All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 143

143

Misty drove an ’85 Mustang, gunned the engine as they pulled onto Interstate 35. She wore boots, a raincoat, her blonde hair buried beneath a cream woolen hat. She slowed by the Gold Run River as he opened the window to soaring bluffs and heard nothing, the katydids months off.

They pulled off the road beside a box canyon so deep and narrow he imagined Grace down there, her body long since given back to the ground.

Misty reclined her seat and closed her eyes, and before long he heard her sleeping.

Patch lay awake till morning broke around them, climbed from the car and stared into woodland blanched, the trees thin in places, the ground mulched leaves like a blanket laid atop her. Patch knew it ran over a million acres.

Misty took his hand. Trees leaned with a hill so steep they took a longer route, crossing fallen joists as thick as his waist. Tooms could give no more detail than that he had taken one of the couple of hundred tracks till it grew too thick, and then stopped and dug, and hauled the body of a young girl from his car, left her in the dirt, and dragged earth over her skin.

Above them a great oak held bronze sky in its trusses. Patch sought a stream that shone like polished glass shattered over rocks that humped from the bed so the sandpipers had a spot to fish from.

Saint’s instruction had been clear and vague enough.

Patch moved through shortleaf pine, Misty a step behind.

They stopped by the rusted sign.

“This is it.”

She breathed hard, so they stalled awhile, boots in the all-weather gravel road that had long since closed. Saint had mapped the area, relayed everything Tooms said and guessed at the route he’d taken from Monta Clare, the likeliest place he’d pulled into, the next access road near seventy miles along highways he would not want to travel.

“The rooftop trail,” he said.

They walked slow.

The track rose steep, near five hundred feet above dolomite glades ringed by American smoketrees that opened for a horizon of thick oaks, hickories and walnuts.

“No way he carried her this far,” Patch said, without emotion, the thought so cold Misty pulled her hat low over her ears and hugged her raincoat around her.

From there they walked back down, Patch stopping at each break in the trees, each tableland before it rode the cascade of mossed banks slick with morning dew and knots of joe-pye weed.

For hours he stopped still in places, looked at the dirt like there was method to his madness. It was only as they came back in sight of the access road that Misty stopped.

“This is the road by Turners Breach?” she said.

He nodded.

“There was a storm…when you were taken. Took down tracts of woodland. I remember they didn’t clear it till fall because the Danby Dam burst. My father owned land further up and took the Department of Natural Resources to court. It was in The Tribune. So if the road was blocked—”

“Then he can’t have buried her here,” Patch said.

“No other way into this area. The next trail is an hour north. He’d risk driving that with a body in the trunk?” Misty said, the words not sounding quite real as they left her mouth.

They drove back in silence, Patch contemplating what he knew.

In the old house he picked up the phone and dialed.

Saint answered like she’d been waiting.

She made her checks and called him back. “Doesn’t mean—”

“He lied, Saint.”

“Maybe he got the spot wrong. It was night.”

“Or maybe she’s still alive.”

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