Part 5
“They want the questions to stop,” Owen said. “That’s what I heard in the offer. Let us find out which questions bother them.”
Caleb agreed to wait. The following morning, two anonymous callers told the county office he was unstable and keeping a stolen dog. Owen checked on him, recorded the complaints, and refused to treat repetition as corroboration.
That afternoon, Mara found a man sitting in a pickup outside her clinic. He drove away after she stood at the window and photographed his license plate. When she called Caleb, her annoyance made the account sound smaller than it was.
“Don’t come down here,” she said before he could offer. “I’ve told Owen. He’s having someone pass by at closing.”
Caleb set down the phone and looked at the written medication schedule still attached to his refrigerator. Her name was at the top, above the number she had told him to call at any hour.
In town, talk moved faster than the sheriff’s vehicles. A deputy’s wife heard that Calder Fork might cancel seasonal work because of the accusations. Beth arrived with groceries and said a cabin owner had asked whether she knew who was talking to the police.
“What did you tell him?” Caleb asked.
“That I was there to clean his bathroom.” She put the milk down harder than she intended. “I’ve got three places this week. I’d like to keep three.”
Caleb paid her and carried the empty bags to her station wagon. One rear door was blue, the others gray. He waited while she started it, watching until both taillights disappeared around the bend.
Inside, Ranger had taken up his place by the window. Caleb sat on the floor and worked his fingers through the thick fur along the dog’s shoulders, stopping whenever he felt him stiffen. At the sound of a distant truck, Ranger turned away from his hand.
Caleb left the lamps off that evening. He tried to read, then found himself holding the same page while listening to engines on the county road. He had told Owen he would wait, but every passing sound seemed to place somebody else between his decision and its consequences.
On the second night after Sloane’s visit, Ranger rose and went to the back door. He put his nose near the seam, drew in air, and looked toward the north window. There was no growl this time.
Caleb opened the door enough to listen. A faint engine note came from the creek drainage, intermittently lost in the wind. Ranger leaned into the opening, intent on the trail that ran below the cabin.
Caleb could have shut the door and called again in ten minutes.
Instead, he called Owen once. When it went to voicemail, he left the route and said he was taking a look. He put water, a spare wrap for Ranger, and his small camera into the pack, then stood with his hand on the harness while the dog waited.
“We see what’s there. We come back.”
He knew that saying it did not make it a plan Owen would accept. He clipped on the line anyway and left by the rear trail.
The snow was bright under a clear moon. Ranger followed the creek drainage below the property, choosing the packed edges where the crust would bear him. Caleb shortened the line at the brush and gave it back on open ground, keeping their pace slow.
They crossed a shallow frozen runoff and turned up a tributary toward Slate Creek. At one bend, Ranger stopped before a narrow gap between two fallen trunks. Caleb found a stretch of cable partly hidden beneath the lower branches and went around it.
He didn’t know whether the dog recognized the place or disliked something about it. He knew enough to stay behind him.
The smell of fresh-cut wood reached them before the clearing did. Through the trees Caleb saw pale log ends under sagging tarps, then the outline of a generator and folded portable lights. A service truck sat beside the stacks with frost on its windows.
Ranger lowered himself behind the brush. Caleb crouched next to him, one hand resting lightly on the harness, and waited until his own breathing was quiet. Nothing moved in the clearing.
The log deck filled an old cut screened from the road. Ruts ran from the stacks into a narrow access spur, with nowhere for a long truck to turn except the cleared ground in front of them. Three cameras on trees faced outward along the approaches. Beneath one, a trap chain glinted near a sapling; another disappeared under a fan of loose snow.
Caleb took photographs from cover, steadying the camera against a trunk for the longer exposures. The open moonlight showed the pale timber clearly. He moved only far enough to record the parked truck’s plate, the equipment markings, tire tread in the ruts, and the line of the access road.
He had photographed the near side when Ranger rose and bumped his thigh. Caleb stopped with one foot lifted. The dog leaned away from a drift beside a fallen log and wouldn’t move past it.
Caleb set his foot back where it had been. From there he could see the short chain disappearing into the snow. A little clearing with a branch exposed the edge of a trap.
He swallowed and moved his weight away. The camera hung against his wrist, its strap suddenly tight where he had twisted his hand.
“Okay,” he whispered. “We’re done.”
He photographed the trap from where he stood, slid the camera into his zippered inside pocket, and turned toward the way they had come. Ranger had already shifted his attention to the access spur. His ears went flat, and Caleb felt the small vibration of an approaching engine through the ground.
Headlights appeared between the trees.
Caleb drew Ranger toward the brush, trying to put the stacked timber between them and the road. The truck cleared the bend before they reached cover. For a moment its lights washed past them, then swung back.
It was the dark pickup from the cabin. Caleb could see a driver and someone beside him, their faces hidden behind reflections on the windshield. The engine rose as the front wheels straightened toward the narrow opening where Caleb and Ranger stood.
There was no room to keep both of them on the line. Caleb released the clip at Ranger’s harness and pushed him toward the trees, turning his own shoulder toward the fallen log.
The pickup accelerated straight at them.
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