Thursday, 5:05 a.m.
I woke because the room had no one in it.
There is a difference between an empty room and one with a man asleep, and I've been reading it in the dark for eleven years. The clock on his nightstand said 5:05. The light was gray going gold, the sun five minutes off the tree line. I lay on top of the quilt in my clothes with the receiver still hissing on my belt. It was the first sleep since Tuesday that wasn't in a chair.
The second thing was that the window was empty. No man at it. No back, no keys.
"Cal?"
The oximeter lay on his pillow. The clip stood open like a small mouth, and the screen was dark, not beeping, not showing anything. Somebody had held the button down until it quit.
I said his name again, louder, and the house took it and gave nothing back. I was down the stairs with no thought for which of them talked. The fourth knocked like a fist on a door. The ninth groaned.
I went through the house saying his name into every room, and every room said what an empty room says. Tansy sat on the bottom stair with her deaf side to me, looking at the kitchen door as if it owed her something. In the mudroom my own boots stood alone on the mat, no laced pair beside them. I pushed my feet into them and went out and looked at the place by the shoeing rig where a dark-green truck had stood every night for eleven years.
A rectangle of gravel, paler than the rest, where the truck had kept the night's wet off it. Around it the stones were dark with dew, and the edges of the rectangle had begun to go dark too, the way a stain comes back into a blotter. I stood and did the sum I'd do for a cooling carcass. An hour, or a little more. He had gone soon after I'd shut my eyes, with an alarm on his finger, and I had slept through a door and a truck and the ninth stair.
I ran to the barn anyway. It's what your legs do. The aisle light was on, and Pilot swung her big head round and looked at me over her door with her ears forward, chewing, and behind her Rook shifted in his stall and blew. Nobody had touched the whiteboard. 5:52 BM, oil through, eating, in a hand I had used on Wednesday morning and did not recognize even now. His shoeing rig stood open by the shop with the forge cold and the rasp laid across the anvil, where he sets it down when he means to pick it up again.
My truck sat where it sat, with the drug box shut and the padlock through the hasp. I rattled it. The key was on my own ring. He hadn't touched it, or he had, and had locked it after, because he thinks about who else is in the dark.
I went back to the house with the barn door open behind me.
* The note was under the jar of wooden spoons beside the toaster, next to the Post-it that has said the same thing since March. I'd walked past it twice. He'd written on the back of a farm-store receipt with the flat carpenter's pencil he keeps behind his ear, in the square capitals he uses for invoices, and he'd pressed hard enough that I could read it from the ridges on the other side.
IT'S ME THIS IS ABOUT. IT ALWAYS WAS.
I'M GOING TO ASK THE ONE PERSON WHO'D KNOW.
DON'T CALL ANYONE.
I'M SORRY ABOUT MARCH. —C.
The pencil had gone through the receipt at ALWAYS. I read it standing up. Then I read it with my back to the counter, because my knees had opinions.
I had closed his fingers over the keys one at a time.
North, I thought. Dagny. It's Dagny, or someone she's told. He'd said she docked at four, and he'd said let me be the one, and I'd thought he meant the phone. A woman on a tug at the top of the state, and a man in a green Silverado with a hole in his memory and my drug still in his gut, doing seventy north on a road he had no business driving. By now he'd be in the dead country where the phones give up, the long stretch of pine and gravel before the lake.
I dialed his number on my phone to hear it ring, which is a thing you do.
Over my head, through the ceiling, something buzzed. It walked across wood.
I took the stairs again. His phone was on his nightstand, face down on the charger, lined up with the edge, so the light wouldn't wake me. He had taken his keys and his boots and nothing that could be traced.
I'M SORRY ABOUT MARCH.
Every card had come in March.
I thought, I could call the sheriff. It wasn't a thought so much as a hand going to a pocket. Marlys, or whoever had the overnight desk, who'd have a deputy on the road in ten minutes. I thought of Osric and didn't dial him either. He had my vial and my log in his truck, and I did not know yet what he meant to do with them. If he walks out of that house, the voice had said on Wednesday night, and left me the rest. And he had walked out. Not because anyone made him.
