Edmund Graves's Arc

Chapter 8 of 8

Edmund walked home from the woods with the game call still in his pocket. The wolf's yellow stare stayed with him. He had one problem left that mattered more than a girl or an animal. Somewhere between the city and the sheriff's desk, a sketch of the woman who got away was moving closer. He did not know how close. Without knowing, he could not plan his last kill or his exit. He made coffee and sat at the kitchen table with a road map. The county seat was forty miles east. Mail from the city came through a sorting office there, then out to the sheriff by county van three days a week. He had watched that van at the crossroads all summer. If the sketch was in a padded envelope on that route, he needed eyes on the depot. He could not stand at the depot himself. His face was the face on the paper. He needed a reason to be in town without being seen looking. He thought of the young mother two doors down the road, the one with three small children hanging off her at the grocery. Sarah Morrison. She drove into the county seat every Thursday for diapers and cheap milk. She talked to anyone who would hold a door. He crossed the yard that afternoon with a paper sack of apples from his tree. She was on the porch with a toddler on her hip and a pacifier in her free hand. Two more children fought over a plastic truck at her feet. She smiled at him like he was a kind neighbor. "I hate to ask," Edmund said. "I'm expecting a legal envelope from my sister's lawyer. Post office keeps losing it. You go through the county seat Thursdays, don't you? Could you stop at the sheriff's front counter, ask if any mail from the city came in for Graves this week? Save me the drive." She shifted the toddler. "Sheriff's office? Sure. I'm in that block anyway." "I'd owe you." He handed her the apples. "Just the front desk. They'll say yes or no." She agreed. He walked back across the road with his hands steady for the first time in a week. She would ask an innocent question at the counter. She would come home and tell him what mail the sheriff was waiting on. He would know the day. Thursday evening she knocked on his door. The toddler was asleep against her shoulder. Her face was wrong. Pinched. Careful. "They said no envelope for you," she said. "But the deputy at the counter, he looked at me a long time. He asked how I knew you. He wrote my name down." Edmund kept his face still. He thanked her. He closed the door. He had his answer. The sketch was already there. The deputy had it in a drawer and was watching for anyone who spoke his name.