Part 4
Dean’s knowledge was suspicious, not proof. Cole made that distinction twice before Frank stopped pressing him.
“He could’ve heard it from a volunteer’s cousin or somebody monitoring the radio,” Cole said. “I’ll talk to him. You will not.”
“I know how to ask a question.”
“You also know how to turn a question into a confrontation.”
Frank looked through the screen door at Dean’s tire tracks. “He was near that den.”
“Maybe. Let me establish it.”
Cole’s search team had recovered a state research camera thirty yards from the uprooted hemlock. Someone had removed its memory card and left the empty housing strapped to the tree. A second camera on an adjoining trail might have captured whoever approached, but spring flooding had knocked it sideways, and the card was being examined at the regional office.
The missing card made Frank more certain. It made Cole more careful.
That evening, Tessa called with news neither of them wanted. F-17’s fever had risen despite treatment, and damaged tissue in her leg was threatening the circulation they had hoped to preserve. She needed surgery. The newborns would remain with trained staff until their mother was stable enough to nurse again.
“What are her chances?” Frank asked.
“Better if I operate now. I’ll call when I know more.”
He reached for his coat after the line went quiet.
Megan remained beside the table. “Where would you go?”
“The center.”
“To do what?”
“Wait there.”
“Tessa told us to wait here.”
Frank’s hand closed around the coat. The old reflex had already carried him halfway to the door: move toward the lights, the radios, the place where action was happening. At the center he would still be useless, but he could stand near useful people and mistake proximity for purpose.
He hung the coat back on its peg.
Megan filled the kettle. Beth’s mug sat on the counter between two ordinary white ones, its green glaze crazed with hairline cracks. Megan chose the white cups and left her mother’s untouched.
For twenty minutes, they discussed safe subjects: the weather, a leaking seam in the porch roof, and whether Frank’s neighbor could plow the drive if he spent part of the winter in Wisconsin. Each subject brought them near the real conversation and then carried them safely past it. Frank checked his phone again.
“She told you to go,” Megan said.
He looked up. “Mom. That morning. You say it every time we get close to what happened, so let’s begin there. She told you to answer the call.”
“She knew they were short on experienced crews.”
“I know.”
The lack of argument unsettled him. He had spent eight years defending a fact Megan had never denied.
“What are you asking me for?”
“I want you to stop using her words to end the story.” Megan wrapped both hands around her cup. “You left. Maybe she wanted you to. Maybe she knew sitting beside her was the one emergency you couldn’t bear because there was no procedure left. Both things can be true.”
Frank stared at the table. Rain ticked against the kitchen window, the same soft spring rain that had fallen the day Beth died.
Megan went on before courage failed her. After Frank left for the bus crash, Beth asked whether he had taken his waterproof jacket. She worried that he would stand in the rain and pretend not to be cold.
Later, Beth wanted the bedroom window open because the house smelled too much like medicine. Megan sat beside her and described the maple buds outside, though Beth no longer seemed able to see them. Frank’s phone lay dark beside his hand.
“Did she ask for me?” Frank said.
It was the first time he had asked.
“Once.” Megan’s voice thinned. “I told her you were coming home.”
He pressed his thumb against a crack in the tabletop. “I was.”
“I know. She slept after that. Her breathing changed, and I called the hospice nurse, but the nurse was forty minutes away. I kept telling Mom what was happening because I didn’t know whether she could hear me.”
“When you came back,” Megan said, “I needed to tell you I was angry. Not because I had decided you were a bad husband. I was twenty-seven, my mother had just died, and I had been the only person in the room. I needed to be unreasonable for a while.”
“You tried.”
“Yes. And every time, you said she told you to go. Then you walked outside or found something to repair. After a while I stopped trying.”
Frank remembered coming home in wet boots. Beth’s body had already been taken, and Megan was sitting on the floor beside the stripped bed with a pillowcase in her lap. He had stood in the doorway, unable to cross the room. By dawn he was fixing the loose latch on the ambulance shed.
He had called that grief. Megan had lived it as abandonment.
“I don’t know whether staying would have been right,” he said. “That’s the truth. But I should have come home to you after. I should have let you tell me what it cost.”
Megan wiped a thumb beneath one eye. “Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded, but she did not rescue him from the discomfort by saying it was all right. Frank was grateful for that. An apology that ended pain immediately would have been another kind of escape.
Tessa called after midnight. F-17 had survived surgery. The damaged leg remained viable, and the infection had been cleaned as thoroughly as possible. One kitten was taking formula; the other had begun rooting against a warmed blanket. The next twenty-four hours still mattered, but the family had been given time.
Frank sat down after the call instead of looking for his coat. Megan reached across the table and covered his hand for a moment.
At 7:10 the next morning, Cole arrived with a sealed evidence envelope and a printed photograph. The second trail camera had captured a man on a snowmobile six days before Frank found the den. The image was grainy, but the machine’s repaired green fairing and square cargo rack were clear. So was the coil of red cable strapped behind the seat.
Dean Voss was standing beside it, looking directly toward the uprooted hemlock…
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