Friday, 10:25 a.m.
Treadwell’s office had a window onto the parking lot, a dying philodendron on the file cabinet, and a framed photo of a younger Treadwell in a red search-and-rescue jacket on a snowfield with four other people, all of them squinting. Jo sat in the chair across the desk. It was the same kind of chair as the one in the interview room, but nobody had bolted it down.
“The front desk says it’s about the path,” Treadwell said.
She had her readers on. She had a yellow legal pad squared in front of her and a pen laid across it, and she didn’t pick the pen up yet.
“My statement’s wrong,” Jo said.
She had worked it out on the drive, the long way, down Fourth. She gave it to Treadwell the way she’d have charted it at work: times, findings, nothing she couldn’t defend.
Treadwell picked up the pen. She wrote for a while. Jo watched the pen move and read it upside down, because she could read anything upside down after fifteen years of charts: 3:18. Split cedar. “10 min without you.” Did not observe return.
Treadwell wrote the last word and underlined it. She looked at Jo over the readers.
“Rob’s been telling me about that dog for eleven days,” she said.
“I know he has.”
“Every morning. I’ve got a stack of his messages this thick.” Treadwell didn’t hold up her fingers. “You sat in the camper and listened to that podcast call him a drunk who lost his kid, and you had this.”
“Yes.”
“Why today?”
Jo had known that was coming, too. She’d thought about it on Fourth. There wasn’t any answer that didn’t have the old man in it.
“Because I’m done,” she said.
Treadwell took that in without writing it down. Then she turned her chair a quarter turn to the computer on the side of the desk, and touched the mouse, and the screen woke up.
“Well,” she said. “That’s timely.”
◆
Jo didn’t know what she meant for about forty seconds. Treadwell read something on the monitor, scrolled, read, and her face didn’t change at all, which Jo was learning was what Treadwell’s face did when it had something. She took her readers off and put them back on. Then she turned the monitor around on its swivel so it faced across the desk.
OREGON STATE POLICE FORENSIC SERVICES. PRIORITY. A table of numbers in columns, locus names down the left side, D3S1358, vWA, FGA, pairs of numbers across. Jo couldn’t read it. Nobody could read it. She read the words underneath.
Reference sample (toothbrush, submitted as belonging to TOBIAS VOSS): profile is identical at all loci to Subject (UNKNOWN MALE, DOB unknown). Reference is likely contaminated with Subject’s DNA and is not suitable for comparison.
Subject and J. VOSS (mother): profiles are consistent with a first-degree parent–child relationship. Note: STR analysis cannot determine direction of relationship.
Treadwell let her read it twice.
“He used it, didn’t he, Jo?” she said. “You gave me a toothbrush he’d used.”
The green dinosaur, splayed, on the edge of the sink at five in the morning on Thursday. The water running at two.
“Wednesday night,” Jo said.
“So I don’t have your son’s DNA. I have his.” Treadwell pointed the pen at the monitor without touching it. “And I have him and you. Parent and child. First degree. The lab can’t tell me which way it runs, but I can count.” She put the pen down. “He’s sixty-something. You’re thirty-seven.”
Jo sat still.
“Your father’s name is Gary Pruett,” Treadwell said. She had it written on the legal pad already, on a line higher up, Jo saw. She’d written it before Jo came in. “Gary Wayne Pruett. Born 1961. Left Calder in 1992. Last address I’ve got is a trailer park in Winnemucca in 1998, and after that he’s smoke. You told me yesterday he left when you were three.”
Three. Jo had one thing of him, one only, and she didn’t know anymore if it was a memory or something Dee had told her so many times it had turned into one: a truck with a bench seat, and a man’s arm along the back of it, and the smell of Juicy Fruit. And his teeth. She’d been three years old and she remembered a man’s teeth, a gold crown on the upper right, first molar, flashing when he laughed. She’d been looking at people’s teeth since before she could read.
“He’d be sixty-four or sixty-five,” Treadwell said. “That’s about what your man looks like. He knows your family like the inside of his pocket. He turns up at your camper eleven days after your boy goes missing. He’s your father, Jo.”
