“Crap,” Jack said. He popped the driver’s side door and got out.
Kyle got out, too. It was thick and muggy, still heavy summer even though it was this late in the year. He looked to the left and to the right. Everything was torn up. He didn’t recognize the place.
“You remember what it was like before?” he asked Jack.
“Before what?”
“Before they started this building.”
“Sure I remember what it was like before.”
“Do you remember them digging it up the first time?”
“They dug it up before?”
“When Chester Ray Morton went missing. There was a rumor. Somebody said they saw him out here, or saw some guy out here, and we came and dug it up. We dug the whole thing.”
“Wasn’t that twelve years ago? You were on the force twelve years ago?”
“No,” Kyle said. “I was at the college. But I remember it. I thought everybody remembered it.”
“I’m from Kiratonic,” Jack said. “I wasn’t living here then.”
The man walking toward them was beginning to look like something besides a blob in haze. Kyle recognized him. It was old Tim Kika, except that his name wasn’t really Tim. It was something complicated that sounded foreign. He just called himself Tim.
Shpetim Kika stopped in front of them. He looked bad. Kyle couldn’t put a more precise word on it. He just looked bad.
“Well,” Jack said.
“We left it alone,” Shpetim said. “After we opened it, I mean. I mean, it was there, what were we supposed to do, it came out of the dirt. So we opened it.”
“You opened it?” Kyle asked.
“One of the guys opened it,” Shpetim said. “I was there. They pulled it out of the ground, and then they were worried about it. I mean, it’s a yellow backpack. We should have thought not to touch it. But we opened it. And there it was.”
“Have any of you touched it?” Kyle asked.
“I don’t think so,” Shpetim said. “Nderi, my son, came out here to look at it first. Before I did. Only, we didn’t, you know, any of us, put our hands on it. We opened it, with a stick, because we wondered. You guys looked at this place already. You dug it all up. I remember.”
“I remember, too,” Kyle said. “I was just thinking about it. But I don’t think we actually dug it all up. I think we just searched the place.”
“Even so,” Shpetim said. “Somebody dug a hole in the ground, you’d have noticed it. Wouldn’t you? We thought you would.”
“Maybe we better go take a look at it,” Jack said.
Kyle looked at the sky over his head. There wasn’t much to see. Everywhere it was getting dark. The air was thick and hard to breathe. He did remember police going over this whole field, inch by inch of it. And that was—what? Weeks later?
“It wasn’t like it was wooded,” Kyle said.
“What?” Jack said.
“I know what you mean,” Shpetim said. He sounded relieved. “It wasn’t wooded. It wasn’t like there were trees that would make something hard to find. The police were here. They went all over it. If there was something dug in the ground just then, you’d have seen it. So we didn’t think, you know, that this could be related to that. Except here we are.”
“Here we are,” Kyle said.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re all talking about,” Jack said.
Kyle sighed. “He’s talking about Chester Ray Morton. You know, the guy who went missing, the guy on all the billboards all over town? He had a yellow backpack the night he went missing. Bright yellow, L.L. Bean backpack.”
“It’s bright,” Shpetim said. “It’s been in the dirt. If it’s even his. And not, you know, other kinds of trouble.”
“They didn’t search anything for weeks after he went missing,” Kyle said, “because the police didn’t think he was dead. They just thought he’d decided to disappear. But his mother kept pushing, and his mother kept pushing, and then somebody said they’d seen somebody in around here, and we went over the entire area. I remember it. I remember the day of the search. A bunch of us drove our cars up over there and got out and sat on them and watched. But they didn’t find anything.”
“Is this the guy whose mother is supposed to be crazy?” Jack said.
“If it was my son, I’d keep pushing,” Shpetim said.
Then he looked back at the little crowd of men, and Kyle and Jack looked back with him.
“Well?” Shpetim said.
Jack was tired of waiting. He started across the building site, all torn up now, the grass mostly gone. Kyle and Tim looked at each other. Shpetim shrugged.