Now Ellard wondered if Amos still had a hold over Silver. He looked at the damp she’d left on the seat, the same shape her hair used to make when she lay on the ground underneath him. He put his hand on the upholstery and pressed but nothing seeped up. She knew something she wasn’t saying. He would talk to her again if he hadn’t found Gracie or Amos by this afternoon. The constable had gone to see Beulah Kesterson last night and gotten nowhere with her either. It was time for Ellard to pay Beulah a visit himself. He pulled his revolver from its holster, popped out the cylinder, emptied the bullets into his hand then reloaded them. As he sat behind the wheel of the sheriff’s car the lake broadened and deepened across the bank in the Hankins pasture, overtaking the tasseled weeds in uneven ponds, touching the lowest wires of the fence still tufted with hanks of bovine hair. Rising over any scrap of sacking snagged from a child’s home-sewn dress hem. Swirling up any pattered bead of red. Drifting off any wisp of hair. Washing away every remaining shred of anyone’s child, not just the one he was searching for. Erasing the footprints of those living along with those dead, those moved on to inhabit other towns along with those lost forever. Too soon no sign would remain of any child ever torn from its mother.
That midmorning Annie Clyde Dodson wound up back in the cornfield where she’d started, as if she might find Gracie and Rusty waiting again at the end of a row. She didn’t know what hour it was but when she looked up the sun was higher behind rafts of cloud. After all night without sleep she felt lost on her own land. As she wandered between the stalks calling her daughter’s name she dreamed on her feet, remembering how she’d sat yesterday on the bottom porch step plucking chicken feathers and looking out at this field, corn swaying in the uneasiness before the windstorm. Earlier going into the musty gloom of the coop, singing to soothe the rooster. He had perched on an empty nesting box, manure hardened on the rotting straw, waiting for her. Once the rooster was plucked she had meant to ride Gracie among these rows in the wheelbarrow, collecting roasting ears for their dinner. She had told Gracie to stay on the porch, left the front door propped open with an iron long enough to put the carcass in the basin and get the flour. From the kitchen she had heard Rusty barking and gone through the dim hall toward the lit doorway. She had watched the dog running into the field with Gracie behind him. Then the corn had swallowed Gracie up and she couldn’t see her anymore. That was where everything had gone wrong. Now she slapped aside the stalks spraying drops, shouting for her daughter. There was no answer. Not even Rusty barking to say there was someone in the field who didn’t belong. This time there was only water standing at the end of the row. Instead of Gracie, a formless puddle.
But Annie Clyde felt in her bones that Gracie was somewhere close. The reservoir was filling, the floodwaters spreading. If they didn’t find her quick she might be drowned with the rest of the town. Annie Clyde couldn’t stop imagining Gracie wrapped in algae, sinking into a darkness with no bottom. Last night after James left with the sheriff she had waited in the house until she could take it no longer. She had gone back out and searched the roadside pines alone while the others were down at the water. She’d known even as she ran to the river at dawn when she heard clamoring voices that it wasn’t Gracie. No matter what the men believed, or what her husband believed. It made her wonder how much James loved Gracie if he could give up on her. Then she thought of the day Gracie was born, when he bent over the swaddled bundle of her to kiss the tips of her matchstick fingers. She thought of him carrying Gracie on his shoulders to church, handsome in suspenders and a hat with a striped band. But a man’s love, a father’s love, must be different than a mother’s. She’d seen his eyes before he went to the water last night. He was mourning already. She remembered the remark he made weeks ago about Gracie running off into the lake. She’d wanted to kill him when he said that. Now she wanted to kill herself. She might have done it already, if she didn’t believe Gracie was still alive.
It seemed James couldn’t admit that Gracie may have been taken by Amos. It seemed he would rather accept that anything else had happened to her. Amos had been passing in and out of town since before Annie Clyde was born. It was frightening to find Gracie in the cornfield with him, but she didn’t believe he was a child murderer, however certain she felt that he was keeping her daughter from her. Whatever Amos did to Gracie, as long as Annie Clyde got her back alive, it could be fixed. Annie Clyde could wash away any mark he left. As long as Gracie was found and returned with life still in her body, the one Annie Clyde knew every inch of as well as or better than she did her own, they’d be all right. Annie Clyde could love her child back from anything but death. If James was here beside her now she would have reminded him there was no coming out of that lake. Whatever it spread over was gone. Whatever the water took, it kept. But she could make Amos give Gracie back to them. All she had to do was get to him before the law did. Thus far she had managed to remain in motion, even with guilt crushing the breath out of her. It was her fault for not watching Gracie. There was no one else to blame. If she hadn’t been planning to leave her husband, she wouldn’t have been distracted. She had to be the one to make it right.
Annie Clyde was trying to get her bearings in the field when she heard a vehicle fishtailing down the track to the road, another band of men going off to look for her daughter. Around sunup a truckload had left with the only picture of Gracie she owned, taken last summer by a man who traveled around the countryside with his camera making family portraits. Annie Clyde had used money set aside for coffee and salt to pay him with, but it was worth the sacrifice. She hadn’t wanted to forget what Gracie looked like at two years old. Now she wanted her picture back. Her instincts told her it was as useless looking outside of Yuneetah as it was looking into the lake. It was the same waste of time. She thrashed her way between the rows and out of the field to see more cars and trucks parked in the knee-high grass of the lot fronting the house. One belonged to James’s uncle, the Packard she rode in on her wedding day. Wallace and his wife Verna had come from Sevier County, where the Methodist church was relocated. They’d been there after James lost his father in the flood of 1925 and now they were back to see their nephew through again. Annie Clyde didn’t know how they got word, or any of the others. She’d returned home sometime in the night to find Verna with the wives of men who came down from the mountains and from other counties making coffee in her kitchen. Her mouth grew dry thinking about it. She needed to have a drink of water and a bite of bread in her stomach. Maybe to sit and warm herself beside the stove for a minute, change into a clean dress and put on a hat. She had to get her head on straight if she meant to outwit the drifter and find his hiding place.