mine. He didn't seem afraid right now, but he had his dad beside him. The boy's calm eyes told me that Carson had been brought up in the expectation that adults would protect him from harm. Nothing had happened to shake that expectation. Even though his brother had been taken, Carson was sure he would not be. I hoped he was right.
Parker seemed to think that Doraville would be safe if he discovered and eliminated the man who'd killed his son. He seemed to think it would be easy to do this. For a moment, I jeered at him in my head; but then I reminded myself of what this man had gone through. He had a right to any fantasy he chose if it would help him get through this life.
We all have our fantasies.
Chapter 7
THE cabin at the lake had been used by the Cotton family for forty years or more. In recent years, the McGraw family had enjoyed it. Parker said that at first they'd felt like intruders, but the surviving children of Archie Cotton were well into their sixties and had no children of their own living in Doraville any longer. They seemed content to let the children of their dad's wife enjoy the old place.
"Jeff loved it out there," Parker said. "Me and Carson, we'll stay out there and go fishing in the spring, won't we, Carson?"
"Sure," Carson said. "We'll catch some fish for Mom to clean. She loves to clean fish so much." That startled a smile out of his dad.
The deputy on duty had buzzed us into the fenced parking lot behind the police station. Tolliver and I scrambled out of the truck and got in our car. We followed Parker out of the parking lot.
Pine Landing Lake was about ten miles out of Doraville in a northeastern direction, and those ten miles were up a twisting, narrow two-lane road. We had met light traffic along the way. The lake seemed to be close to a community much smaller than Doraville, a dot on the map called Harmony. We didn't drive all the way around the lake, but at some points I could see its farther shore quite clearly. There were dwellings scattered around the lake, ranging from homes that looked year-round habitable to structures that were little more than open-air pavilions.
"This would be beautiful in summer," I said, and Tolliver nodded.
We followed Parker's truck at a respectful distance, and when he turned into a narrow driveway we followed, going sharply downhill for a few yards until we could park beside the truck at a broad flat spot by the shore.
The Cotton property was on one of the larger lots. It was a two-story building of very modest size, and you could tell it had been there a lot longer than some of the others because of the huge trees around it. Maybe it had just been built with more landscaping care than the others. Appropriately rustic, with cedar shingles on the roof and cedar siding, it blended into its surroundings better than most of the others we could see.
The bottom level appeared to be a storage area for the boats and other recreational miscellany. There was a heavy padlocked set of doors on this ground-level entrance, facing the lake. Stairs went up the south side of the building to a landing outside the main door. The outer door was screen, of course, the inner a heavy wooden door. Parker unlocked this door and gestured us in.
"Lots of the cabins out here don't have heating or cooling," he said, "but this one does. Mr. Archie did things right. Now, if the electricity goes off, which it does out here with some regularity, you've got your fireplace there, should be in working order. We had the guy clean it out last month."
I looked around. The interior was pretty much one big room. There were two double beds set up with their heads against the west wall, and there were several folding beds rolled up against the wall by them, covered with plastic cases. The air in the cabin felt musty, but not unpleasant. The smell of old cedar was strong. The fireplace was in the east wall, and it was faced with natural rock. The walls were unpainted cedar boards, adding to the feel that we were really roughing it. There was a small stove, an ancient refrigerator, and a couple of cabinets by the door where we'd entered, and a walled-off west