Episode 226 · The Road He Had Taken

By seven, Soles was downstairs at the agency stores, waiting for the man behind the counter to finish his tea.

His own phone had lit up on the stairs.

Awake. Working. Call when you can actually stay on the line.

He had answered I will. He was becoming very good at promises small enough to fit on a screen.

The stores man laid out the cuff and chain Soles had requested the night before. The chain reached a little over two paces when fitted to the knife. On his first attempt to bring it back, the blade hit a table leg and fell sideways.

The man moved his tea.

— Returns go on the counter.

Soles retrieved the knife by hand. Outside, he practiced freeing the slack from his sleeve until it stopped catching the lining, then opened the file.

The last confirmed sighting was at the forest station west of the town. The map showed an old charcoal road entering the woods beside it. Farther in, someone had circled the forester’s cabins and marked two caves above a ravine. A photograph had been clipped to the report; Soles studied the face, looked at the map and found he could no longer remember the mouth.

He tried again. Dark coat. A pale gap in one eyebrow. The rest resisted him.

Under the warning against a lone approach, the space for accompanying personnel was empty.

He took both phones.

The driver left him at the forest station before noon. A ranger pointed out the charcoal road without coming down the steps. His eyes kept going to the trees behind Soles.

— He asked about a roof, the ranger said. Somewhere dry.

— Which roof did you give him?

— I told him there was an inn back on the road.

— And in the woods?

The ranger rubbed the place where a key should have hung beside the door.

One cabin had been opened. Nothing stolen except lamp oil and a blanket. The ranger had found a folded note saying they would be paid for when the man could come back.

— You kept it?

— I burned it.

Soles waited.

— I have two boys, the ranger said.

He gave Soles the direction. Soles left him on his steps.

The cabin was less than an hour from the road, a low timber room beside a spring. He stopped in the trees before reaching its clearing. Through the open shutters he could see a bunk and an overturned cup. The doorway was empty.

His first impulse was to cross and look inside. Another came close behind it: watch the place where a man would stand to watch that door.

He stayed beneath the branches.

A jay moved along the roof. Water dripped from the eaves. He could find no weight moving through the cabin’s boards, but the spring shook the ground and the walls told him less than he wanted. He waited until his calves began to ache, then went around to the back.

Someone had eaten there. A heel of bread lay beneath the bunk; ash had been swept out in a careful heap. At the spring, a boot had pressed deep into mud beneath a stone ledge. Rain had blurred its toe. The heel remained square and narrow.

Soles crouched. The next mark was on the other side of the water, on ground that would have kept less of a print.

He knew, for a breath, where he would put the next foot.

The certainty belonged to cold woods and a man who would have checked the wind before leaving shelter. It faded while Soles was still trying to hold it. He stepped where it had pointed and found flattened grass beneath the bank.

There. Something real. Start with that.

Farther on, the grass rose again. He followed a broken twig for twenty minutes before finding the deer droppings beneath it.

He went back to the last boot mark.

By afternoon, he had stopped expecting the forester to supply a path through everything. Haya had known his own woods. This was a map, wet ground and Soles’s feet; someone still had to do the looking.

Once, he almost put his ankle through a loop laid among dead leaves. His hand had already closed on the sapling beside him when he saw the cord. He stayed still and followed it with his eyes. A bent branch waited above the path.

Phenom’s patience settled coldly over the urge to pull it apart.

There would be a place to stand where you could watch a man struggle in that.

Soles backed out along his own footprints and spent the next hour finding it. A hollow behind a fir gave a view of the loop and the charcoal road. The needles had been pressed flat. Beneath them, the earth was still dry.

The Hunter had been there since the rain began. Perhaps he had been there while Soles studied the loop.

He turned slowly, keeping the tree behind him.

Nothing moved.

He did not catch another trace before dusk. At the forest station, the ranger had shut the shutters. Soles left the trap’s position written beneath the door and took the road back to the inn.

The woman at the desk gave him a room above the yard. He asked whether anyone else had come in from the woods. She turned the register toward him, and he saw how many names could belong to the face he could not remember.

He took the room and paid for two nights.

The room had one window over the yard. Below it, a low tiled roof ran out to the wall, and past the gate the lane divided, one way toward the road, one toward the trees. He looked at it for a while the way he would look at a machine before taking the cover off: which parts moved, which would bear weight, where a man could stand without being seen. He counted the steps from the bed to the door, and from the bed to the window. Five to the door. Three to the window.

Rain thickened against its window while he ate. He checked the latch and the door, then stood with his hand against the stone partition beside the bed. The building carried water, sleepers and the movement of someone stacking cups below. He could not separate all of it. At the workshop he had once spent an afternoon chasing a knock in a truck engine that turned out to be a loose heat shield; three mechanics had sworn it was the bearings. Noise lied best when there was plenty of it. He took his hand off the wall and wiped it on his pants without knowing why.

On the second night of the assignment, he put his own phone on the chair beside the bed. Maxim’s reply was still open. He would call when he could keep his mind on the answer.

He left the cuff on his right arm and the knife sheathed at his hip. Then he lay back on top of the blanket.

He closed his eyes. Rain filled the room.

When he opened them, lightning had made the window white.

A man stood beside the bed with a knife already coming down.