Boys Life

heart of spring. A week after Dad had jumped into Saxon’s Lake, this was the story: Sheriff Amory had found no one missing from Zephyr or from any of the surrounding communities. A front-page article in the weekly Adams Valley Journal brought forth no new information. Sheriff Amory and two of his deputies, some of the firemen, and a half dozen volunteers got out on the lake in rowboats and dragged nets back and forth, but they only came up with an angry catch of snapping turtles and cottonmouths.
    Saxon’s Lake used to be Saxon’s Quarry back in the twenties, before the steam shovels had broken into an underground river that would not be capped or shunted aside. Estimates of its depth ranged from three hundred to five hundred feet. There wasn’t a net on earth that could scoop that sunken car back to the surface.
    The sheriff came by one evening for a talk with Dad and Mom, and they let me sit in on it. “Whoever did it,” Sheriff Amory explained, his hat in his lap and his nose throwing a shadow, “must’ve backed that car onto the dirt road facin’ the lake. We found the tire marks, but the footprints were all scuffed over. The killer must’ve had somethin’ wedged against the gas pedal. Just before you rounded the bend, he released the hand brake, slammed the door, and jumped back, and the car took off across Route Ten. He didn’t know you were gonna be there, of course. If you hadn’t been, the car would’ve gone on into the lake, sunk, and nobody would ever have known it happened.” He shrugged. “That’s the best I can come up with.”
    “You talked to Marty Barklee?”
    “Yeah, I did. Marty didn’t see anything. The way that dirt road sits, you can drive right past it at a reasonable clip and never even know it’s there.”
    “So where does that leave us?”
    The sheriff pondered my dad’s question, the silver star on his hat catching the lamplight. Outside, Rebel was barking and other dogs picked up the tribal call across Zephyr. The sheriff spread his big hands out and looked at his fingers. “Tom,” he said, “we have a real strange situation here. We’ve got tire marks but no car. You say you saw a dead man handcuffed to the wheel and a wire around his throat, but we don’t have a body and we’re not likely to recover one. Nobody’s missin’ from town. Nobody’s missin’ in the whole area, except a teenaged girl whose mother thinks she ran off with her boyfriend to Nashville. And the boy don’t have a tattoo, by the way. I can’t find anybody who’s seen a fella with a tattoo like the one you described.” Sheriff Amory looked at me, then my mother, and then back to my dad with his coal-black eyes. “You know that riddle, Tom? The one about a tree fallin’ in the woods, and if there’s nobody around to hear it, does it make a noise? Well, if there’s no body and no one’s missin’ anywhere that I can tell, was there a murder or not?”
    “I know what I saw,” Dad said. “Are you doubtin’ my word, J.T.?”
    “No, I didn’t say that. I’m only sayin’ I can’t do anything more until we get a murder victim. I need a name, Tom. I need a face. Without an identification, I don’t even know where to start.”
    “So in the meantime somebody who killed another man is walkin’ around as free as you please and doesn’t have to be scared of gettin’ caught anytime soon. Is that it?”
    “Yep,” the sheriff admitted. “That about sums it up.”
    Of course Sheriff Amory promised he’d keep working on it, and that he’d call around the state for information on missing persons. Sooner or later, he said, somebody would have to ask after the man who had gone down in the lake. When the sheriff had gone, my father went out to sit on the front porch by himself with the light off, and he sat there alone past the time Mom told me to get ready for bed.
    That was the night my father’s cry awakened me in the dark.
    I sat up in bed, my nerves jangled. I could hear Mom talking to Dad through the wall. “It’s all right,” she was saying. “It was a bad dream, just a bad dream, everything’s all right.”
    Dad was quiet for a long time. I heard water running in the bathroom. Then the squeak of their bedsprings. “You want to tell me about it?” Mom asked him.
    “No. God, no.”
    “It was just a bad dream.”
    “I don’t care. It was real enough.”
    “Can you get back to sleep?”
    He sighed. I could imagine him there in the darkened bedroom, his hands