Sometimes the Wolf

Chapter 1

THE DEER LAY a little way off the road at the bottom of the fence. The stomach opened on the cattle wire, with the skin peeled away and the viscera hanging loose in the predawn air. The sun had yet to crest the mountains and Silver Lake stretched away to the south for miles, dark and flat, with only the new wind that came with the morning to tousle the water and work the whitecaps. Gray slate all the way from one edge to the next, and the cattle wire and road running along it like a border. One piece of farm followed by another all the way around the top of the lake and into town, where the flatland ran out and the mountains began again, dense with fir and hemlock, sword fern and peat moss.

Deputy Bobby Drake stood beside the open door of his Chevy, toggling down through the contacts on his phone. Too early for anyone from Fish and Wildlife to answer. All of them had been out the night before—Drake partnered with one of the officers—as they worked to stop a string of poachings in the hills. The spotter plane high up over the mountains calling in positions as Drake and the local Fish and Wildlife officer rushed to catch up.

Now Drake waited in the growing morning haze with his breath curling before him in the twilight, the car hazards washing the scene in a slow pulse of orange, his fingernails cold on his face where he held the phone.

The message clicked on and he listened. When it was his turn he gave his name and then the location. “Pretty near cut herself in two,” he said, looking to where the animal had caught on the cattle fence, the blood black and slick along the metal. He turned the phone away and looked at the deer, trying to decide if there was anything else he could say. A she-wolf had been at the carcass when he’d rounded the curve and caught the animal with his headlights. One rib gnawed to the white bone, and the wolf tugging at the deer, stretching the flesh along the wire.

For the past couple weeks the wolf had been in the hills, calling out for others. Haunting the mist that came off the lake at night and threaded its way up through the mountain valleys. Sheri, his wife, turning the volume up on the television and waiting till the howls faded away and all was silent again. No sound outside but that of the trees brushing against the siding of the house, and the familiar rattle of the wind as it shook through the naked branches of the apple orchard out back.

Drake took a step toward the fence. The head of the deer played back at a strange angle. The animal flipped over on its back, where it had come to rest, eyes black and wide, looking up into the sky. Belly all but eaten clean. He didn’t know what else to say, the phone still open in his palm, and the message ticking down a second at a time. He gave the phone another moment of study before closing it in his fist.

He wondered how long the deer had lain like that before it was found, before the wolf came out of the darkness, pulled by the smell of blood and the bleat of fear. No way of knowing something like that, but a hope it had not been long and the deer had bled out along the wire before the scavenger arrived.

In the past couple weeks Drake had responded to three sightings. The wolf coming down out of the hills, tipping trash cans and chasing cattle. Only once had he seen her though, loping across a rancher’s field, the gaunt hips slowing for a moment as she neared the forest. The wolf, winter worn and skinny, all bone and fur—turning to regard him where he stood. No pack to run with, or cubs to nurse. One of the first wolves to be seen in the valley in fifty years and Drake had no idea what he was supposed to do about it.

He raised his eyes and looked into the cool dark at the edge of the field. A pink light had begun to spread behind him over the edge of the mountains and in the grass the deep blue that came just before the dawn could be seen. He knew the she-wolf was waiting, shifting in the shadows beneath the trees, watching him where he stood.

He scraped a foot over the gravel at the edge of the road, feeling a dull tightness in his leg as he watched the forest. He checked the time on his phone and then ran his eyes to the south, where the sky was lightening with the sun. Out of uniform for the day, he wore a dress shirt and slacks on his thin frame. No desire in him to leave the carcass or the wolf. And a certainty that what lay ahead of him down the road was more threatening than anything lurking in the shadows beneath the trees. Nothing he could do but move on, an appointment he needed to keep and the simple fact that as soon as he rounded the next curve, the nature of the thing would continue.

THREE HOURS LATER Drake sat in his car watching the Monroe prison gates, waiting for his father’s release. The clouds were breaking overhead and the moisture that had condensed inside the car now showed with the sunlight. The morning had been cold and as he’d driven up through the birch that lay around the recesses of the prison, he could see the rolling barbed wire clear down the line. Wrapping over and over again as it crested one wall and then fell ten feet to the next, layer after layer of it, and no chance of escape for anyone inside, except, Drake thought, maybe his father, Patrick.

It was almost twelve years to the day since his father had been sentenced. In the years past Drake had searched for some sign of his father in his own face, looking at himself in the mirror of his cruiser, or under the bright changing-room lights of the department. The genes there that all who met him said were evident in his face. A fine line dividing the two of them, a reason Drake had tried so desperately in the last twelve years to distance himself from the father everyone could see within him.

All that had changed in his life, Drake thought, and all that remained the same.

He checked his watch and then looked to the prison gate. He didn’t know what to expect and he sat there in the lot watching the single pane of the steel door, searching for the shift of light or shadow from within that would signal Patrick’s arrival. Twelve years ago the life Drake had wanted for himself at the age of twenty put up on the shelf. Everything after his father went away feeling like the life of someone else.

Fifteen minutes went by in this way, the cold seeping in through the seams of the late-model Chevy, before he saw the door push open from within and a guard emerge onto the small concrete path, holding the door wide. Drake didn’t recognize his father at first, carrying a cardboard box in his arms, his breath curling away behind him as he walked. His beard grown full with white hair and a thin, almost animal-like mane, falling thick from his bald crown. He was over six foot, with the beginnings of a belly, and the well-built chest and shoulders he’d always had. The skin of his neck below the beard thickly veined in the cold.

Drake got out of the car and stood, waiting. The one time he had visited his father in prison, the man had just stared coldly back at him, his head shaved to the skin, and a slight tilt to his lips as he sat answering Drake’s questions. The man locked away for a third of Drake’s life. Sheriff Patrick Drake, a legend in his time with no other family left in Silver Lake except his son and daughter-in-law.

The deputy for years had not cared what happened to his father, shamed any time his father’s name was mentioned. The family history in the hills and mountains around the lake nothing to be proud of, Drake’s own grandfather, Morgan Drake, infamous for bringing booze and entertainment to the logging camps up and down the North Cascades, eventually settling the family in Silver Lake.

Looking at his father now, with his hair grown out and a beard matted across his face, his skin pulled flat in places and creased in others, Drake felt like he didn’t know his father the way he should. So much time had passed with nothing being said between them. Patrick wearing the same clothes he’d gone in with twelve years before, outdated and now large on his thin, muscular frame.

Behind, the guard closed the door and Drake heard the latch fall as Patrick crossed the lot to where he waited by the car. The old canvas coat open at Patrick’s chest, revealing the flannel shirt and jeans he’d gone in with all those years before.

“I see you’ve gone wild,” Drake said, gesturing to his father’s white mane.

Patrick smiled. He’d been in there a long time. And the creases on his skin looked all the deeper. “I’ve always been wild,” he said.

In the lot behind them, Drake heard an engine start up, followed by the soft putter of exhaust, but Drake didn’t think anything of it as he took the box from his father and loaded it into the backseat, watching how Patrick put a hand to the door and lowered his body down into the car.

IT WAS AN hour before they spoke again. The sound of the interstate moving beneath them, the thrum of the tires on the asphalt and the radio turned on low against the quiet. The absence of their voices like some living, breathing thing, tucked far back in the darkness waiting to appear.

“Pull off at the next exit,” Patrick said, pointing ahead of them to an overhead sign.

There was still a good forty-five minutes before they would turn off the interstate and head east into the Cascades, threading their way up the mountain pass toward Silver Lake and the home that had been left for Drake and his wife when his father had gone in.

“You planning on knocking off a convenience store?”

“You know that’s not what I was convicted of,” Patrick said. His eyes flashed on Drake for a moment and then looked away again.

Drake had no idea why he said the things he did to his father. No way around what his father had done but to joke about it and hope it could be avoided for just another day. “You had a lot of people fooled,” Drake said.

The old sheriff nodded but didn’t look over at Drake again.

Drake took a hand off the wheel and ran it back over his scalp, feeling the close-cropped hair he’d gradually been losing since his midtwenties. Like his father he was built thick through the shoulders, with long legs and the thin, angular bones that had been passed down through their family for generations. “People still talk about it. That’s all I’m saying.”

“What people?”

“Silver Lake, the whole town.”

“I never thought I’d be going back there.”

“Well, I don’t know where you thought you’d be. We had to sell a lot of the land just to hold on to the house.”

“I never asked you to go back there.”

“I never asked you to get thrown in prison.”

His father shifted, then looked behind him, reaching for something out of the cardboard box in the backseat. “I’m not proud of what I did but at the time it seemed like the only option.” He was sitting in the seat again, holding open a thin folder. “Look,” he said. “I saved them, every one I could find. Even the ones that had my name in them.”

Drake looked over at the clippings and then looked away. Some from before his father had gotten into trouble, some from years afterward. All of them he’d seen before and he knew they told something about Drake’s past that he really didn’t care for, that he wasn’t proud of, but that he’d done because he’d thought at the time it would mean something.

Drake felt nauseous just thinking about those years. All he’d given up to come home and deal with his father’s debts. A basketball scholarship to Arizona he’d had to leave behind. All the time he’d spent trying to make up for his father’s crimes. To earn the name back. It wasn’t Drake’s fault. None of it was, and that point—most important to Drake now—had only recently occurred to him. Still, he had to remind himself that he was living for himself. For his wife, Sheri. He was living his own life in a way he hadn’t for many years. And now with Patrick sitting beside him, trying to reawaken all the old memories, all the things that had occurred in the past, Drake knew he needed to look to the future.

“They’re all here,” Patrick said, holding a clipping up for Drake to see. “Even the newspaper articles from Arizona, from when you played basketball.”

“Why would you keep those?”

“So I don’t forget.”

“Sometimes things are better forgotten.”

Patrick paused, looking down at the clipping in his hand. Even with his eyes on the road, Drake couldn’t help but notice. “I don’t plan on making any problems for you,” Patrick said. “Not anymore.”

Drake looked over to where his father sat in the car, the green shift of the landscape going by, the backs of houses, run-down and scabbed with paint.

His father closed the folder and put it back with the rest of his possessions. “You don’t need to worry about me,” his father said, his eyes looking to the side mirror as the road went by in a flicker of light. “I just want you to know that I’ll be fine. I want you to know that I have a plan. Whatever I did in the past, it’s covered. You and me are going to be fine.”

Drake nodded and watched his father. Now it’s me and him, Drake thought. When did that happen? When has that ever been the way things were? Drake certainly hadn’t played a part in the second mortgage Patrick took out on their house, on the money he owed. All that had added up after Drake’s mother passed and there just wasn’t anything in the bank for the bills.

“I was away for a long time,” Patrick said. “I thought about a lot of things. I know going back to Silver Lake is what I have to do now. But someday I plan to build a cabin in the woods—live like your grandfather. Just disappear.”