Jo laughed.
It came up out of her before she could stop it, a hard short sound, and then another behind it. She put her hand over her mouth. Her eyes ran. She sat in Ann Treadwell’s office with her hand over her mouth and laughed until her ribs hurt, because every word on the screen was true, and it was exactly backward.
Treadwell didn’t move. She watched her do it.
When Jo stopped, Treadwell took the readers off and let them hang on their cord.
“Your father takes your son,” she said, “you hand me a spoiled sample and change your story about the path two days after he shows up. Help me out here.”
Jo wiped her eyes with the cuff of the hoodie.
“He’s not my father,” she said.
“Then who is he?”
The philodendron had a yellow leaf. The parking lot was bright through the window, and the Subaru was out there in the third row with the boots under its floor.
Treadwell waited long enough to be sure. Then she picked up her desk phone and pressed a button.
“Cole,” she said. “I want the Whistler again. All of it, to the squeeze, with a cadaver dog. Call Deschutes, they’ve got the HRD dog, the Lab. Today. This afternoon.” She listened. “I don’t care. Tell them it’s me.”
She put the phone down.
Cadaver dog. Jo had heard the word eleven days ago from the SAR coordinator in a voice he thought she couldn’t hear, and she’d gone and thrown up behind the pit toilets. She didn’t throw up now. She sat with her hands in her lap and thought about a Labrador going up the Whistler trail into the rocks, nose down, looking for her son, who was sitting in a cell on the other side of this wall.
“Here’s the rest of it,” Treadwell said. “The DA won’t file false information on a man in his sixties with a heart like that and no record in any system on earth. Not with the whole state watching. So I can’t hold him past this afternoon on what I’ve got.” She squared the legal pad. “He walks at one. He doesn’t leave the county. Neither do you.”
The lake was in the county. Jo didn’t say it.
“You can wait in the lobby,” Treadwell said. “Or you can go home. I’d think about which.”
◆
She waited in the lobby.
Plastic chairs in a row, bolted to a rail. A rack of pamphlets about drug take-back and hunter safety. A water cooler, the same one, glugging. Through the glass doors at the front she could see the Bend van on the street, and another one pulling in behind it, and the man in the puffy jacket, who seemed to go wherever she went.
At 11:58 Rob came in.
He came through the glass doors with his head down and the voices behind him, and he saw her in the plastic chair and stopped. His eyes went to the wall clock over the front desk and came back to her.
“I told her,” Jo said. “The path.”
He stood there a while longer. Then he went to the front desk and said his name, and the woman buzzed him through, and the door into the back shut behind him on its slow hinge.
She sat. She counted the pamphlets in the rack. Thirty-one. She counted the ceiling tiles from the door to the cooler. Fourteen. She thought about Rob in Treadwell’s office in the chair where she had sat, saying, It’s him, Ann. It’s Toby. She thought about a room at St. Anne’s with a window that didn’t open.
At 12:21 the door opened and Rob came out. He sat down in the chair next to hers, which was too small for him. The rail creaked.
“I told her about the dog,” he said. “Again. That’s all I told her.”
“You said noon.”
“I had it in my mouth, Jo. I couldn’t.” He was looking straight ahead at the pamphlets. “She told me what the lab said. She told me he’s your dad.”
Jo made a sound, a short one, and stopped it.
“If I go in there and say he’s our son,” Rob said, “she puts him in a room at St. Anne’s with no handles on the inside. And she’s right to. Anybody would.” He rubbed his palms down the front of his jeans, slowly, both of them, knee to hip. “They’re letting him out at one.”
Jo looked at the clock over the front desk.
“So I’m driving him to the lake.”
She turned in the chair. He kept his eyes on the pamphlets.
“He asked me,” Rob said. “Last night. He said drive me up. He said you’ve got the truck.”
◆
At 1:05 a deputy walked them around the side of the building to the sally port, a concrete bay with a roll-up door and a painted yellow line on the floor, and told them to wait behind the line.
The inside door opened and the heavy older jailer came out with his keys on his belt, and behind him came Toby.
