“Is anyone living in the house?”

“Nope. The hands that ain’t married have their own place, back along the crick.” He paused for a moment. “You’re thinking Jon might have gone to his parents’ house. I would have seen a light there if anyone had been inside the last two nights. Besides, I can’t imagine Jon running back to his mom and pop. That’s the last thing he’d do.”

“So you know him pretty well.”

“As well as anyone, I reckon.”

Harry kicked a clump of hay-studded manure out of his way. “Tell me true now. Is he likely to be off on a bender?”

Arent De Grave rested his pitchfork against the cobbled stones and looked at Harry. “Now where would he be getting booze around here, Chief?”

Harry sighed. “I’m not asking where anybody’s getting anything. But your friend walked out on his wife in a temper and hasn’t been seen since. Most men, that means they’re either drinking or whoring.”

De Grave raised his barely there blond eyebrows.

“Or they’re bivouacking with a friend. So how ’bout it? Which category would you place Jonathon Ketchem in?”

“He’s not here.” De Grave dug his pitchfork into the manure pile and tossed another twenty pounds into the spreader. “Who-all’s on that list you got?”

Harry pulled the creased paper from his back pocket. “You, Hutch Shaw, Leslie Bain, and Garry MacEacheron.”

“We’re all of us married men. With kids. I can’t imagine any of those men’s wives not picking up the phone and letting Jane know that Jonathon was there.” He smiled, almost shyly. “I know for sure my missus would.”

“Could he be holed up in a speakeasy someplace? Maybe gone to Glens Falls, taken a room there?”

De Grave clanged the pitchfork tines against the cobbles to loosen the muck and kicked what remained off with the edge of his boot. “Help me get the team hitched up,” he said, walking into the barn. Harry followed him. For a moment, his vision shut down in the difference between the bright, chill sunshine outside and the warm animal gloom inside. Two enormous geldings, half-Percheron by the looks of them, stood patiently, and Harry was relieved to see that they were already in tack. It had been a long time since he had harnessed up his own dad’s team, and he didn’t want to look a citified fool fumbling around in front of De Grave. “This is Ned”-De Grave indicated the horse at the left-hand block-“and that one is Nick.”

Harry took Nick by the bit strap, scratched his neck, and stroked the outside of his nostrils with a light finger. From between black leather blinders, Nick looked down on him with clever brown eyes that seemed to say, This is all nice and good; but I’m supposed to be to work.

Harry led Nick out of the barn, blinking again as they emerged into the light. “Nick is the far horse,” De Grave called over his shoulder, and Harry led his charge to the right side of the rig. The gelding was so well behaved that the slightest pressure of Harry’s hand on his bit rein caused him to back neatly into his place beside the spreader’s wagon tongue. Harry and De Grave lifted the crossbar, and Harry held it steady while the farmer clipped Ned’s straps to the bar’s left ring and adjusted their tension. Then Harry did the same for Nick while De Grave returned to the tack room to retrieve the heel chains, which would attach the horses’ tack to the spreader itself.

De Grave came about the front of the team and handed Harry a three-foot chain, thick and heavy enough to break a skull open with one blow. “So how ’bout it?” Harry asked as he smoothed a hand over Nick’s broad flank. “Is Jonathon the type of man to have poured himself into a bottle? Does he have a girl somewhere who might have taken him in?”

He bent down to clip on the chain, and through the stolid stacks of the horses’ hind legs, he could catch glimpses of De Grave: muck boots and faded pants and hands that looked older than his thirty-some years, meticulously attaching chain to ring, checking the latch, checking the straps.

“Jonathon liked his whiskey as much as the next man in his younger days,” he said, his words slow and thoughtful. “He never was a temperance man, that I heard. But I haven’t seen him near liquor for… well…” He stood, resting one hand on Ned’s muscular croup. “Well, not since his children passed.”

Harry stood up, the heel chain still dangling from his hands. “What?” He could just see De Grave’s head over the horses’ rumps. “What do you mean, after his children passed? I thought he and his wife had the one daughter.”

De Grave nodded. “She was born after. They had four youngsters before. All of ’em died of the black diphtheria in ’24.”

“Good God.”

“Sometimes His will is hard. Hard to bear.” De Grave’s hand traced the leather lines of the straps crisscrossing Ned’s hip and rump. “Jonathon was different after that.”

“Different how?”

De Grave tilted his head up and squinted at the pale blue sky of early spring. “He had always been real certain about where he was going, what he wanted. He was going to make a big success of his farm, buy more land, do better than his father. After the children passed, he just sort of… spun free.”

“You mean he started acting up? Getting wild?”

“No, no, just the opposite. He didn’t have any more spark for fun in him, I think. He was more like…” Harry waited while the farmer chose his words with care. “Like a working barge that’s been set adrift on the river. You see it traveling downstream, it may look like it’s doing what it’s always done, but there’s no purpose there. No hand on the tiller.”

“Sooner or later, an unmanned boat will wreck.”

De Grave looked at Harry. “I know.”

“But not on a bottle.”

De Grave shook his head. “I don’t think on other women, either, although I can’t say for sure, one way or tother. It’s hard to imagine a man with a pretty, sweet wife like Janie looking elsewhere.”

Harry didn’t find it hard to imagine at all. He could picture it, long nights lying next to the woman, and every time you looked at her seeing your lost children in her eyes, her mouth, the color of her hair. Never touching each other without the chains of grief weighing your limbs down, making your flesh cold. He glanced at the heel chain, heavy in his hands. Easy to imagine wanting to hide yourself in someone else’s hot, blank, forgettable body.

He squatted down and attached the chain to Nick’s trace strap, tugging on it to make sure the latch was secure. He fastened the other end to the big steel ring bolted to the corner of the spreader. When everything was neat, he stood again, looked across the horses’ backs at De Grave. “What’s your guess, then?” he said. “You know the man. What would you think he’d done, disappearing from his home and not coming back?”

De Grave weighed the question with the same deliberate concentration he gave to everything. “My guess would be,” he said after a minute, “that he’d finally drifted downstream out of sight.”

When Mrs. Ketchem had described her husband investing in his brother’s gas station, Harry had envisioned one of those ramshackle affairs that were popping up in the wake of the new road construction up north, converted livery stables or smiths with a pump out front and bales of hay still stacked in the rear. He was surprised, then, when he spotted a brilliantly enameled brand-spanking-new sign emblazoned KETCHEM’S GAS AND MOTOR SERVICE. The low, wide building on the intersection of Route 9 and Tenant Mountain Road was whitewashed within an inch of its life, stuccoed into rounded edges and smooth curved arches through which three service bays beckoned to distressed motorists. There were no fewer than three pumps outside, protected from the elements by a bright red roof supported by more stuccoed pillars. It looked as if it had been lifted up bodily from Hollywood, California, and transplanted to Lake George.