Chapter 10 Deller

He looked up Deller on the laptop when he got back to Dennis and Rachel's house.

It was a small unincorporated community about ninety miles northeast of the city, the kind of place that existed on maps as a named dot without quite being a town, no mayor, no municipal services, just a cluster of addresses that had accumulated enough density over time to warrant a name on a sign at the edge of a road. The population according to the most recent data he could find was somewhere under four hundred. There was a post office, which was the only reason it appeared in the letter at all, a general store that doubled as a gas station, and a volunteer fire department that covered a wide rural area around it.

It was the kind of place a person went to not be found.

He sat with that for a while.

His father had a post office box in Deller. Which meant his father had, at some point, chosen to be in Deller, or near enough to collect mail there. Which meant that Marcus Caldwell, who had drifted out of their lives three years ago in the gradual and unexplained way that he did everything, had not simply drifted. He had gone somewhere specific. He had picked a place and put down enough of a root to have a mailing address and he had not told either of his sons where he was.

Ethan had spent three years telling himself that his father's disappearance was the continuation of a long pattern. That Marcus had always been partly absent even when present and that his eventual full departure was the logical end of something that had been in motion since Ethan was a child. He had grieved it the way you grieve something you saw coming, briefly and without surprise, and he had moved on. He had built his life around the people who stayed.

All of those people are gone now.

And his father was ninety miles away in a place called Deller with a post office box and a letter in his files from Raymond Holt that talked about a different kind of solution.

He booked a room at the only accommodation he could find near Deller, a motel in a slightly larger town twelve miles away called Harwick, two nights because he did not know how long this would take or what he would find. He told Dennis over dinner that evening that he needed to follow something up and would be gone for a day or two. Dennis did not ask what. He had developed in the past few days a sensitivity to the shape of Ethan's silences that expressed itself as a willingness to not push, and Ethan was grateful for it in the wordless way you are grateful for things that cost another person something.

He left at six the next morning.

The drive northeast took him out of the city and through the suburbs and then into the kind of landscape that opens up when you have been driving long enough, wide flat fields interrupted by tree lines and the occasional farmhouse set back from the road, the sky bigger out here in the way that skies are when there is nothing tall enough to interrupt them. He drove with the radio on low, a talk station he was not listening to, the voices a background texture that kept the silence from being too complete.

He reached Harwick at eight forty and checked into the motel, a low building with exterior corridors and a parking lot that was mostly empty. The room smelled of industrial cleaner and had a window that looked out onto the parking lot and a heater that made a ticking sound when it cycled on. He set his bag on the bed and stood in the middle of the room and thought about what he was doing.

He was going to find his father.

He had no plan beyond that because he did not know what he was going to find. Marcus might not be in Deller anymore. The post office box might be old, maintained out of habit or administrative inertia, the person who rented it long since moved on. Or Marcus might be there, living in whatever reduced and quiet way a man lives when he has chosen to disappear, and if he was there then Ethan was going to stand in front of him and ask him what Raymond Holt had on him and what it had cost four people their lives.

He drove to Deller.

The sign at the edge of the road was weather-beaten, the lettering faded to the point where you had to know what it said to read it. The general store was the first building of any size, a low structure with a covered porch and two gas pumps out front and a hand-painted sign in the window advertising live bait and propane. A man in his sixties was sitting on the porch in a folding chair despite the cold, drinking from a thermos and watching Ethan's car the way people in small places watch unfamiliar vehicles, not with hostility but with the calm attention of someone who notices things and files them away.

Ethan parked and got out.

"Morning," the man said.

Morning. I'm looking for someone. I think he lives around here, maybe in the area. His name is Marcus Caldwell.

The man looked at him for a moment without any particular change of expression. You family?

His son.

Another moment. The man took a sip from his thermos. Marcus doesn't get visitors.

I know. This is important.

The man looked at him for a while longer with the evaluating patience of someone who has learned that most things people call important are not and who is trying to determine whether this is an exception. Whatever he found in Ethan's face seemed to settle something.

"There's a property about four miles out on Fenner Road," he said. Left side, white mailbox, the numbers have mostly fallen off but you can see where they were. He's out there most days. Keeps to himself.

Thank you, Ethan said.

"He alright?" the man asked. Not noisily. The way someone asks when they have decided they have a mild stake in the answer.

"I don't know yet," Ethan said honestly.

He drove Fenner Road slowly, watching the left side. The properties out here were widely spaced, each one set back from the road behind its own trees and its own particular relationship with solitude. He found the white mailbox where the man had described it, the ghost outlines of numbers visible if you were looking for them, and he turned onto the gravel track that led back through a stand of bare trees toward a small house that sat in a cleared area maybe two hundred yards from the road.

He parked and got out.

The house was modest and well-kept in a minimal way, the kind of maintenance that kept something functional without making it comfortable. Firewood was stacked neatly along one exterior wall. A truck he did not recognize was parked to the side. Smoke was coming from the chimney.

He walked to the front door and knocked.

He heard movement inside. A pause that lasted long enough to mean the person inside was deciding something. Then footsteps crossing the floor.

The door opened.

Marcus Caldwell stood in the doorway and looked at his son and the color left his face so completely and so quickly that for a moment Ethan thought he was going to fall.

He did not fall. He gripped the door frame and held on and stared at Ethan with an expression that contained so many things at once that none of them were individually readable.

Then he said, very quietly, How did you find me?

It was not a question. It was the sound of a man understanding that something he feared had finally arrived.

"Sarah is dead," Ethan said. Lily is dead. Noah is dead. And I think you know why.

Marcus closed his eyes.

The smoke rose steadily from the chimney into the pale October sky.