Friday, 1:35 p.m.
At the brown sign Rob turned left without signaling, and the pavement quit, and the washboard came up through the tires.
He drove it at forty. He'd always driven it at forty, the truck loaded or empty, a load of cedar pickets on the rack singing like a harp, and he didn't slow down now. The tools in the milk crate at Jo's feet jumped and chattered. The screw gun with the taped battery walked across the top of the pile an inch at a time until Toby put his boot on the edge of the crate and held it still.
He didn't take hold of the handle over the door. Jo watched him not take it. He sat with his hands on his knees and his head against the rest and his eyes on the back of Rob's neck, where the sunburn stopped at the collar, and every time the truck came down hard out of a rut he breathed out through his nose and waited, and then breathed in.
Rob checked them in the mirror. He'd been doing it every half mile since town.
"Too fast?"
"No," Toby said.
In the mirror Rob found Jo. She kept her eyes on Toby's mouth. It was still blue at the corners. She put two fingers on his wrist on his knee, and he turned his hand over for her without looking down, and she counted against the dust going by. It came the way it came in the camper, in handfuls, a spill and then nothing.
"You still have the coffee can," Toby said.
It was on the dash, jammed against the windshield in the corner, a red Folgers can with its label gone to pink and a slurry of screws and washers and a tape measure in it. Rob's eyes went to it and back to the road.
"Different can," he said.
"Same screws."
Rob drove. The dust boiled up behind them and hung in the pines. After a mile he reached up and turned the can a quarter turn on the dash, for no reason, so the dent faced the other way, and put his hand back on the wheel.
Jo's phone was in the front pocket of the hoodie against her stomach. She could feel the edge of it. There'd be no signal from here on, and it didn't matter, because it had been on silent since the fourth day and she'd stopped expecting anything from it that she wanted.
◆
Walt's truck was gone from the host site. His rake was leaning against his picnic table where he'd left it Wednesday, and his camp chair was folded, and a Styrofoam cup sat on the table with a rock on it so it wouldn't blow.
"Where's Walt?" Jo said.
Nobody knew. Rob went on past, past the bulletin board and the two posters under their little roof, past the loop road, and Jo turned her head at site 9. Dee's camper was still there, blinds down, the propane cover shut over the key. A sheet of paper was taped to the door that hadn't been there Wednesday. From the truck she couldn't read it. She knew what it said.
The trailhead was at the north end, a gravel pad for six cars under the lodgepoles. Today it held a Tamarack County Tahoe and a white Deschutes County SUV with a dog box in the back, and a length of yellow tape strung across the trail between the trailhead sign and a pine, sagging in the middle, snapping a little when the air moved.
Cole Haskins was sitting on the Tahoe's back bumper eating a gas-station sandwich out of its triangle of plastic. He saw the truck and stood up. He saw who was in it and put the sandwich down on the bumper.
"Rob," he said, when Rob got out. He had the peeling nose still, pinker. "Mrs. Voss." He looked past them at the back door of the truck, which was opening. "Sir."
"Hi," Toby said.
He got down from the truck slowly and stood holding the door. Haskins had spent most of yesterday afternoon across a table from him asking where he'd buried a child. He tried to decide what his face should do about it, and gave up, and put his thumbs in his belt.
"I can't let you up," he said. "Sheriff's orders. It's a search area."
"We're not going to touch anything," Rob said.
"Rob. I can't." Haskins looked at the tape instead of at him. "She wants every inch of it done. To the squeeze. The dog's already been up once, they came down for water, they're going back up. We'll be at it till dark. Could be later." He looked at Toby's feet in Rob's Red Wings. "I'm going to have to radio her you're up here."
"Radio her," Rob said.
The handler came around the side of the white SUV then. She was a short woman in a green Deschutes County fleece with a leash wrapped twice around her fist, and at the other end of the leash was a yellow Lab with a gray muzzle and a working vest, her tongue out, pleased with everyone. The handler said, "Cole, she needs another—" and stopped, seeing them.
The Lab didn't stop. She pulled the leash out to its length and went straight to Toby and put her nose in his hand, and then against the knee of his trousers, and then his hand again, snuffling, her tail going. She gave Rob's boots on his feet a thorough going-over. Then she sneezed, and lost interest, and sat down and looked at the handler for her reward.
"She's not interested in you, sir," the handler said, not unkindly, and then heard herself, and went red to the ears.
Toby laughed. It was the boy's bark, and it hurt him, and he held the truck door through it.
Jo didn't laugh. She was looking at the tape. It went across the trail at the height of her hip and it would come down any time anyone lifted it, and it was the flimsiest thing she had ever seen stand between anything and anything, and her hands in the pocket of the hoodie had stopped shaking. She noticed that. She took them out and looked at them and put them back.
Above them in the rocks, far off and thin, the Whistler made its sound. A breath going in over a bottle. It went up and came down and stopped.
