Tuesday, 11:20 a.m.
The brown was going.
It had gone first from her palms, where she washed most, and then from the backs of her hands, and this morning it was the color of weak tea everywhere except the creases of her knuckles and down in the cuticles, where it had got in with the sting and meant to stay. She sat at the kitchen table on Larch Street and looked at her hands on the wood. Another week, maybe.
The house was quiet. Pip was under the table with Captain Otter and a box of crayons, drawing on the back of a Safeway receipt, and every so often her foot knocked against Jo’s ankle and stayed there.
There was a voicemail on her phone from Sunday that she hadn’t deleted. Jo, it’s Hal. A long breath. Given everything. The patients— And then nothing, for three or four seconds, and then he’d said he was sorry and hung up. He’d been her boss for nine years. He’d sent a fruit basket on day three with a card signed by the whole office.
On Sunday morning, with walnut to the wrist and mud still in her shoes, she’d sat in Treadwell’s office for two hours with a recorder on the desk and told it all, in order, from the split cedar on. The path. What she’d said on it. What he’d said. That she hadn’t watched him go. Treadwell had asked her to spell Ost, and she hadn’t been able to.
On Monday she’d called Brynn Kessler herself, and said it again at this table into a phone propped against the sugar bowl, and hadn’t let her ask anything until she was done. It aired last night at nine. Jo hadn’t listened.
Rob’s text had come at 8:04 this morning. Hendersons’ builder called. Done. Nothing else. Then at 9:15, DA declined. Ann called me. I’m coming at noon.
The Hendersons’ builder had been going to give him three years of decks.
The case report was on the table in front of her in a manila envelope. Treadwell had brought it by at ten, in jeans and a fleece, with no gun. Thought you should read it before somebody reads it to you. It was eleven pages. Jo had read all eleven. Dates, times, names, the lab numbers, the Y-STR. Rob’s statement from the Bell Room, word for word. Hers. It didn’t say where he’d gone. It didn’t say what he’d said at the door. It said a man had presented himself on September 2 and departed on September 6, and it listed what he’d been wearing.
The last line was by itself at the bottom of page eleven.
Disposition: Returned to family.
Jo turned it face down.
Under the table Pip said, “Is it noon?”
“Nearly.”
“Is Dad coming?”
“He’s coming.”
“Is the sheriff?”
“She’s coming too.”
Pip thought about that. “She’s not in charge today,” she said, and went back to her receipt.
◆
They went up in Rob’s truck, the four of them, with Pip between Jo and Rob on the bench seat and Treadwell folded into the back of the crew cab with her knees against the seat. Rob had fixed the tailgate. Someone had come by Sunday night and written on it again, and Rob had gone out Monday with a can of primer and done the whole gate white, and it was white now, blank, with the smell still on it.
Rob started the truck, and the radio came on with it, low, the Bend station. It was noon. A fire north of Sisters, a school levy, and then the woman said Tall Timber, and the name of the lake, and Jo’s voice came out of the dash.
It was smaller than the voice she heard in her head. Flat. Somebody reading back a chart.
He asked if he could come with me. I told him to go back to his dad. I told him I needed ten minutes without him.
Rob’s hand went to the knob. Jo put two fingers on his wrist, and he took the hand back and put it on the wheel.
He said he wished I wasn’t his mother. He turned around. I didn’t watch him go.
Then Rob, rougher than he sounded in the cab: I was on the phone at the turnout. I was working. I wasn’t watching.
Pip had stopped kicking the dash. “That’s you,” she said.
“That’s me.”
In the back Treadwell watched the pines go by. The woman came back and said the family had declined further comment, and went on to the weather, and Rob pulled out onto Larch with the radio still going, and Jo left it on.
At the trailhead there was a Forest Service truck and nobody in it. They went up the Whistler trail in the sun, slow, Rob carrying Pip on his shoulders for the steep part with her hands in his hair. The old search tape was still tied to the trees in places, faded, flapping. Jo didn’t look at the lake.
The tube was cold. Forty-two degrees, the same as Sunday. Their headlamps went ahead of them over the breakdown and down into the Bell Room, and the whistle came to meet them, and it was wrong. It was low. It had a sound in the bottom of it like a drain.
The rock at the slot was wet.
It shone in the lamps. The slot at the bottom of the wall was dark and glistening, and out of it, across the floor of the Bell Room in a thin sheet no wider than a hand, ran water. It ran over the stone toward the low place under the far wall and went away into a crack there. Jo crouched and put her fingers in it. It was so cold it ached. It smelled of snow and grit and something green.
