THIS TIME HE DIDN’T wait for the reporters and the fluffed-up anchorwomen or the rest of the hyenas either. The minute the sheriff left he went in and disconnected the phone and then took his cell out of his right-front pocket and buried it in the top drawer of the bureau in the bedroom. And when Carolee’s cell started ringing midway through dinner—a salad of cold chicken and avocado she’d numbly prepared at the kitchen counter with rigid hands and frozen arms, a salad neither of them could eat because food was the last thing they wanted—he got up from the table, dug the phone out of her purse and turned it off without bothering to find out who was calling or why. “What if it’s news?” she said. “What if they—?” But they both knew it wasn’t news and that they—the authorities, the cops, the SWAT teams Rob had already called in—hadn’t found or done anything. He just shook his head. Her phone was like a bomb, like an IED, and it could go off any minute and bring the whole house down. Didn’t she realize that? It was wrong. It was foul. It was dirty. So what he did was take it across the kitchen, down the hall and into the bedroom, where he buried it in the bureau right next to his own.
Neither of them slept that night. Every time he began to doze off he was aware of her there beside him, tense and alert, listening for sounds in the night. And he was listening too. Listening not for gunfire or the crackle of police radios or the rattling pulse of helicopters sweeping overhead, but for the furtive creaking of the back door, the sigh of bedsprings in the guest room, for Adam, come home to them. Because if he didn’t come home, didn’t get out of the way of everybody, didn’t get treatment and meds and whatever else it was going to take—court-appointed shrinks, the lockup—there was only one way this was going to turn out. Adam might have known these hills, might have been a mountain man—or boy, because that was what he was, a boy still and always—but the sheriff had cordoned off the whole area on both sides of Route 20 and banned entry to anyone for any purpose. They were carrying live ammunition out there. They had dogs. They had heat sensors. If he didn’t come in—and here was a prayer, sent up to whoever might be listening—he was dead.
Then it was morning. Mist in the yard. Carolee asleep finally, mercifully, and the whole world asleep with her. He was in the kitchen making coffee and distractedly gazing out the window when he saw something moving on the periphery of the yard and his heart jumped. Adam, he was thinking, beyond all reason—what were the chances, since he wouldn’t even return to the old house, the house he’d trashed, let alone this one?—and in the next moment he was out the door, barefoot and dressed only in the boxers and T-shirt he’d slept in. The grass was cold and wet but he didn’t feel it, didn’t feel anything—not until the image of his son vanished and rematerialized as some clown in oversized shorts and high-tops with a video camera on one shoulder and a microphone in his hand. “Mr. Stensen,” he was saying, and he didn’t ask if he could have a word because he already knew the answer and just plunged right in, “how do you feel about your son being the target of the biggest manhunt this community has ever seen?”