Chapter 3

The fog ate the shore road ten feet ahead of her bumper. Georgia drove north out of town, past the campground, past a bait shop with its windows soaped. Three miles. Four. Mailboxes on posts. A stand of birches with the leaves gone. Black water past them. No trailers. No lights. Where the pavement turned to gravel, she stopped and sat there with the engine running. The boy could be anywhere in those woods. She turned the truck around.

Back at the terminal, one window was still lit. The night shack. Luis Arriaga sat on the step with a steel thermos and a wool blanket across his knees. He stood up when her headlights swept the gravel. "Mrs. Pruitt." Georgia took off her cap. "You know me." "I know the name on the paycheck." He said it with no weight at all. She liked him for that. "Can I sit?" "It's your step." So he knew. She sat down anyway and looked at the water.

"He comes about ten," Luis said. "Some nights later." "How long?" "Since the frost. Six weeks, maybe seven." He turned the thermos in his hands. "I leave him a sandwich and dry socks on the step. He takes them and goes." "He never knocks?" "He watches till I go inside. Then he comes." Georgia's hands were cold. She put them in her pockets. "Does he ever say who he's with?" Luis looked at the water for a while. "He says he has to get back to her before she locks the door." "Her." "He starts the name. Then he shuts his mouth." Every time. Georgia looked past the shack at the trees. "Who taught him that?" Luis did not answer. He didn't have to. Somebody had spent five years teaching a child that a name could kill him.

Georgia stood up. "Five years ago. The night the boat went down. Were you on this gate?" Luis was quiet for a long moment. "I was." "What did you see?" "A truck on the shore road. Lights off. Sitting there a while." Georgia waited. "Whose truck?" Luis set his thermos down on the step. "I'd rather not say a name I can't prove." Georgia looked at the gate road. It could have been any truck in town. It could have been one.

Then a set of headlights swung across the gravel. Wendell's truck. He got out with his radio on his shoulder and his coat hanging open. He had come back. Georgia wondered if he had ever really left. "Lou," Wendell said. "You're talking to the wrong person." Luis didn't move. "You're off the clock, Wendell." "I'm never off the clock." Wendell turned to Georgia. "I called the county." "For what?" "Trespass. Harassment. Whatever sticks." "Call them." "I already did."

A county car did come. Slow, lights off, a young deputy who took a report and did not read the folder in Wendell's hand. He told Georgia she could file a civil complaint in the morning. Then he drove away. Wendell watched him go with his hands on his hips. "That's how it works," he said. Georgia said nothing. She was watching Luis. Luis was watching the taillights, and he had gone very still.

Then Wendell made his mistake. He pulled a folder out of his jacket and opened it. Maybe he meant to show her the county number. Maybe he only meant to scare her. "The boy's got a guardian," he said. "Legal. Filed. So whatever you think you saw, it's none of your business." Georgia looked at the paper on top of the folder. It was old and water-stained. "Show me," she said. He turned it toward her, just for a second, just enough. She saw the name at the bottom. Her own. Georgia Pruitt. In a hand that was almost hers, and not hers at all. The date under it was eight days after the boat went down. Eight days. She had spent nine of those days flat on her back in a hospital in Duluth. Sedated. Not signing anything. Georgia heard her own voice come out flat and level. "That paper is dated eight days after I buried my husband." "So?" "I was under sedation for nine of those days." She looked up at him. "I never signed that." Wendell closed the folder fast. But she had seen it. And he knew she had seen it. For the first time all day, he had nothing to say.