They didn’t have building bricks when he was a boy. His dad had given him Lincoln logs, and over the years, Ron’s dad had added to the set until they filled a box almost too big to fit under his bed. Ron made forts and villages and fences and barns. Two short logs crossed over each other served as cannon. His dad came into his room one night and they built a tower together, half as tall as Ron.
Years later, when Levi was six, Ron had said to his dad, “You never told me how much fun being a father would be.”
“I didn’t think of it at the time,” his dad said.
Ron fingered the building brick. He’d never made a tower with Levi.
The sky grew dark, and Ron didn’t move. He thought about putting Levi to bed. “Have good dreams,” he’d say. For forty nights now, Levi had not had Ron to wish him a bedtime without nightmares. He thought about throwing a baseball back and forth. He remembered reading to him, book after book, Levi’s head resting against Ron’s arm as they sat on the couch.
Ten days ago the Denver detective in charge of the investigation said, “We’re giving up the search, Ron. You’re going to have to face the possibility your son is dead. Sims killed his victims. We know that.” They sat in the detective’s temporary office in the Gilpin County Courthouse. Ron struggled to remain calm. The detective didn’t look over twenty, and it was clear Ron made him uncomfortable.
“He didn’t kill them right away,” Ron insisted. “The Perez girl he kept in his basement for a week. In Colorado Springs he kept that baby in a storage garage for four days. His house was in Central City. My boy is in a mine somewhere. It’s logical.” Ron held a crumpled flyer. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD? Levi smiled from the page, a strand of his black hair across his forehead, his dark eyes turned toward his cake before he blew out the candles.
With the detective, Ron had walked through Sims’ house, a restored turn-of-the-century Victorian gingerbread with no closets. Posters covered the living room walls, all children. Except for the kitchen, blocked with yellow crime-scene tape and the outline of Sims’ body on the floor, the rooms were meticulously tidy. Magazines on the coffee table were fanned out perfectly, the same half-inch overlap on each. On Sims’ dresser in the bedroom, a line of brass padlocks stood like sentinels in a military row. They were the only decoration. Ron wondered what could make a man like Sims. Couldn’t love have saved him? Love, pure love, might have kept Sims from hating, just as pure love would find his son. The police didn’t love Levi enough to find him.
The detective shook his head. “If he hadn’t shot himself, we could ask him. But he did. We’ve had crews up and down the area. If your son were there, we would have found him. He might have lasted a week without food. Only a couple days without water. It’s been a month. Sims buried his victims. I’m sorry to have to say it this way, but I’d guess your boy is in a shallow grave.”
Ron gripped the arms of the chair to keep from leaping at the man. “There’s bonds between a father and his son. I’d know if he had died.”
“The department can arrange counseling, if you request it,” the detective said.
“You’re not a father, are you?” Ron looked past the detective. Black and white photographs hung on the wall behind him: men standing before a wagon, holding shovels and lunch boxes; a long shot of Central City down main street when it was still dirt; the front of a school, forty or fifty children sitting on the steps, their severe looking teacher standing behind them with her arms crossed.
Ron touched the hard edge of the plastic building brick sitting on the dashboard and thought about the kids in the school a hundred years ago no different than his own boy, all dead by now for sure, and Levi who might not be. Razor-edged stars filled the sky through his windshield. The air had cooled, caressing his face through the open windows. This far up the rutted road he couldn’t hear traffic from the highway or crowd noise from the casinos that filled Central City. He canted his head to hear better. Something clicked repetitively in the distance, maybe a night bird or a locust. He wondered if locusts lived this high. For a long time he rested his finger on the brick and listened. The night vibrated with its own muttering. Unidentifiable sounds that he guessed might be the breeze sliding over rocks and through the scrubby grasses. A high squeak that might be a bat. He couldn’t tell. The mountain was perfectly black and the cloudless sky danced with stars that provided no illumination.
He turned on the ceiling light to read the map. If someone saw him from a distance, he thought, he’d look like a time traveler in his craft, light glowing through the windows, unattached to the Earth.
Eventually he turned the light out and fell asleep sitting up, his head pillowed on a jacket against the door, windows still open so he could hear if Levi should call.
Charles slipped out of the cabin before dawn, the eastern sky just barely lighter than the west. The wind came up the valley, and in it he could hear the stamp mills thrumming as they crushed ore.
He trudged up the switch-back trail toward the mine, his hands heavy, his head heavy. Had any child the boy met lived? There weren’t that many children in the camps. The school in Nevadaville had 150 students last year, he’d heard, but there were 10,000 miners in the district. Central City had a small school and so did Blackhawk. Charles had never sent the boy, but he was supposed to go in the fall. The town was growing. More families came in every day. They were building churches.
At the top of the hill, he paused. From here in the pre-sunrise grimness, most of the town was visible in purples and blues. He couldn’t find his own cabin though. Then, he gasped. A black aura like a cloud hid it from him, and for a moment it seemed as if it grew tentacles that flowed down the dirt roads, over the wooden sidewalks, sniffing at each door. The wind rippled the cloud’s top, then blew in his face, carrying the smell of a crypt and the fevered dampness from the Laughlin cabin.
Charles shook his head. There was his cabin! There was no black cloud. He held his hands over his pounding heart. Am I going mad? A hallucination! But the question echoed hollowly. This was not madness. He’d seen the cloud as a vision, a sign. He backed up the trail, afraid to take his gaze away from the cabin.
When a man’s dog goes wild, he shoots him. It’s his responsibility. What was his responsibility as a father of a monster?
When Charles worked the mine that day, he stuffed his pockets with candles, and he kept one lit no matter where he was. The shadows beyond the weak candlelight were like the shadow creeping from his own house.
If Sims had locked Levi in a mine, it would have to have several qualities, Ron thought as he shouldered his pack. Pine lining the mountain top glowed in the morning light, but the sun wouldn’t touch the valley’s bottom for another hour. Ron checked his map and began the long hike up the old road. It had to be both close enough for him to get to, but far enough off the beaten track that it was unlikely anyone would find it. It had to be far enough back that even if Levi screamed for help, no one would hear him. There would be food and water. The question was, how much food and water? Sims wouldn’t have planned on leaving Levi with over a month’s supply.
Each step up the road felt like the ticking of an immense clock counting down. How much time was left? Was Levi even now crouched against a locked gate, light leaking around the edges, on the brink of death by thirst or starvation? If he ran out of water, might there be water in the mine itself that he had been drinking to keep himself alive? Ron thought about Tom Sawyer, not the hijinks of the little boy, but the awful image of Injun Joe trapped in McDougal’s cave. After Ron’s dad had read him that part, Ron had nightmares for months about eating bats while trying to carve through a thick wooden door with a broken knife.