Thinking of all that needed doing before the day was over Ellard passed out of the courtroom for the last time, casting one final look up at the balcony as though someone might be watching, heels scuffing the oak floor that had gone all these months unpolished. The one lawman around this morning besides Ellard was the Whitehall County constable, but he and Ellard went way back. They had always come to each other’s aid when and however they could. As Ellard went through the lobby on the way to his office he nodded to the constable sitting at the counter behind the box of the shortwave, twisting the knobs and producing static, the dials glowing amber. The constable yawned into his fist, rubbed the back of his neck where his dark hair was clipped close. Ellard thought about telling him to take a break, maybe even to go on home. Yesterday had aged both of them. He could see it in the bags under the constable’s eyes and could feel it in his own joints. But he needed what help he could get.
Other than the constable, only Sam Washburn had returned to the courthouse after the events of yesterday afternoon. Ellard had meant to see if Washburn needed medical attention once Amos was subdued and the Dodsons were led away, but the boy had disappeared. Then earlier he had been waiting on the bench in the vestibule when Ellard arrived back at the courthouse with the college men. As Washburn rose to greet Ellard they didn’t mention what had happened down in the basement, or the shallow cut under the boy’s chin, although Washburn’s presence spoke something of his grit. He told Ellard he had met with the director of the TVA first thing this morning. If Gracie was still missing tomorrow, a drawdown would be ordered. Ellard found this concession somewhat hard to believe after how their meeting with Harville had gone but he saw no reason to doubt Washburn’s word. He supposed the boy knew better than he did how to deal with his own kind. When Washburn told Ellard he was headed to the Walker farm, Ellard said he would drive out directly to see the Dodsons himself, but he knew they’d be in good hands until he got there. It was his way of thanking Washburn for coming back to Yuneetah when others hadn’t. Their eyes locked and Ellard thought they understood each other.
Now Ellard stepped into his office and closed the door behind him, shutting out the static from the radio. He considered all the hours he’d spent in this long room, drafty enough in the winter to wear a coat and hot enough in July to sweat through his shirt because of the tall window overlooking the square. He glanced at the portrait on the wall of his predecessor. Twenty years he’d spent here, and this was the end. He wondered if the man in the picture over the desk would have appreciated more the gravity of this moment. If he would have done better by the town in its last days. Right now Ellard felt as wrung out and empty as the street beyond the window. He had never been more ready to head back up the hollow to his childhood home.
Then out of the corner of his eye he saw Silver Ledford rushing up the sidewalk, looking like the lone survivor of some disaster. Ellard knew she wasn’t coming to see him. He would meet her at the door and send her away but for a few seconds he allowed himself to observe her. Before yesterday, he hadn’t seen much of her in the last three decades. He would nod if he met her coming out of the store or drove by as she traveled down the road dragging her cotton sack through the pricker bushes. When he was younger he thought about her for days after encountering her. He turned the memory of her over in his mind in the night. When people teased that his apartment was too big for one man or said he needed a wife to cook for him, he grinned and lowered his head. There had been other women. He just hadn’t met one since Silver that he wanted to marry. As he grew older he was able to forget about her for long stretches. He would think he was over her until he heard somebody snickering in Joe Dixon’s or at McCormick’s Cafe as he ate his dinner, the ones who bought whiskey off Silver saying they had seen Amos up on the mountain. After all this time, he couldn’t stand to think about her with anybody else. Even now it galled Ellard to know she was here for Amos and not for him.
He was about to move from the window when he saw that Silver wasn’t coming by herself. There was a redbone coonhound trailing behind her, its nose to the ground. Ellard frowned, squinting through the flawed glass panes, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. It was the Dodsons’ dog, there was little question about it. As Silver left the pavement and started across the lawn it trotted through the grass at her heels. When she and the dog both disappeared from view of the window Ellard got moving. He was emerging from his office just as Silver was bursting into the vestibule, a shaft of sun falling in the door behind her. The dog halted at the threshold, stood on the top step looking in at the tile floor. Silver let the heavy door slam behind her and came farther inside, her feet leaving wet tracks. She tried to speak but didn’t seem to have enough wind. “What is it, Silver?” Ellard asked, his eyes searching her face.
“It’s Gracie,” she managed.
Ellard touched her shoulder. “Slow down and get your breath. Tell me from the start.”
“I was up on the ridge and heard the dog barking.”
“All right.”
“By the time I made it down the mountain Annie Clyde and James was getting in the car with some government man.” Silver took in a hitching breath. “They had Gracie with them.”
“You’re saying they found her?”
Silver nodded.
Ellard tried to organize his thoughts, his mind racing with questions. He didn’t know which to ask first. Finally he settled on the most important one. “Is she alive?”
“I think so. They was in a hurry.”
“Could you tell what kind of shape she was in?”
“She didn’t look well, from what I could make out.”
Ellard hesitated, searching Silver’s face again. “You don’t look too well either,” he said. “Come in here and have a seat.” She didn’t protest when he took her by the arm and led her through his office door to a chair in front of his desk, the same one James Dodson had been sitting in two days ago. She took several minutes to tell it all, in a fragmented way that Ellard, watching her lips so as not to miss a word, had trouble putting together. She’d been up on the ridge this morning when she heard the clamor. She tried to see off the ledge but couldn’t for the trees. The barking was coming from the woods and not the house. She thought the dog must be in a tangle with a coon or a skunk. She stayed where she was until she heard high voices mingled with the yelping. Then she made her way as fast as she could down the rocks, scrambling to reach the farm. But in the woods at the foot of the mountain where a beech tree was fallen she paused to absorb what she saw. The beech’s root ball was hacked to chunks, the mud around it ravaged. There was a hole in the ground underneath the tree, a narrow cave or burrow, but she hadn’t realized then that Gracie must have been inside it. When she ran out of the pines into the hayfield she found a path trampled through the weeds. She pursued James and Annie Clyde but was too late to catch them. Stopping at the side of the house with a stitch in her side, she saw James lowering himself with Gracie in his arms into the back of the government man’s car.