Startled, he opened his eyes, letting the feeling settle, until his breath evened again.
Now there was another man in the room next to the cage Lucas was in. Lucas could smell him through the thing high on the wall that blew air out of it. Hot. Cold, he thought. Both. What was the name of that thing? He couldn’t remember. But the scents of the men were stronger than the lighter scent of the woman and he lost his grasp on it. She faded away.
After a time, he smelled the man getting closer and was unsurprised when he showed up, using a key in the door with bars and sliding it open, coming into the cage with a smile.
“Thanks for waiting for me,” the man said. He had hair the color of the big rocks that sat on the river’s edge—light gray and dark silver all speckled together. “If you’ll follow me this way, we can talk.”
Lucas followed the man, turning his head to see the woman. But the door of the room she was in was closed. The man brought Lucas to another room with a table and two chairs. “Please sit,” the man said, and when Lucas did, the man sat too. “My name is Mark Gallagher. I’m an agent with the Montana Department of Justice.” He smiled again. His eyes are nice, Lucas thought. But he didn’t trust himself to see niceness. Or meanness. Lucas knew well that people lied and pretended. “I know you’ve been mirandized and that the sheriff already asked you some questions, but I have a few more if you don’t mind.”
Lucas nodded slowly, not wanting to answer questions, but understanding that they weren’t asking, they were telling.
“Good. Will you tell me again how you knew the victim, Isaac Driscoll?”
“He traded things with me. Things I needed but couldn’t get.”
“Okay. And why couldn’t you get the things you needed?”
He didn’t tell the man why. He wasn’t sure he should. Didn’t know who to trust, and who not to trust. Not yet. “I didn’t want to leave the forest. I wanted to stay there. And I . . . didn’t have a car.”
“I see. Okay.” But he could tell by the man’s face that he didn’t see. Did he know Lucas was lying?
“Is there anything else you can tell me about your relationship? Anything you knew about him that we should know?”
“No.” He tried not to picture the blood when he answered, the puddle that had grown and grown moving across the floor.
“Okay. And you live in a house on Isaac Driscoll’s property?”
“Yes.”
“And you traded things with him in exchange for rent?”
Rent? Lucas wasn’t sure what that meant, but he knew the man—the agent—expected it was true so he answered, “Yes.”
“So, in essence, you depended on Isaac Driscoll to obtain things not available to you?”
There were too many words in that sentence he didn’t understand, but he nodded anyway. “Yes.”
“Did you like Isaac Driscoll?”
“I don’t know. I just traded with him.”
The agent waited for a second before talking. “Okay. Have you seen anyone unusual in, er, your area of the woods so to speak, recently?”
Don’t tell anyone about me.
“No.”
“Okay.” He gave Lucas a long look and Lucas stared back. “Have you ever been to town before, Lucas?”
“No.” That was almost the truth. He’d been to town once, but only walked a few steps into it. He didn’t want to tell the agent about that. His muscles still got achy and tight when he thought about it.
“How did you come to live way out there?”
“I . . . my . . . parents couldn’t care for me. Driscoll let me stay on his land.”
The agent stared at him, but his face didn’t say anything. “So, you’ve been living out there how long?”
“Fifteen winters.” So many. So much cold. So much hunger. So much loneliness.