Drake shifted, rolling his shoulders back. “Don’t disappear just yet. You’re still out on parole. Plus I wouldn’t be surprised if the forestry service had some sort of restraining order out against you after all the time you spent in the woods last time you were free.”

“Very funny,” Patrick said. He had his eyes on the side mirror and it made Drake look to the rearview, scanning the highway behind. Nothing to see but a tall line of semis and the daytime running lights of cars shining back on him.

Drake took the exit. He slowed into a stop sign and then turned to the east, where there were several gas stations and a McDonald’s. Up the road he saw where a big warehouse store was going in, the skeleton of the place big as an airplane hangar.

“You need money?” Drake asked.

“No, just a bathroom.”

Drake pulled in beside one of the pumps and watched his father go in. With his credit card Drake paid the machine and let the tank fill, sitting in the car with the door open and the sound of the engine ticking beneath the hood. With his hand he pushed into the muscle of his thigh and felt the tendons pull. Two years before he’d been shot in the knee while trying to help out a DEA agent by the name of Frank Driscoll, and there were pieces of Drake’s patella still floating around through his insides. All of it the result of a bust Drake had tried to make on a man smuggling drugs over the mountains outside Silver Lake, a former acquaintance of his father’s.

With the door open he brought his legs around, resting them on the pavement and working the muscle in his hands, the smell of gas strong in the air. There had been physical therapy for a year afterward, lessons on how to shift his weight, how to swing his knee, and try to minimize the limp he would have for the rest of his life.

All the people we try to be, Drake thought. All the people we will be in a single life.

On the weekends Drake still pushed the ball up the court at the local high school. Wearing a knee brace. His bad leg constantly losing the battle with his good leg. He’d had to adjust for how he shot, making sure he came off his good leg when he ran in for a layup. He had to think about it now, the way he couldn’t jump as high anymore. He’d always been an outside shooter, playing point in college, he’d spent most of his time moving the ball around at the top of the key, or stepping back beyond the three-point line to line up his shot. But he’d put on weight since then. He’d slowed. And even keeping himself in shape he knew he’d never be the same player he once had been. Though he was teaching himself to be something different now, not worse or better, but something different. Smarter perhaps. Drake didn’t know. The person he was then so far from the person he was now.

He sat in the car with the door open. The smell of gasoline dissolving in the air as he ran his fingertips over the muscles of his thigh, pushing the strain away. His fingertips digging for the familiar scars and wounds of his past.

A minute later his father came out of the gas station wiping his hands down the sides of his pants to dry them. “I worried about you when I read in the paper what happened,” his father said.

“It’s nothing now,” Drake said. “It stiffens up on long drives.”

“You were shot twice, weren’t you?”

“Once in the knee and once in the arm,” Drake said. His hand on his kneecap and the slight indentation left in the bone from where the bullet had passed through. He’d thought in that moment, two years before, he was a dead man, and that all he had tried to do in his life had been for nothing. A scar in the shape of a star on his forearm where the second bullet had gone in, and the dark purple sliver of tissue at the back of his left hand where he’d caught a knife through his palm. Thinking on it now he couldn’t even begin to put it back together, or reason out why he was still alive. But he was. All that in the past and now he sat trying to wring the stiffness from his leg.

When he raised his eyes from his knee, his father was no longer looking at him, his head up, with his focus across the street. “You know those men over there?”

Drake turned and found where Patrick’s gaze fell. A new-model Lincoln Town Car with two men inside, sitting in the McDonald’s parking lot. “I don’t think they care much about us,” Drake said.

“They’re a little too far for me to make out.”

“I don’t recognize them,” Drake said.

“They pulled off the highway as we came up the exit,” his father said. “They’ve been sitting like that ever since I got out of the car and went inside.”

Drake stood and put his hands to the small of his back, working his shoulders until he heard the ligaments pop. “Is that why you were looking in the side mirror?”

Patrick stood watching the men. “Why are they just sitting there? Why don’t they go in?”

“They could have gone in while you were in the bathroom.”

“I wasn’t in there that long.”

Drake stared at his father and then looked back at the men. “Is there a reason they’d be following us?” The pump clicked off and Drake walked back to take the hose from the tank. “Are you feeling all right, Dad? You’re scaring me a bit here.”

Drake watched as his father’s eyes quivered, something watery and loose in their stare before they broke away and met Drake again. “Just paranoid, I suppose. Too much time locked away in small places seeing things that aren’t there.”

Drake nodded, taking the receipt from the machine. Patrick stood on the other side of the car, the beard and stark white hair giving him a mythical quality, like some piece of history come to life from a book. “You sure you’re okay, Dad?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Just feels different out here, I guess.”

“That’s fine,” Drake said. He started the car and pulled it around to the road, feeling the engine work as he pressed his foot down and angled for the interstate.

In his rearview Drake watched the road, waiting to see if the Lincoln would round the corner and take the entrance with them. Nothing there to see, and only the semis out on the interstate as he pushed the accelerator again and headed north.

Chapter 2

THERE WAS THE SOUND again of something hitting against the metal—the thump of an elbow, the beat of a foot, the hard strike of a palm against the inside of the trunk lid. The skinny man looked to the side where the big man sat and then he looked behind him, over the backs of their seats to where the leather—with every knock—seemed to palpitate like something alive.

He turned and ran his eyes to the gas station across the street. The car they’d been following since that morning now pulling out into traffic, headed toward the highway again. He watched it go, tracking it with his eyes as it went. And then when it was gone he got up from the Lincoln and walked around to the back where the sounds could be heard.

There were several children playing inside on the McDonald’s play structure—twenty feet of slides and rope ladders, a bridge of netting from one plastic tower to the next. One overweight boy of eight or nine there at the edge, surveying the land, watching the skinny man where he stood in the parking lot. The two stared at each other for the beat of a second. The boy there and then gone, called away by his mother or by some other child.

The man turned and opened the trunk. The driver there in the belly, his face showed as only a mash of dried blood and broken bones. One side of his skull sagging like melted rubber, cheekbone to eye socket crushed inward. And the skin purpled and swollen from when he’d been beaten unconscious.

The skinny man took it all in quickly, looking to the McDonald’s and then looking back on the driver. He dropped a fist fast into the windpipe of the man and crushed the driver’s larynx. Then as the eyes opened wide, the driver’s lungs struggling to breathe, the skinny man bent downward and with two hands took hold of the driver, breaking his neck as deftly as a farmer snapping the neck of one of his chickens.

Chapter 3

“YOU GOT SOME TIME?” Drake asked as they came into Silver Lake, the houses all strung together along the road. Prefabs with vinyl siding and patchy lawns farther out, and as they came into town, two-story clapboards with wood-frame windows and lopsided porches. A single yellow caution light dangling where the two main roads came together and then split apart again.

“Plenty of time,” his father said, leaning into the windshield to take in the town. “Hasn’t changed much, has it?”

“A few more logging outfits,” Drake said. They came to the blinking yellow and Drake turned the steering wheel to the left, heading away from the lake.

When they came to the metal Quonset hut five miles up the road, Drake pulled into the gravel and set the brake. “This is new,” Patrick said.

“Fish and Wildlife put it in a few years back. I’ve been helping them out. This morning on the way to pick you up I spotted a wolf just off the lake road.”

“A wolf?”

Drake nodded. “Positive.”

“No shit?” Patrick said, leaning forward to take in the hut like he might see the wolf standing there before them. “Your grandfather used to tell me stories about the old packs that ran in the North Cascades. Nothing like that when I was around. This must be the first wolf in fifty years.”

“At least.” Drake pushed the door open and moved to get out, pausing and looking back at his father. “You hear from him at all? Grandpa? Is he still crazy?”

“He wrote me a few times. Says he’s getting old. Told us to come visit when we had a chance. Says he’s been shooting gophers and prairie dogs. Sent me a recipe for chili a few years ago. Same crazy old man.”

“What kind of chili?”

“It wasn’t beef.”

“Sounds about right,” Drake said. “I’m surprised he wrote you.”

“Living out where he does I think he gets lonely,” Patrick said.

Drake told his father he’d be only a moment and then got up out of the car and closed the door. He could smell the tree pollen in the air. The first buds of spring showing on the stink currant branches off the road.

Nothing up the road but forest, and then eventually, thirty miles on, the border crossing into Canada. A single booth set in the middle of the road with red-and-white pole gates hanging off either side, like a trawler on the ocean. Drake took a breath and felt the sweet air at the back of his throat, cold and mineral as snowmelt. He nodded to his father and then went on to the hut.

He smelled the deer by the time he had the door open and he put a hand to his nose to quell the stench. “How long did she sit in the sun before you brought her in?” he asked.

Ellie Cobb leaned out from behind a metal cabinet. Eight years younger than him, she wore a pair of safety glasses over her dark eyes, her brown hair tied back and the green Fish and Wildlife uniform visible beneath a yellow rubber apron. With a gloved hand, she removed the glasses and stood. “When you left the message this morning you didn’t say anything about the deer being half-eaten.”

“She wasn’t half-eaten when I left her,” Drake said. He was standing close by Ellie now and he could see how the wolf had cleaned one of the flanks to the bone. A strong light focused down on the remaining muscle. The musk of the deer floated in the air, and an underlying smell of the wilderness.

The room they stood in a mix of salvaged wood furniture—culled from some government office in Olympia—and the more modern stainless examination tables toward the back, where a series of freezers lined the wall and filled the room with an electric hum. Each freezer containing the various remains of one thing or another, finds either Drake or Ellie had brought in over the last few months: a frozen coyote, a flattened porcupine, and the remains of a diseased elk.

Drake picked up a pair of surgical tongs and folded open the stomach cavity. The innards torn and the ribs snapped in a jagged fashion Drake knew had not been done with human hands. When he looked over at Ellie to tell her about the wolf, the Fish and Wildlife officer’s eyes were looking past him.

Drake turned and found his father there, the big canvas coat on his shoulders and a hand held to his nose.

“Ellie Cobb,” Drake said, “this is my father, Patrick.”

“The convict,” Ellie said, a playful smile on her face as she said it. “I’d heard your time was coming up.”

“Ex-con,” Patrick said, extending a hand to Ellie.

She looked down at it a moment and then gave him a weak wave with her gloved hand. “Sorry,” she said. “Blood.”

His father nodded and forced a smile. He was standing about two feet away from where Drake leaned over the carcass. “My son tell you I was getting out?”

“Actually, no. The sheriff, Gary, said you might be around soon. Bobby only told me about it when I pressed him a little.”

“Gary is the sheriff now?”

Ellie looked to Drake.

“Gary was my deputy,” Patrick explained.

Ellie’s eyes locked on Drake. “I thought Bobby would have told you.”

“Bobby doesn’t tell me much of anything. I half expected I’d be catching the bus this morning.”

“Bobby seems pretty good at keeping secrets. You have any advice for me if I decide to go rogue?”

