Thursday, 9:50 a.m.
Sheriff Ann Treadwell had put her phone away by the time Jo got the car stopped. She was tall, and she’d been tall at every search briefing for eleven days, standing at the back of the host site with her arms folded and her gray buzz cut, a head over the volunteers. She’d run search and rescue in this county for twenty years before she ran for sheriff. She had been the one to tell Jo, on day nine, that the search was suspended, and she’d done it sitting down on the camper step so they were at the same height.
She came around to Jo’s window now and waited for Jo to put it down.
“Morning, Jo.”
“Ann.”
“The school called me at eight-forty.” Treadwell didn’t lean on the car. She kept her hands at her belt. “Your daughter told her teacher you hid a man’s boots so he can’t leave.”
Up at the house, the truck door slammed.
“Then Rob called me. Dee had called him. Then Brenda Sparks put this up on Bring Toby Home.” She took the phone back out of her breast pocket and turned it around. It was Room 4, a little crooked: an old man folded onto a blue plastic chair with his knees under his beard, Pip leaning against his arm in her rain boots, and half of Jo at the edge of the frame. There were already two hundred and eleven comments. “So.” She put the phone away. She bent a little and looked across Jo at the passenger seat, and her face was patient and pleasant and missed nothing. “Who’s your guest, Jo? And where are his boots?”
The passenger door opened.
He got out of the car the way he got out of everything, one hand on the roof, and stood in the driveway in his coat and Rob’s Red Wings and faced her over the hood.
“Toby Voss,” he said.
Rob was coming down the lawn. He came fast, and he was bigger than Jo remembered, or she was smaller, six foot two and heavy through the shoulders in a Carhartt jacket with sawdust in the creases, and a carpenter’s pencil behind his ear that he’d forgotten was there. He hadn’t shaved in a week. His face was a color she’d never seen on it.
“Say that again,” he said.
Treadwell stepped into his way and put one flat hand on his chest. She didn’t push. She didn’t have to. He stopped against the hand like a truck against a curb.
“Rob,” she said.
“Say it again. Say it to me.”
The old man didn’t step back. He looked at Rob’s face, and the pencil, and the sawdust, and his own face opened up in a way Jo hadn’t seen yet, not at the camper, not with Pip. It was a boy’s face at the window when the truck pulls in.
“Hi, Dad,” he said.
Rob made a sound. Then his eyes went down, past the coat, to the ground, and stayed there.
“Those are my boots,” he said.
Across the street a screen door opened, and old Mrs. Kowalski came out onto her porch in her housecoat and stood with her arms folded.
“Those are my goddamn boots, Jo.” Rob wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the Red Wings with the laces wrapped around the ankles. “You brought this into the house. With Pip. Eleven days I got a podcast lady in my yard, I got people writing on my truck, I got Denise telling me Tuesday. Tuesday, Ann, they’re going to file charges. And she’s got some old—” He stopped. He breathed through his nose. “The dog went down the lake path, Ann. I told you. Day one I told you. He didn’t walk off from my table. He went after her.”
The old man looked down at his feet in Rob’s boots, and stood like that for a while. Then he looked at Jo across the roof of the car. That was all. She felt her face go and couldn’t do anything about it.
Treadwell didn’t turn around. “Inside,” she said. “All of us. Mrs. Kowalski’s got her glasses on.”
◆
The kitchen still smelled of brown butter. The pot was on the stove with the lid on it, and Pip’s bowl was on the table with the spoon in it and Captain Otter’s chair pushed out, and Treadwell took all that in from the doorway before she sat down, and Jo watched her take it in.
He sat where he’d sat for breakfast. Rob didn’t sit. He stood against the counter by the sink with his arms folded so tight his shoulders came up.
Treadwell put her notebook on the table and her readers on her nose.
“Sir,” she said. “What’s your date of birth?”
“March fourteenth. Twenty eighteen.”
She wrote it down. She didn’t look up.
“And how old are you?”
“Sixty-three.”
She wrote that down, too, underneath, in the same small square print.
“Anybody can read a Facebook page,” Rob said.
“Rob.” Treadwell turned a page. “Where have you been, sir? Since August twenty-second.”
