A hush fell over both of them. Ellard went on studying her for a while, the sun reflecting off the white plaster walls into his eyes. It took a minute for him to get it straight in his head, that Amos had never been involved. “What time did you see them?” Ellard asked at last.
“I don’t know. I went down the road after the car a piece. I tried to follow their tire tracks but I gave up. I’d say it took me about an hour to make it here walking. I couldn’t get a ride.”
“What direction was they headed?”
“South. Over into Whitehall County.”
“Taking her to the doctor. Sit tight and I’ll be back as soon as I know something.”
“Wait,” she said, before he could leave. “What about Amos?”
Ellard stopped. In the stillness he heard the constable’s voice, the crackle of static. “Let me ask you something, Silver. What put you in such a rush to get here? Was it Gracie or Amos?”
Silver looked away. Ellard had never wanted to slap a woman before but his hand itched now to meet with her cheek, to strike some color into it. He could even imagine how the print of his fingers would appear there as stripes. “I reckon I ought to let him go. Just take your word.”
“You think I’d lie to you about a thing like this?” she asked.
“I don’t know what you’d do for him,” Ellard said. But as quick as the old fire flamed up it died out of him. It was suddenly meaningless. It occurred to him that if he and Silver stayed here long enough the flood would wash them out, float them up like the curtain hems and the papers on his desk. In those few seconds he pictured how the shine of the window would look through murky water, lighting Silver’s waxen face riven with lines. A clutch of bubbles purling up from the slits of her nostrils like unstrung pearls. Both of them swimming in the coils of her black hair, in the rags of her calico dress. If they didn’t move they would both be buried underneath the lake. Whether they moved or not, they would both be forgotten with the rest of Yuneetah. Even Gracie. The dam would stand in memory, but not of their individual lives. Only of a moment in history. Ellard’s arm felt like lead as he reached for the doorknob. Then he dropped it when he heard the constable’s brisk footsteps approaching, resounding on the tile.
Ellard’s eyes remained on Silver as the constable knocked on the door and opened it without waiting to be invited into the office. “A call came in from my boys over at Whitehall County,” he said, all of his previous weariness gone. “Gracie Dodson has been found.”
“That’s what this woman is telling me,” Ellard said. “Who reported it to them?”
“I reckon it was Dr. Brock’s nurse.”
“What did they say about her condition?”
“They didn’t have a whole lot of information. Her mama and daddy brung her in. I reckon the doctor has done took them on to the hospital in Clinchfield.”
“I better head out there,” Ellard said.
“What about your prisoner?” the constable asked.
Silver raised her face to Ellard. A greenfly had entered with her and it buzzed between them. Ellard spoke more to Silver than to the constable. “I don’t reckon we can hold him.”
“You want me to turn him loose?” the constable asked.
“Naw,” Ellard said. “If you will, get on the radio and see what else you can find out.”
When the constable left the room Ellard went to his desk, strewn with paperwork from the power company. He opened the right-hand drawer with a key on an iron ring inside, took the key out and placed it on the desktop before Silver. As she stared down at the key he got up and went to the wall behind the door where Amos’s peacoat hung from a hook beside his own rain slicker, as though Amos was a guest and not a prisoner. On the floor beside Ellard’s rubber boots was the drifter’s bedroll. He hefted it under his arm, then took the coat from the hook. He carried them both to Silver, shoving the drifter’s things into her lap. “Here. You let him go. I can’t hold him, but I can’t be the one that turns him loose. I’ll let it be on your hands, since you think so well of him.” When Silver said nothing Ellard gritted his teeth. “There ain’t no telling what he’s done before and what he’ll do after this. You know that, don’t you? You know it and you don’t care.”
Silver blinked at the key on the desk, then up at Ellard. “Don’t be like this,” she said.
“I don’t know how to be any other way.”
“I don’t either. That’s been our problem, ain’t it?”
Ellard glanced out the window and saw the hound sniffing at the tires of his car. Amos was still down there in the bowels of the building. Ellard considered going downstairs to question him further but in the end he had nothing more to say to Amos. As there was nothing more to say to Silver Ledford now. “Should I wait on you in the car?” he asked her.
“No,” she said, looking so ill that he thought she might need a doctor herself. “I’ve got to watch after Gracie’s dog. But you come up and tell me how she is as soon as you get back.”
“You can stay here and wait for me,” Ellard said. “Unless you’re going off with him.”
“I’ll be around, Ellard,” Silver said. “Like I always have been.” Then she took the key and Amos’s possessions to the door, so tall her head nearly touched the frame. Ellard sat on the edge of his desk and looked across at her with the grayed roll of the bindle in her arms, past her shoulder the notice board tacked with papers as flimsy as their lives still seemed to him. He took in her paleness, the dark hair that spilled down her back almost to her waist. He didn’t try to close the distance between them as he once did on the riverbank. He had Silver for a summer when he was seventeen and he guessed that would have to do him. But he would think later that letting her go didn’t mean she never belonged to him. Nothing could change what was already done. The past at least was permanent. Whatever there was to come for himself and the neighbors he’d served and protected for twenty years, whatever lives and places they moved on to, he had known them in this one. As he’d known Silver Ledford in a way that nobody else ever could. The thought would comfort Ellard some when he’d remember how she turned her back on him with the bindle in her arms. How she left him there as she had done before and went to Amos.
At one o’clock Beulah Kesterson sat in the slat chair she kept beside the front door with her shoes off to let her blisters dry in the sun. Her legs and feet still ached from walking to town and back yesterday. It was hard to figure how she had traveled ten miles a day with her mother when they were peddling. She lifted her face to the breeze. As high over the valley as she lived, she could smell the river. It made her think about musseling. When her mother was alive they called it toe digging, pulling the shells from the riverbed silt to collect in their pans, taking turns with the good shucking knife. Sometimes they would boil the mussels in a smoke-blacked pot on the shore when they stopped to rest beside the river on their peddling rounds. The best mussel bed they’d found was now on the other side of the dam. It was past dinnertime and Beulah’s stomach was empty. She hoped Amos wasn’t hungry down at the jail. They had gone musseling together often when he was a child. The lassitude of the work had suited his patient nature. She had a notion to take him a pan of mussels right now, worn out as she felt. Even without her fortune-telling bones, she still had her intuition. She hadn’t escaped her inheritance. She supposed the discernment was like her blood, unseen but there inside her, a thing that could die only when she did. If she went to the courthouse Ellard Moody would let her in. She was the one who birthed him. He owed her some respect. She looked down at the bunions on her feet, the weeping blisters, and knew that she had to go in spite of them. She heaved herself from her chair, put on her shoes then went inside to find her musseling pan and her shucking knife.