Patrick ran his tongue over his teeth, thinking it through. His eyes dancing over her and then away again. “I can tell you what not to do,” he said. “Don’t smuggle drugs in across international borders. Don’t let anyone know you’re doing it. And…” He looked around the room in mock suspicion. “Don’t get caught.”

“I see you’ve been rehabilitated,” Ellie said.

“Totally cured.”

Drake watched Ellie to see how she was taking it. There was an undeniable level of sarcasm in Patrick’s voice and it was hard to know what to do with it.

“You feel guilty about any of it?” Ellie asked.

“I’d take it back if I could,” Patrick said. “I messed a lot up. I was the sheriff and I was arrested right here in town. I tried to run but I didn’t make it far. I got cocky. Of course I didn’t know it at the time. But sitting in Monroe for all those years I can see how it all spiraled out of control for me. I tried to sell too much at one time. People start to take notice.”

“Those people being the DEA?”

“When I started out in this I didn’t have a lot of options. No one wants to do business with a sheriff and I rushed into it. I needed the money. The DEA offered my contact down in Seattle a deal and that deal involved me. I walked right into it. I really didn’t even need the money at that point.”

“And you got out this morning?”

“Only three hours ago.”

“It must feel pretty good, like a birthday or something.”

“Yeah, a birthday I only get to celebrate every twelve years.” Drake’s father blew air through his teeth and looked around at the room. “Bobby told me about the wolf, I thought I’d come in for a second. I didn’t expect to meet anyone like you in here.”

“Is that a good thing?” Ellie asked.

“You’re the best thing I’ve seen in twelve years.”

“The state prison offering charm school now?”

“Yeah,” Patrick said. “Just before shop class and after basic auto maintenance. It’s real popular.”

“I bet.” Ellie looked from Patrick to Drake and then dropped her eyes to the half-eaten carcass on the table.

Drake turned and looked at his father. “You think you could give us a moment?”

“Yeah, no problem. I just came in to give the place a look.” He nodded a good-bye to Ellie and then smiled toward Drake. “Bobby, I’ll be out by the car when you finish up here.”

Drake watched his father walk back toward the front entrance. When the door drew shut, Ellie said, “You definitely didn’t mention he was such a smoothy.” A playfulness showing on her face again.

“I didn’t know you were into older men.”

“Only if they’re old enough to be my father,” Ellie said. She gave Drake a wink. “That bad-boy thing really gets me going, you think he’d wear a leather jacket if I asked?”

“You can stop anytime, Ellie.”

“Just having some fun. Just being polite. The guy has been locked up for twelve years.”

“Uh-huh, and it’s your job to cheer him up?” Drake said. He could feel the flush of blood on his cheeks. He didn’t know why he felt this way about her, or what to call it. Protective? Maybe. Ellie was like a little sister to him. She’d grown up in the town and then left for college, later applying to Fish and Wildlife. She’d been something like twelve years old when everything had gone down with Drake’s father. And just like everyone else in Silver Lake, she knew almost every detail about the case.

“He could probably use some good times,” Ellie said.

Drake shook his head, trying to get a handle on it. He thought if he opened his mouth to speak his voice would break like a teenage boy’s. He swallowed, wetting his throat, knowing it was all talk, and that Ellie was giving him a hard time like she always did. “You thought you’d just flirt with him a little?” Drake said. “Show him a good time?”

“The convict thing? It’s the one thing he’s known for, isn’t it? That and knowing every inch of these mountains.”

“That’s what happens when you spend a couple years smuggling drugs over them.” Drake laughed, but it felt forced, and he looked to the front door of the Quonset hut and wondered what his father was doing outside.

With one gloved hand, Ellie pushed the light back from the carcass and flicked off the power. “I didn’t know it was for that long.”

“Not everything was in the papers.”

“I guess not.”

“I tend to think people know things about our family before they’ve even met us. I’m surprised Gary never told you that part.”

She took the gloves from her hands and threw them into the trash can beneath the table. A dappling of sweat showed at her hairline where the examination light had caught her. “Gary barely says a thing and you won’t talk about him at all except to tell a few stories from his childhood. You’re not exactly forthcoming with all the information sometimes.” She walked over to her desk, where a topographical map of the surrounding mountains was spread. Little red marks all up and down the valley floor. “When you called this morning, you didn’t say anything about our wolf.”

Drake shrugged. “I didn’t want you getting all excited about it.”

“She’s becoming a problem.”

“Better the deer than someone’s cow.”

“That’s the problem,” Ellie said. “It’s only a matter of time before one of those ranchers starts shooting at her. She’s on her own and starting to look for the easy meal.” Ellie put a hand to the map, running a finger from one red mark to the next. “These are all the places where she’s been seen. She’s not just passing through at this point. Wolves hunt in pairs. Without a pack she’s pretty much just going to go for the easiest meal she can find. A calf, trash cans, or roadkill. All of which are related to humans.”

Drake looked at the thin corridor of sightings, north to south along the lake, following the main road.

“I want to collar her and see where she goes,” Ellie said. “When I can prove it’s an individual wolf, and I have her movements worked out, I can start to put a plan together. I want you to help me out.”

Drake looked around the room, wondering for the slightest moment if she might have been talking to someone else. “I’m a little busy being a deputy,” Drake said.

“I’m trying to save her,” Ellie said.

“That’s all fine and good but I still don’t see what it has to do with me.”

Ellie got up from the desk and untied the yellow apron from around her waist. Standing she came to Drake’s shoulders, petite with a swimmer’s broad arms and sculpted legs. Her size alone reminded Drake of how young she was, and how brand-new to Fish and Wildlife she seemed. Nothing worn away on her or piled up against the surface of her skin, like a cabin in the winter under all that snow. No scars, or pieces of her missing. Drake wanted her to stay just the way she was, twenty-four years old, doing exactly what she wanted with her life.

Drake watched as she turned and hung the apron up on a hook by the door. By the time she turned back around she was already looking at him like something funny had been said. “I already talked this over with Gary.”

“Christ,” Drake said. “You want to go on a wolf hunt? I’m people police. You understand that, right?”

“He says you probably know the valley better than anyone.”

“Christ,” Drake said again, this time hoping a prayer might be answered. “When?”

“Tomorrow or the next day. Sooner the better.”

“My father just got out.”

“Bring him.”

“No.” Drake waved off the statement, both hands in the air. “No way.”

“After all these years you’d think you’d want to spend time with your father.”

“You might think that, but I don’t.”

“Like I said, he’s famous for knowing every inch of these mountains.”

“And for being a convicted criminal,” Drake said. “Your words, not mine.”

WHEN DRAKE GOT to the car his father was sitting in the passenger seat with the windows down looking toward the forest. The light slanting in through the trees, rich with pollen, and the sword ferns a nuclear green at the edge of the road.

“Gary is the sheriff now?”

Drake pulled open the door and then sat there looking at his hands on the wheel. Gary had been Patrick’s best friend. And when Patrick went away Gary had stepped in to help Drake get situated, taking Drake fishing, even giving him the job at the department.

“He was the interim sheriff when you went away,” Drake said. “And then he was elected a year after.” Drake brought out the car keys from his pocket. “I thought you would have heard.”

“I’m not surprised,” Patrick said, turning to Drake. He smiled a bit, coming out of whatever place his mind had taken him.

His father had been gone a long time and Drake knew there were going to be times like this. Moments when the flash of a memory came across his father’s face and then went away again. A decision that was made a long time before and that absence in time—what could have been—the only thing left to regret.

Patrick went on smiling and then he nodded toward the Fish and Wildlife hut as he came back to himself. “Did I cut in on your action?”

It took Drake a second and then when he saw what his father was getting at his face flushed. “That’s not what that was about.”

“Seems funny to me,” his father said. “All this time since we’ve seen each other and the first thing you want to show me in Silver Lake is the young Fish and Wildlife officer.”

Drake started up the car and turned out onto the road. “That’s not it at all.” In the rearview mirror Drake watched the Quonset hut disappear around a bend in the road.

“You know I haven’t even met Sheri yet. Seems like she’d be the one you’d take me to see first.”

“I hope you’re not trying to be a dad,” Drake said.

“She is your wife, right? Sheri?” Patrick smiled for a second and then looked away, watching the green thatch of the forest pass by out the window. Drake knowing that his father wanted him to say something, that the old man was just trying to egg him on like he had when Drake was a boy. His father trying to reconnect in the only way still familiar to him, like something lost long ago and then found.

Ten minutes later they passed through the yellow caution light and turned up the lake again, heading toward the house. Sheri would be away at work, but he’d told her they’d be home in time for lunch, and even if she didn’t know, he felt an urge not to disappoint her. The sun above, almost directly over the lake. Nothing out on the water, and the thin glint of sunlight refracted off the chrome of a few logging trucks far down the other side of the lake.

“Ellie is a local girl, isn’t she?” Patrick said. “Have Sheri and she met?”

“I’m surprised no one shanked you in prison,” Drake said.

“She’s young,” Patrick said. “I recognize her. Didn’t you go out with her older sister in high school?”

“Are you planning to blackmail me?”

“Just having a little fun,” Patrick said. “You seem pretty familiar with her. You see a lot of her?”

Drake looked over at his father and then looked away. “You’re relentless,” Drake said. “I have to see Ellie for work, that’s all.” He wasn’t looking at his father but he could feel his father’s eyes on him and Drake was almost certain there was a grin to go along.

When they came to the opening in the forest leading toward their house, Drake waited for a couple cars to pass. When they’d gone by, rocking the Chevy on its springs, he turned the wheel and the car came off the lake road and bounced down into the rutted gravel drive. The house was another hundred yards on, hidden beyond a curve in the road and behind a patch of trees. “Sheri is meeting you for the first time. I know it sounds strange to say now that you’re here, but it was sudden for us. Sheri’s been under a lot of stress lately,” Drake said.

“I was told the probation was dependent on your approval,” Patrick said. “That was a month ago.”

“I know,” Drake said. “She’s just nervous about it.” They took the turn in the drive and came into the clearing before the house. The gravel drive ending and the house there before them. The Sheriff’s Department cruiser Drake drove every day parked just to the side. The house a two-bedroom rambler, one story in height, with a few steps leading up to a red door. Drake taking it in fresh as he tried to see it through his father’s eyes. Sheri and Drake had painted the house a few years back. The wood siding a light brown that the salesclerk at Home Depot had called sandstone. The trim around the windows painted white and the door a bright red color Sheri had said would make the house “pop.”

Now Drake looked at it and didn’t know what to say. He was thinking about Sheri. He was thinking about all the changes that had been made since his father had owned the place and Drake had been a child there. They had taken out much of the furniture, repainted the walls inside, updated the bathroom, all of it an effort to try to make the place seem more their own. Now, with Patrick there, Drake didn’t know. He felt somehow like he’d been house-sitting all this time and as soon as he brought Patrick inside, the property would be his father’s again.

