Part 3
Frank’s hand was still on Scout when the dog lifted his head and growled at the empty road. That decided the hour for us. We would not wait until morning traffic made our movements easy to follow; we would leave before dawn and enter Blackwater from the abandoned west cut.
We covered the kitchen windows and packed by lantern light. I brought water, food, first aid, flashlights, and my grandfather’s old double-barreled shotgun. Frank brought the rope and a hunting knife. Neither of us pretended two gray-haired men with sore knees were a rescue team, but the county had already failed Eli once, and calling the sheriff might tell the wrong man exactly where the evidence lay.
Frank made me photograph the backpack and the name tag with the date displayed on my kitchen calendar. We sealed the bag in a clean grain sack and hid it beneath loose boards in the pantry. “If we don’t come back,” he said, “somebody needs to find more than two bodies and a story Price can rewrite.” I left a note for my neighbor June that mentioned the pantry but not the hollow.
At three-thirty we climbed through the mudroom window into wet raspberry canes, leaving the front door bolted. Scout took the trail without a command. He moved at a ground-eating trot, checking back whenever Frank’s breathing grew rough.
For the first mile Frank tried to hide how badly the climb punished him. Then he stopped beside a cedar and coughed until he had to brace both hands on his knees. Scout came back and stood against his shin. Frank looked down at him with something like embarrassment.
“I kept telling myself I drank because they ended my career,” he said when he could speak. “Truth is, I drank because they made one threat and I let it work.”
“Save your breath for walking.”
“That your idea of comfort?”
“It’s the kind I have.”
He almost smiled. Then Scout moved again, and we followed.
The forest changed after the old creek. Open lodgepole gave way to cedar and fir, the canopy thick enough to hold the night beneath it. Somewhere ahead, a diesel engine labored and metal struck stone.
“Heavy equipment,” I whispered.
“On a closed slope before daylight.” Frank did not finish the thought.
We crawled to the rim of a ravine. Below us, truck tires had churned a road where the county map showed none. Yellow signs hung every fifty yards: PRIVATE TIMBER LEASE. DANGEROUS GROUND. NO TRESPASSING. A hunting blind stood among the firs with glass flashing behind its camouflage screen.
A man occupied the blind. Through Frank’s compact binoculars I saw him lift a thermos and turn slowly with the discipline of a sentry, not a hunter. Farther down the road, a bulldozer pushed fresh soil against the base of the slope. The work explained the diesel noise and threatened to erase whatever the hollow still held.
Scout ignored the road. He pulled toward a limestone wall on the opposite side of the ravine, where dark seams broke the pale rock.
“That’s why we missed him,” Frank said. “We searched the drainage. Nobody put a team through those slots after Price closed the sector.”
We descended through thorn and slick clay, keeping boulders between us and the blind. Scout seemed younger with every yard. He chose footholds, waited when we slid, then pressed on. At the base of the cliff, I found a fir twig snapped and laid like an arrow beneath an overhang. Under it, protected from rain, was a faded candy wrapper.
There were other small marks once I knew how to look: a flat stone balanced upright, three cuts in the bark of a young fir, a strip of food-can label wedged high in a crack. They formed a private route away from the truck road. Eli had marked the world available to him, perhaps so he could always find the cave before dark.
Frank turned it over carefully. “Old, but placed. Not blown here.”
Ten feet ahead, Scout flattened himself and wriggled through grapevine covering a narrow split in the rock. The earth outside had been walked smooth.
The passage forced us onto hands and knees. It smelled of limestone, mice, and smoke embedded in stone. After twenty feet, the ceiling opened into a dry chamber. My flashlight found a fire ring, a bed of fir boughs and blankets, rusted food cans, plastic jugs, and rows of tally marks scratched into a soot-black wall.
The blankets were arranged with care rather than abandoned in a heap. A tin cup hung from a peg driven into a crack. Beside the fire sat a spoon whose handle had been wrapped in cloth to protect a hand from cold metal. Each ordinary adjustment made the place harder to bear. A child had not merely survived here; he had spent years solving the daily problems of being kept outside the human world.
There were hundreds of them.
I touched the newest row. The pale scratch beneath my finger had not yet gathered soot. In one corner, a cardboard case held canned stew stamped with a packing date from the previous month.
One can had been opened cleanly and rinsed. Another carried the label of a store in Pine Ridge. The delivery was recent enough that whoever supplied it might return at any hour.
“Somebody still brings food,” I said.
Frank crouched beside the bedding. From under a blanket he lifted a crude figure carved from pine bark. It had four stiff legs, a pointed muzzle, and two ears cut far too large for its head.
“A dog,” he said.
Scout smelled the carving and made a thin sound I would not have believed could come from him. He nosed the blankets, then swung toward what looked like the rear wall. His hackles rose.
Behind a fall of loose stones was another crack, scarcely wide enough for a person. Air moved through it. Scout barked once, sharp and formal.
Something shifted in the darkness beyond.
Frank stepped beside me. “Eli? My name is Frank Dobbs. I helped look for you. We’re not with Cole.”
Silence held for several seconds. Then came the small scrape of a heel against rock and a breath pulled too quickly to hide.
Scout pushed through the opening before either of us could stop him. His claws clicked, his tail beat stone, and the chamber filled with a high, broken whine of recognition.
I angled the light through the gap. A boy was folded into the farthest corner, painfully thin, wrapped in sweaters tied at the waist with cord. Matted hair covered most of his face. He had both hands raised against the beam until Scout reached him and pressed his head beneath them.
The boy’s fingers closed in the dog’s fur.
“Max?” he whispered. “You came back.”
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