“Yessir.” He handed me the laser pointer.
“Push the gray button,” he said. “Shine it on my hand.”
I pushed the button and shined it on his hand.
The long-haired man sat down in the road and took his laser pointer back. Then he took a piece of yellow candy from his pocket and ate it. I wanted one too but I didn’t ask.
“What’s your name?” he said. He was smiling now.
“Ben Worthington.”
“Ben, that was awfully nice of you to tell me I dropped this. You could’ve kept it. You’re an honest boy. If I give this to you will you be careful not to shine it in your eye?”
“I would be very careful.”
“I can’t give it to you right now. I have to use it this afternoon but—”
“Why?”
“I lost something in a tunnel and I have to find it with this.”
It made me sad that I couldn’t have it right now.
“But maybe… No, I shouldn’t. Your parents probably wouldn’t let you have—”
“Yes they would.”
“No I don’t think—”
“They would too.”
“Ben, if I give this to you you can’t show it to your parents. Or your brother. He would steal it and play with it. Your parents would take it and throw it away.”
“I won’t tell them.”
“You promise?”
“Yessir, I promise.”
“You can’t tell them about me either.”
“I won’t.” He got up and looked down at me.
“Later tonight I’m going to come knock on your window. You have to go to your backdoor and open it so I can give this to you. Can you do that, Ben?”
“Yessir.”
“You have to do it very quietly. If anyone wakes up and sees me I’ll have to leave and you won’t be able to have the laser pointer. Do you want to have it?”
“Yessir.”
“Say that you want to have it.”
“I want to have it.”
“Say it again.”
“I want to have it.”
“You’re obedient. That’s a good boy. I have to go now. I’ll see you tonight.”
“Can I do the laser again?” The long-haired man sighed.
I didn’t think he was going to let me but then he said, “All right, once more.”
8
LUTHER Kite straddles the thickest limb of the pine fifteen feet off the ground. It is suppertime on Shortleaf Drive, quiet now that the children have been called home, each house warm with lamplight and lively with the domestic happenings of a Sunday night.
His stomach rumbles. He has not eaten. He will eat afterward because this is North Carolina, land of Waffle Houses that never close. He’ll consume a stack of pancakes and scrambled eggs and sausage links and torched bacon and grits and he’ll drown it all in maple syrup. Especially the bacon.
A breeze stirs the branches and the vivid dying leaves sweep down in slowmotion upon the street. The sky has darkened so that he can no longer see the silhouette of the water tower that moments ago loomed above the rampart of loblollies across the lake. Only the red light atop the bowl signals its presence.
The October night cools quickly.
It will be warm inside the house he has chosen.
He smiles, closes his eyes, rests his head against the bark.
Just four hours.
The moon will have advanced high above the horizon of calligraphic pines, burnishing the empty street into blue silver. He sleeps perfectly still upon the limb, the smell of sap engulfing him, sweet and pungent like bourbon.
9
HORACE Boone had used credit card information to track Andrew Thomas to a postal outlet in Haines Junction, Yukon.
But he didn’t leave right away.
He continued working in Anchorage from April to August, saving everything he earned. In September he quit his job at Murder One Books, put what few possessions he owned into storage, and embarked in his stalwart Land Cruiser for the Yukon with four thousand dollars, a suitcase of clothing, and blind faith that he would find Andrew Thomas.
Upon arriving in Haines Junction, Horace staked out the downtown, studying the village’s sparse foot traffic for his man.
On the fifth morning, while wondering if he’d made a giant mistake, he watched the same long-haired man who’d graced Murder One Books several months back, enter Madley’s Store to retrieve his mail.
Horace was elated.
The next day, his twenty-fourth birthday, Horace rented a rundown trailer on the outskirts of the village and began taking copious notes for the book he wholeheartedly believed was going to make him a rich and famous and oft-laid writer.
His second week in the Yukon he ventured onto Andrew Thomas’s property late one night and spied on the cabin from a distance with binoculars.
The following week he’d crept all the way up to a side window, watched the man wash his supper dishes and write in his loft late into the night.
Now, more than halfway through October, his fourth week in Haines Junction, Horace had decided to take his first real chance.
It was Monday morning and the snow from two days ago still dallied in the shadows of the forest. A full but feeble moon remained visible in the iris-blue morning—a clouded cataractous eye.
Horace sat behind the wheel of his Land Cruiser in that worn space between the trees where he always parked. Andrew Thomas’s Jeep passed by right on schedule, village-bound, a dirtcloud rising in its wake. On this calm morning it would be almost an hour before the dust of its passage had settled.
Horace closed his purple wire-bound notebook and set it in the passenger seat.
He’d already finished outlining the second chapter of his memoir, tentatively titled Hunting Evil: My Search for Andrew Thomas. He was so excited about the book he was having trouble sleeping. It was a concept that couldn’t miss because he might be the only person in the world who knew the whereabouts of the most notorious murderer of the last decade.
Horace had grown up poor.
He wasn’t handsome.
Never been popular in school.
Writing was all he had.
He believed that after twenty-four years of having to see his stupid reflection in the mirror he was entitled to wild success.
Horace climbed out of the Land Cruiser and started down the faintly tread path to Andrew’s cabin, making sure he didn’t track through the patches of snow and leave evidence of his presence here.
He soon glimpsed the cabin through the trees.
He reached the front porch.
Turned the doorknob.
His hypothesis was correct: people who live in the wilderness aren’t compelled to lock their doors.
He stepped inside, his heart convulsing epileptically, brain teetering between exhilaration and outright terror. Unbuttoning his down jacket, he slung it over the railing of a daybed and commanded himself to settle down. He would hear Andrew’s Jeep coming down the driveway long before it reached the cabin.
Stepping forward, he glanced once through the monster’s home, committing to memory every detail—the sinkful of dishes in the kitchen, the halfeaten pie on the breakfast table, ashes steaming in the doused fireplace, the bearskin rug at his feet. The place smelled of woodsmoke, baked raspberries, venison jerky, and spruce. The floorboards creaked beneath him. He couldn’t believe that he was actually here.
He unlaced his boots, walked in sockfeet to the ladder, and climbed into the writing loft. His eyes gravitated first to the poster of Edgar Allen Poe and those stormy melancholic eyes. Then he read one of the numerous Post-It notes stuck to the rafters:
describe the woman in Rock Springs in the puffy pink jacket who heard Orson yelling in the trunk
Stepping carefully over an unfolded roadmap of Wyoming, Horace found himself standing before Andrew Thomas’s writing desk, bookended by bookshelves, cluttered with a typewriter, dictionary, Bible, thesaurus, and The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees (Eastern Region).