Drake pushed the transmission up into park and sat looking out on the house. The red door and all that sat inside. “I meant to say that there’s been some problems lately.” Drake didn’t turn in his seat. He kept looking up at the house. “I don’t want you giving her a hard time. She really has always wanted to meet you.”

“That thing about Ellie?” Patrick smiled. “I was just talking. I already told you I’m not going to give you any problems.”

“That’s good,” Drake said. He opened the door and stood. He didn’t know what he was trying to say to his father. Or even how to say it. Whatever had been said somehow not enough. Everything, lately, not enough.

DRAKE KNEW SHERI could keep a cool head about things. She’d been keeping a lot of things bottled up inside recently. But Drake didn’t know how cool that head would be if he, or his father, told Sheri that the Fish and Wildlife officer he’d been working with till two A.M. was Ellie Cobb. A girl from Silver Lake with whom Drake had a little history.

Only the night before Ellie and Drake had sat up in the Fish and Wildlife truck for almost five hours. The truck pulled off the road, hidden beneath the trees, watching what passed for traffic in Silver Lake. Up above, circling high and wide over the valley, they occasionally heard the spotter plane Ellie had applied for a month before. The plane circling and looking down on the night forest below, marking headlights in the woods, and as soon as they had the locations they would go bouncing up logging roads or down old ranchers’ paths, trying to figure who was out there.

Many of the places they’d found in the past month or so since the poaching had begun were just empty grass lots, barren of trees and thick with low-lying brush. Perfect for waiting out groups of grazing deer, spotlighting them with headlights, and then taking shots at them while they stood frozen in the light.

Poaching had been a problem lately on the weekends, and through the night they were called to four different sites, but each time they arrived there was little there to indicate the plane circling above had gotten the location right. At the third lot they came to Drake could see a clear track in the mud and nearby a set of boot prints leading down the slope into the grass.

About fifty yards in they found the bloodstain in the grass. A small depression made where the deer had gone down and then the poachers had lifted the animal and brought it back up the slope with them. There was no more sign than that and Drake knelt, looking the boot prints over, several of them there in the mud at his feet. Possibly two or three men from the size and shape of the tracks. Drake couldn’t say for sure.

Ellie was back in her truck then, asking if the spotter plane had seen anything else, though Drake knew as soon as the poachers turned off their lights they pretty much disappeared beneath the trees.

Ellie and Drake sat for a long time, watching the clearing, their own lights out now, and Drake leaning into the passenger-side window. Ellie occasionally radioing up to the spotter plane for an update while Drake watched moths land on the glass. The insects drawn out by the light of the moon, dusty legs perched along the slant of the windshield. Their wings spread wide, fluttering for a moment, then moving on again to some brighter place among the trees.

They sat for another ten minutes before the radio crackled on again and the plane above gave them their next location. No more than a mile away. From where they sat looking out on the clearing, Drake could hear the crack of a high-powered rifle even from inside the cab of Ellie’s truck.

“These guys are making a real night of it,” Drake said.

Ellie turned the engine on and brought the truck around. “What are the chances they’re still there when we show up?”

“Given what we’ve accomplished already, I’d say not very good.” They were cutting back along the logging road with just their parking lights on, trying to keep a low profile, and in twenty minutes, when they found the location, they would see nothing but a bloody depression in the grass, just like what they had found every weekend for months now.

DRAKE SET THE keys on the counter and looked around. Sheri had left a note on the refrigerator telling Drake what time she would be home from work. The kitchen was completely clean, dishes put away, counter wiped down, a fresh set of towels hanging from the oven handle. Drake opened up the refrigerator and looked inside. Even the condiments had been organized inside the door. The leftovers from a few nights before neatly stacked in Tupperwares and the inside shelves soaped and cleaned. He closed the door without taking anything and went back to the counter.

The kitchen, dining area, and living room all one L-shaped room. Standing there he could see the small four-seat dining table, and then farther out around the bend of the L he saw part of the living room, where it led away to the bedrooms. After he’d married Sheri, they’d made a real effort to make the place their own, switching out his father’s worn and mismatched furniture for a pair of sofas, a matching dining room table and buffet, and twin side tables for the living room. On one of the tables was the box his father had brought with him from Monroe. Drake stared at it for what seemed a long time, waiting until he heard the toilet flush and the door open down the hall.

Drake walked out and stood waiting for his father. Patrick stepped from inside the bathroom, pausing to flip the light off, and then wiping his hands down his pants to dry them. He was looking at all the pictures on the walls as he passed. Some that Sheri had taken, others that Sheri’s mother had taken when Sheri was a girl. All black and white pastoral views of rolling farmland, or bent wood fencing. An artsy sort of thing that Drake had never quite understood, but that he’d grown used to and, truthfully, barely even noticed anymore. Everything, down to the two gray sofas in the living room, with their white piping, a sort of matching set.

Drake watched his father study one of the pictures for a moment before moving on. He passed his old bedroom, the one Sheri and Drake had taken for their own, and he paused, putting a finger to the door and pushing it open on its hinges. Drake tried to imagine what Patrick saw inside. The queen bed with the tall dresser nearby. The sheets pulled all the way to the top of the mattress and tucked beneath a collection of pillows, each a different size and shape, but somehow all appearing to belong. The whole scene put together that morning by Sheri. Her hands tightening down the corners of the bedding, running her palms along the topmost sheet, smoothing the wrinkles before pulling the comforter across it all.

Drake took a step and Patrick looked away from the room, noticing his son for the first time. “Different than you remember?” Drake asked.

Patrick didn’t say anything and Drake wasn’t sure if he’d even asked the question aloud. Lately it had been like that. Like Drake had tried to say something but forgotten to work his lips. Whole moments seeming to disappear from focus, then snapping back into a reality more clear and bright than anything before.

He watched his father step forward down the hall and push the door to Drake’s childhood bedroom open. The door hinges heard in the silence as Patrick looked inside. It was the bedroom that Sheri and Drake had agreed to fix up for Patrick. The one he would have while he stayed with them.

Patrick turned and looked to Drake. “You didn’t say anything about having a…”

Drake watched his father try to find the words. Two blank eyes looking back at him. “There was a complication,” Drake said. “It’s been almost a month now. She was pregnant, but we lost it.”

Patrick turned again and pushed the door farther open. He was silhouetted in the hallway, the dark opening of the bathroom door behind him down the hall. “How far along was she?”

“Four months,” Drake said. “After three they say you’re in the clear.” He hadn’t moved from where he stood in the living room. He felt like he hadn’t moved in weeks. “We painted the room those colors because we didn’t know if it was going to be a girl or a boy. We thought we’d wait and see. Keep it a surprise.” Drake heard the words come out of his mouth but he wasn’t sure they were his. They were just words, mashed together, rushed, a series of observations, of hopes and thoughts on things that had never come to be.

“It was our office. We waited till after the third month to start buying things. To get the crib and find a changing table,” Drake said. “I don’t know why we haven’t gotten rid of them now.” He took a few steps and found he was standing next to his father. “We don’t talk about it much. We keep the door closed.”

What Drake didn’t say was how he’d come into the room a week ago to put the single bed together for his father. He didn’t say how he’d assembled it with the door closed and his back to the crib, trying not to look at the walls of the room, how they spread from light blue at the base, up toward the ceiling, where puffed white clouds were stenciled. The blue paint climbing farther up the walls, past the clouds, until it went pink, yellow, and orange like a sunset. The ceiling dotted with the same sort of glowing stars Drake remembered from his own childhood.

THEY STOOD AT the edge of the orchard, Drake and Patrick, looking down at the small patch of disturbed earth.

“Listen,” Drake said. “She doesn’t talk about it. We never even told anyone, we were going to wait until she started showing. Sheri didn’t want people whispering about her at the restaurant. She didn’t want to cut her hours until it was on her terms.”

“So no one knows?” Patrick stood on one side of the little grave and Drake on the other. Patrick looked up at Drake and then looked away, across the orchard to where the house sat.

Drake checked his watch. Sheri’s lunch shift ended in two hours. “We’d been seeing a doctor in Bellingham. She had some stomach pains one night and she went into the bathroom. She was in there a long time.” Drake didn’t know how to go on. He didn’t know how to tell his father about how Sheri had locked the door, about the sound of her in there, the crying, the way her voice carried through the wood and came to Drake as if through the walls. The crying turning to sobbing and then the sobbing turning to silence. Drake having to ask again and again for her to open the door.

RECENTLY, THERE’D BEEN a lot of times when he had to remind himself they were going to be fine. That all would pass, and they could still have the future he had always thought they’d have.

Drake closed the refrigerator door and turned to look over at Sheri where she sat at the table. Patrick, sitting opposite, turned to look at Drake. “The lettuce,” Sheri said. “There’s a big plate in there with the cut tomatoes.”

“Right,” Drake said. He turned back to the refrigerator and opened the door. There it was, on the middle shelf. He reached in and brought it up and set it on the counter. It had happened again, he’d drifted, found himself just staring into space. The same thing had happened that morning, looking over the deer carcass, the cell phone in his hand and—for only a moment—no idea at all what to do.

He looked back at the table. Grilled hamburger patties, buns, a jar of pickles, potato chips, and all the condiments set out. Drake closed the door and brought the plate of lettuce and tomatoes around the counter and out into the dining room. Sheri trying to answer a question about her hometown, where her folks were from. Patrick leaning into the table with his forearms, his shoulders pushed forward as he listened. Drake set the plate down and asked, “Anyone want a beer?”

Sheri said she’d have one and when Patrick wanted one too, Drake went back to the kitchen and found three on the bottom shelf.

Everything with Sheri and Drake was in the open now. Sheri had come home after her lunch shift and met Patrick. Then she’d gone into the bathroom to take a shower as Drake unloaded the groceries Sheri had brought.

It was just before dinner when they were all outside by the grill at the bottom of the back stairs that Patrick brought up the changes to the house. The pictures and furniture. The way the house looked new to him. How well they’d taken care of it, painting the outside and updating the bathroom. Patrick and Sheri sitting on the stairs while Drake stood a few feet apart, spatula in hand as the burger meat spat and hissed on the grill. “It never looked this good when Bobby was growing up here.” He gave Drake a quick glance before continuing. “I noticed the things you got for the second bedroom.”

Sheri looked away toward the orchard and then turned back.

Patrick glanced at Drake again, almost asking permission. “Bobby told me about the baby. I wanted to say I’m sorry about what happened.”

Sheri took a moment. “Thanks,” she said. “We never told anyone about it and so when we lost it we didn’t feel like we had anyone to talk with.”

“I’ve felt the same way,” Patrick said. With his fingers he worked a splinter up from the stair on which he sat and then flipped it away. “Bobby’s mom and I tried for a while after Bobby started school here in Silver Lake, but with her getting sick we lost a couple pregnancies and then just figured we’d wait till she got better.”