The note said DON'T CALL ANYONE. So did the voice. It was the first time in two days the two of them had agreed, and I didn't care for it.
* I went back out. Down the lane with the light coming up behind the barn, and out to the road, where the ditch was loud with frogs and the dew lay on the verge like a sheet on a bed. Two dark lines cut across it at the corner, one wheel cutting close, where a truck had turned out of my lane. They turned north.
Two miles up, the county road split. Highway 8 went on to Port Ashby, four hours of it, and the other fork went to the lakes. Two dark lines in the dew didn't say which, and I stood at the mouth of my lane and couldn't choose.
I stood at the end of my own drive and looked up the empty road, the culvert a hundred and fifty yards off with its field entrance and its stand of ragweed, and Tiede's house on the far side, gray and shut, the beige Volvo nosed in by the porch, every window blank. Upstairs, at the window where he keeps his binoculars for the cranes, the glass gave back the sky and nothing else.
I walked up to the culvert, because it was a hundred and fifty yards and I had to do something with my legs. The ragweed at the field entrance lay flat in two long strips where a truck had backed in and sat. No cigarette end, no cup, no wrapper. Whoever it was had taken his trash home with him.
I had nothing to find him with but a sentence: the one person who'd know. And the person who knew was on the road with him, or ahead of him, or behind.
I got the phone out. I opened my recents. My thumb was on Dagny's name, on the letters of it, when the screen lit and buzzed in my hand and the name went under a number.
A 715, which is half the state. I had it by heart now; I didn't need my arm.
5:31.
I let it ring twice, so the hand wouldn't shake. Then I answered and said nothing at all.
The line was open. Not a room, not a road, not a breath. It let the silence sit, and I let it, and I stood in the road with my feet planted.
"Good morning, Hanne."
Level as Tuesday, each word weighed against the last.
"Where is he?"
It waited until I'd finished.
"He came to me," the voice said. "He always comes when he is sorry."
I put my free hand over my mouth and took it away again.
He came to me. I stood in the road with it in my ear and there was nothing under it to look at. Not a man, not a woman. A sister on a tug. A stranger with a machine. I tried Dagny's face on it, and it neither fit nor refused.
"You told me Tuesday you had him," I said. "On Tuesday you had nobody. You had a man asleep in my bed and a phone."
"Yes," it said. "Now I have your husband."
For two days there had been no one for it to have. Now there was.
The sun had reached the ridge of the barn roof. A killdeer ran along the pasture fence.
"Put him on."
"You have asked me that before."
"Put him on the phone. A word. A syllable. I'll know it's today."
"He is sleeping, Hanne."
It was my own line, or nearly. Is he sleeping, Hanne? I had typed Yes to that, under a lamp, with my thumb over the glass. The vet in me sat up: sleeping how, with what, how much, who's watching his airway.
"Listen to me. He has a drug in him that can stop his breathing. It's in his gut and it's still coming out, and if somebody puts anything on top of it, he stops. Whoever's with him needs to know that. Someone has to be watching his chest."
"I know what is in him, Hanne," the voice said. "I know exactly what is in him."
I had one hand on the gatepost. I could not have said when I'd put it there.
"Noon," the voice said. "Bring what you did not finish. You will finish it where I can watch, or the water will."
"What water? What are you—"
"It will not take long."
"Where? Where do I bring it?"
"You will know by eleven."
The line closed. There was no click, as there had never been one. It was simply gone, and I stood at the end of my drive with a screen that said 5:33, and the killdeer going on along the fence, crying its name.
The water.
North of Marten Falls there is more water than road. Forty lakes with names, and forty without. The river, and the flowage, and every farm pond and stock tank between here and the state line. I stood there with the phone going warm in my hand and tried to hear which of them it had meant, and I couldn't, and the killdeer went on.
Bring what you did not finish.
There was one thing in the world I had begun and not finished. I had what was left of it in a bottle in my jacket pocket.
I was walking. Then I was running, the boots loud on the gravel, up the lane past the barn where Pilot put her head over the door and blew, toward the house and the phone he had left on his nightstand on purpose, and four digits I already had.