“River,” Rob said.
Nobody answered him.
They sat down against the wall, the same wall. Rob with Pip. Treadwell a little apart, with a thermos. Jo nearest the slot, with her back to the rock and her knees up and her fading hands on her knees, and the water going by her shoes.
They waited.
Nobody said how long. Pip ate a cheese stick and fell asleep on Rob’s leg. Treadwell poured coffee into the thermos lid and passed it along the wall, and they all drank from it, and it came back to her. The whistle went lower. After a long time it began to catch, the way a kettle catches just before it boils, and then run clear again, and then catch. The seep got a little wider. Jo watched it. Once she caught Rob looking at his watch, and he saw her see, and he put his arm down behind Pip where it couldn’t be seen.
◆
It was a scrape.
A small sound, metal on rock, back in the slot where the lamps didn’t reach. Then another. Jo was on her knees before she knew it, at the mouth of the slot with the water running over her hands, and her headlamp went in along the wet rock, and something was coming down the seep toward her, turning a little, bumping, the way a stick comes down a gutter in the rain.
It came out of the slot and stopped against her hand.
The red flashlight. It wasn’t red. It was bare aluminum all over now, dull, gray, worn down past the knurling, with a dent in the head she didn’t know and the old two beside it. It was heavy. It was so cold it hurt to hold. Below the switch, tipped to the lamp, there was the ghost of where the letters had been. The T. Most of the Y.
Treadwell had looked at her watch. At the edge of Jo’s lamp she uncapped a pen with her teeth and wrote something on the back of her own hand.
Pip was awake. “Is it Toby’s?”
Jo didn’t answer. Her hands were doing it. She turned the tail cap. It was stiff, and then it gave, and she unscrewed it, and water ran out onto her knees, and there were no batteries in it. There was a roll of cloth, oiled, dark, packed tight into the tube, and she hooked it out with one finger.
Inside the cloth was a roll of thick soft paper, dry. And inside the paper, where the roll was tightest, was a plastic butterfly clip.
It had been purple. It was white now, chalky, the color bleached out of it all the way through. One wing had a crack across it.
Pip put out her hand.
“That’s mine,” she said.
Jo gave it to her. Pip held it in her palm and looked at it, and closed her hand on it.
Jo unrolled the paper on her knee under the lamp. The printing was big. Each letter separate, careful, pressed hard enough to dent the paper. It took up the whole sheet. She read it to herself, and then she read it out loud, because Rob was there, and Pip.
> Mom. > > Senna died two springs after you left. I held her hand the whole time. > > I built one more bridge. It has triangles. I used Dad’s tape. Tell Dad. > > Don’t count. > > Pip, if you get lost, stay put. People come. > > Toby
Under his name was a triangle. Three lines, the corners closed.
Rob put his hand flat on the wet rock beside the slot and kept it there.
Treadwell got up and walked to the far side of the Bell Room and stood with her back to them.
◆
The whistle dropped.
It went down, and down, lower than Jo had ever heard it, a sound more in the rock than in the air, and then it gurgled, a thick choked sound like the last water leaving a tub, and then it stopped.
The seep ran for a few seconds more. It thinned. It went to a line, and to a shine on the stone, and it stopped.
There wasn’t any sound. There was the four of them breathing, and a drip somewhere, once, and nothing.
Treadwell uncapped the pen again and wrote on her hand under the first thing she’d written, and capped it. She didn’t say it out loud. Nobody asked her.
Jo rolled up the letter and put it inside her hoodie, against her skin, and zipped it.
After a while Rob stood up. He put Pip on her feet. He picked up the oiled cloth off the rock and folded it in four and put it in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap.
Pip was looking at the flashlight in Jo’s hand.
“Can I carry it?”
Jo looked at it. The bare metal. The empty tube. The place where the name had been.
She screwed the tail cap back on and gave it to her.
Pip took it in both hands, against her chest, with the white clip still shut in one fist. It was too big for her and too heavy, and she didn’t ask for help. She went up the passage ahead of them, over the breakdown, slow, careful where she put her feet, and Rob went behind her with his headlamp on her back, and Treadwell behind him, and Jo last.
It was a quarter mile to the mouth of the tube.
The light came down the tube to meet them, gray and then white, and the air changed, and got warm, and smelled of pine. At the mouth Pip didn’t stop. She walked out of the Whistler into the daylight with the dark lamp held against her in both arms, and Jo let her go first.