Toby had turned his face toward it. He stood listening with his mouth a little open, the way Pip listened for the ice cream truck.
"After dark," he said. "They'll come down when it's dark. They'll be cold."
"Toby," Jo said.
"After dark, Mom."
He let go of the truck door. He looked at the trail going up into the rocks past the tape, and then he turned all the way around, away from it, and looked south through the trees toward the lake.
"Can we walk the path?" he said.
◆
It was three hundred and forty steps from the campground to the split cedar. Jo counted them going down. She had never walked them in this direction with anybody.
Toby went first because he set the pace, and the pace was slow. Rob's boots were a size and a half too big for him and the heels lifted with every step and came down with a scuff, and every fifty or sixty steps he stopped and put a hand on a tree and stood there. He didn't sit. He said, "I'm just looking," the first time, and after that he didn't explain. Jo stood below him on the path with her fingers on his wrist and counted, and Rob stood above him with his hands in his back pockets and watched the lake through the trees as if he'd been asked to keep an eye on it.
At a hundred and ninety the path turned and the lake came all the way into view, both lobes of it, blue-black, with the afternoon light lying on the near one in a sheet.
At three hundred and twenty she could see the cedar.
She had walked to it twice a day for eleven days and it looked exactly the same: gray, split at the height of her chest, the two halves leaning apart. She stopped at three hundred and forty, beside it, where she always stopped. Toby stopped because she did. Rob came down behind them and stopped too.
"Here," Jo said.
He put his hand in the crotch of the fork. He put it in exactly where she put hers, on the place worn smooth, and his hand was bigger and it covered the whole of it. He stood there with his hand on the tree and didn't look down the slope at the water. She saw him not look, and knew how that was done.
"You were right there," he said. "Pip had your sunglasses. She kept taking them off you."
Jo didn't remember that. She remembered it now.
"The sun was on the water, so I couldn't see your face." He looked at the lake now, finally, at the light on it. "It's the same time. Almost."
It was ten after two. It wasn't the same time. It was near enough that the light was the same, and Jo didn't say so.
The Whistler went again up behind them, clearer from here than from the trailhead, carried down the slope through the pines. Toby turned his head.
"I heard that," he said. "I heard it right here. You were walking down and I was walking up and I heard it, and I thought I'll go find something. Something amazing. A bone or a crystal or a cave nobody knew about. And I'd bring it down and show you, and you'd have to come up and see it. You'd have to come find me."
His hand was still on the tree. His voice didn't do anything. It was the voice he'd used to tell her about Varra at the dinette, plain, getting it said.
"I wanted you to come find me," he said.
Rob was standing three feet up the path. Jo didn't look at him. She kept her eyes on the back of Toby's hand on the cedar, the brown skin and the knuckles and the short ring finger, and she put her own hand on top of it, on the wood, the way she hadn't been able to put it anywhere for eleven days. He turned his hand over under hers so they were palm to palm, with the tree underneath.
They stood like that. Down on the water a duck came in and skidded and settled.
"Two hundred and twelve," Jo said, when she could. "To the shore."
"I know," Toby said. "You count out loud when you think nobody can hear you."
◆
The shore at the bottom of the path was coarse gray sand and pebbles and bleached drift, and the lake came in over the pebbles in small clear pushes and went out again. Toby sat down on a drift log first thing, and stayed sitting a long time, breathing, while Rob walked the waterline with his head down.
Rob came back with his hands full. He dumped them on the log beside Toby. Flat stones, a dozen, gray and green, one of them nearly black.
"Pick," he said.
Toby turned them over one at a time and weighed them in his palm and put most of them back. He chose a thin gray one. He got up from the log, and it took him a while, and he walked to the edge of the water in the big boots, and then he did a thing Jo had never seen anyone do. He turned side-on to the lake and dropped low, lower than she'd have thought his knees would let him, until his hand was nearly at the water, and he threw from down there, flat and hard, with a snap at the very end of it like cracking a towel.
The stone went out skimming. It didn't hop. It ran, a long string of little kisses on the surface too fast to count, and went under forty feet out with hardly a splash.
Rob said something under his breath that Pip would have repeated at school.
"That's how they do it on the Oss," Toby said. "On the millpond. The kids. You go low so it doesn't climb." He showed him with an empty hand, low, the snap. "It's all at the end."
Rob picked up the black stone. He turned side-on and dropped, and his knees cracked like kindling, and he threw, and the stone went out low and ran and ran and went farther than Toby's had. It went so far Jo lost it in the glare.
Toby stared after it. Then he laughed, all the way this time, bent over with his hands on his knees in the wet sand, laughing until he had to stop and hold his chest, and Rob stood there with his hand still out from the throw and didn't know what to do with it.
"You're better," Toby said. "First time. I did it for fifty years."
"Beginner's luck."
"No. You're just better." He straightened up slowly, a hand on his thigh. "You always were."