Drake was staring at his father. He’d never heard his father say anything like that to anyone. He’d never heard the man talk about anything personal, really. It was only when the burgers started to flame that he remembered they were there at all.

“They say it’s common,” Sheri said. “That’s what they told us at least. They said it’s just one of those things.”

Drake flipped a few more burgers and let them cook. When they were finished he asked for a plate and waited while Sheri went inside to get one.

Now he stood looking into the refrigerator again, the beers suspended between his fingers. He closed the door and walked back to the dining room table. His father there with his wife, and Patrick telling Sheri about the day they’d had. Talking about how nice it was to sit at a table and have a burger, to drink a beer, to not have every day repeat itself like every day before.

“Did Bobby tell you about the wolf?” Patrick asked, taking the beer in his hand and twisting the top off. He didn’t wait for Sheri to answer before going on. “First in the valley in fifty years.” He was smiling now and for a moment he looked at Drake and then looked back to Sheri. “I bet he didn’t tell you about the new Fish and Wildlife officer, either.”

“HOW MANY DAYS will you be out?” Sheri asked.

Drake sat on the edge of their bed and slid one boot off, followed by the other. “Two to three, depending on how it goes.” He looked back at Sheri. She was a few years younger than him, wrinkles just beginning to show around her eyes when she smiled.

They had met at the Chelan County Fair a couple years after Drake moved back to Silver Lake. Drake off for the weekend with one of the other deputies. Sheri with her friends, walking around the fairgrounds looking over the various prizes. The whole time Drake trying to catch her eye and missing every time. Watching her until he’d finally worked up the nerve to talk to her.

Now, turned on the bed, he looked back at her and thought over all the time that had passed in between. Sheri was already under the covers with her head resting on a pillow against the headboard. “The Fish and Wildlife officer wants me to take along my father.”

Sheri turned in bed and moved her feet beneath the covers, digging one of her toes into Drake’s side. “You mean the cute Fish and Wildlife officer that you didn’t tell me about?”

Drake watched his wife for a second as he tried to decide whether she was playing with him, or if this conversation held any hidden pitfalls. He moved a hand down and caught her foot, pressing his thumb into the arch. She made a small animal sound. Her body curling up as she brought her other foot from beneath the covers and placed it on his lap.

“This how you passed the time last night?” Sheri said. “When you were out late on your stakeout?”

Drake screwed his face up, trying to look disgusted. He finished the massage on the first foot and started in on the other. “On Ellie? No,” Drake said. “She’s got horrible corns and the calluses on her soles cut my hands any time I try.” Drake smiled back at his wife and Sheri dug her free foot into his side again, this time with a little more force, almost pushing him over.

“So she wants you to take your father along?” Sheri said.

Drake finished with the massage. “I haven’t told him. I don’t know if it’s the best idea. Going along with us so soon after getting out.” Drake pulled his T-shirt over his head and threw it to the corner of the room near a wicker hamper. “Seems like he’s able to charm everybody except me.”

“Pat has been perfectly fine,” Sheri said, and Drake knew he had. Over dinner Patrick had asked Sheri questions about herself, where she worked. What she did at the Buck Blind, waitress or bartend. Who she knew in the valley. He complimented her on the garden out back and the line of time-warped mason jars she’d collected over the sink window. After dinner producing a gift from his little cardboard box of possessions, a whittled horse figurine he’d done for her in the prison shop. Sheri leaned in to kiss his cheek, and afterward asked, “How is it being back here in this house?”

“Strange,” he said. “But in a good way. Everything is the same and everything is different. You know what I mean?”

Drake was leaning against the counter between the kitchen and dining area finishing his beer when Patrick looked away from Sheri, fixing Drake for a moment before going on. “Just strange, that’s all.” He looked back to Sheri and said, “It feels like I closed my eyes for a moment and then opened them again and twelve years passed.” He shook his head, thanked Sheri and nodded to Drake, and said good night to them both.

Drake tried to put it all in perspective, but it just wouldn’t go. For the next hour after his father had gone to bed Drake kept rolling around the idea of blinking away the past. Nothing like that had happened to him in those twelve years. All that time now seemed longer than anything. And everything before—when he’d been a boy in Silver Lake, then gone on to college—like water in his hand, bleeding through his fingers and then gone.

“The truth is,” Drake said, “I can’t trust him. I want to but I just can’t.”

“He’s your father. I don’t know what else you want from him. I’m sure he’s sorry about it all.”

“He’s not the same person. He’s not who I remember. Earlier, on our way home, he thought someone was following us.”

“What do you want me to say?” She looked over at him, her eyes begging for understanding. “It’s just nerves. When they told us he was getting out they said it might be difficult.”

“Stop acting like you know him,” Drake said, the words spilling out before he could stop them. “You don’t know him like I do.”

“Did you ever think that maybe you don’t know him?” Sheri said. She’d pushed herself up on the bed now, her thin, fine-boned hands at her sides. The brown hair she usually wore at her shoulders, tied up in a ponytail, a smattering of freckles on her cheeks that would only grow darker as the season warmed. “You went to visit him only once in all his time away. At least I tried to write him and keep him in the loop. Telling him about you and what was going on here in Silver Lake, and he was good about responding, about wanting to hear about you. At dinner tonight you heard him yourself, talking about the land, about the hills and mountains, about how you two used to ride up into the valleys on horseback. It seems like going along with you would be something he’d want.”

Drake shook his head. He knew already there was no point in going into it. He was being the asshole, but he didn’t care, he was angry at his father, he’d been angry for a long time, and his father’s coming home wasn’t going to change that. He got up from the bed and crossed to the dresser, where he took out a pair of thin cotton pants and changed into them. For a little while, when Sheri had become pregnant—when they had stayed up late in bed, the lights off, making plans for the future and whispering to each other in the darkness even though there was no one else to hear—Drake had let himself forget about who he was, about where he’d come from and the reasons his life was the way it was. His father a convicted criminal, and anything Drake had wanted to be in his younger years no longer a reality he could ever hope for. “Don’t you see that my life would be completely different if it wasn’t for him?”

“You would have finished college,” Sheri said.

“Yes.”

“And you would never have come back to Silver Lake.”

“Probably not.”

“And you never would have met me.”

Drake looked over at her; he didn’t know what to say. It was the truth. He never would have met her. He started to tell her it wasn’t true, but then gave up. He was being pigheaded. He loved her. He depended on her, knew she would never lie to him, that she would always give it to him straight. He felt bad for every unnamed thing that had been going through his head from the moment he’d woken up this morning, to this moment, here in their bedroom.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I get it.” Her voice losing some of the sharpness that had been growing in around the edges. “But it’s not like you can invent a time machine and go back. Your life isn’t going to change in that way. Not ever.” The last few words beginning to tighten and catch in her throat as her voice broke.

“Hey,” he said, and then, “Hey, hey, hey.” His voice dropping to a whisper as he stood next to the dresser and looked back at her, knowing what she’d just said wasn’t really about him alone. It was about them. It was about the baby they’d lost and a million other things that had been adding up to this moment alone.

She was crying now, softly, with her body turned away from him on the bed. The sheets pulled tight over her shoulders. He went around the bed and sat next to her. With his hand he tried to rub some warmth onto her back. “Hey,” he said. “We’re okay. We’ll be just fine.” But he didn’t know it and he said it again, repeating it like a mantra.

For a while now he’d thought maybe they were both waiting to see who would leave first, and then when the parole board had called to tell Drake about his father’s release, Drake had thought maybe they would stay together, maybe they would figure it out.

He knew losing the baby had hurt Sheri in a deeper way than he could understand. He hadn’t been there for her. He’d been on the outside, listening through the bathroom door. Stuck between knowing what to do and not knowing. No clue. No training for a thing like this—for life to come at them out of the dark without warning. But hadn’t that been it? Drake thought. One moment you’re joking about calluses and corns and secrets and the next…

Drake sank into the bed and pulled Sheri toward him. Her wet face to his, warm and soft, strands of loose hair come free from her ponytail where they lay against her cheeks. She wasn’t crying anymore and he listened to her snuffling breath. Her nose and mouth close into his shoulder and her hot breath on his skin.

“It’s good,” he said, taking his time, “that you were able to talk about it with my father today. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” He felt her give the smallest nod. The crown of her head just below his chin. “We had to start talking about it sometime.”

Everything Drake had thought or done in the last month felt like it was all coming together. His past life asking questions of his present. Still, he’d gone rigid when Patrick had started talking to Sheri about the baby. Drake just standing there holding the spatula, paralyzed. Everything inside telling him he needed to protect Sheri. But at the same time, realizing that he’d been waiting for this, waiting for this time of his life. The past meeting the future, Drake adding a new role, being a father, sweeping all the failures of the past away to make room for this new stage in his life. He’d wanted that baby more than anything he could remember wanting before.

Instead they’d lost it and now their marriage felt like something fragile, like an egg in the palm. Hold too tight and he’d crush the thin shell in his hand, too loose and he’d drop it on the floor.

He kept her close for a long time, feeling her breath whispering on his clavicle. He remembered the days after. Sheri home in bed, not wanting to move, not even bothering to take the medication the doctor in Bellingham had prescribed for her. He thought of this now and about how fragile she’d become in such a short time. So different from the person she’d become to him. The person he thought of as his wife. When she fell asleep he turned and flipped off the bedside light and lay there listening to the air in her lungs, feeling his heart beating in his chest.

He lay there until he was quite cold, feeling the chill on his skin but worried that if he moved to pull the sheets up and cover them both fully, she would wake. Eventually, when the goose bumps had risen and pricked his skin like chicken feathers, he got up from the bed and loosened the sheets from the bottom where Sheri had tucked them that morning. When he climbed back in, Sheri’s breath had changed and he knew she was awake.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I feel bad about what I said to you. About another life. About things being different.” He moved his fingers down the outside of her arm, feeling the little hairs that grew there, and for a while he wondered if she’d heard him.

“I thought tonight might be different,” she said, eventually. “Meeting your father for the first time. Having him out of prison finally. To anyone else this would be a happy day.”

Drake didn’t know how he felt about it, either. He ran his hand down all the way to her fingers and squeezed them in his palm. He wanted to let her know he was there but he couldn’t find the words to say it aloud.

“So you’ll leave tomorrow?” she asked, her voice muffled by his arm.

“The next day,” he said. “I need to go in to the department tomorrow. I need to talk to Gary about all this.”

HE WOKE EARLY and made a pot of coffee in the kitchen. The sound of his father’s snoring coming from beneath Drake’s old bedroom door. All Patrick must have been thinking as he lay down in that bed last night, in that old room, painted now for a small child who had never arrived, while Sheri and Drake slept just down the hall in Patrick’s old bedroom.

