When she swung into Cindy’s driveway, the gravel giving way under her wheels, she saw there was another car parked there in front of the barn, not Cindy’s or Gentian’s, but one that looked familiar somehow. Whose was it? The answer would come to her the minute she pulled up beside it, shut down her engine and climbed out of the car with her tool kit: it was Adam’s mother’s car, Carolee’s. Because here came Carolee marching out of the mist with Cindy and Gentian flanking her, the two of them looking as if they were going to war while she looked like she’d just been punched in the gut. “Hi,” Sara said, though Adam’s mother was somebody she could definitely have done without seeing.
Gentian, a big man, once powerful, but now gone to seed around a face that drooped in folds right on down into the collar of his shirt, stopped in his tracks and the women pulled up then too. The look he was giving her was fierce, outraged. He spat out the words. “He shot Corinna and Lulu.”
“Who? What are you talking about?”
Cindy answered for him: “Adam.”
They all looked to Carolee, the mother, but Carolee had nothing to say, either in affirmation or denial. She was having enough trouble keeping her face composed. What she’d done — Sara could see this in a flash — was come down here to help out, to do something, anything, to get away from the terrible tension at home that must have been even worse for her than it was for herself. She’d given birth to him. Breast-fed him. Potty-trained him. Held his hand when he went to kindergarten and agonized over every inappropriate display and skewed adjustment through what must have been a chaotic childhood to a squirrelly adolescence and now this — they were hunting her son and he was their quarry, no different from the deer the sportsmen bungee-strapped to the hoods of their cars, and who hadn’t seen the blood there striping the windshield and tarnishing the bright resistant strips of chrome? In that moment, Sara went outside herself and saw what this woman — her enemy, who’d rejected her right from the start — was going through. She said, “It wasn’t Adam.”
“How the hell would you know?” Gentian still hadn’t moved, but she could see how furious he was, his fists clenched, the old splayed muscles tightening on their cords, something working beneath the skin at the corner of one eye. “Did you see him? Did you ask him?”
“It wasn’t Adam.”
Cindy said, “He’s on foot, Gent. It’s forty miles.”
The picture of Corinna came into her head then, not the big-ribbed corpse she’d see bloodied in the field in due course, but Corinna after she’d had her first calf, proud and watchful and erect on her stiffened legs, her ears up and her nostrils to the wind. A dog had appeared at the periphery of the meadow one afternoon, a thousand yards away, a dog on a leash being walked along the street on the far side of the fence, no threat at all, not if she understood the situation. But Corinna didn’t understand the situation. Corinna had perceived the danger in the way the light scissored between those four trotting legs and she charged halfway across the field, flinging up turf with her savage cutting hooves that could have decapitated that dog in a heartbeat and maybe his owner too. That was instinct. That was all she knew.
“Forty miles, shit,” Gentian spat, turning bitterly on his wife. “You tell me who else is crazy enough to shoot defenseless animals like this? Who else is out there killing things with a rifle? Huh? Tell me that?”
No one answered him. The fog lifted and fell in beaded threads and tugged at the light in waves that seemed to pulsate across the yard. The gravel shone with wet. Gentian was red-faced. Cindy looked ashamed. And Carolee? Carolee looked as if she never expected her feelings to be spared again, looked like a pariah, mother of the murderer. And what did that say about her then? She was the girlfriend, no denying it, and that made her guilty too. As guilty, in their eyes, as if she’d pulled the trigger herself.
35
IT WAS MIDWAY THROUGH the fifth week, Adam was still at large and the police were beyond crazy. They were stopping everybody on Route 20 just to look in their cars because in their feeble minds they imagined Adam squeezed under somebody’s seat or packed into their trunk and they’d stopped her three times now but it was nothing more than a petty annoyance. They didn’t ask for her papers and she didn’t have to state her status. They didn’t care if she was wearing a seatbelt or not and they didn’t run her license plate or turn up the warrant out for her arrest on the grounds that she’d refused to play their idiot games or shuffle one more time through the charade of authority with the old hag of a judge in her courthouse presided over by the flag of the U.S.I.G.A. No. All they were interested in was Adam. It was all-out war now. They’d been made to look like the fools they were, big macho men with their big manly guns and all the resources of ten sheriff’s departments and they still couldn’t catch one twenty-five-year-old mountain man who was driving a stake through the heart of the local economy and scaring the bejesus out of the taxpayers so they couldn’t even sleep at night.
She was at home, in the kitchen, listening to music and pushing two bone-in pork chops around a pan and sprinkling them with rosemary from her garden. She was tired of salad so she’d bought some fresh spinach at the farmers’ market, rinsed it, tossed it with a little garlic salt and pepper, then splashed it with olive oil and balsamic and microwaved it for three minutes, easiest thing in the world. It had fallen dark now, the nights growing shorter — and colder — and Halloween just two days away. How would that play out? she wondered. What would parents tell their children? They’d have private parties, she supposed, because no one — absolutely no one — would be going house to house. Not with Adam out there. Would he consciously hurt a kid? Not the Adam she knew. But then he had driven his car onto the playground, hadn’t he? And maybe he wasn’t really the Adam she knew, not if he could shoot down Art Tolleson and the other one and just leave them there to rot.
Kutya stirred in the corner where he’d been lying asleep, laziest dog she’d ever seen and not getting any younger, and now he came clicking across the floor to her and the smell of the meat searing in the pan. “No,” she told him, bending from the waist to look into his eyes, “you’re just going to have to wait.” Then she turned back to the pan and flipped the chops, everything in its place and everything quiet, but here she was in her warm kitchen with the smell of the meat rising around her and she couldn’t help wondering what Adam was eating. He had a prodigious appetite and no matter how many freeze-dried entrées or cans of beef stew he’d squirreled away out there, how could it have lasted him all this time? He’d been breaking into cabins, they’d reported that, and he’d held that one old lady hostage back there at the beginning, but still. And that was another thing: no hot food. Even when it was raining, even when it was cold, and it had been getting down into the forties at night. Maybe he had a camp stove, the kind of thing you could risk cooking on in a deep secluded place, a cave or something, but even so he must have been pretty miserable. She tried to picture that a minute, him in a cave, with that rank wet smell caves always had and what, bats hanging overhead? He wouldn’t dare travel in the daytime, not if he had any sense and he did, obviously, so he must have been roaming the woods in the dark — and if he was, he couldn’t use a light. And if he couldn’t use a light, how could he find his way? Plus, how could he keep from dying of boredom out there, even if he was putting everything he had into baiting the jerkoff cops and their killer dogs and no doubt enjoying it too? Adam. And why couldn’t she stop thinking about him?