Kate nodded. “He used to work alongside Roy on the maintenance crews. I gave him the photograph yesterday when he came to help me go through some of Roy’s things. He said he’d recognized your face from the old missing-child posters the moment he saw the picture. He said if he ever saw you on Route 9, he’d put it in your hands himself.” She paused. “I thought he was chasing something that was never going to happen.”
“He was sitting there waiting for me.”
“Not exactly. He does that stretch of road sometimes, helps stranded drivers for extra money. This morning he called and said he’d seen your tire go and recognized you.”
Margaret stood up so quickly the chair hit the wall behind her.
Kate reached for her keys. “I’m coming with you.”
“Give me one minute alone with him first,” Margaret said. “Just the first minute.”
Kate looked at her for a long moment. Then she wrote down the address of the lumberyard and said: “Bring him home.”
The Lumberyard on the Mill Creek Road, and What Happened When She Put the Cold Bottle in His Hand
The lumberyard was a working place — the kind that smells of fresh-cut pine and engine oil, with stacks of lumber organized along a gravel yard and a small office in a corrugated metal building at one end.
She found him in the open yard.
Late twenties. Broad shoulders. Sawdust on the sleeves of his work shirt and a slight stiffness in the way he bent, the way certain kinds of physical labor settle into a person over years. He was stacking boards in the methodical, unhurried way of someone who has done this long enough to have found the rhythm of it.
He turned and saw her watching.
She saw him — truly saw him — and for one second she saw her seven-year-old boy, the one who had campaigned for the Sprite, the one who had worn the red shirt, the one whose crooked front tooth had been in the school photograph on her nightstand for twenty years.
And then she saw a stranger.
A grown man who had never met her.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Daniel,” she said.
He frowned. “It’s Danny.”
