“I don’t know how else to put it,” he said, “but I wish your dad had lived to see this.”

Kenny nodded. “I do too.”

“My last words to him weren’t very kind ones,” Grant said. “To Billy. I would like to have them back.”

Kinney blew a stream of smoke. “Mine weren’t either, Grant. He didn’t go out of his way to bring out the best in people.”

“Well,” said Grant. “I’m not likely to remember that part.”

They smoked. They watched their families, each one of whom glanced in turn to see that the men were still there behind the bench, still smoking. As the wives talked and the men looked on, Caitlin slipped her hand into the sheriff’s daughter’s hand and without looking at her simply held it.

“I guess she didn’t get to them other funerals, then,” Kinney said. “Them two girls and that other man, the hiker.”

“No. But the families came to see her at the clinic. The girls’ families.” Grant looked away and drew on the cigarette. “I’ll tell you, Joe, it reminded me of when she’d win a race, and the parents of the other girls would come over to shake her hand, hug her.”

Kinney flicked the ash from his cigarette. He peered into the gray sky.

“They ever find any family of that man?” Grant said after a moment.

“Not much. Both his folks are dead. They found his old granny in a nursing home in Sterling but she didn’t hardly know her own name so they just let her be.”

Grant stared into the distance. Then he said: “I’d have killed him if I had a chance, Joe. You know that?”

“I know it.”

“I pictured it a thousand times. Walking up to him with your dad’s shotgun, putting it in his face. I wouldn’t have cared what happened to me.”

The sheriff looked down at his boots.

“I had the TV on this morning at the motel,” Grant said. “And they were talking about a little girl nine years old got taken by some man down in, I don’t remember the name. It wasn’t too far from here.”

“Pueblo.”

“Pueblo. Yes. Little thing got away when the man’s van broke down and he took her into a 7-Eleven and she started screaming.”

“Brave little girl.”

“Yes,” Grant said. “But say that van didn’t break down, Joe?”

“Well,” said Kinney. “I guess some would say God was looking out for her.”

“Is that what you’d say?”

Kinney looked out over the stones. “Some days I would,” he said.

Grant nodded. He said, “Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t make a mistake, not seeing him for myself, that man. His body. Seeing it with my own eyes. I wake up sometimes and I know he’s not dead. That he fooled everybody and he’s out there still.”

Kinney looked at him until he looked over. “That was some other man took that little girl, Grant. I can by God guarantee it.”

“I know it, Joe. I know it. But it’s no comfort.”

At the cars Kinney leaned down so Caitlin could put her arms around him once more, and Grant lifted her from the wheelchair as he had once lifted his son, and he and Angela got her settled in the backseat of the new car with the pillows behind her and more pillows under her leg along the seat. A few days before, down in Denver, he’d traded in the blue Chevy for the wagon. He’d wanted to throw in the green Chevy too, but Sean said the car would be too crowded and that he’d follow along in the old truck.

Angela reached to embrace Kinney and he stood stooped and patting her back while his wife and daughter waited. He shook Grant’s hand and he shook Sean’s casted hand, and Sean wanted to tell him something but the sheriff raised his free hand as if to deputize him and said that everything that ought to be said about Billy had already been said. None said good-bye and neither did they say they’d see each other at the cafe, and the two families got into their cars and Kinney sat behind the wheel watching until the new wagon with its three riders and the old Chevy with its one had both passed under the arms of the ponderosas and turned onto the county road, and he waited a little longer still before putting his own car forward, knowing he would never see any of them again.

73

Three days later and a week sooner than he’d predicted, Dr. Wieland pronounced Caitlin fit for travel and she was discharged to the care of her family and to the postsurgery specialist who awaited her in Wisconsin. That afternoon, she and Sean left their parents in the motel as they’d left them one July morning long ago and they drove out of the city in the new car and up into the mountains, Sean at the wheel and Caitlin arranged in the backseat with her pillows. Up and up the winding pass as before to the Great Divide where the waters decided which way to go, east or west, and without stopping they looked at the families who’d pulled over and they saw children on the slope above the parking lot making snow angels in the high old snow, in the warm April sun, and they drove down again, down once more into the small resort town and everything was as she remembered it and they passed the motel where her parents and the boy had lived while they searched and while the sheriff and his people searched and the rangers and the FBI searched and the whole world searched and none of them ever more than ten miles from where she was as the crow flies and none of them ever anywhere near her for that.

The road was called Ermine, she remembered that, and they found it and followed the black swings of it up into the pines again, and at each intersection Sean stopped while Caitlin studied his old map in its four faded pieces, and he went whichever way she told him to go and they were not up there long before she had him pull over and park.

It did not look like the place to him but he killed the engine and got out and collected her crutches from the back and stood by as she wrestled herself up out of the car, and when she was up on her one foot he handed her the crutches. She took a few steps on the blacktop and stopped and lifted her face to the sun and breathed slowly.

“You get used to them,” he said.

“I know. I remember.”

“You remember?”

“I had them when I was seven.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“I do.”

“What happened?”

“Dad ran over my foot.”

“Dad ran over your foot.”

“I came running out of the house and he backed over my foot. My own stupid fault.”

“Was he drunk?”

She shrugged. “All I remember was he was leaving and he hadn’t said good-bye.”

They stood in the sun. There was the smell of the desiccated needles and of the sap weeping from the pines. Then they left the blacktop and made their way through the pines, Caitlin choosing her steps carefully and Sean following, ready to reach out but knowing he would not have to, that already she’d integrated the crutches into the thoughtless mechanics of movement, as she’d integrated the absence of one human foot and would integrate the mechanical one when it came.

They entered the glen and sat on the stone bench in the freckled light. The white and maimed Virgin stood as before amid the white trunks of the aspens and the chalky headstones. There was the weird sense of being back in time, at the beginning, a sense of knowing what was coming. Everything in the glen had an arranged, artificial look to it, like staging—even the light, even themselves. She was winded and as she caught her breath he leaned to look

for the plaque, expecting it to be covered in growth as in his dream, but it wasn’t.

She saw him reading the plaque and turned to read it herself.

Right Reverend Tobias J. Fife,

Bishop of Denver, Mercifully Grants,

In the Lord, Forty Days of Grace

For Visiting the Shrine of the Woods

And Praying before It,

1938.

The little aspen leaves stirred and they felt the breeze, brief and cool.