I studied the walls again and began to see the music, the rhythmic bursts of color. The shading of notes gliding into others, or tapering off as a trill must have tapered into the air. One compelling picture displayed a three-color arc: blue, becoming a sideways, bottom-weighted crescent of purple, transmuting into a wavering series of lines, blue again. The background was coal black, providing a stillness behind the color, the sense of a night sky. I’d heard those colors recently.

“This one,” I said, pointing to the picture. “It’s a whip-poor-will, right?”

Cherry’s eyes turned to me with surprise. Miss Bascomb stared through the thick lenses, canting her head as if bringing me into focus. She walked to me, took my hand in hers. Her hand felt like driftwood.

“You’re the first person to ever see one right,” she said, leading me past the walls like at a gallery opening, pointing out towhees, starlings, robins, crows - a nervous jitter of black and yellow - martins, several varieties of thrushes and finches, bluebirds, cardinals, willets, grebes, plovers, and dozens more. When the tour was finished, a smiling Leona Bascomb went to fetch tea and cookies.

“How did you do that, Ryder?” Cherry whispered when the bird artist had retreated to her tiny kitchen, clattering dishes. “How did you know those splotches were a whip-poor-will?”

“I couldn’t imagine it being anything else.”

When Miz Bascomb returned, Cherry steered her into our questions. I sipped tea and nibbled a sugar cookie, happy to be out of the limelight.

“I wasn’t here that morning the poor woman’s body got found,” Miz Bascomb said to Cherry. “The health service came by real early and took me to the clinic for my six-month look-see. I’m good, praise God.”

“You mentioned hearing a car the night before?”

“It was almost midnight. I was up, puttering. Cain’t never sleep no more, just doze. I heard a car out on the road. Sounded big. I can tell by the sounds of the motors. I cain’t see hardly none any more, but God gave me ears as good as they git.”

“Is that common, Miz Bascomb, nighttime traffic on the road?” Cherry asked.

“Any traffic ain’t real common. Nothing back there but the ol’ logging camp. In the daytime, local kids sometimes go back there in summer to splash around. But most of ‘em goes to the divin’ rock over in the Red River. Water’s deeper and there’s other kids to show off for. I did the same myself, when I was a girl.”

“So the vehicle on the road caught your ear?” Cherry asked.

“I was waiting for it to come back out. It did, ’bout two hours later.”

“The same vehicle?”

“No way to tell that perzactky. Same kind of one, to tell by the sound.”

Cherry made some notes in her pad. “So a vehicle went in around midnight, came out around two. Possibly the same vehicle.”

The old woman nodded.

Cherry looked at me. It fit the timeline, given what we’d learned from the lab about time of death. Tandee Powers was probably taken from her home around eleven, driven past Leona Bascomb’s house, then another desolate mile to the creek. She’d been dressed in a sexually suggestive manner, dragged into the water, tortured by being pulled under and then released back to the surface. This could have gone on for an hour and a half. Perhaps longer.

“No other vehicles went back down the road after that?” Cherry asked.

The birdsong artist frowned, trying to discern a memory. “I drowsed off around four in the morning. Something popped my eyes open just afore six. I’m purty sure it was a car, but I was sorta drifty. It seemed like it was going west toward east, like driving away.”

Cherry looked at me and shook her head. Not the car. It didn’t fit the timeline, the sun rising by six. It was the midnight ride that carried Tandee Powers to her death.

We stood and bid our farewells, Miz Bascomb seeming loathe to see me go, offering more tea and cookies, or dinner. I again complimented her work as we withdrew toward the door. I paused, turned, a sudden thought lighting my head.

“One more thing, Miz Bascomb,” I said. “The sound the earlier vehicle made. Do you think you could draw it for me?”

A smile crossed her face, as though the challenge was amusing.

“Why not? Lemme git my workings.”

Leona Bascomb walked to a cabinet, withdrew a sheet of paper and a box of bright pastel crayons.

“I got a daughter lives up in Louisville sends me my colors from an art store,” she said, sitting in the rocker and placing the sheet on the TV tray. She thought for a full minute and I saw her lips move as the sounds replayed in her head. Her ancient fingers whisked over the colors, selected.

The gnarled hands began drawing.

Two minutes later she handed me the paper. I saw a vibrating line that ran a few inches in yellow, turned green, jumped into blue and stayed the same until running off the edge of the page. I peeked out the window and confirmed the bridge that had slowed Cherry’s vehicle three hundred feet away. After crossing the bridge the vehicle would have accelerated to the speed the potholed road could bear, twenty-five or thirty miles per hour. The colors in Miz Bascomb’s drawing shifted abruptly, as the sounds must have changed.

“A standard transmission,” I said. “I see it shifting.”

Cherry stared at me.

27

Cherry dropped me at my cabin. We climbed out, stood on separate sides of the car. “Well, Ryder, it looks like this is it,” Cherry said over the hood, her smile strained. “I’m sorry your vacation turned into work. And for the record, I truly wasn’t the person who called you.”

“I believe you,” I said.

“Thanks for all your help. And your company. I just wish that we’d had the time to—”

I turned to the cabin. Something was missing. Mix-up was nowhere to be seen.

“You all right, Ryder?”

“Mix-up. Where is he? Mix-up!” I yelled into the trees. “Yo … Mr Mix-up. Come here, boy!”

Nothing. I turned to Cherry. “This is strange. He never goes far.”

She clapped her hands, yelled, “Here Mix-up!” I joined in and we walked up and down the drive, calling. I told Cherry I was heading into the woods and I’d let her know when he came back. I whistled, clapped, banged a wooden spoon on his metal food bowl, playing his favorite music. I hiked a mile up the creek, a mile down, yelling and banging until my hand hurt and my voice was a painful rasp.

No rustling in the underbrush. No happy bay as he raced to my side. Nothing.

I drove the nearby roads, stopping to speak to everyone I saw outside. Giving them my cell number in case they saw him.

“What’s your dog look like, mister?”

“Like nothing you’ve ever seen. And a lot of it.”

I saw a barrel-bodied guy wearing overalls and a ZZ Top beard sitting on his porch and cleaning a shotgun. I stopped, told him my story and passed him my number. “You know there are b’ars in the woods, don’t you?” he said, spitting tobacco juice over the porch rail.

I nodded. “But bears are few and far between, right?”

He thought for a moment. “E’yup. It almost ain’t never b’ars that get lost dogs …”

Thank God, my mind said.

“They usually get tore apart by coyotes,” the guy finished.

I added the aspect of heart-pounding frenzy to my search and continued another hour, passing out my number like a religious zealot jamming tracts into people’s hands. My breath stopped at a mound of fur at the side of the road, started again when I saw it was a deer carcass. Several times I wondered if passers-by thought me a crazy man, parked beside the road, yelling into the woods while beating a bowl with a wooden spoon. I didn’t care.

After two hours of nothing, I returned to the cabin, passing Jeremy’s home. Though I figured I’d said my goodbyes, I had to check.