Drake poured a cup of coffee and tried to imagine what his father had thought before he closed his eyes. The unfamiliar becoming the familiar again. Like watching an old movie that hadn’t been seen in years. The same lines replaying, the same scenes, and plot twists. A half-remembered life slowly coming back into focus.

Drake sipped at the coffee. He was barely awake. The thoughts in his head seeming random and disoriented, bumping around inside him with a sleep-starved stumble. After Sheri had drifted off, he’d slept poorly and in the morning he’d woken and dressed in his uniform. The light just up over the mountains and the back acre of their property—where the apple trees grew in unkempt lines all the way to the forest—bright with the morning sun.

He drank the coffee and watched the orchard. The year after his mother died, the apples had sat in the field unpicked. Drake, age nine, watching as a yearling bear wandered around, picking the apples from the ground. Going from tree to tree and eating what apples it could find. The bear drunk on rotting apples by the time it had reached the fourth tree.

His father had come to stand with him at the window as the yearling lay back against one of the apple trunks and rubbed its spine one way, then the other. Eventually falling back into the grass and rolling around with its arms half suspended in front of its face. The bear dozing for over an hour before lumbering off again.

Even now they didn’t care for the trees as they should and half had gone wild, their tops lopsided and unkempt. The apples sagging on the branches in the fall, deer and elk showing up out of the forest to pick over the rotting apples on the ground, or as he had seen once or twice, put their hooves to the trunks and reach for the apples like giraffes extending their slender necks toward the most tender leaves.

Drake set his empty cup in the sink. He left the coffee machine on and collected his hat from near the door. When he’d gone a hundred feet down the wooded drive in his cruiser, he saw a Chevy Impala waiting out on Silver Lake Road. A man in a suit getting out of the car and closing the door behind him.

Drake pulled forward and when he came closer, he put down his window and said, “I was wondering if you’d show up.”

The agent smiled and offered his hand. “How are you, Deputy?”

Drake took his hand and said, “Fine, Driscoll. It’s been a long time.”

Driscoll looked down the drive toward Drake’s house. “How’s the family? How’s Sheri?”

“Still doesn’t like you very much.”

“She’s got gentle sensibilities.”

Drake watched Driscoll for a time, trying to figure the man out. There were only a couple reasons the agent would be waiting for him at the entrance to his drive. And none of those reasons meant anything good for Drake. “I’m guessing you didn’t travel three hours from Seattle for a simple hello.”

“Your father was released from prison yesterday, wasn’t he?”

Drake thought of the two men who had been waiting in the McDonald’s parking lot the day before. He hadn’t thought much of them then but he was starting to reconsider. They hadn’t looked like DEA men. “Driscoll, I hope you’re here because you just wanted to make sure we got home all right?”

“Something like that,” Driscoll said. A car went by on the road, the tires moving over the asphalt. Driscoll watched it go by and then when it was gone, leaned in again. “You think I could talk with you for a moment before you head in?”

“You got somewhere in mind?”

“Sure,” Driscoll said, straightening up. “Follow me into town.”

“YOU’RE SO FUCKING predictable,” Drake said, looking around the doughnut shop.

“Just blending in. I thought all you small-town cops hung out in places like this.” Driscoll took a seat in a far booth, away from the main windows. He gestured to the bench across from him.

Drake sat, throwing his hat on the table, and when the girl looked up from the counter, Driscoll ordered a black coffee and Drake asked for a maple bar. Their table far enough down the side of the doughnut shop that they wouldn’t be noticed by anyone driving by.

When the girl brought the doughnut and coffee over, she nodded to Drake, and Drake said, “Thanks, Cheryl.”

“I didn’t know you were on a first-name basis here,” Driscoll said, his head turning to watch the girl walk away.

“You’ve seen this town,” Drake said. “We’re all on a first-name basis. She probably even knows who you are—probably made you the moment you drove that unmarked Impala into town.”

Driscoll waited for the girl to go into the back before he spoke again. He fingered his coffee cup with two meaty hands and looked down into it for a long time, like someone wishing into a well. “I need to talk to you about something,” Driscoll said. “You remember how we first met?”

“Sure,” Drake said. “You accused me of being a dope runner like my father.”

Driscoll chuckled and looked up from his coffee. “I gave you a hard time, yes, but I wanted to make sure I could talk to you frankly. No beating around the bush. No leading you on, no feints.”

“You’re about to tell me why the DEA has been following me around.”

Driscoll gave him a dead stare. “What do you mean?”

A strained laugh escaped Drake’s lips as he looked around the doughnut shop like Driscoll was playing a joke on him. “The two men? The ones who followed us up the interstate yesterday morning in the black Lincoln. They were your guys, right?”

Driscoll took a sip from the coffee and then put it back on the table. He’d grown bigger in the two years since they’d last seen each other, his shoulders rounded and the jowls of his face thick on his jawline. White all the way through his hair in a way it hadn’t been before. “Deputy, I didn’t put any guys on you.”

“Are you sure?”

“They were following you?” Driscoll asked. He had taken a small notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and he wrote down “Black Lincoln.”

“My father thought they were. I told him he was being paranoid.”

“That’s probably true,” Driscoll said. “I’ll check it out for you, though, just in case. You remember anything else about them?”

Drake went down the list, two white males, one larger than the other. He gave Driscoll the exit number and a more thorough description of the vehicle they were driving. He couldn’t remember the license number. “Is this something I should be worried about?” Drake asked.

“Have you seen them since?”

“No.”

“Then I wouldn’t worry about it. You’re probably right, your father is being paranoid.” He tucked the notebook away in his jacket again and then sat forward with his forearms on the table and his fingers interlaced. “I think you know me and your father have a little history together. I think I made that pretty clear from the beginning. The thing I didn’t tell you before is that I was part of the team that eventually brought him in.”

“Just a little something you forgot to mention. Right, Driscoll?”

“I didn’t want you blowing it out of proportion.”

“You’d already accused me of being a criminal. How much worse could it have been?”

“I’m the guy who put the cuffs on him. Pushed his face into a table just up the street here.”

“What the fuck, Driscoll?”

The agent raised his hands from the table. “I needed you to think we were on the same team, you know?”

“Jesus. We were on the same team… we are on the same team.” Drake felt himself growing angrier, remembering how Driscoll had brought him into the interrogation room in the Seattle federal building and treated him like he was part of the problem, like he was the one smuggling drugs in from Canada. He reached down and straightened his leg, feeling his kneecap click. “I was shot twice,” Drake said. “How many times have you been shot?”

Driscoll smiled, obviously enjoying this. “Let’s not get into a pissing contest, Bobby.”

“Why are you here, Driscoll?”

“Well, your father is out.”

“Yes, and he served his time.”

“What are his plans now that he’s out?”

“So far his plans seem to be screwing with my life.”

“Look, Bobby, I want to be straight with you here. We made an example out of Patrick Drake. We put him away for a lot of years. But if we could have proved everything we had on him from the start, he’d still be in prison. He did a lot of bad shit.”

Drake took a bite of his maple bar, thinking it through. He didn’t have a clue what Driscoll was talking about or what his father was doing. What his father had planned now that he was out. Coming north on the interstate Patrick had told Drake not to worry about him. It was all covered. “I’m not helping you put him back in prison,” Drake said.

The smile spread across Driscoll’s face again. “I thought you said we were on the same team.”

“I remember now why my wife doesn’t like you,” Drake said.

“You could lose your house, Deputy. That’s as straight as I can give it to you. You’re in trouble, and your father is most certainly the root of your problems.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the fact that before Sheriff Drake went to prison, two guys were found dead in a gravel lot north of Bellingham.”

“That’s a whole other county,” Drake said.

“Well the thing about it is that they were two guys who had ripped off a lot of money from someone big. Someone your father worked for.”

“Sounds like they had it coming.”

“Who’s saying that?” Driscoll asked. “You or your father?”

“I’m not my father.”

“A lot of money went missing,” Driscoll said. “Hundreds of thousands. It was drug money and—from what I hear—a portion of it was your father’s. So, naturally, a big deal like this gets my attention, and I talk to my sources and they say Patrick was the one who tracked the two men down. Said they stashed the money before Patrick found them. Only I go around and start asking questions from the wives of these guys—real trashy sort of girls. Moss all over their houses, rent-to-own sort of lifestyle. You get what I’m saying?”

Drake nodded. His head turned toward the front windows, just looking at the sunlight outside, wishing he could be somewhere else.

“They say they don’t know anything about the missing money. They admit to everything else. What their husbands were up to, how they did the job, who put them onto it, everything. Only they don’t know anything about the money. Are you following me, Deputy? Twelve years later one of the wives is still living in the same house. She’s paid off her rent-to-own couch, but there’s still moss on her siding, and she’s taking in welfare checks to pay for the kids. The other one isn’t doing as well. Couldn’t make her house payments, lost her place, and is living with her brother’s family, working three jobs, all that horrible stuff.”

Driscoll took a drink of his coffee. Drake knew he’d paused just to push the knife in deeper. A grin on Driscoll’s face that heralded the coming twist of the handle.

“So you might want to ask: where’s the money?” Driscoll said. “Well that’s the interesting part. That’s the part that gets me up in the morning and keeps me watching those two poor widows. Because you know what, that money is gone. It never made it back to the smugglers up in Canada. The widows don’t have it. And little by little I start to wonder where it’s gone and who has it. It’s a lot of money to go missing, a lot of money that most anyone would do most anything to hold on to. And so I go to Monroe to ask your father this question a few years back. I tell him if he knows where it is and he’s willing to point the finger at the people he works for, who sent him to do what he did, he can get out of prison right then and there. Time already served. He’s off the hook. The murders weren’t him, I know that. I just want to know where the money is and who sent it down this way in the first place. Hell, we went hard on him, too hard. And you know what, I don’t think Sheriff Drake was in on it alone.”

“You’re saying my father didn’t kill those men?”

“For now I’m giving Patrick the benefit of the doubt.”

“How much are we talking about?” Drake asked.

“Two hundred thousand. Not much in this day, but twelve years ago it would have been a good amount. Enough to get out of the business. Maybe start a new life. For your father to settle his debts.”

“You think that’s what he was doing?”

“I don’t know,” Driscoll said. “That’s why I’m coming to you. I’m asking for your help on this.”

“Go talk to someone else. I’m certainly the last person my father would tell anything to,” Drake said.

“That’s right,” Driscoll said. “But what I’ve heard and what I keep hearing is that your father and his deputies were pretty tight back in the day. Bend a few rules. Get away with a little here and there. Wasn’t your current sheriff, Gary Elliot, one of his deputies?”

“That’s taking it too far,” Drake said. “Gary gave me my job after my father went away. For Christ’s sake, he lives in a two-bedroom apartment over the Laundromat. He’s not a rich man.”