He was in the linen shirt and the wool trousers, and the oilcloth coat over his arm, and Rob’s Red Wings. Somebody had given him back the laces. He’d laced them the way Rob laced them, wrapped twice around the ankle and tied in front. He walked slowly. He stopped when he came into the light from the open bay door and stood there with one hand on the wall, and Jo looked at his lips before she looked at anything else, because she couldn’t help it. They were blue-gray at the edges. He’d been gray in the camper on Wednesday and gray on the curb on Thursday, but this was a different gray, a gray with blue under it, like skim milk.
The jailer handed him a manila property envelope and a clipboard. Toby signed where the jailer pointed. He signed with a triangle. The jailer studied it, and him, and let it go.
Toby opened the envelope. He tipped it and a few things slid into his palm: a twist of cloth with dried cherries in it, a flat bronze triangle on a cord, a folded square of thick soft paper. He looked into the envelope again, and felt inside it with two fingers, all the way to the bottom corners.
Then he looked up at Jo.
She’d said the word herself, yesterday, in the observation room, to Treadwell. Foxglove. He’ll need it. She stood behind the yellow line with her hands in the front pocket of the hoodie, and he put the cherries and the triangle and the map back into the envelope and folded the top of it down twice.
He came across the line.
He stopped in front of them. Rob was on one side of him and Jo on the other, and Toby stood between them in the doorway of the sally port with the light behind him. His braid was coming loose. There was white stubble growing up out of the beard on his cheeks, where he usually kept it clean. He was taller than Jo by most of a foot and shorter than Rob by five inches, and older than either of them by a whole life, and he looked from one to the other of them with Rob’s eyes.
“Hi, Dad,” he said. “Hi, Mom.”
Rob’s hand came up, and stopped, and went to the back of his own neck.
“Now,” Toby said.
He didn’t say it loud. He said it to Jo, only to her, the way he’d said before first light, then across the kitchen table on Wednesday night.
Jo looked at him. At the blue at the edges of his mouth. At the Red Wings, laced twice around.
“Now,” she said.
◆
The Subaru stayed in the lot. Rob’s truck was the only thing they had that would take FR 46 fast, and he said so, and nobody argued. Jo walked past the Subaru in the third row on the way to the truck and didn’t look at the hatch.
The F-250 was parked by the side fence with its orange letters facing the street. #THREEBEERS. Toby stopped behind it and read it, moving his lips, and then looked at Rob.
“What’s that mean?”
“Nothing,” Rob said. “Get in.”
Toby got in the back, slowly, a hand on the grab bar and a hand on the seat and then a long pull, and Jo went around and got in the back beside him. Rob found the two of them in the mirror. He started the truck.
There was a camera at the lot entrance. There was the man in the puffy jacket. Rob drove through all of it at five miles an hour and out onto Court Street and turned north, toward the highway, and the voices fell away behind them.
The back seat smelled of sawdust and coffee and the lemon air freshener clipped to the vent that Rob had been buying since high school. There was a milk crate on the floor at Jo’s feet full of tools and a yellow screw gun with a cracked black battery wrapped in electrical tape. Toby looked down at the screw gun. He didn’t touch it.
Jo took her phone out of the hoodie pocket to check the signal before they lost it for good.
1:15. Two bars. Nothing from Dee. She looked at the time and at the bars, and then out the side window at the Sheriff’s Office going by, the Subaru in the third row, the van, and she set the phone down on her thigh while she found her seat belt. The belt had slid down behind the seat. She had to dig for it.
The phone lay on her leg, screen up, lit. 1:15, and under the clock, small and square, PIP 2:50.
It stayed lit while she dug for the belt, and while she found it, and while she pulled it across herself and clicked it in, and it was still lit when Rob stopped at the light on Main. Then the screen went dark on its own.
Toby was sitting very still beside her, with his hands on his knees.
The light went green. Rob turned onto the highway, and the town fell away behind them into juniper and sage, and Jo put the dark phone back in her pocket and watched the road for the Forest Service sign.
Beside her, in Rob’s boots, Toby watched the road too, and he didn’t ask her what time it was.