He turned and began to run.
21
The bulrushes shook as if a herd of elephants raged through and in a moment a group of men burst into the clearing. My father and Karl and Gus were among them and the sheriff was there and Doyle and a couple of deputies. They halted when they saw Jake and me at the lean-to. Halted all except my father who strode straight to us and stood eyeing us with confusion and concern.
“What are you boys doing here?”
“Looking for Warren Redstone,” I said.
The sheriff came and stood beside my father. He said brusquely, “Where did he go?”
I thought about Redstone’s parting words: You’ve just killed me, white boy. And I recalled the afternoon in the back of Halderson’s Drugstore and the drunken men with the look of murder in their eyes. I stared into my father’s face where rain ran off his brow in clear rivulets and I saw a fearful desperation there. I looked into the sheriff’s face and was met with a coldness, a hard determination empty of compassion, and although I didn’t see murder in either of these men what I did see was disturbing enough to make me hold my tongue.
“That way,” Doyle shouted and pointed downriver toward the path Jake and I had hastily broken through the reeds and Warren Redstone in his own flight had followed.
“How long ago?” the sheriff demanded.
“A couple of minutes,” I said.
All the men began a footrace except my father who hesitated a moment and pointed toward the slope of the riverbank and said, “Go on up to the car and stay there, do you understand?” And without waiting for us to reply he joined the others in pursuit.
I stood in the rain and looked down the ragged empty way we’d torn through the reeds.
Beside me Jake said, “Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“That he’s as good as dead? That they’ll kill him?”
“He thinks it’s true,” I said.
“Do you think he hurt Ariel?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t think he did, Frank.”
The moment of my own anger had passed and in the quiet of the regret that followed I thought Jake was right.
“Come on,” I said and began to run in the direction Redstone and the men had gone.
Thunder broke again and again over our heads and in those moments lightning whitened the gray curtain of the rain. The downpour was so heavy I couldn’t see more than thirty yards ahead and the men were not there. We raced as fast as our legs would carry us but the men’s legs were twice as long and took them away at twice the speed and I was sure that catching them was hopeless. Jake at the beginning was by my side but he gradually fell back and though he called to me to wait I ran on alone. Past the place where only fifteen minutes earlier we’d come down from the Flats, past the last of the houses along Fifth Street, and finally to the trestle across the river where my history with Warren Redstone had begun.
I’d run myself out. I stood dripping wet in the shelter of the trestle in the same place where the dead man had lain and Redstone had sat beside him. I breathed in gasps and my side hurt. The riverbank had become slick from the rain and in the mud there I could see tracks where the men in front of me had run in their pursuit. I thought I might even have heard them calling to one another though I couldn’t be certain because the roar of the wind and the pounding of water out of the sky drowned out almost all other sounds. I lifted my face in the same way Warren Redstone on that first encounter had lifted his and had caught Jake and me spying on him through the crossties of the trestle. And there above me between the crossties was the face of Redstone staring down.
He didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He simply lay flat on the trestle and looked at me with eyes as brown and old and worn down as two stones that had tumbled along the glacial river over ten thousand years ago, a river that had been given the same name as he: Warren.
I remembered what he had said to Jake on our first meeting, that the tracks were like a river, a steel river, always there but always moving, and I realized that the river Warren Redstone intended to follow was not one of water.
He stood. I saw his body in flickers between the crossties as he started across the trestle. I left the shelter of the railroad bridge and walked out along the riverbank and watched him moving quickly and carefully from crosstie to crosstie with his head down so that he would not misstep and fall. He looked back at me once as if gauging my intent then returned his attention to making his escape.
The last I saw of him he’d crossed the trestle and slipped behind the veil of the heavy rain.
22
The sheriff’s people finally got around to searching the railroad tracks on the other side of the river but by then Warren Redstone was long gone. I never said a word to anyone about seeing him. How could I possibly explain my silence, my complicity in his escape, things I didn’t really understand myself? My heart had simply directed me in a way that my head couldn’t wrap its thinking around and the deed once done was impossible to undo. But it weighed on me heavily. And with all that was about to occur, that guilt over my silence would finally come near to crushing me.
In the driving rain that afternoon a search was conducted along both sides of the river from well above Sibley Park to well beyond the trestle. It turned up nothing. The sheriff’s people also carried out a search of the O’Keefes’ basement where Warren Redstone had been staying. They’d hoped to discover something that might further connect the man to Ariel, maybe even the mother-of-pearl barrette that matched her locket or the gold watch she’d worn that night, but they came away empty-handed. The sheriff told us that he’d notified authorities in all the adjoining counties and assured us that Redstone would be caught. In the meantime, he would continue his search for Ariel.
Judy Kleinschmidt finally confirmed Morris Engdahl’s story and so gave him the alibi that freed him from the cell where for several hours he’d remained the guest of the sheriff’s department. The sheriff confided to my father that he didn’t necessarily believe Engdahl’s story or the girl’s confirmation of it but he had no choice at the moment except to release the kid, especially in light of the locket that had been in Warren Redstone’s possession.
By that evening our situation was well known in New Bremen. My grandfather and Liz arrived and Liz took charge of feeding us which was its own blessing since she was a wonderful cook. Emil Brandt had gone home and then returned because, he told my mother, he couldn’t wait this out alone. Karl, who’d brought him, looked uncomfortable in our presence and in the presence of our misery and he quickly left. The downpour continued and brought an early dark and after dinner the adults sat in the living room and Jake and I sat on the front porch, barely talking, and watched the rain fall so hard it threatened to beat the leaves from the trees.