“I know where he lives,” Driscoll said. “I even know how much money he has in his bank account. Look, we’ve gone through just about everything. Before you gave up being a basketball star and came back from Arizona we even went through your house.”

“And you didn’t find a thing, did you?”

Driscoll laughed. “This is just like old times, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Drake said. “I’m just waiting for you to accuse me of being a criminal mastermind. You got anything more you want to tell me?”

“That’s it. That’s all there is. I thought I owed you a talk at least. I thought you should hear it from me.”

“Don’t give it to me like that, Driscoll. What is it you really want?”

“I just want you to keep your eyes open. Stay sharp. Weeks from now I don’t want to see you across the table from me in a federal interrogation room.”

“You want me to tell you if my father starts spending ten-thousand-dollar bills.”

“Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying. We’re friends, aren’t we? I’m only asking you to keep your father close for a little while. If nothing comes of it, then I’ll go back to sitting around the office, throwing the tennis ball at the wall. No harm done.” Driscoll slid a card out across the table. “In case you lost the last one I gave you.”

Drake picked up the card and read the title and name: Regional Director, Agent Frank Driscoll. “If you’ve got all this information on my father why didn’t you just threaten him with life in prison for killing those two men?”

Driscoll smiled. “If there was evidence to prove it, I would have.”

“You’re out on a limb here, aren’t you?”

“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“Doesn’t mean you’re right, either.”

“I’m here to help you out, Deputy. I tell you about the fact that maybe you brought a murderer into your home and on top of that, your boss over at the Sheriff’s Department might have been involved, and you think I’m the one doing you a disservice?”

“You’re a fucking cheery guy, you know that, Driscoll? I ought to have you over for more barbecues.”

“Yeah, well, tell that to your wife and see how it goes.”

DRAKE GOT INTO the department thirty minutes late and went straight into Gary’s office.

“I bet you’re wondering why I set you up with Fish and Wildlife,” Gary said. He was sitting at his desk, looking through the morning paperwork.

Drake nodded, his eyes casting out around the office like he might find a bloodstained sack of money in the corner. He had to check himself and keep his focus on Gary.

“I know you’ve been helping Ellie out with that poaching thing, and this didn’t seem too much of a stretch,” Gary said. A few years younger than Patrick, Gary had been like an uncle to Drake growing up. He’d given Drake his job, even loaned him money till Drake could sell off some of his father’s land to buy groceries and pay for the mortgage on their house. Since then Gary had begun to show his age. The uniform rounded on his stomach and the hair that had once been red now gone thin on his pink scalp. Worry lines across his forehead deep and defined on the skin.

“The truth is,” Gary was saying, “your fellow deputies, Andy and Luke, could have done it, but you know the valley better than anybody and you’re the one who keeps getting the calls as it is.” Gary shook his head like something was funny. “Hell, you’re about the only one besides Ellie that gives a shit about that wolf. I think a lot of people would rather you just shot it, and to be honest, I’m one of them.”

Drake had his hat sitting in his lap and as Gary talked he turned it slowly with his fingers. “You know my father is out?” Drake said.

“I know,” Gary said. “I was the one who approved your day off.”

“You ever visit him in Monroe?”

Gary cracked a smile, the flesh beneath his chin drawing tight. “You know I did. I haven’t in a long while, but I did.”

“Except for one time, I didn’t visit him at all,” Drake said.

“He’s staying with you and Sheri?”

“He has my old bedroom.”

Gary nodded; he leaned back in the chair and fixed his eyes on the ceiling. The office had been Patrick’s at one time. Now all the pictures that had lined the walls were gone and Gary had replaced them with his own. Pictures from the fishing trips he took to Alaska, one with Drake holding a king salmon and looking proudly at the camera. The trips a yearly vacation for Gary, sometimes on his own but often with one of the deputies from the department. And Drake knew, too, that if Patrick had never gone away to prison it would have been his father there in the picture instead of him.

“You guys were close when I was a kid.”

“Yes, we were,” Gary said. “It’s a shame how it all turned out.” Other photographs showed Gary in the Cascade foothills, kneeling next to big bucks he’d shot, their antlers turned up in his hand and the buck’s eyes staring out at the camera, dull and black as those of the deer Drake had seen the other day. “You should tell Patrick we say hello. Me, Andy, and Luke, all of us, tell him that and say we’ll get a few beers one of these nights.”

“What I mean to say is that my father just got out yesterday. I don’t know if I should be headed off into the hills on a wolf hunt.”

“I can stop by and check up on him, if that helps you out at all,” Gary said. “I don’t think that wolf can wait more than a day.”

Drake thought about what Driscoll had told him only thirty minutes before. The image in his mind of two old lawmen sitting on Drake’s porch counting the cash they’d stolen twelve years ago. Drake was having a hard time keeping his focus. All the things Driscoll had said to him earlier at the doughnut shop were crawling up his spine like spiders through a tin pipe. “Maybe I’ll just take Dad with us,” Drake said.

“Is that you or Ellie talking? I already told her that was a bad idea.”

“I told her the same,” Drake said. “But I’m not going to leave him around the house doing who knows what.”

Gary smiled. “Don’t trust the old man yet?”

“Something like that,” Drake said. He was having a hard time trusting anyone at this point. “Did Ellie mention when she wanted to head out?”

“She was thinking you’d go out tomorrow, early, as soon as the sun is up.”

Drake collected his hat and stood. He was holding it in his hand and about to turn when Gary said, “Son, don’t put too much faith in your buddy Driscoll. He was around here a good amount when your father went away. There was a lot of media and law enforcement throwing crazy theories around and he was one of the main guys throwing the mud.”

Drake ran his fingers under the band of his hat. His eyes on the floor, feeling exposed.

“Andy’s oldest daughter went to school with that girl over at the doughnut shop, Cheryl. Maybe it comes with the job, but the girl likes to get in people’s business—she likes to talk, too, and it just worked its way up through the grapevine. It’s the nature of a small town. I wouldn’t think too much on it. I’ve been expecting we might see Agent Driscoll around here again at some time.”

Drake let himself out and closed the door. Andy and Luke at their desks. Drake went and sat in his chair. He felt defeated. He had no clue what to think about any of it, but mostly he just felt pissed off. Until an hour ago he’d thought Driscoll was his friend, now he was saying one thing and Gary was saying another. Two people Drake had always trusted.

Drake sat at his desk and looked around the office. Whatever seed Driscoll had planted was growing. Roots coiling around his chest like a vine on a tree and Drake there in the office scared to see how it bloomed.

DRAKE MADE IT into the early afternoon before he went back into Gary’s office and asked to take the rest of the day off.

When Drake pulled up to the house he saw his father one hundred feet away at the edge of the clearing where the apple orchard ran out and the alder fence had once sat. Patrick stood there for a moment and then bent a knee into the grass, where with one hand he seemed to be looking something over. He wore a set of jeans and one of his old flannels. His scalp and beard shaved clean. And the newly exposed skin white and puckered in places where the razor had nicked his neck and jawline.

Drake slipped the car into park. For a while he watched his father where he knelt at the edge of the clearing. He didn’t know what to think about the man. And it was only when Drake got up out of the cruiser and closed the door that his father raised his eyes to Drake.

By the time he made it across the orchard to his father, Patrick was standing again. “I’ve never seen you in the uniform,” Patrick said. His eyes on Drake, taking in the cop browns he wore.

Drake tried to smile. He looked Patrick over and then he looked back at the house, where he could see Sheri’s profile through one of the kitchen windows.

“You get off early?” Patrick asked.

“Yes,” Drake said, turning back to his father. “Gary let me go. I thought I’d just come home for a little while. What’s been going on?”

“Sheri showed me around. We picked up some groceries, had lunch, really just took it easy.”

“And now?”

Patrick bent and lifted something from the grass. “I came to look the fence over.” In his hand was a rotted piece of alder. “I was thinking maybe I could help you build it again—maybe this weekend? With the two of us we could finish in an afternoon.”

“Yeah,” Drake said. “I don’t see why not.” He looked his father over one more time and then made an excuse about getting out of his work clothes. He said good-bye and then, halfway to the house, turned and saw his father still there at the edge of forest, picking pieces of rotten alder from the ground.

Later, dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, Drake came into the kitchen and stood watching Sheri peel carrots over the sink. “You never left him alone the whole day?”

She told him that his father had slept until ten. Then they’d walked to the lake, and gone shopping for that night’s meal.

“How long has he been out there?”

“Not long,” Sheri said.

Drake took the few remaining steps to where she stood. Through the window he watched his father carry a load of wood and dump it into the burn pile out behind the house. “So you never left him alone the whole day?”

“He went to the bathroom on his own,” Sheri said. “I didn’t sign up for anything like that.” Sheri was laughing now, looking to Drake like she thought the joke was so funny. Like she belonged on a stage in front of a packed house.

All Drake could think about was the money and if his father had somehow stashed it under the bathroom floorboards, or in a waterproof bag in the porcelain tank. All of his ideas ridiculous. He was turning into his father, seeing things that were not there.

Chapter 4

THE MAN CAME IN wearing a black suit, ill fitted to his skinny body, and ordered two coffees and a Danish to go. While he waited he tapped his fingernails in rhythm to the stereo playing behind the counter and watched the girl walk away to the coffee machine, where she filled the two cups. When she came back he thanked her and paid.

He balanced the two coffees in the claw of his upturned palm. And as he went out the door, holding it with his hip, he already saw how the Danish had begun to stain the small paper bag. The paper turned waxen with pastry grease in the cold early evening air.

When he took his seat in the car again, he gestured to the glove box, asking the big man for a pen and paper, all the while watching the shop and drinking from his cup of coffee. As the minutes passed, they kept time by checking a prepaid cell phone they’d picked up at a convenience store and that they’d charged while driving.

They sat in the car for an hour before the girl closed the shop. When she was about a block up they started the car and pulled forward, coming even with the girl as she stopped at the corner.

The skinnier of the two men drove, slowing to make pace with the girl. He put the window down and called to the girl by name.

The girl paused, her eyes searching the face that looked up at her from the driver’s-side window. “Hello?” she said, unsure at first. And then as she recognized the face staring out at her from inside the car. “How was the coffee?”

“It’s Cheryl, isn’t it?” the man said. His hair was slicked back and the suit was too big on his thin bones. He had one arm out the window and he moved his hand while he talked, gesturing to the uniform she wore. “It’s right there on your name tag.”

She turned and looked back toward the shop and then looked around her. The sun was almost gone down, a pale light now hanging in the air to the west and the street blue with shadow.

“You know Deputy Drake?” the man asked. “And maybe you met our boss Frank Driscoll today? They were in your shop earlier.”

“You guys work for the DEA?” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and then stepped forward, bending a little to take in both men.

“Have you seen either of them?” the skinny man went on. “Driscoll asked us to come up. He said there might be some trouble with Deputy Drake’s father. Driscoll gave us the address but we’re having a hard time.” He held out a coffee-stained piece of paper for her to see. The address, written in blue ink, clouded and distorted with dried liquid.