“A place called Varra. It’s through the Whistler. On the other side.” He said it plainly, the way he’d said it at the camper, not trying to sell it, like a man giving his address. “I have to go back. I have to go today.”
“Uh-huh.” She wrote. “And how’d you get down here from the lake?”
He looked at Jo.
“I drove him,” Jo said.
“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday.”
Treadwell’s pen stopped. “Yesterday. And last night he slept here. With your daughter in the house.” She said it without any weight at all, just reading it back. “And his boots.”
Jo had her hands around a mug she hadn’t filled. “In my car,” she said. “He’s confused. I didn’t want him walking into the road.”
“I’m not confused,” he said.
Treadwell looked at him over her readers, and then at Jo, and then she closed the notebook on her pen.
“Rob,” she said. “Jo. I’m going to talk to this gentleman by myself for a bit.” She stood up. “Living room, sir, if you’d come with me. Rob, you stay in here. You stay in here and you don’t come through that door.”
◆
Deputy Haskins’s cruiser pulled up behind Rob’s truck at ten-forty. Jo saw him through the window over the sink, young and sunburned, the skin peeling off his nose from the lake, standing at the bottom of the driveway with his thumbs in his belt. He’d been on the boat with the divers. He’d brought her a Gatorade on day three and told her they’d find him.
In the living room Treadwell’s voice went on, low and even, and his voice went under it, shorter, with gaps. Jo couldn’t make out words. She could hear the rhythm: a question, a pause, a short answer. Once, a long answer. Once he laughed, the boy’s bark, and Rob flinched at the sink as if something had hit the window.
Rob hadn’t moved from the counter. He’d taken the pencil from behind his ear and was turning it end over end in his fingers.
“Is it him,” he said.
Jo got up and filled the mug from the tap. She didn’t drink it.
“Jo.” He said it to the window. “I’m asking you. Is it him.”
She put the mug down. She looked at the pot on the stove.
“What’d he make,” Rob said. He lifted the lid on the cold oats with the cranberries in them and the brown butter gone hard on top. He put the lid back on very carefully, as if it were somebody’s.
At eleven-fifty she turned on the little TV under the cabinet, because the rhythm through the wall had gone on for an hour and she couldn’t listen to it anymore. It was the noon news out of Bend, early, the anchor with the helmet of hair. A fire near Sisters. The school board. Then Toby’s school picture came up over the anchor’s shoulder, the camera smile, the gap, and then a picture of Rob she’d never seen, from somebody’s Facebook, Rob at a barbecue in a Mariners cap holding a can of Rainier up to whoever was taking it.
“—where a popular true-crime podcast has focused attention on the boy’s father, and the hashtag—”
The screen showed it. White letters on a green band. #THREEBEERS.
Rob looked at it, and his face went smooth and flat as a planed board. She’d been married to that face for eight years.
“It’s on my tailgate,” he said. “Paint marker. I got it off Tuesday night. Wednesday it was back.”
She turned off the TV.
He put the pencil back behind his ear.
“I was sober two years,” he said. “Two years, two months. I had three beers. You know how many times I’ve thought—” He stopped. “You know what I keep thinking? He was right there. He was sitting at the table. I looked right at him.” He pushed the heel of his hand into one eye. “Except the dog says he wasn’t. The dog says he went down the path. And you say he was at the table at three-fifteen. And I don’t know anymore. Jo, I don’t know what I looked at.”
Jo didn’t say anything.
In the living room the voices had stopped.
◆
Treadwell came back through the door at five past twelve with her notebook shut and her readers in her shirt pocket. He came behind her and stopped in the doorway, one hand on the frame.
Treadwell sat down across from Jo. She didn’t open the notebook.
“He knows a lot,” she said.
Jo waited.
“He knows the name of your son’s second-grade teacher, which is on the internet, and the name of his best friend, which is on the internet if you look. He knows the otter, which is on the posters.” Treadwell folded her hands on the notebook. “He knows you had hot dogs your last night at the lake and Rob burned them. He knows you said it didn’t matter, they were already dead. He knows the Kowalskis’ dog’s name and that it bit him once, on the calf, and you didn’t report it because Frank Kowalski’d just had his hip done.”
