine.
They ate in silence.
After a while, Sue said, “Roger?”
“Yes, honey?”
“We did it right, yeah?”
It annoyed him that she would bring it up over dinner, but he was well on his way toward inebriation, a nice buffer swelling between himself and all that had come before.
“I don’t know how we could’ve been more thorough,” he said.
“I keep thinking we should’ve moved his car.”
“That would’ve been just another opportunity for us to leave evidence. Skin cells, sweat, hair, fibers of our clothing, prints. I thought it through, Sue.”
She reached across the table and took his hand, the karat diamond he’d given her twenty-four years ago sending out a thousand slivered facets of candlelight.
“Above all, it was for the girls. Their safety,” she said.
“Yeah. For the girls.”
The scent of a good cigar swept past.
“You’ll be able to go on all right?” Sue asked. “With what... what you had to do?”
Roger was cutting into his steak, and he kept cutting, didn’t meet her eyes as he answered, “I’ve had practice, right?”
It was early October when it occurred to one of the forest rangers of the Pisgah district that the black Buick Regal with a Minnesota license plate, parked near the restrooms of the Big East Fork trailhead, had been there for a long damn time, which was particularly strange considering no one had been reported missing in the area.