There was a moment of hesitation, the deputy’s face a field for the interplay of his emotions, and then they both watched as he turned his back on them and picked his way across the lawn to flip the latch on the gate and disappear round the corner of the house.
“Sten. Look. I know this is hard,” Rob said, easing off the glasses and folding them away in his pocket. “But the evidence doesn’t support that.”
It was hard and it just got harder because he was trying to put Adam and Carey in the same equation, trying to picture the way his son would break with reality but always seemed to be able to come back to it, to right himself. Until now.
“I’ve got to ask you,” Rob said, no trace of understanding or even consideration left in his voice, just calculation, “—you know where he is?”
Sten just shook his head.
“When did you last see him?”
“I don’t know. It’s been a while.”
More gulls. The mountains. The ocean. Big River. And the sheriff, the sheriff calculating, because he was working on his own equation. “He was angry last time you saw him, isn’t that right? He didn’t want to leave that house. You had a fight, the two of you.”
“That’s right. But you’ve got to realize, Adam’s not normal. He needs help. I’ve been on to social services about it, everybody, and all I get is privacy laws, all I get is it’s none of my business.”
“And when he left that night, he went where?”
He was trying to come up with an answer, trying to mitigate, minimize, deny, but all he could do, even as Carolee came slamming through the back door with her hair in her face and her feet trying to run out from under her, was look toward the mountains. And point.
31
THIS TIME HE DIDN’T wait for the reporters and the fluffed-up anchorwomen or the rest of the hyenas either. The minute the sheriff left he went in and disconnected the phone and then took his cell out of his right-front pocket and buried it in the top drawer of the bureau in the bedroom. And when Carolee’s cell started ringing midway through dinner — a salad of cold chicken and avocado she’d numbly prepared at the kitchen counter with rigid hands and frozen arms, a salad neither of them could eat because food was the last thing they wanted — he got up from the table, dug the phone out of her purse and turned it off without bothering to find out who was calling or why. “What if it’s news?” she said. “What if they—?” But they both knew it wasn’t news and that they — the authorities, the cops, the SWAT teams Rob had already called in — hadn’t found or done anything. He just shook his head. Her phone was like a bomb, like an IED, and it could go off any minute and bring the whole house down. Didn’t she realize that? It was wrong. It was foul. It was dirty. So what he did was take it across the kitchen, down the hall and into the bedroom, where he buried it in the bureau right next to his own.
Neither of them slept that night. Every time he began to doze off he was aware of her there beside him, tense and alert, listening for sounds in the night. And he was listening too. Listening not for gunfire or the crackle of police radios or the rattling pulse of helicopters sweeping overhead, but for the furtive creaking of the back door, the sigh of bedsprings in the guest room, for Adam, come home to them. Because if he didn’t come home, didn’t get out of the way of everybody, didn’t get treatment and meds and whatever else it was going to take — court-appointed shrinks, the lockup — there was only one way this was going to turn out. Adam might have known these hills, might have been a mountain man — or boy, because that was what he was, a boy still and always — but the sheriff had cordoned off the whole area on both sides of Route 20 and banned entry to anyone for any purpose. They were carrying live ammunition out there. They had dogs. They had heat sensors. If he didn’t come in — and here was a prayer, sent up to whoever might be listening — he was dead.
Then it was morning. Mist in the yard. Carolee asleep finally, mercifully, and the whole world asleep with her. He was in the kitchen making coffee and distractedly gazing out the window when he saw something moving on the periphery of the yard and his heart jumped. Adam, he was thinking, beyond all reason — what were the chances, since he wouldn’t even return to the old house, the house he’d trashed, let alone this one? — and in the next moment he was out the door, barefoot and dressed only in the boxers and T-shirt he’d slept in. The grass was cold and wet but he didn’t feel it, didn’t feel anything — not until the image of his son vanished and rematerialized as some clown in oversized shorts and high-tops with a video camera on one shoulder and a microphone in his hand. “Mr. Stensen,” he was saying, and he didn’t ask if he could have a word because he already knew the answer and just plunged right in, “how do you feel about your son being the target of the biggest manhunt this community has ever seen?”
How did he feel? He felt about the way he had when he came out of the jungle in Costa Rica and Warner Ayala had prodded him with the barrel of his weapon. What they wanted was to provoke you, get you when you were staggered and confused and ready to explode for the viewing pleasure of everybody out there whose son wasn’t psychologically impaired and crouching in the woods like some kind of animal waiting for his brains to be scorched out of him. He knew that. And he knew he had to control himself if Adam was to have any chance at all, but it didn’t matter what he knew because there was no knowledge and no thought involved in what came next. It was just a kind of eruption, and he didn’t hurt the guy, the reporter, whoever he was, and he didn’t say a word to him either. All he did, once he’d got the parameters straight, was snatch the camera off his shoulder — a lightweight thing, half the size and heft of the ones they used in his day — and beat it methodically against the side of the house until there wasn’t much more left of it than you could hold in the palm of your hand.
He didn’t say a word about it to Carolee but by the time she got up all she had to do was look out the window to see for herself — a whole cordon of reporters lined the street with their cameras and microphones, cars and sound trucks were parked up and down the block like the grand opening of an auto show, and the helicopter that kept clattering overhead and buzzing back again had nothing to do with the police. That was a public street out there, he understood that, and he had no recourse unless they actually set foot on his property like the one who’d shoved the camera in his face before the sun had even cleared the horizon, but he’d called Rob Rankin nonetheless to tell him he’d better keep the vultures off or they’d be hunting him down too. Rob said he’d send a car by. And added, before he’d even asked, that there’d been no new developments, except for rumors and crank calls and the usual wave of sightings that turned out to be non-sightings. And he promised, as he’d promised yesterday, to do everything in his power to see that Adam came to no harm, but then — and here he’d paused so long Sten thought the connection had gone dead — that depended on Adam.
The day progressed, the first day, in a way that just didn’t make any sense. They were both half-mad to get out and do something, anything — put up posters featuring Adam’s face and a number to call as if he were a child gone missing, haunt the sheriff’s substation in Fort Bragg in the hope of hearing even the least scrap of news, hike out into the woods and shout their son’s name till he heard them and laid down his rifle and came back to them, but all they had to do was appear in the window and the cameras were trained on them as if the house was a cage and they were some rare form of wildlife never before seen in captivity. Step out the door and the shouts and cries came crackling across the lawn like verbal gunfire. It was frustrating, but above all it was humiliating, deeply humiliating — two men they both knew, knew and respected and liked, were dead, and they were complicit in it. Because their son, their crazy son, enacting whatever fantasy had invaded his head, had shot them dead, and who was responsible? Sten asked himself the question, over and over, through the long morning and into the interminable afternoon, but the answer never changed: they were. He was.