But to accuse Amos of taking a child, that was something else. Amos hadn’t done serious harm in Yuneetah that Ellard knew of, although he got a feeling the man might be capable of murder just from the deadness in his one eye. Amos was dangerous aside from any threat he posed to the Dodsons. It had been so long since Ellard last saw Amos he’d begun to hope the drifter had finally landed himself in the penitentiary somewhere. There must be a reason he was in Yuneetah during its last days that had nothing to do with Gracie Dodson, but Amos being seen hours before she disappeared seemed like too much of a coincidence. Whether she’d drowned or not, he might well have had a hand in whatever happened to her.
If Ellard had known before leaving the courthouse that Amos was around he could have radioed the other counties to be on the lookout for the drifter as well as for Gracie. He wished James had said more about the situation up front. Amos was a worse menace than the lake. He moved faster and with more cunning. He would be hard to track and Ellard needed backup if he meant to catch him, maybe more than the boys from Whitehall County. He would have to get the state police involved if Gracie didn’t turn up by morning. Now he moved around the house behind Annie Clyde with rain pouring off his hat brim. Nearly half an hour had passed from the time he turned up the track by the cornfield until they stopped at the elm beside the barn. “We can’t find the dog either,” James spoke up, his voice hoarse. “He was tied here. Gracie must have turned him loose.” Ellard bent with his lantern, drops falling from the leaves onto his back. He plucked the chain out of the bog at the base of the trunk. The links and hasp were unbroken. The slurry was marred with prints from both feet and paws, too mottled to tell Ellard anything useful. He stood and held the lantern aloft, lighting the tree’s skinned bark and the ropy twist of its roots. His brow knitted. Every second evidence was washing away and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. When he was ready to go on, they crossed the hayfield under the starless sky. Weeds whisked over Ellard’s slicker, water bounced off his shoulders. It had become nighttime. Looking up he saw that the clouds were dark shapes against a darker backdrop. The weather was dulling his senses, muffling his hearing, blurring his vision. It seemed to Ellard that everything was working against him and the Dodsons. The hour, the empty town, nature.
When they reached the second tree it shook like something alive, pelted leaves whirling, apples thudding. Ellard lowered himself to one knee and inspected the ground where Annie Clyde pointed. What might have been a footprint was now a misshapen trough. “It was there,” Annie Clyde said, begging with her eyes for him to believe her. He got to his feet and she took his arm again, jogging the lantern. “We ought to be out finding Amos,” she said. He looked at James standing hatless beside his wife, as if he didn’t feel the rain down the planes of his face. Their eyes met long enough for Ellard to see that what little hope James had had in the first place was waning. When Ellard plunged back into the weeds they followed like lost children themselves.
For another half hour they canvassed the farm. Ellard walked through the cornrows but Amos had left no trace behind. In the barn, the smokehouse, the corncrib, Ellard cast his light into corners looking for tracks in the dirt, blood drips on the plank walls, strands of hair or cloth snagged on nails. After the three of them had inspected the outbuildings they went back through the slapping hayfield weeds to where the trees started, the storm and the deep shade making the woods pitch black. Even with their lanterns it was near impossible to see under the dense canopy of leaves, fog seeping between the close trunks. Ellard could hardly hear himself shouting for Gracie over the storm. They climbed a ways up the mountain, calling to the child and whistling for the dog. But if she was calling back they couldn’t hear it. Or if Amos was in the trees laughing at them. All Ellard could do was keep his eyes open for signs of movement. Finally he led them out of the woods to convene in the hayfield. “I’ve done radioed Whitehall County,” he said. “They’ll be along anytime. We can talk back at the house until they get here.”
“We need our own people to look,” Annie Clyde rasped. “But everybody’s gone now.”
“There’s still some around,” Ellard said.
Annie Clyde leaned against James. “Where are your men? They’re taking too long.”
“Me and James’ll go on if they don’t make it before much longer,” Ellard said. “Best thing for you to do is stay and light the lamps so she can see to get home if she’s out here lost.”
“No. I’m going with you.”
James looked down. “Gracie can’t come back to an empty house.”
Ellard nodded. “I’d say she’ll be wanting her mama.”
It got quiet besides the rain tapping on the slickers of the men. Annie Clyde looked from James to Ellard, as if trying to believe it was possible that Gracie might come home on her own. Then she wilted, her shoulders caving. When her knees weakened James put his arm around her waist and helped her back across the field behind Ellard. They went in the kitchen door. James led Annie Clyde to the pine table where she sat staring at the stove as he made a fire in it. Ellard took a seat across from her while James lit the lamps. He removed his hat and set it aside on the table, hung his slicker from the back of the chair. He wondered if Annie Clyde or James wanted to change their clothes but they only waited for him to go on. He brought a notebook from his breast pocket and asked them to talk him through the details of the day. James began with coming home from Sevierville. Annie Clyde began with Gracie chasing the dog into the corn. Their voices flat, their eyes glazed. When they had both fallen silent he replaced the notebook in his pocket. “All right then,” he said. “You all sit and rest yourselves while I take a look around.”
Ellard stood and shrugged back into his slicker. Annie Clyde asked, as if out of nowhere, “Will you get my aunt Silver? I didn’t make it that far up the mountain. She don’t know yet.”
At the mention of Silver Ledford’s name Ellard felt his mouth corner twitching. He didn’t know if he could take her on top of everything else. She was a nerve-racking woman, and as far as Ellard knew not much of a doting aunt either. But he supposed Annie Clyde needed her mother right now and Silver was the closest thing she had. “I’ll send somebody up yonder to get your aunt before me and James leave,” he said. “You ought not to be here by yourself.”
Annie Clyde dropped her head, her hands lying limp in her lap. Ellard put on his hat and left her at the table with James to investigate the rest of the house, his shadow moving on the wallpaper. There was nothing out of place, no print they hadn’t tracked in themselves.
He thought as he climbed the stairs about what came next, once the Whitehall County constable made it to the farm. Beulah Kesterson would have to be questioned, but Ellard didn’t know how far he would get with her, in spite of the soft spot she had for him. Beulah had been something like a grandmother to Ellard growing up in the hollow. He’d spent many afternoons shooting marbles under the shade trees around her cabin. In the summers after Amos hopped a train he’d helped Beulah tend her goats and her bees. But he didn’t doubt where her loyalties lay. It might be better to send the constable up to see her, considering she knew Ellard and Amos to be enemies. She might be more willing to give Amos up to somebody else. Ellard needed to put most of his efforts tonight into rounding up a search party. Standing alone in the Dodsons’ bedroom, his lantern casting a shine on Gracie’s empty crib in the corner, he feared it would be a difficult task. He was relieved when he heard at last the sound of slamming vehicle doors and the faint but clear voices of men in the yard below. Ellard hoped for a competent tracker in the bunch, or that someone had brought along a dog. Though as far as Ellard knew there was one man in these parts that raised bloodhounds and he was in Clinchfield, an hour out of reach.