I had a lease I'd signed in a hurry that was gonna eat for the next five months. I had a duffel at the apartment I hadn't unpacked. I had two hundred and forty miles to drive on the back end of a twenty-four, on no sleep, with three days of stubble and the smell of the BQE wreck on the inside of my jacket.
None of it touched me.
The only thing I had was a woman on Maple Avenue who had made the call of her life with half the story, and the rest of the story in my mouth, and two hundred and forty miles between me and the porch I was going to say it on.
I was going.
The phone in my pocket buzzed.
I pulled it out.
Duke
Brother. Moose got out the back gate. The whole town's in the woods behind Maple. Astrid's not askin' for help. She needs it.
I read it once.
I read it twice.
I'd been about to point myself at her anyway.
CHAPTER 24
Astrid
My throat had gone raw an hour ago.
I'd been calling his name so long that the sound was coming out of me thin. Duke was twenty yards ahead on the trail with the radio at his hip, going low and steady, Lou at the firehouse running point while the off-duty crew checked in section by section. Audrey was at my shoulder in a parka that didn't match her sweatpants. Her hair was in a knot she hadn't bothered to put any care into. She didn't have lipstick on. I hadn't seen Audrey without lipstick on a workday since the eighth grade.
She wasn't filling the silence.
That was the part I kept noticing without letting myself say. Audrey filled silences as a rule. She'd been filling mine since the third grade. She wasn't filling this one. She was at my shoulder, calling Moose's name with me, and she was letting the rest of it be quiet.
"Moose!"
My voice cracked at the back of it.
"Moose, buddy!"
The wood was holding its breath. The cold had gotten into the soles of my boots. The light was high December gray at nine,the sun up but not committed to being up. I could see my breath every other step.
Duke stopped on the trail ahead of us. He listened to something on the radio. He keyed it twice.
"Mendoza's at the river bend. Halsey's working the ridge. Nothing yet."
"Copy."
"You hangin' in, Doc?"
"I'm hanging in."
He went back to walking.
I'd texted Duke at six-thirty-five. I stood at the open back gate in my robe and slippers with the prints in the frost going up the trail and could not make my hand do anything for a count I did not track. Then I went back inside, pulled real clothes on, boots over two pairs of socks, and stood at the kitchen counter with the phone in my hand.
I texted Duke.
Not Audrey. Duke. Because Duke had been across the counter from me at the clinic three times in three weeks, his mother's spaniel at his hip, never once saying Easton's name and never once pretending the not-saying wasn't deliberate. Duke was the piece of Easton that had stayed.
