Thursday, 7:40 p.m.
Somebody had gone over it again.
Tuesday night Rob had scrubbed the tailgate with Goo Gone and a green pad until the white paint came up dull. Wednesday it was back. He’d scrubbed it again. Now it said #THREEBEERS again, in orange paint marker, the kind surveyors used on stakes, in letters a foot high. Whoever it was had a steady hand. They’d done the pound sign right. Two lines and two lines, parallel, crossed square.
He shut the truck door and stood in the driveway on Juniper Road with his lunch cooler in his hand.
There was a van from the Bend station across the ditch with its mast down. The woman was standing on his lawn, which was mostly cheatgrass, holding her phone out in front of her at chest height the way she always did, as if she were offering him something.
“Rob. Rob, can I ask you about Calder Elementary this morning?”
Brynn Kessler. Thirty-something, Portland, a fleece vest. Eleven episodes. She had a voice like a school counselor and she’d used it to tell eighty thousand people what kind of beer he drank.
“There’s a photo going around of a man in Pip’s classroom,” she said. “An older man. Do you know who he is? Is that why you were at Jo’s house this morning?”
He went past her. He didn’t walk fast. He’d learned on day five that if you walked fast they put it in the episode.
“Rob, people want to hear from you.”
He got the door shut and stood in the kitchen with the cooler.
◆
He’d set eleven posts that afternoon at the Lindgrens’ out on Crane Butte Road. Alone. Cody had quit after episode four because his girlfriend didn’t want him on the podcast, and nobody else had called back. Eleven holes, thirty inches, a bag and a half of Quikrete each, plumb both ways, braced. He’d gone out there at one o’clock straight from Jo’s because concrete sets whether you’re thinking or not, and he’d needed something that would.
It hadn’t worked. He’d plumbed every post and seen the old man in Jo’s driveway every time.
Standing there in Rob’s Red Wings. Rob’s. He’d resoled them twice and left them in the garage on Larch when he moved out, and there they were on a stranger’s feet, too big, the laces wrapped twice around the ankles to hold them on. Toby Voss, the man had said, over the hood of the Subaru. Just said it. Rob had come down the lawn at him, and Ann had put one flat hand on Rob’s chest and held it there, and she was stronger than she looked.
There was a message on his phone from Denise, left at 5:12. He stood at the counter and played it.
“Rob, it’s Denise. Nothing’s changed on Tuesday. They’ll file after the holiday, that’s still what I’m hearing.” Paper moving on her desk. “I’m also hearing Ann’s got someone in holding tonight. An older man, something to do with Jo. Don’t talk to anybody. Not the podcast, not Ann, not Jo. Call me in the morning.” A pause, as if she’d taken the phone away from her mouth and brought it back. “If he’s anything at all, Rob, he’s something for us.”
He deleted it.
Then he stood there with the phone and wanted it back, and that was worse.
◆
He hadn’t been asleep.
At three o’clock on the twenty-second he’d walked up the campground road sixty yards to the overlook turnout, where if you stood at the guardrail and held your phone out over the drop you got one bar. Terry Hollis had called about the bid. Sixteen by twenty-four, second story, off a slider, pressure-treated frame with composite on top. Hollis wanted to know why it had to be two-by-tens. So Rob had stood at the rail with his back to the camp and the lake and explained it. Span. Load. Twelve-foot joists at sixteen on center, and you want the ten-inch, because the eight will bounce, and a deck that bounces is a deck that’s telling you something. Hollis was the kind of man who wanted to understand everything he paid for. Rob had liked him for it. The call went forty minutes.
He’d gotten the job.
He’d walked back down at ten to four, and the table was empty, and he’d thought, Good. She took him. He’d opened the cooler and gotten a Coke and sat down.
When the deputy asked him that night, with the lights going blue across the tents, he’d said he must have dozed off. Three beers, a camp chair, August. The deputy wrote it down. It had been true ever since.
