I don’t give a shit if they stretch all the way to Fairbanks, Alaska, Bellwether said. They’ve got to be searched. It’ll just take a lot of men.
The raw earth yard was full of cars. Doctor Jamahl had come in a sleek black Lexus. He berated his wife. Why weren’t you watching her? he asked. Unlike his wife’s, the doctor’s speech was impeccable. She covered her face with her palms and wept. The doctor still wore his green surgeon’s smock and it was flecked with bright dots of blood as a butcher’s smock might be.
I need to feed a few cows, the paperhanger said. I’ll feed my stock pretty quick and come back and help hunt.
You don’t mind if I look in your truck, do you?
Do what?
I’ve got to cover my ass. If that little girl don’t turn up damn quick this is going to be over my head. TBI, FBI, network news. I’ve got to eliminate everything.
Eliminate away, the paperhanger said.
The sheriff searched the floorboard of the paperhanger’s pickup truck. He shined his huge flashlight under the seat and felt behind it with his hands.
I had to look, he said apologetically.
Of course you did, the paperhanger said.
Full dark had fallen before he returned. He had fed his cattle and stowed away his tools and picked up a six-pack of San Miguel beer and he sat in the back of the pickup truck drinking it. The paperhanger had been in the Navy and stationed in the Philippines and San Miguel was the only beer he could drink. He had to go out of town to buy it, but he figured it was worth it. He liked the exotic labels, the dark bitter taste on the back of his tongue, the way the chilled bottles felt held against his forehead.
A motley crowd of curiosity seekers and searchers thronged the yard. There was a vaguely festive air. He watched all this with a dispassionate eye, as if he were charged with grading the participants, comparing this with other spectacles he’d seen. Coffee urns had been brought in and set up on tables, sandwiches prepared and handed out to the weary searchers. A crane had been hauled in and the septic tank reclaimed from the ground. It swayed from a taut cable while men with lights searched the impacted earth beneath it for a child, for the very trace of a child. Through the far dark woods lights crossed and recrossed, darted to and fro like fireflies. The doctor and the doctor’s wife sat in folding camp chairs looking drained, stunned, waiting for their child to be delivered into their arms.
The doctor was a short portly man with a benevolent expression. He had a moon-shaped face, with light and dark areas of skin that looked swirled, as if the pigment coloring him had not been properly mixed. He had been educated at Princeton. When he had established his practice he had returned to Pakistan to find a wife befitting his station. The woman he had selected had been chosen on the basis of her beauty. In retrospect, perhaps more consideration should have been given to other qualities. She was still beautiful but he was thinking that certain faults might outweigh this. She seemed to have trouble keeping up with her children. She could lose a four-year-old child in a room no larger than six hundred square feet and she could not find it again.
The paperhanger drained his bottle and set it by his foot in the bed of the truck. He studied the doctor’s wife’s ravaged face through the deep blue light. The first time he had seen her she had hired him to paint a bedroom in the house they were living in while the doctor’s mansion was being built. There was an arrogance about her that cried out to be taken down a notch or two. She flirted with him, backed away, flirted again. She would treat him as if he were a stain on the bathroom rug and then stand close by him while he worked until he was dizzy with the smell of her, with the heat that seemed to radiate off her body. She stood by him while he knelt painting baseboards and after an infinite moment leaned carefully the weight of a thigh against his shoulder. You’d better move it, he thought. She didn’t. He laughed and turned his face into her groin. She gave a strangled cry and slapped him hard. The paintbrush flew away and speckled the dark rose walls with antique white. You filthy beast, she said. You are some kind of monster. She stormed out of the room and he could hear her slamming doors behind her.
Well, I was looking for a job when I found this one. He smiled philosophically to himself.
But he had not been fired. In fact now he had been hired again. Perhaps there was something here to ponder.
At midnight he gave up his vigil. Some souls more hardy than his kept up the watch. The earth here was worn smooth by the useless traffic of the searchers. Driving out, he met a line of pickup trucks with civil-defense tags. Grim-faced men sat aligned in their beds. Some clutched rifles loosely by their barrels, as if they would lay waste whatever monster, man or beast, would snatch up a child in its slaverous jaws and vanish, prey and predator, in the space between two heartbeats.
Even more dubious reminders of civilization as these fell away. He drove into the Harrikan, where he lived. A world so dark and forlorn light itself seemed at a premium. Whippoorwills swept red-eyed up from the roadside. Old abandoned foundries and furnaces rolled past, grim and dark as forsaken prisons. Down a ridge here was an abandoned graveyard, if you knew where to look. The paperhanger did. He had dug up a few of the graves, examined with curiosity what remained, buttons, belt buckles, a cameo brooch. The bones he laid out like a child with a Tinkertoy, arranging them the way they went in jury-rigged resurrection.
He braked hard on a curve, the truck slewing in the gravel. A bobcat had crossed the road, graceful as a wraith, fierce and lantern-eyed in the headlights, gone so swiftly it might have been a stage prop swung across the road on wires.
Bellwether and a deputy drove to the backhoe operators house. He lived up a gravel road that wound through a great stand of cedars. He lived in a board-and-batten house with a tin roof rusted to a warm umber. They parked before it and got out, adjusting their gun belts.
Bellwether had a search warrant with the ink scarcely dry. The operator was outraged.
Look at it this way, Bellwether explained patiently. I’ve got to cover my ass. Everything has got to be considered. You know how kids are. Never thinking. What if she run under the wheels of your truck when you was backing out? What if quicklike you put the body in your truck to get rid of somewhere?
What if quicklike you get the hell off my property, the operator said.
Everything has to be considered, the sheriff said again. Nobody’s accusing anybody of anything just yet.
The operator’s wife stood glowering at them. To have something to do with his hands, the operator began to construct a cigarette. He had huge red hands thickly sown with brown freckles. They trembled. I ain’t got a thing in this round world to hide, he said.
Bellwether and his men searched everywhere they could think of to look. Finally they stood uncertainly in the operator’s yard, out of place in their neat khakis, their polished leather.
Now get the hell off my land, the operator said. If all you think of me is that I could run over a little kid and then throw it off in the bushes like a dead cat or something then I don’t even want to see your goddamn face. I want you gone and I want you by God gone now.
Everything had to be considered, the sheriff said.
Then maybe you need to consider that paperhanger.
What about him?
That paperhanger is one sick puppy.
He was still there when I got there, the sheriff said. Three witnesses swore nobody ever left, not even for a minute, and one of them was the child’s mother. I searched his truck myself.
Then he’s a sick puppy with a damn good alibi, the operator said.
That was all. There was no ransom note, no child that turned up two counties over with amnesia. She was a page turned, a door closed, a lost ball in the high weeds. She was a child no larger than a doll, but the void she left behind her was unreckonable. Yet there was no end to it. No finality. There was no moment when someone could say, turning from a mounded grave, Well, this has been unbearable, but you’ve got to go on with your life. Life did not go on.