He raised his eyes and looked into the cool dark at the edge of the field. A pink light had begun to spread behind him over the edge of the mountains and in the grass the deep blue that came just before the dawn could be seen. He knew the she-wolf was waiting, shifting in the shadows beneath the trees, watching him where he stood.
He scraped a foot over the gravel at the edge of the road, feeling a dull tightness in his leg as he watched the forest. He checked the time on his phone and then ran his eyes to the south, where the sky was lightening with the sun. Out of uniform for the day, he wore a dress shirt and slacks on his thin frame. No desire in him to leave the carcass or the wolf. And a certainty that what lay ahead of him down the road was more threatening than anything lurking in the shadows beneath the trees. Nothing he could do but move on, an appointment he needed to keep and the simple fact that as soon as he rounded the next curve, the nature of the thing would continue.
THREE HOURS LATER Drake sat in his car watching the Monroe prison gates, waiting for his father’s release. The clouds were breaking overhead and the moisture that had condensed inside the car now showed with the sunlight. The morning had been cold and as he’d driven up through the birch that lay around the recesses of the prison, he could see the rolling barbed wire clear down the line. Wrapping over and over again as it crested one wall and then fell ten feet to the next, layer after layer of it, and no chance of escape for anyone inside, except, Drake thought, maybe his father, Patrick.
It was almost twelve years to the day since his father had been sentenced. In the years past Drake had searched for some sign of his father in his own face, looking at himself in the mirror of his cruiser, or under the bright changing-room lights of the department. The genes there that all who met him said were evident in his face. A fine line dividing the two of them, a reason Drake had tried so desperately in the last twelve years to distance himself from the father everyone could see within him.
All that had changed in his life, Drake thought, and all that remained the same.
He checked his watch and then looked to the prison gate. He didn’t know what to expect and he sat there in the lot watching the single pane of the steel door, searching for the shift of light or shadow from within that would signal Patrick’s arrival. Twelve years ago the life Drake had wanted for himself at the age of twenty put up on the shelf. Everything after his father went away feeling like the life of someone else.
Fifteen minutes went by in this way, the cold seeping in through the seams of the late-model Chevy, before he saw the door push open from within and a guard emerge onto the small concrete path, holding the door wide. Drake didn’t recognize his father at first, carrying a cardboard box in his arms, his breath curling away behind him as he walked. His beard grown full with white hair and a thin, almost animal-like mane, falling thick from his bald crown. He was over six foot, with the beginnings of a belly, and the well-built chest and shoulders he’d always had. The skin of his neck below the beard thickly veined in the cold.
Drake got out of the car and stood, waiting. The one time he had visited his father in prison, the man had just stared coldly back at him, his head shaved to the skin, and a slight tilt to his lips as he sat answering Drake’s questions. The man locked away for a third of Drake’s life. Sheriff Patrick Drake, a legend in his time with no other family left in Silver Lake except his son and daughter-in-law.
The deputy for years had not cared what happened to his father, shamed any time his father’s name was mentioned. The family history in the hills and mountains around the lake nothing to be proud of, Drake’s own grandfather, Morgan Drake, infamous for bringing booze and entertainment to the logging camps up and down the North Cascades, eventually settling the family in Silver Lake.
Looking at his father now, with his hair grown out and a beard matted across his face, his skin pulled flat in places and creased in others, Drake felt like he didn’t know his father the way he should. So much time had passed with nothing being said between them. Patrick wearing the same clothes he’d gone in with twelve years before, outdated and now large on his thin, muscular frame.
Behind, the guard closed the door and Drake heard the latch fall as Patrick crossed the lot to where he waited by the car. The old canvas coat open at Patrick’s chest, revealing the flannel shirt and jeans he’d gone in with all those years before.
“I see you’ve gone wild,” Drake said, gesturing to his father’s white mane.
Patrick smiled. He’d been in there a long time. And the creases on his skin looked all the deeper. “I’ve always been wild,” he said.
In the lot behind them, Drake heard an engine start up, followed by the soft putter of exhaust, but Drake didn’t think anything of it as he took the box from his father and loaded it into the backseat, watching how Patrick put a hand to the door and lowered his body down into the car.
IT WAS AN hour before they spoke again. The sound of the interstate moving beneath them, the thrum of the tires on the asphalt and the radio turned on low against the quiet. The absence of their voices like some living, breathing thing, tucked far back in the darkness waiting to appear.
“Pull off at the next exit,” Patrick said, pointing ahead of them to an overhead sign.
There was still a good forty-five minutes before they would turn off the interstate and head east into the Cascades, threading their way up the mountain pass toward Silver Lake and the home that had been left for Drake and his wife when his father had gone in.
“You planning on knocking off a convenience store?”
“You know that’s not what I was convicted of,” Patrick said. His eyes flashed on Drake for a moment and then looked away again.
Drake had no idea why he said the things he did to his father. No way around what his father had done but to joke about it and hope it could be avoided for just another day. “You had a lot of people fooled,” Drake said.
The old sheriff nodded but didn’t look over at Drake again.
Drake took a hand off the wheel and ran it back over his scalp, feeling the close-cropped hair he’d gradually been losing since his midtwenties. Like his father he was built thick through the shoulders, with long legs and the thin, angular bones that had been passed down through their family for generations. “People still talk about it. That’s all I’m saying.”
“What people?”
“Silver Lake, the whole town.”
“I never thought I’d be going back there.”
“Well, I don’t know where you thought you’d be. We had to sell a lot of the land just to hold on to the house.”
“I never asked you to go back there.”
“I never asked you to get thrown in prison.”
His father shifted, then looked behind him, reaching for something out of the cardboard box in the backseat. “I’m not proud of what I did but at the time it seemed like the only option.” He was sitting in the seat again, holding open a thin folder. “Look,” he said. “I saved them, every one I could find. Even the ones that had my name in them.”
Drake looked over at the clippings and then looked away. Some from before his father had gotten into trouble, some from years afterward. All of them he’d seen before and he knew they told something about Drake’s past that he really didn’t care for, that he wasn’t proud of, but that he’d done because he’d thought at the time it would mean something.
Drake felt nauseous just thinking about those years. All he’d given up to come home and deal with his father’s debts. A basketball scholarship to Arizona he’d had to leave behind. All the time he’d spent trying to make up for his father’s crimes. To earn the name back. It wasn’t Drake’s fault. None of it was, and that point—most important to Drake now—had only recently occurred to him. Still, he had to remind himself that he was living for himself. For his wife, Sheri. He was living his own life in a way he hadn’t for many years. And now with Patrick sitting beside him, trying to reawaken all the old memories, all the things that had occurred in the past, Drake knew he needed to look to the future.