Three beers was a thing that happened to a man. A deck bid was a thing he’d picked.
And Jo’s statement said she’d left Toby at the table with his dad at 3:15. He’d read it in Denise’s office, twice, with his hands flat on his knees. The table part he could never call. To call it he’d have had to say where he was.
◆
Gil’s text came at 9:52.
Your guy is in holding. Im on till 6. Back door after 10:15 if you want. 10 min, off the books.
Gil Ahern had worked nights at the county jail for twenty-two years. Rob had built his fence two summers ago, cedar, dog-eared, six foot, with a gate that still closed on its own weight, and Gil had paid half in cash and half in elk, and at the end of the job he’d said, If you ever need anything. People said it. Gil had meant it, which was the kind of thing you didn’t find out until you needed something.
Rob sat in the kitchen with the text for twenty minutes.
He thought it through in order, the way he’d lay out a job. First you look at the site. You look at the hands, because hands tell you what a man has done with his life. Then you ask the one question and you don’t let him walk you off it. Where is my son. You don’t argue. You don’t touch him. Ann could hold a man on a lie for a night, and she could hold him longer on something else, and if the something else was a thing he said to the father at ten-thirty at night, then Rob would hear it first.
He’d walk out of there with the old man’s answer or with the old man hanging himself on something the DA could use. Either one was a place to stand.
He put on a clean shirt. He didn’t know why.
◆
The jail was the back half of the Sheriff’s Office on Court Street, cinder block painted the color of a Band-Aid, with a steel door under a caged light. Gil buzzed him in and walked him down a hall that smelled of floor wax and somebody’s microwave burrito.
“I got a grandson eight,” Gil said, not looking at him. “That’s all it is.”
There were two holding cells at the end, and one was empty. Gil dragged a plastic chair up to the bars of the other one and went back through a door with a wired-glass window in it and sat down in the booth on the other side where Rob could see him, and put his reading glasses on, and opened a clipboard.
The old man was lying on the steel bench with his back to the bars and his knees drawn up, too long for it. He had on the linen shirt from this morning, gray-white, with no collar, and the wool trousers, and Rob’s Red Wings, and the Red Wings had no laces in them. The jail had taken the laces. The tongues hung open.
He knew somebody was there. Rob saw his shoulders know it.
He sat up. It took him a while. He put a hand on the wall and came up off his side a piece at a time, like a man getting up off a roof, and when he was sitting he stayed very still with his hand flat on the concrete and his mouth open a little, getting his air back. Then he pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and the side of his first finger, hard, and held it, the way a man pinches out a wick. Under the fluorescent light he was the color of wet cement.
Rob saw it. He put it somewhere and didn’t go back for it.
“Where is he,” Rob said.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Don’t.”
The old man put his hands on his knees.
So Rob looked at the hands. It was the first thing on the list, and he did it.
They were big hands for the wrists, big in the knuckle, brown and spotted across the backs. There was a ridge of callus across each palm under the fingers, yellow and hard, and a pad on the heel of the right hand, and a smooth worn place on the inside of the right thumb and the first knuckle of the forefinger where something with a handle had ridden for years. Not a hammer. A hammer gives you the palm. This was something you held and pushed. A chisel. A drawknife. The left ring finger stopped short at the first joint, healed over clean and shiny, no stitch marks.
They were hands that had worked wood every day for longer than Rob had been alive. There wasn’t any faking that. You could fake a story. You couldn’t fake forty years of a chisel handle.
“What took the finger,” Rob said.
“An adze. I was seventeen. I was showing off for a girl.”
Nobody used an adze. Rob had seen one used exactly once, at a timber-frame show in Sisters, by an old boy with a beard to his belt squaring a fir log while a crowd of people from Portland took pictures.
“Dad,” the old man said. “You let me drive the screw gun on the Hendersons’ deck. You said a triangle can’t lie.”
Gil turned a page on his clipboard behind the glass.
