With that idea in mind, they paddled back out for their spring break vacation, sticking to the bigger lakes that had already thawed, and set up camp on an island melting in the afternoon sunlight. Lucas was reticent while they put up the tent and tarp. He became listless, crawling into his sleeping bag instead of exploring the campsite with his usual energy. He didn’t want breakfast the next morning and wouldn’t do more than sit at the fire and stare. At first Josiah had chalked it up to witnessing the fight with Heather, but when Lucas’s eyes glazed over he figured he’d caught a cold and let him sleep. In the middle of the next night, though, as Josiah was watching his campfire turn to embers, Lucas began screaming. He thrashed at the sides of the tent, pulling the stakes out and clawing at the fabric. Josiah dove inside and wrestled Lucas free, but he wouldn’t stop flailing or yelling about bugs. Bugs everywhere, attacking him, except they weren’t. It was too early for insects, too cold, but no amount of reason could calm Lucas, whose skin – to Josiah’s horror – felt hotter than the charred wood in the firepit.
There was no medicine in their camp and no way out, not when Lucas could thrash over the side of the canoe or capsize the whole thing in his panicking state. It was too dangerous. He held the last remnants of snow to his son’s forehead and murmured the same hollow reassurances over and over on a loop, willing the seizures and hallucinations away. When he saw a light flashing over the water, he thought he might be hallucinating, too. Then it drew closer and he made out a lone figure in a canoe.
He shouted over the water and pleaded for help. The light faltered and turned off and again he thought it was a mirage, until finally the bow of a boat slid onto the island’s shore.
A small woman bundled in all-weather gear stepped out. Only the top half of her face was visible as she eyed their campsite warily. He explained the situation and asked if she would bring them in. ‘I can hold him still while you paddle.’
After a long pause, where she searched the horizon of trees as if hoping anyone else might come along and volunteer for this job, she finally nodded her head toward the canoe. They loaded the essentials and Josiah strapped a life jacket on Lucas, propping him on his lap in the front, while the woman powered them from the stern, setting off into the night.
They moved slowly, inching through the black. Her strokes were measured and steady and she seemed to know where the shallows and boulders lay even without the flashlight’s beam. He didn’t inquire what she was doing by herself in the middle of a still-frigid April night. She didn’t ask him anything except about Lucas’s symptoms, and showed no reaction when Josiah listed them out.
It was almost dawn by the time they reached a small, rock-filled beach where the woman led him to a cabin nestled in the trees. She pointed out a small bedroom, where Josiah laid Lucas’s unconscious body that had now begun to shake and told him she thought Lucas had the flu.
‘Influenza. My daughter had it once.’
Josiah glanced around at the empty cabin. ‘Was your daughter okay?’
She nodded and turned away. ‘She is now.’
While he wiped Lucas’s brow with a cool cloth, she told him the doctors had given her a prescription for Tamiflu. Josiah asked if he could use the phone.
‘It’s not in service.’
Then he asked if he could use her car as soon as business hours began. She nodded and disappeared out the front door. Ten minutes went by, then twenty. After the night he’d endured, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d simply collapsed into the shadows of the woods. There was something spent about her, as if she’d given away all her vital organs and the frame that was left was fragile, unsupported. Just as the sun cleared the trees, though, she returned with a thermometer and a small manual, a medical reference book they used to look up influenza, its symptoms and treatment. The hallucinations, Josiah hoped, were the product of a fever that the thermometer read to be a hundred and two degrees. Since his breathing was normal and skin didn’t have a bluish tinge, he didn’t appear to be in immediate danger. He just needed fluids and medicine. The woman didn’t have any Tylenol – she didn’t seem to own much of anything the more Josiah looked around – but she handed him her car keys.
‘Would you go?’ He took a step back toward the bedroom. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to move him again yet. I’ll give you money.’
‘They won’t give me the prescription.’ She moved to a window, her silhouette ghostly in the half-light of the morning.
‘Shit.’ He didn’t want to make Lucas endure a doctor’s visit.
‘It’s okay to leave him here. I’ll watch him until you get back.’
He pulled his boots on and was halfway out the door before stopping and turning back. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Jane,’ she said and he couldn’t tell whether or not she was lying.
He glanced at the bedroom behind her, realizing that for the first time in nine years he was going to leave his son with a total stranger. She dropped her head, shirking his stare and making him hesitate further, but the longer he stood around the longer Lucas went without medicine. He slammed the door and raced to the car.
When he got into town, driving seventy in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone, the doctor’s office still wasn’t open yet so he stopped by the duplex to pick up extra clothes. Two squad cars were waiting in the driveway. Before Josiah could process what was happening, the officers took him down to the station to question him about Heather’s disappearance and when he lied and said he hadn’t seen her – -because who the fuck cared about Heather Price, he needed to get medicine back to his son – they threw him in jail for obstruction of justice. They flashed his record, as if that would scare some bullshit confession out of him, and played a game of bad cop/bad cop that had more to do with him than about finding Heather Price. He’d run into local boys like this all his life, the ones who stared at the same few miles of land so much they thought they owned anyone who dared to walk on it. Cooperating, he described the fight he’d had with Heather, leaving out the part where he’d shoved her into the walls, and asked them to dust his apartment for fingerprints.
‘She probably took the money straight to her dealer.’
‘Heroin?’ Sergeant Coombe, the overfed desk cop who seemed to be in charge, chewed on that idea like it had a funny taste he couldn’t identify. ‘We don’t have an opioid problem up here.’
An opioid problem. Josiah bit back the impulse to ask him if they didn’t have ‘the Internets,’ either. ‘Maybe that’s why Heather didn’t have any friends.’
‘It’s easy preying on a woman with no friends, isn’t it?’
He felt a flash of panic, not over Heather – all he’d ever done to Heather was say no, thank you – but about the hollow-eyed woman who paddled alone in the dead of night. He’d left her cabin hours ago and the more time that passed, the less he could remember about her. The color of her hair, the pitch in her voice, the expression on her face when she looked at Lucas: all of it wavered out of his memory, leaving a dark outline that could be inhabited by any manner of person. And Lucas – what would Lucas think when he woke up? If he woke up? The fever might have spiked again. A dozen possibilities competed for the worst-case scenario as Josiah stared at the beige on beige ceiling, crumbled at the corners and hacked up with holes for electrical equipment and video surveillance. He loathed it more with every minute he sat underneath it in handcuffs.
‘I’ve cooperated, haven’t I? I’ve told you everything that happened that day, so there’s no grounds to hold me anymore. I’m not hiding anything.’
‘No, you’ve been pretty straight with us about giving a missing woman money so she could buy illegal drugs.’
‘I paid her rent. What she did with the money after that is her business.’
Sergeant Coombe flipped a paper over and scanned it. ‘What about your son?’
Josiah went cold. ‘What about him?’
‘Would he agree with your version of events? Neighbors claim you’re two peas in a pod. They never see one of you without the other.’
‘Lucas has nothing to do with this. Leave him out of it.’
‘Listen here, Brad Pitt.’ Sergeant Coombe leaned over the interrogation table. ‘I’m sure you get away with ordering people around like that in most areas of your life, but I’m the one wearing the badge. I’m the one who’s going to find out what happened to Miss Price. And I hope – I really, truly hope – that you had something to do with it, because I would love to see your pretty face behind bars.’
‘Really?’ Josiah mirrored him, leaning in over his cuffed hands. ‘Because if I were you, I’d hope Miss Price was found alive.’