Timberline Road

At one twenty in the morning, Danny Cord sat in his patrol car at the end of the Dresser driveway and wrote Harlow Auto on the first line of his notebook.

Rain ticked along the roof. The wipers had left a clean half-moon across the windshield, and beyond it the Dresser house stood dark except for the kitchen. Pat moved through the yellow square of window, carrying a dish towel from one counter to another. Len had taken off his mill jacket. He sat at the table with both hands around a mug.

Danny had listened to them for forty minutes. He had their son’s age, the blue canvas jacket, the brown work boots, the lunch pail, the cash in the pay envelope, the failed ride. He had Dean Holcomb’s address. He had the name of a girl from Sweet Home whom Scott had seen last spring and a boy Scott had shoved in a school parking lot. He also had a mother who said her son came home after work and a father who kept saying Scott was seventeen, as though seventeen explained every hole in a person’s story.

He put the notebook on the seat beside him and drove back toward the highway strip.

The road was wet but clear. A truck passed going east with a stack of lumber under a blue tarp. At the Dairy King, the neon crown above the windows was off. Harlow Auto sat two blocks down with its blue sign still burning over the front glass. Danny stopped at the junction where Timberline Road split from the highway and got out.

The rain had worked grit into the shoulder. There were tire tracks everywhere: cars cutting through, trucks coming down from the mill, people pulling over to make a call from the pay phone at the gas station. A person could walk along the edge and leave a mark for twenty feet, then step on pavement and disappear among everybody else. Danny stood with his hands in the pockets of his raincoat until cold came through the lining.