hundred yards farther was a bridge.
“Is that it?” Jim Corliss asked his son.
As Bronski pulled off the road a few feet from the bridge, Randy looked at it uncertainly. “I guess so,” he said at last. The three of them got out of the car, and Randy scrambled down the bank to stand beside the stream. Now he was sure. “This is it,” he called up to his father.
“Okay. There’s a path up here,” Jim replied. Randy climbed back up.
“We have to go downstream,” he announced.
“How far?” Bronski asked.
“I don’t know,” Randy replied. He started down the path, with his father and the policeman following. Every few minutes he glanced down at the stream. This morning, in the bright sunlight, everything looked different. Last night the stream had been swift and deep, and he could remember its roaring in his ears. But now its sound was a murmur, and he could see that it was only a couple of feet deep.
Maybe it was the wrong stream, and the bridge had been the wrong bridge. What if he was lost and couldn’t find the Academy? Would they think he’d lied about everything?
As he kept walking, he became increasingly nervous. The two men with him exchanged a glance.
“It seems like an awfully long way,” Bronski finally commented.
Randy said nothing. Had it really been this far? He tried to remember how far he’d waded, but there were no landmarks, nothing he recognized.
And then he heard the waterfall. He broke into a run, and the two men had to jog to keep up with him.
“This is it,” Randy yelled. “This is the waterfall. See?” He pointed excitedly at the cascading stream and the large rock looming above it “That’s the rock I sat on after I climbed the waterfall.” He began recounting the struggle he’d had fighting the current, too afraid of the dogs to leave the stream. “Come on,” he finished. “There should be a fork just a little way farther.” He dashed ahead, and disappeared around a bend in the trail.
“What do you think?” Jim asked.
Bronski shrugged. “I don’t know. He found the bridge, and he found the waterfall.” Then they heard Randy’s voice floating back to them.
“I found it! I found the fork! We’re almost there.”
Jim and Carl caught up with Randy at the point where the stream split into two smaller channels. “Which fork do we take?” Jim asked.
“This one,” Randy said, no longer uncertain. “Come cm!”
The path disappeared, and the three of them began pushing their way through a tangle of laurel, keeping as close to the brook as they could.
“It’d be easier to wade,” Randy suggested.
“How much farther is it?”
“I don’t know. Not much. I could still hear the dogs barking when I got to the fork.”
And then they were there. The brook suddenly disappeared into a metal culvert, the end of which was covered by a heavy wire-mesh grating. A few yards beyond the opening of the culvert they could see a high fence. Randy stared silently at the fence for a moment, then turned to look up at his father. “We’re here,” he said. “That’s the fence around the Academy.”
Bronski moved forward. The fence stretched off in either direction, and beyond it he could see nothing but more woods. “Where’s the house?” he asked.
“You can’t see it from here,” Randy told him. “It’s off that way.” He started walking along the fence, but the sound of Sergeant Bronski’s voice stopped him.
“Randy? Didn’t you say there was a dead dog right about here?”
Randy nodded. “I threw it against the fence, and it got electrocuted.”
“Where is it?”
Randy stared through the fence, trying to remember exactly where he’d climbed it
He couldn’t.
He looked for the body of the dog.
It wasn’t there.
Tentatively, he reached out and touched the fence.
There was no current.
“But it was here,” he said. “I know it was here.” He looked up at the two men, sudden tears brimming in his eyes. “I’m not lying,” he said. “The gate’s off that way, and from there you can see the house.” Determinedly, he began walking along the fence, with the two men once again trailing after him.
They came to the gate, and Randy stood still, staring through the bars. In the distance he could see the massive brick house, its barred windows clearly visible in the bright morning sunlight Flanking him on either side were his father and Sergeant Bronski Bronski’s eyes swept the house and lawn and came to rest on the rusted chain that was wrapped around