“Like I said, he’s famous for knowing every inch of these mountains.”
“And for being a convicted criminal,” Drake said. “Your words, not mine.”
WHEN DRAKE GOT to the car his father was sitting in the passenger seat with the windows down looking toward the forest. The light slanting in through the trees, rich with pollen, and the sword ferns a nuclear green at the edge of the road.
“Gary is the sheriff now?”
Drake pulled open the door and then sat there looking at his hands on the wheel. Gary had been Patrick’s best friend. And when Patrick went away Gary had stepped in to help Drake get situated, taking Drake fishing, even giving him the job at the department.
“He was the interim sheriff when you went away,” Drake said. “And then he was elected a year after.” Drake brought out the car keys from his pocket. “I thought you would have heard.”
“I’m not surprised,” Patrick said, turning to Drake. He smiled a bit, coming out of whatever place his mind had taken him.
His father had been gone a long time and Drake knew there were going to be times like this. Moments when the flash of a memory came across his father’s face and then went away again. A decision that was made a long time before and that absence in time—what could have been—the only thing left to regret.
Patrick went on smiling and then he nodded toward the Fish and Wildlife hut as he came back to himself. “Did I cut in on your action?”
It took Drake a second and then when he saw what his father was getting at his face flushed. “That’s not what that was about.”
“Seems funny to me,” his father said. “All this time since we’ve seen each other and the first thing you want to show me in Silver Lake is the young Fish and Wildlife officer.”
Drake started up the car and turned out onto the road. “That’s not it at all.” In the rearview mirror Drake watched the Quonset hut disappear around a bend in the road.
“You know I haven’t even met Sheri yet. Seems like she’d be the one you’d take me to see first.”
“I hope you’re not trying to be a dad,” Drake said.
“She is your wife, right? Sheri?” Patrick smiled for a second and then looked away, watching the green thatch of the forest pass by out the window. Drake knowing that his father wanted him to say something, that the old man was just trying to egg him on like he had when Drake was a boy. His father trying to reconnect in the only way still familiar to him, like something lost long ago and then found.
Ten minutes later they passed through the yellow caution light and turned up the lake again, heading toward the house. Sheri would be away at work, but he’d told her they’d be home in time for lunch, and even if she didn’t know, he felt an urge not to disappoint her. The sun above, almost directly over the lake. Nothing out on the water, and the thin glint of sunlight refracted off the chrome of a few logging trucks far down the other side of the lake.
“Ellie is a local girl, isn’t she?” Patrick said. “Have Sheri and she met?”
“I’m surprised no one shanked you in prison,” Drake said.
“She’s young,” Patrick said. “I recognize her. Didn’t you go out with her older sister in high school?”
“Are you planning to blackmail me?”
“Just having a little fun,” Patrick said. “You seem pretty familiar with her. You see a lot of her?”
Drake looked over at his father and then looked away. “You’re relentless,” Drake said. “I have to see Ellie for work, that’s all.” He wasn’t looking at his father but he could feel his father’s eyes on him and Drake was almost certain there was a grin to go along.
When they came to the opening in the forest leading toward their house, Drake waited for a couple cars to pass. When they’d gone by, rocking the Chevy on its springs, he turned the wheel and the car came off the lake road and bounced down into the rutted gravel drive. The house was another hundred yards on, hidden beyond a curve in the road and behind a patch of trees. “Sheri is meeting you for the first time. I know it sounds strange to say now that you’re here, but it was sudden for us. Sheri’s been under a lot of stress lately,” Drake said.
“I was told the probation was dependent on your approval,” Patrick said. “That was a month ago.”
“I know,” Drake said. “She’s just nervous about it.” They took the turn in the drive and came into the clearing before the house. The gravel drive ending and the house there before them. The Sheriff’s Department cruiser Drake drove every day parked just to the side. The house a two-bedroom rambler, one story in height, with a few steps leading up to a red door. Drake taking it in fresh as he tried to see it through his father’s eyes. Sheri and Drake had painted the house a few years back. The wood siding a light brown that the salesclerk at Home Depot had called sandstone. The trim around the windows painted white and the door a bright red color Sheri had said would make the house “pop.”
Now Drake looked at it and didn’t know what to say. He was thinking about Sheri. He was thinking about all the changes that had been made since his father had owned the place and Drake had been a child there. They had taken out much of the furniture, repainted the walls inside, updated the bathroom, all of it an effort to try to make the place seem more their own. Now, with Patrick there, Drake didn’t know. He felt somehow like he’d been house-sitting all this time and as soon as he brought Patrick inside, the property would be his father’s again.
Drake pushed the transmission up into park and sat looking out on the house. The red door and all that sat inside. “I meant to say that there’s been some problems lately.” Drake didn’t turn in his seat. He kept looking up at the house. “I don’t want you giving her a hard time. She really has always wanted to meet you.”
“That thing about Ellie?” Patrick smiled. “I was just talking. I already told you I’m not going to give you any problems.”
“That’s good,” Drake said. He opened the door and stood. He didn’t know what he was trying to say to his father. Or even how to say it. Whatever had been said somehow not enough. Everything, lately, not enough.
DRAKE KNEW SHERI could keep a cool head about things. She’d been keeping a lot of things bottled up inside recently. But Drake didn’t know how cool that head would be if he, or his father, told Sheri that the Fish and Wildlife officer he’d been working with till two A.M. was Ellie Cobb. A girl from Silver Lake with whom Drake had a little history.
Only the night before Ellie and Drake had sat up in the Fish and Wildlife truck for almost five hours. The truck pulled off the road, hidden beneath the trees, watching what passed for traffic in Silver Lake. Up above, circling high and wide over the valley, they occasionally heard the spotter plane Ellie had applied for a month before. The plane circling and looking down on the night forest below, marking headlights in the woods, and as soon as they had the locations they would go bouncing up logging roads or down old ranchers’ paths, trying to figure who was out there.
Many of the places they’d found in the past month or so since the poaching had begun were just empty grass lots, barren of trees and thick with low-lying brush. Perfect for waiting out groups of grazing deer, spotlighting them with headlights, and then taking shots at them while they stood frozen in the light.
Poaching had been a problem lately on the weekends, and through the night they were called to four different sites, but each time they arrived there was little there to indicate the plane circling above had gotten the location right. At the third lot they came to Drake could see a clear track in the mud and nearby a set of boot prints leading down the slope into the grass.