Jo sat down on the drift log where Toby had been. She was ten feet from them, and sound carried on the water, and she didn't go any closer. They didn't ask her to.
They threw for a while. Rob went and got more stones. Toby threw fewer and fewer and watched more. Rob asked him how you got your feet under you on a rock bottom in a fast river, and Toby told him, and Rob asked him what they used for mortar with no Portland cement, and Toby told him that too, lime and river sand and a thing they burned out of the hills, and Rob said huh, the way he said it over a set of plans when somebody had done a thing he wouldn't have thought of.
"What'd you build?" Rob said. "Your job. What'd you actually build."
Toby weighed a stone in his hand. He didn't throw it.
"Bridges," he said. "Forty-one bridges." He turned the stone over. "Every one's got a triangle cut in it. On the keystone. That's my mark. That's how they know it's mine."
Rob didn't say anything. He'd bent to pick up a stone and he stayed bent, with his hand on it, and he didn't come up. The water came in over his boots and went out, and came in again. His back was the broad back she'd slept against for eight years, and it was doing something she had seen it do only once, at his mother's funeral, a kind of locking, all the way up.
Toby didn't look at him. He threw the stone, low, and it ran.
After a while Rob came up with the stone in his hand. He threw it without turning side-on, badly. It went in with a clunk.
"Were you a good dad?" he said. His voice was rough. He cleared it. "Your kids. Were you good to them?"
Toby took his time.
"Not always," he said. "Once I left my son for six weeks. He was three. Almost four." He looked out at the far lobe of the lake, where the water went dark under the trees. "I left him at the door."
Rob looked at the sand.
"I left you for three beers," he said.
"You didn't leave me." Toby said it right away, as if it were a thing he'd had ready for a long time. "I left. I walked up the hill by myself. You were right where you were supposed to be."
Rob made a sound. Jo didn't see his face; he'd turned toward the water. She saw Toby see it, and not go to him, and pick up another stone instead and hold it out, and Rob take it.
Later Rob sat down on the sand with his back to the drift log and his legs out, and Toby sat beside him, and they drew in the sand with sticks, and Jo heard pier and cutwater and you'd want to crib that and didn't understand any of it. At one point Toby laughed with his whole mouth open, and Rob looked at him, at the gap on the upper left.
"Forty-one bridges," Rob said, "and you never got one of your own."
Toby stopped laughing. He put his tongue in the gap. Then he laughed so hard he tipped over sideways against Rob's shoulder and stayed there, and Rob sat very still with the weight of his son against him and let it be there.
Jo sat on the log above them. She had brought the two of them to the lake, and now there was nothing for her to do there. She watched a man older than his father teach his father to throw a stone, and lean on him, and she didn't know what her hands were for.
"Dad," Toby said. "What time is it?"
Rob turned his wrist over. The big steel watch.
"Two-forty."
Toby turned his eyes out to the far lobe under the trees where the water was dark, and his face didn't change at all. Jo thought nothing of it. He'd been asking the time for two days.
He picked up his stick again and drew a line in the sand, and another beside it, and crossed them.
◆
The light moved on the water. By a little after three it had come around onto the near lobe and was lying there in a flat bright sheet, as it had lain behind her on the twenty-second, and she couldn't stand to have her back to it, so she turned around and looked straight into it until her eyes ran.
They were going to be here until dark. Past dark. They'd walk back up in the dark with the flashlight she didn't have, because it was in the Subaru, and Haskins would come down off the rocks cold, and then—
Pip would need to stay at Dee's tonight. Somebody had to tell Dee.
Jo stood up.
"I'm going up to the turnout," she said. "To call Dee. I'll be back."
Rob looked up at her from the sand. Toby didn't. He was drawing.
She went up the path. At two hundred and twelve she stopped at the cedar and put her hand in the fork, and it was warm from his, or from the sun, and she counted to thirty and took it out. She went on. At the campground she turned up the loop road past site 9 and the sheet of paper on the camper door, and climbed the sixty yards of shoulder to the overlook turnout, the one place in the campground with a bar.
The turnout was a wide place in the gravel with a guardrail and a view of both lobes and the peaks behind. She took the phone out of the hoodie and held it up over her head.
One bar. It flickered, and held.
The phone woke in her hand and began to shake. It shook and shook, one notice after another stacking up on the screen faster than she could read them, the way it had on the second day when the whole state found out.
Missed call: Calder Elementary. Missed call: Calder Elementary. Missed call: Dee. Missed call: Dee. Missed call: Calder Elementary. Missed call: Dee. A 541 number she didn't know. Missed call: Dee. Eleven of them. The texts came in under them all at once, all from Dee.
School called. You didn't pick her up.
JO
Where are you. Are you at the lake
Pip walked out. Jo, where are you.
It was 3:47. Above all of it, at the top of the screen under the clock, small and square and patient, where she had pinned it at half past seven that morning with Dee watching, it still said PIP 2:50.