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“I remember.”

“That boy come through here maybe last night or this morning?”

Hank looked down at the counter. “I was sorry to hear about your sister.”

“I asked you a question, goddamn it.”

“What did he do? Get in some trouble?”

“You might say that,” Bodecker said. He grabbed the newspaper off the counter, held the front page up in front of Hank’s face.

The storekeeper’s brow wrinkled as he read the black headlines once again. “He ain’t the one done that, is he?”

Bodecker dropped the paper on the floor and pulled out his revolver, pointed it at the storekeeper. “I ain’t got time to fuck around, you dumb bastard. Have you seen him?”

Hank swallowed and turned his eyes toward the window, watched Talbert Johnson’s hot rod slow down as it passed the store. “What you gonna do, shoot me?”

“Don’t think I won’t,” Bodecker said. “After I splatter your little bit of brains all over the candy case, I’ll put that butcher knife in your hand you got laying over there by your scroungy meat slicer. It’ll be an easy self-defense. Judge, the crazy sonofabitch was trying to protect a killer.” He cocked the gun. “Do yourself a favor. It’s my sister we’re talking about.”

“Yeah, I seen him,” Hank said reluctantly. “He was in here a little while ago. Bought a bottle of pop and some cigarettes.”

“What was he driving?”

“I didn’t see no car.”

“So he was walking?”

“He might have been, I guess.”

“Which way did he go when he left here?”

“I don’t know,” Hank said. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Don’t lie to me. What did he have to say?”

Hank looked over at the pop case where the boy had stood and drank the root beer. “He mentioned something about the old house where he used to live, that’s all.”

Bodecker put the gun back in his holster. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?” He started out the door. “You’ll make a good little rat someday.”

Hank watched him get in the cruiser and pull out onto Black Run Road. He placed both hands flat on the counter and bowed his head. Behind him, in a voice faint as a whisper, the radio announcer sent out another heartfelt request.

53

AT THE TOP OF THE FLATS, ARVIN STARTED SOUTH. The brush was thicker now along the edge of the woods, but it took him only a couple of minutes to find the deer path that he and his father had walked on their way to the prayer log. He could see the metal roof of the barn, and he hurried on. The house was gone, just like the storekeeper had said. He set his bag down and walked in where the back door used to be. He continued on through the kitchen and down the hall to the room where his mother had died. He kicked at black cinders and charred pieces of lumber, hoping to find some relic of hers or one of the little treasures he had kept in his bedroom window. But except for a rusty doorknob and his memories, there was nothing left. Some empty beer bottles were arranged in a neat row on one corner of the rock foundation where someone had sat and drank for an evening.

The barn was nothing now but a shell. All the wood siding had been torn off. The roof was rusted through in spots, the red paint faded and peeled away by the weather. Arvin stepped inside out of the sun, and there in a corner lay the feed bucket in which Willard had once carried his precious blood. He moved it over to a spot near the front and used it as a seat while he ate his lunch. He watched a red-tailed hawk make lazy circles in the sky. Then he took out the photograph of the woman with the dead man. Why would people do something like this? And how, he wondered again, did her bullet miss him when she wasn’t more than five or six feet away? In the quiet, he could hear his father’s voice: “There’s a sign here, son. Better pay attention.” He put the picture in his pocket and hid the bucket behind a bale of moldy straw. Then he started back across the field.

He found the deer path again and soon arrived at the clearing that Willard had worked so hard on. It was mostly grown over now with snakeroot and wild fern, but the prayer log was still there. Five