Rob had both hands on the arms of the plastic chair. He didn’t remember putting them there.
Nobody knew that. It was a Saturday. Jo had taken Pip to a birthday party. The Hendersons were in Arizona till October and he’d had the place to himself, and he’d brought Toby because there was nobody else to take him, and set him on an overturned bucket with a coffee can of deck screws. Nobody else had been there. Rob hadn’t told anyone. It wasn’t the kind of thing you told.
“What color was it,” Rob said. “The screw gun.”
“Yellow. It had a black battery on the bottom that you said not to drop. I dropped it.” The old man’s mouth moved in the white beard. “You said, well, that’s twenty-two dollars.”
It had been a DeWalt. The battery had cracked across the casing and still worked. It was in the truck right now, in the milk crate behind the seat, with electrical tape around it.
His chest had gone tight across, like a strap cinched one notch too far.
The old man leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and lowered his voice, though Gil was behind the glass and couldn’t have heard him if he’d shouted.
“You weren’t asleep,” he said.
Rob sat.
“You were up at the turnout on the phone. By the rail. You had your back to the lake. You were saying twelve-foot joists. You said it two times, because the man didn’t understand it the first time.”
“How.”
“I came up the path. I was going to tell on Mom. I was going to tell you she was mean.” He said mean the way a kid says it, all the way down on the word. “I heard you up there through the trees. I saw your back. You had your hand on the back of your neck, like you do.” He put his own hand on the back of his neck, and took it away. “Then I heard the whistle.”
“You came up the path,” Rob said. “From where.”
The old man gave him a long look, and it didn’t ask for anything.
“I wasn’t with you,” he said. “I followed Mom down the path. She sent me back. I didn’t go back.”
◆
The dog.
The dog was called Duchess and she was a bloodhound out of Deschutes County with a handler named Maddox who talked to her the whole time in a voice like a man sweet-talking a truck. Day one, first light. They’d given her Toby’s pillowcase to smell. She’d gone out of site 9 and straight down the lake path at a run, nose down, ears dragging, down past the switchback and on down to the split cedar, and circled there, and then come back up the path, and turned off it where the Whistler trail went up, and gone up the trail into the rocks. Rob had been there. He’d seen it with his own eyes. Down, and around, and back up.
He had told Ann. He’d told her that morning and every morning. The dog went down the lake path, Ann. He went after her. And Ann had written it down, and nothing had happened.
At the table with his dad at 3:15.
Jo had seen him. Jo had seen him on the path and sent him back up it alone, and come back at four and said, Where’s Toby, and Rob had said, With you, and she’d let that stand. For eleven days she’d let it stand. She’d sat in that camper and let eighty thousand people and Ann Treadwell and the Tamarack County DA believe the boy had wandered off from a drunk asleep in a chair.
And Rob had let her. That was the part that came up after, like a nail you’ve set that works its way back out. He’d let her because the chair was better than the rail.
“Dad.”
Rob looked up.
It was Rob’s own eyes looking back at him. Gray, with the dark ring around the outside of the gray that Rob’s mother had had, and Rob had, and Toby had, and Pip didn’t. They were in a face that was all bone and white beard and they were looking at him with nothing in them but patience. Rob had looked into those eyes in the bathroom mirror every morning of his life and never once seen them patient.
“They took my leaf,” the old man said. He pressed two fingers against his breastbone, under the shirt. “For my heart. Mom knows what it is.”
“What leaf.”
“I need it.” He took the fingers away. “Drive me to the lake.”
“You’re in a cell.”
“After. When they let me out. After the spit test.” He said it like it was the name of a real thing, a thing that had been on a schedule for years. “Drive me up. You’ve got the truck.”
Rob opened his mouth. There was nothing in it.
Behind the glass Gil stood up and tapped twice on the window with his wedding ring. He held up a hand with the fingers spread, and then closed it.
Rob stood. The plastic chair scraped. He stood there with his hand on the back of it.
