One Cold Night

possibility that there was. It was Susan; she had entered him, changed him. Love had muddled and confused the clear thinking of his mind — but he would take it any day over the unanswerable questions thattroubled him. He would even trick himself into belief, if that was what Susan required for their marriage to survive the staggering blows of today. He would blind himself willingly, refusing to see human life as biological accident or dried-out fields as scientific inevitabilities, cycles of life, but rather as mysterious blessings: The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
    He was human, after all, and just as vulnerable to hopelessness as the next guy. He could almost see himself tomorrow — having failed Lisa, having failed Becky, having failed Lolita — walking the edges of these very fields in tattered clothes, proclaiming the justice of the Lord’s will. Slain in the spirit.
    In spite of himself, he would become the personification of what he most reviled; wouldn’t that be the ultimate punishment for a nonbeliever? To become another Elvis-Jesus rocking the world. By his side would be three teenage spirits with long floating hair, girls no one saw but himself, angels.
    “I know He took my baby away because He has a plan for her,” the mother wept against Dave’s chest outside an East Brooklyn housing project after her six-year-old daughter had been brutally raped and murdered by her neighbor’s boyfriend. Dave kept quiet, letting her take comfort from his silence as he despised her passive stupidity, because no child deserved that, and the boyfriend was a perverted creep who didn’t deserve to live, and brutality like that had no plan, only accident.
    The open fields of America invited unreasonable hope and unreasonable desperation. He saw it now. Faith was necessary, if false.
    On the left, the field gave way to forest. It was the same woods that harbored the Stutley house on theother side. Miles of woods in which, Dave believed, Lisa was now being led to an orchard of some significance to either the groom or Peter Adkins or both. Or maybe she had already arrived.
    They approached the intersection of routes Forty-four and Fifty-five. Just as Braithwaite had said, there was nothing there but an abandoned gas station.
    “Here we are,” Braithwaite said, turning right onto a dirt road posted with a faded wooden sign announcing CHILDRESS FARMS.
    Dave turned back to look at the dense forest on the opposite side of the road that marked the edge of Stutley’s land. It didn’t make sense that Adkins would risk taking Lisa across an open road; but this was the location of the Internet order and there was nothing else here. Obviously, the order had been placed for a reason.
    “It’s just a bit up this way,” Braithwaite said.
    A long wooden fence snaked beside the road. After a couple minutes the orchard appeared. There was a small, weathered white house, a big red barn and, beyond that, hundreds of apple trees. Bushels of apples were haphazardly arranged in front of a makeshift farm stand with a sign asking that five dollars per bushel be left in the coffee can.
    “Who comes here?” Dave asked. “It’s so far off the main road.”
    “Locals, mostly,” Braithwaite answered, pulling up in front of the house. “John Childress is likely home. Hardly leaves the place since his wife died. Old man’s determined to die on his own land.”
    They got out of the car and started up the stone walk to the house. Dave let Braithwaite press the bell. As they waited, Dave glanced behind him at thebushels upon bushels of unsold apples. The orchards seemed to spread endlessly behind the house, a web of gnarled branches laced together, dotted red.
    Inside the house, he heard footsteps approach the door. He wished he had brought his gun, but Braithwaite had his, snapped onto his belt holster next to a pair of handcuffs. Dave wondered if the man was swift enough to actually use the gun... because if Lisa was inside this house and if Adkins had one, they would have to act quickly.
    The door creaked open and there stood a skinny old man who reminded Dave of one of the apple trees in the orchard. From the sleeves of his undershirt, gnarly arms protruded like branches that were a little too long for his body. His blue jeans were worn and baggy, beneath which the legs assumedly matched the arms: strong, bark-skinned limbs. He had a head of moppy white hair and sharp green eyes. He hadn’t shaved in at least two