Descent

He’d been one of the good ones, Waylon Reese. Free sandwiches and coffee for the sheriff’s people, the government men, the volunteers. He’d hauled his whole family up into the mountains, Julie and the two boys, to help look. He’d kept the poster up at the Black Bear long after others in town had taken it down.

A good man who now flipped to a fresh page on his little pad and, staring at it, said, “What can I get you, Grant?”

A CAR HONKED AND he looked up. The light was green.

He accelerated around the corner and drove down the old street, past the school playground, the town hall, until he reached the sheriff’s building. Inside was the woody, dusty, faintly sour smell of a church. The groaning floorboards, the rack of shotguns aligned ceilingward like organ pipes. He looked over the head of the young deputy to the bulletin board and felt his heart fall out of him—his daughter’s face, there amid the postings. Her good teeth, her sun-squinted eyes. Black hair whipping away as if she were in full sprint. It was the picture taken at the top of the divide by a stranger. Grant and Angela and Sean, mountains and sky, all cropped out. He had looked on it a thousand times and it never failed to kill him.

The young deputy sent him on back, and at Grant’s rap on the doorjamb Joe Ki

Grant told the sheriff he’d got a hankering for the Black Bear, and Ki

In the outer room the young deputy opened a drawer, shut it, and muttered something.

“Do you mind if I close this door one minute, Joe?” Grant said, and the sheriff said, “No, sir. Shut it and sit down. You want Do

“No, thanks. I’ll only take a minute here.”

“Take as long as you like.”

On the desk between them a walkie-talkie faintly hissed. Grant knew the exact heft of it, its leathery, electronic smell. Off to the right, staged with a father’s pride, stood the picture of Ki

Ki

“Well,” Grant said, and the other man said, “Shit, don’t tell me he fell off another roof—”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Man his age, climbing on roofs.”

“Nothing like that,” Grant said. He gazed critically at the tip of his cigarette. “I just wondered if you knew Billy’s come home again.”

The sheriff leaned back and drew on his cigarette. “Last I heard he was in Nevada.”

Grant sat forward to tip his ash into the glass ashtray. “No, he’s back. I thought you might like to know about it, if you didn’t already.”

“I appreciate that, Grant. But I guess if anything was wrong I’d of heard from Dad.”

Grant nodded. “It’s not my place, Joe. But your dad and Billy. Well, your dad’s getting on.”

The sheriff smiled crookedly. “I know he is, Grant. But if you’re sitting here telling me he can’t handle that piss-ant little brother of mine, well, I’d say you ought to know better by now.”

“I’m not trying to tell you anything, Joe. I probably shouldn’t have said anything at all. I just thought you might like to know he’s come home again, that’s all.”

The walkie-talkie crackled, throwing a quick, reflexive flurry into Grant’s heart. Ki

Grant said, “Well,” and he stabbed out his cigarette and began to rise. But the sheriff motioned with his hand and said, “Now, hold on a minute, Grant. I got something to tell you too.”

“All right.”

“It’s about Angela.”

“What about her?”

“She’s been calling again. Day, night, it doesn’t matter. ‘What are you doing, Sheriff? What’s your plan? What are you people doing up there to find my girl?’ She’s been working that phone and . . . I don’t know how else to put it, Grant, but she don’t sound like she’s got both feet altogether on solid ground. I’m sorry for what she’s had to go through—what you’ve both had to go through—you know that. But . . .” He lifted a hand and dropped it again.

Grant studied his own hands. The truncated two fingers. He’d heard this tone from the man before—that first time, that first morning, when the sheriff wanted to know what a fifteen-year-old boy was doing way up on that mountain by himself.

Ki

And when it was?

“I’m sorry to hear this, Joe,” Grant said. “I’ll talk to her.”

Ki

“I want to thank you for keeping that up,” Grant said.

The sheriff didn’t turn to look at the bulletin board. He looked down and scuffed the old floorboards with the sole of his boot and he studied the scuffmark a long time.

“I don’t believe it’s in the papers here yet, I haven’t looked. But I heard from a lawman yesterday about this gal in Texas got kidnapped when she was twelve. Dragged into a car right in front of her house. Fifteen years ago and they just now found her. Living in a garage all this time behind the man’s house not ten miles from her home. Neighbors never knew a thing. Say they never saw her. Never saw the little girl she had by the man, neither.”

The sheriff looked up. “Twenty-seven years old now, this girl. A little daughter same age she was when she got taken and who don’t know a thing about this world but that garage.” He drew a breath through his nostrils and shook his head.

Grant held his eyes.

“I didn’t know if I should tell you about it or not,” Ki

Grant nodded. “Thanks, Joe.”

“Oh, hell.” The sheriff drew himself up. “You’d of read about it anyways.”

14

She walked in the rain’s aftermath along wet sidewalks and under dripping trees with the clouds coming apart in the sky like rotted fabric. The old brick library was gone and the new one with its soaring glass facade like a church stood in its place. There was a history. During construction, people had called it the Lindsay Suskind Library because it was Lindsay Suskind who’d gone rolling backward down the wheelchair ramp of the old building, and it was Lindsay’s mother, Jea

Wide, smooth sidewalks now coming and going, glass doors parting at ground level, book aisles like boulevards. Walking into the building was like walking into a botanical atrium, plant life and the sound of water chuckling somewhere, bright shafts of daylight. But the smell of the new library was like the smell of the old library: paper, bindings, the faint whiff of mold. Like the smell of buses, it was a smell of childhood. Of young girls out on their own on a summer day. Long empty days of sunburn and ice cream and the pursuing eyes of boys. Of men.

Angela stood staring at the new releases. Picking one up. Putting it back. Choosing another.