She stepped up to the black car, a foot’s distance from its open window, and took the small piece of paper from the man. She looked the address over and then gave it back. “I can see why you’d have trouble with this,” she said.

“Some of the coffee spilled. It’s important we find the deputy’s place.”

“Is Bobby in some sort of danger?”

“We don’t think so but Driscoll asked us to come up. We heard they had coffee in your shop this morning. Would you mind showing us the address?”

The girl looked around on the street. The sound of plates and cutlery could be heard far down the block from the open kitchen window of the Buck Blind. The girl hesitated, looking to the restaurant a few hundred feet away. “You can’t call your boss?”

“That’s the thing,” the skinny man said. “We’re already late. He probably wouldn’t be too happy.”

She looked in at the two men and told them it was only a couple minutes away. The big man in the passenger seat was dressed informally in a worn pair of jeans and a padded flannel button-up. The last few buttons on the shirt left loose at the collar to allow for the rolls of skin that appeared below his jaw.

The driver turned and looked back down the street and then when he turned back, still holding the coffee-stained address between his fingers, said, “You show us where it is and we’ll have you back in five minutes.”

“Five minutes?”

“Yep, you’d really be helping us out.” He reached behind him and pushed the door open from the inside. “Get in,” he said. “We’ll bring you right back.”

She stepped in and brought the door closed behind her.

When they came to the intersection with the dangling caution light she told them where to turn and they followed the lake road. The shadow of the mountains over much of the lake, but far to the east a sliver of gold was still visible on the water.

“You heard what Driscoll was saying to the deputy today?” the man asked.

“Some of it,” she said.

The man smiled up at her reflection in the rearview. “So you were eavesdropping?”

“No, of course not.”

“It’s okay if you were,” the man said, kidding her still, his smile wide beneath his thin lips. “If the deputy is in trouble it’s better we hear about it sooner than later.”

“I didn’t hear anything really. They were talking about his father,” Cheryl said. “You’re here about his father, right? So you must know the story about him.”

“We’ve heard some stories.”

The man watched her in the rearview and when they came to the driveway leading to the Drake property Cheryl pointed it out and told them how far up the house was. “Are you two here to take him back to prison?” she asked.

The man looked up at her in the rearview again and then broke away. He was driving on the lake road still, Drake’s driveway now a quarter mile behind them. “What’s up ahead here on this road?” the man asked.

“Nothing. Logging. A couple more houses.”

“Can you keep a secret?” the man asked. His eyes were on her again and with his free hand he touched a button and dropped all the locks on the doors.

The sound made Cheryl jump, her fingers to the door handle before she knew she had placed them there. When she looked back to the front, the big man was climbing over the seat with one large hand outstretched toward her.

Chapter 5

DRAKE SAT ON THE back stairs, drinking a beer and staring out on the orchard. The sky tinged a deep blue in the west and the first stars already showing. The little garden Sheri kept, dug out and lined with earth-turned rows.

He put the beer to his lips and tipped the bottle back. He’d given it a lot of thought through the day. What Driscoll had said, what Gary had tried to tell him, his father. It was all a mess. Drake kept running it around in his head. A footrace that never seemed to have an ending, just around and around until someone dropped dead.

He scuffed the heels of his boots over the dirt at the base of the stairs, digging a hole. The apple trees set in lines all the way to the forest. A patch of disturbed earth at the edge of the orchard where they’d buried their child in a grave the size of a shoebox. No one but them—and now Drake’s father—knowing anything about it. All of their lives somehow entwined by this fact.

The new knowledge about his father adding to it all and piling on. He didn’t think he would tell Sheri about Driscoll’s coming to see him that morning, about what he had to say. He didn’t want her trying to guess, as he was now, whether there was any truth in the story. He didn’t want to add to the pressure. A feeling that had settled over Drake all through the day. Like everybody had agreed to take a ride on Drake’s back—Driscoll, Patrick, and Gary—all at once and none of them offering to get off.

Drake took a swallow of the beer, tipping the bottle back, trying to calm his nerves. There was nothing he could do but wait it out, and when the spring on the kitchen door opened and then snapped shut, Drake already knew it was his father simply from the way the boards on the back porch took his weight. Drake didn’t turn and he waited for Patrick to come down the steps and sit next to him. His father’s hand on Drake’s shoulder as he sat. The first time they’d touched in twelve years. The feeling strange on Drake’s skin.

“Thinking some deep thoughts?” his father asked. He was holding a beer in one hand and he twisted the top off with his other. When Drake didn’t respond, Patrick said, “This was always where I found you when you lost a basketball game.”

“It’s been a while since high school,” Drake said. He finished the beer in one pull and set it on the step beside him. The smell of the yard all around him, fresh turned earth from a few days before, left to bake in the sun.

“Sheri asked me what she should plant this year,” his father said. “I told her I don’t have a clue about that sort of thing. Your mother was always the one who dealt with the growing season.”

Drake nodded. A desire in him to just come out with it. To tell his father everything.

“You’ve made a life of it here,” Patrick said.

“I’ve tried.”

“Your mother kept a garden in the exact same spot.”

Drake nodded again. “I remember.” He felt dazed, his body thrown off balance as he looked into the rows of turned earth, avoiding his father’s eyes.

“I know you didn’t choose this life. Coming back here. Taking the job with Gary. I should have told you that earlier on,” Patrick said. “I meant to tell it to you years ago. I’m sorry about that.”

Drake nodded.

“It was easy money for me,” Patrick said. “Your mom died and by the time you finished high school there was so much debt. I couldn’t figure any other way. I was the sheriff, there was no moving up, there was no way to make more money. I really didn’t know what else to do.”

Drake turned and looked Patrick over. The clean shave on his face. The way he used to look when Drake was a boy. The same familiar way Drake remembered seeing him every day. His hand running over the skin of his cheek and along his jawline as he talked, his fingers searching out the small imperfections, the little scrapes he’d given himself.

“I could have waited,” Patrick went on. “There were things I could have done. Legal things. But I didn’t have the patience for it and the bank was telling me I needed to make my payments or they were going to take the house away. It felt like they were trying to take your mother away from me all over again.” Patrick held a hand to his face, pinching the bridge of his nose. The sound of his breath amplified in his palm, whistling between his fingers. “I know it was wrong,” he said. “It was all wrong…”

Drake didn’t say anything, he didn’t want to speak, even knowing it was his turn, that his father wanted him to say something, Drake couldn’t do it. Patrick wanted him to tell him it was okay and the past was the past. At one time Drake thought maybe he could, but there just was no doing it now, not after everything he’d heard that morning. And now Drake feared if he said anything it would come out hateful, the words tearing up out of him like blood from a wound.

“When your mother got sick I knew things would be different. And when she didn’t get better, when she kept getting worse, I knew the life we’d planned would never be.” Drake listened as his father took a sip off the bottle and then set it back on the wood. “Somewhere in there we jumped the tracks,” his father said. “One life going on the way it should have been, and another taking a completely different path.”

“Dad, don’t talk to me about this anymore,” Drake said. His voice quivering in his throat. “I don’t want to hear it from you.” He felt the words slip up over his tongue and lash out. Nothing he could do to stop them, and a desire to simply spill it all out into the night air and be done with it.

So much hate for his father. For the last twelve years, and more, he realized, all the way back to when he was a boy and his father had brought him to see his mother in the hospital. Hours away. The clinic in Silver Lake not equipped to handle things like cancer, like people who needed to be held up on life support, wired up into the electricity while machines did the work the body no longer could.

Next to him on the stairs, he felt his father stand. “I needed to say that to you.”

“You’ve said it.”

“I’ll see you inside, then.”

Drake heard his father turn and move up the stairs, the grit working beneath his shoes on the wood. “Dad,” Drake said. “I was going to tell you later, over dinner.” Drake paused, trying to get the words right, trying to calm the dangerous beat he felt in his heart. “I’m headed into the hills tomorrow, west of the lake. We’ll be tracking that wolf. Ellie asked if you would come. I think I’d like you there as well.”

A long silence followed. Drake picked up the empty bottle next to him and ran a fingertip over the top, finding the slight imperfection in the glass where the two edges had been sealed together in the factory. He thought about his father twenty-five years ago, his mother in the hospital bed, he thought about the years that followed. He thought about all that had happened twelve years before. He thought about the money, about Driscoll, and Gary, and his father.

“Good,” his father said. “I’ve been meaning to get up into those hills.”

AFTER DINNER DRAKE lay in bed next to Sheri and tried to close his eyes. The thoughts in his head going around and around without end.

Sheri sat there with her back to the headboard. “You going to tell me what’s up?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Drake said. His eyes still closed and his arms crossed over his chest beneath the sheets.

“You didn’t say much during dinner, and those questions you were asking me before, about your father and where he’d been through the day. He can’t be that bad.”

Drake turned away, opening his eyes and staring at the wall until Sheri put out the light. She was resting with her face to him and he felt her breath on the back of his neck and her body close into his. After five minutes had passed Drake asked, “What makes you trust him so much?”

“What makes you not trust him at all?”

“A lot has been said about him.”

“You’ve heard it all before,” Sheri said. “It’s not like you haven’t gotten used to the things people say.”

“Not all of it.”

“Well, you know him better than me,” Sheri said, sarcasm in her voice.

Drake had his eyes open still, the dark room was coming back into focus and he saw the nightstand and the wall farther on. “What makes you so certain about him?”

“I just feel for him,” Sheri said. “For where he’s been and what he’s had to do to get here with us. It took a lot for him to come back here after everything. To the house he used to share with your mother and you. For him to come to Silver Lake. I have sympathy for him, but I also think it takes a lot of courage.”

Drake turned so that he could face her, hoping that she could see the smile on his face when he said, “You’ve got a soft heart, Sheri.”

“Well, you’ve got a heart made of stone,” she said, pushing at him a little beneath the sheets, her own smile now visible.

“He’s here because he has to be. We said we’d take care of him, didn’t we? It was one of the conditions of his release.”

“I know he seems like a loner but he’s not really to blame for what he is. Not totally.”

In the dim light of their bedroom Drake lay watching his wife. He didn’t know what else to say to her. The trip into the woods with Ellie was less than eight hours away. All the things people had said about Patrick Drake over the years and now he was here. Sleeping in the room down the hall, resting up for his chance at the mountains.

Drake lay there for a long time thinking it over. Sheri falling asleep and the thoughts in his head whistling around like leaves over an empty lot, nothing to catch them or anchor them to the earth as they moved. All the while, Drake simply trying to see the world through Sheri’s eyes, but he just couldn’t.

He didn’t want his father to be any of the things people were saying about him. Mostly, though, he didn’t want his father to be a murderer on top of everything else he’d already been convicted of.