Chuck's father, no doubt.
"Yeah, he slugged me in the stomach."
"I imagine you were pretty angry about that."
"I wasn't happy."
"I'll bet your brother wasn't happy, either."
"I'm right here," Tolliver said. "No, I definitely wasn't happy. But his dad came in, and the boy just seemed so disturbed, we left."
"And you didn't call us to report the whole thing?"
"No, we didn't. We figured you-all had more important things to be doing." She knew we hadn't called. She was just underscoring all the mistakes we'd made. I felt worse and worse. Going back to the barn had been my fault, my bad decision, and if the boy was gone, maybe that was my fault, too.
"So no one knows where he is?" Tolliver asked. "Since when?"
"One of the other counselors from the health center came by, maybe an hour after the incident in the barn, as close as I can make out. This is a close friend of Tom's, and he wanted to talk to Chuck to see if he could help." The sheriff made a face. She didn't believe counseling would make any difference in Chuck's case, it was clear. "So Tom starts looking for the boy to get him to talk to the counselor, but Chuck wasn't there. So the counselor insisted Tom call the police. He did, and then he began calling Chuck's friends. No one had seen the boy."
"You haven't had any luck finding someone who saw him around town?"
"No luck. But we thought he might have tried to find you, to finish what he'd started. Or to apologize. With a kid that messed up, who knows what he was going to do."
Deputy Rob Tidmarsh came in, stomping his feet just like the sheriff had done. "Didn't see nothing, Sheriff," he said.
So she'd been distracting us while her minion checked out the property. Well, there was nothing to find, and there was no point getting angry about it. She'd done what she had to do.
"We might need to call our lawyer," I said.
"I've got him on speed dial," Tolliver said.
"Or maybe," Rockwell said, overriding our voices, "you found Chuck and decided to punch him back." She was looking at Tolliver as she said this, as if I were accustomed to sending Tolliver to do my punching.
"We were here all night," Tolliver said. "We got a phone call at - what time did Manfred call us, Harper?"
"Oh, about three," I said.
"What evidence is a phone call on a cell phone?" Rockwell asked. "And did Manfred talk to you?" She was looking at Tolliver with no friendly face.
"He talked to me, but Tolliver was here."
"He won't say he talked to Tolliver, then."
"Well, he may have heard him in the background. But he didn't talk to him directly, no." Calling our lawyer in Atlanta was beginning to seem like a possibility we should bear in mind. Art Barfield had made a mint off us lately, and I was sure he wouldn't mind making a little more.
"I'm not in the habit of abducting boys," Tolliver said. "But of course there's someone here in town who is. Why are you looking at me instead of trying to find out who took all the other boys? Isn't it far more likely that that's who's got Chuck Almand? And if that's so, isn't the boy running out of time?"
I figured Sheriff Rockwell was grinding her teeth together in frustration, from the tensed look of her face.
"Do you think we're not looking?" she said, almost biting the words out. "Now that he doesn't have the use of his usual killing ground, where would he have taken the boy? We're searching every shed and barn in the county, but we have to check out all other possibilities. You were one of them, and a pretty likely one at that."
I didn't think we were so damn likely, but then, we'd had the run-in with Chuck and his dad. There was something more I could tell the law.
"He told me he was sorry," I said to the sheriff.
"What?"
"The boy said he was sorry. For hitting me. He told me to find him later."
"Why? Why do you think that was? What sense does that make?" The tall deputy was looking over Rockwell's shoulder at me as though I'd started barking.
"At the time I just thought - I have to say, I thought it was just some kind of mental illness talking. He looked so strange when he said it."
"And what do you think now?"
"I think...I don't know what I think."
"That's not a