“How?”
He heard the air expel from Lance’s lungs. It sounded sad, like the last breeze before the first snowfall.
Lance lowered his eyes to the ground at his feet. “My father told me. I must have blocked it out, and I only just remembered. He told me what he’d done to her and that she was in the river near the weeping willow.”
Sheriff Dodd turned and saw the ancient tree that sat just up the rise from the riverbed, its low boughs hanging in a mournful show of respect. He shifted his gaze back to the child he had carried from the field beyond in the light of a moon over twenty years before. “I’m sorry.” It was the only thing he could think of to say.
Lance nodded and turned from the river. He scanned the horizon and hunched his shoulders as the breeze returned, whispering of the fall that had only just begun. “Thank you. I wanted to tell you that. I never got to say it before.” Lance looked across the distance between them, at the aging sheriff. The man was different now, but also very much the same. He still held dignity and a rightness that time hadn’t stripped him of.
The sheriff nodded and squinted again at the man before him, not really understanding what he was feeling but knowing enough not to question it. It was as if something tired and worn had finally ended.
Lance turned and walked across the field without another look back. The sheriff heard his receding footsteps breaking the dry chaff of the last crop as he went.
“Sheriff?”
Dodd looked down to where Garrison waited, his hands twitching nervously at his sides. He pulled his hat down closer to his head and stepped down the slope of the hill, toward the awaiting deputy and divers, who had stored their gear away. There was work to be done and no one else to do it.
The door of the Land Rover snapped shut, locking out the coolness of the day. Lance sighed and looked down at his hands, which sat on his thighs. The plastic and titanium prosthetic pieces clicked as he flexed and moved the fingers that he could still feel but were no longer there.
“You okay?”
He looked to his right and smiled at the imploring look on Mary’s face. “Never been better,” he said.
The concerned creases in her brow remained until he leaned across the center console and kissed her on the mouth. When he sat back in his seat, her expression relaxed and he saw the tension that had been building prior to the trip begin to dissipate like mist in a morning sun.
“Are you feeling okay?” he asked.
She tilted her head and nodded, rubbing her growing belly for a moment before reaching out to hold his hand. “Just fine. I’m just worried that the nursery won’t be done in time.”
Lance looked into her teasing green eyes and sighed. Mary laughed and squeezed his hand.
“I’ll finish painting soon. We have another four months, you know,” Lance said, turning the key in the ignition.
“I know, and I’m not pressuring you, although I don’t know why you keep insisting on pink when we don’t know what it is yet.”