Rob made a sound at the sink.
“He says he’s your son,” Treadwell said. “He says he’s sixty-three and he’s your son and he walked out of a cave yesterday afternoon from a country on the other side of the mountain, and he has to go back there today. So here’s where I am, Jo. Either somebody who’s been very close to your family for a long time told that man a great deal. Or he’s been close to your son. Long enough to ask him things.” She let that sit. “Your people from around here?”
“My mom’s dead. My dad left when I was three.”
Treadwell didn’t write it down. She held it in the air in front of her, and put it somewhere.
“Here’s the other thing,” she said. “If he’s just a confused old man with nowhere to be, I don’t have anything to hold him on. Being confused isn’t a crime. I’ll get him a ride wherever he wants to go.” She turned in her chair. “Where do you want to go, sir?”
“Two Sisters Lake,” he said from the doorway. “Please. Today.”
“Then Deputy Haskins can—”
“I don’t know who he is,” Jo said.
It came out level. She heard it come out, in her own voice, in her own kitchen, and it didn’t shake.
“He came to the camper,” she said. “Yesterday. He knocked on the door and asked for water. He knows things about Toby that nobody should know.”
She laid them down one after another like stones across a creek, and she heard Treadwell hear them. Treadwell didn’t move. She only got more attentive.
In the doorway he took his hand off the frame.
“He’s confused,” Jo said.
“He knows where he is,” Rob said. He’d come off the counter. “He’s not confused. Look at him. He knows exactly where he is. He knows what he’s doing.” His voice was rising. “You don’t know who he is? You let him sleep in the house. With Pip. He made breakfast, Jo.”
“Rob,” Treadwell said.
“He’s not confused, Ann. He’s something. He’s not confused.”
Treadwell stood. She pushed her chair in under the table, neatly, and put the notebook in her pocket, and turned to the man in the doorway.
“Sir, I’d like you to come down to the office with me and talk some more. Would you do that?”
He was looking at Jo. He’d been looking at her since she said it. He wasn’t looking at her the way he had at the curb this morning, or across the kitchen at breakfast when Pip asked him. His face had gone quiet all the way through.
“Can you do the spit test?” he said, to Treadwell. He didn’t take his eyes off Jo. “The one on TV. Then you’ll know.”
Treadwell’s eyebrows went up a quarter inch. “A cheek swab. We can do that.”
“Then I’ll come,” he said. “Then you’ll know, and you can drive me to the lake.”
“Let’s go talk,” Treadwell said.
◆
He walked down the driveway ahead of Treadwell in Rob’s boots. He went slowly, lifting each foot so the toes wouldn’t catch, and Haskins came up the lawn to meet them and then saw how slow he was going and slowed down himself, and didn’t know what to do with his hands.
Mrs. Kowalski was still on her porch. Two cars had stopped on Larch with their engines running. A girl in the second one had her phone up against the windshield.
Treadwell opened the back door of the Tahoe. He stopped beside it and looked in at the seat and the cage between the front and the back, the scuffed plastic, the seat belt hanging. He stood there long enough that Haskins shifted his weight.
“I’ll ride in back?” he said.
“That’s where we put folks,” Treadwell said.
He nodded. He put one hand on the roof and one on the door frame. Treadwell put her hand on the top of his head, and he let her, and he folded himself down into the back seat of the Tahoe with his white braid against the cage.
Rob was standing on the lawn with his arms hanging. Jo was on the front walk under the juniper. She hadn’t come any farther.
Treadwell shut the door. Through the back window Jo could see him feeling along the seat for the buckle, and not finding it, and then his hand found it, and the belt went across him.
He turned his head then and looked at her through the glass. He didn’t lift his hand. He didn’t mouth anything. He looked at her with Rob’s gray eyes, steadily, all the time it took Treadwell to walk around the front of the Tahoe and get in and start it and back it out into Larch Street, and he kept looking at her as it pulled away, until the juniper was in the way and she couldn’t see him anymore. She stayed where she was on the walk, where he could still see her if he was looking.