“Is the deck still standing?” the old man said. “The Hendersons’.”
“It’s standing.”
The old man nodded. He lay back down on the bench, slower than he’d come up, and drew his knees in and turned his face to the wall. The unlaced boots stuck out past the end of the bench with the tongues hanging. Rob looked at the backs of them, at the heels he’d worn down on the outside edges himself, over years, walking the way he walked.
He wanted to go in there and lace them. He had laces in the truck.
“Rob,” Gil said, from the door.
◆
He sat in the truck in the lot behind the Sheriff’s Office with the engine off and the keys in his hand.
The Henderson deck had been a sixteen-by-twenty on a slope, which meant tall posts on the downhill side, which meant it would rack if you let it. Toby had been seven. He’d handed up screws one at a time from a coffee can, serious as a nurse. Rob had put a scrap of two-by-four across the corner of a frame and pushed on it with one finger to show him. Box’ll fold on you, he’d said. Triangle won’t. Triangles don’t rack. He hadn’t thought about it once in the year since. Now he couldn’t stop pushing on it, that corner, with one finger, in the dark of the truck outside a jail.
He’d let him drive four screws. Toby had leaned his whole weight on the gun the way Rob showed him, tongue out the side of his mouth, and the first one had gone in crooked and stripped, and the second one had gone in crooked, and the third one had gone in straight and snugged down flush and stopped. Toby had looked up at him. Rob had said, There you go. That’s a screw.
Across the lot there was a light on in a window on the jail side. He didn’t know which window. He sat and looked at it anyway.
◆
At home the van was gone. The orange letters on his tailgate caught his headlights as he swung in and went dark again when he killed them.
His phone went at 11:02. Tall Timber had posted.
WHO IS THE OLD MAN WITH PIP VOSS?
It was a picture somebody’s mother had taken that morning in Ms. Delgado’s room. The little tables and the rug with the map of the states on it, and an old man with a white braid folded up in a kindergarten chair, knees up past his chin, his big hands hanging between them, and Pip leaning against his arm in her rain boots. Jo was at the edge of the frame, cut off at the shoulder. Pip was saying something. The old man had his head bent down to hear it.
Four hundred comments. He didn’t open them.
He opened the refrigerator.
The six-pack was on the bottom shelf behind the ketchup, where it had been since the twenty-fifth. He’d bought it at the Chevron the afternoon the pole camera went into the Whistler and came back out with pictures of rock. Rainier, tallboys, the plastic rings still on. He hadn’t opened one. He’d moved it once, to get at the mayonnaise, and put it back.
He took a can out of its ring. It was so cold it hurt his fingers. He stood in the light from the refrigerator with the door open and the motor kicking on and held it.
Then he worked it back into the ring. It took a while, because the plastic had stretched, and he had to seat it with his thumb all the way around the rim the way you’d seat a gasket. He put the six-pack back behind the ketchup.
He shut the refrigerator.
◆
Larch Street at midnight. One van down at the corner by the park with its windows fogged and nobody moving in it. The swings across the road hung straight.
He parked three houses down, across from the Kowalskis’, and turned the engine off.
The house was dark. The Subaru was in the driveway. The juniper had gotten away from her; it was eating the front walk, and the porch light was off, which it never used to be, because he’d always said leave it on and she’d always said who’s going to rob us, and then left it on.
He sat with his hands on the wheel.
He’d hung that front door himself, the summer Pip was born. Solid-core fir, a pre-hung unit off the truck from Bend. It had stuck that first winter, when the wet got into it, so he’d pulled the pins and taken it down and laid it across two sawhorses in the garage, and planed a sixteenth off the latch side, and sealed the raw edge, and hung it back up. It hadn’t stuck since.
He knew exactly how it would sound under his knuckles. Solid. Not loud. Enough to carry down the hall.
His phone said 12:10.
He put it face down on the dash and sat back in the seat, and he kept his eyes on the door.