By the Monday after Thanksgiving, somebody had stolen eleven trail cameras from the woods along Hollow Creek, and Pete Yoder was ready to shoot whoever did it.
"Not shoot," his brother Ray said quickly. "He doesn't mean shoot."
"I mean it a little," Pete said.
Sheriff Earl Whitaker sat across from them in the back booth at Dot's, with a cup of black coffee and a little notebook. It was 5:30 in the morning. Opening day of deer gun season. Half the men in Calder County were already out in the woods in orange vests, and the other half were at the diner arguing about it.
The Yoder brothers were eighty and seventy-eight. They had hunted the same ridge above Hollow Creek every opening day since the Eisenhower years. Two weeks ago, they had put up three new trail cameras to scout for a big buck they'd been hearing about.
All three were gone. Straps cut. Nothing left but bark marks on the trees.
"It's those boys from the city," Pete said. "The ones who leased the old Pike land. Showed up in matching camouflage like they bought it the same day."
"They lost two cameras too," Earl said mildly.
Pete scowled. That was not what he wanted to hear.
It was not the kind of crime Earl usually worried about. Trail cameras cost a hundred, two hundred dollars. Nobody was hurt.
But Earl had been sheriff for twenty-nine years, and he knew something most people didn't. Small things go bad when nobody looks at them. Eleven missing cameras on opening week of deer season meant eleven angry hunters with rifles, walking the same woods, every one of them thinking it was the other guy.
So after breakfast, Earl went for a walk.
He walked the whole length of Hollow Creek, from the Creek Road bridge to the county line. He found every tree where a camera had been. He took a picture of each one. That night, at his kitchen table, he spread out a county map and put a little red dot at every tree.
Then he sat back and looked at it for a long time.
Eleven trees. Eleven cameras. They were on six different properties, owned by six different families, up and down three miles of creek.
And every single one of them had been facing the same thing.
The old logging trail. A narrow dirt track that ran along the north bank of the creek, through the woods, and came out at only one house.
The next day, Earl drove to the hardware store and bought a strap like the ones that had been cut. He tried cutting it with his pocketknife. It left a ragged, fuzzy edge, the way the hunters' knives would.
The straps from the trees were not ragged. They were cut clean and straight. One snip.
Scissors.
Not the kind of thing a deer hunter carries in the woods.
On Wednesday, Earl got lucky.
He was walking the creek bank below the Yoder ridge when he saw something shiny in the water. He took off his boot and sock, said a few words his mother would not have liked, and fished it out of the freezing creek.
It was one of the Yoders' cameras. The case was cracked and full of water. Whoever had taken it must have dropped it crossing the creek in the dark.
But the little memory card inside was still there.
Earl took it to Tyler Kessler at the diner. Tyler dried it out with a hair dryer, very carefully, and plugged it into his laptop.
"Most of it's ruined," Tyler said, clicking. "But there's a few pictures. Night vision. Black and white." He turned the screen. "Here's a raccoon. Here's a deer. Here's another deer."
He clicked again and stopped.
Earl leaned in.
The picture was grainy and gray. The time stamp in the corner said 2:14 a.m.
There was a figure on the logging trail. A tall, thin man, walking slowly with a flashlight. He was wearing what looked like pajamas. And a bathrobe. And a wide-brimmed hat.
Tyler clicked to the next picture. Same trail. Thirty seconds later.
The tall man was farther down the path now.
And behind him, following close, was a second figure. Much smaller.
A child.
Holding his hand.