Sam waited until she was through the hedge. Then he followed.
He had been a soldier once, a long time ago, and some of it came back to him now without his asking: how to move quietly, how to keep to the shadows, how to keep a target in sight without being seen. He hated it. It felt like a betrayal of something, to be stalking his own daughter through the dark like an enemy. But he did not know what else to do, and his heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his teeth.
She went down the alley to Fourth Street and turned left, toward the river. The town was asleep. The streetlights made pools of orange light on the sidewalks, and Nora walked straight through them without hesitating, her breath smoking in front of her face. A car went by on Market Street, one block over, and she ducked into the shadow of a doorway until it passed, and Sam's stomach turned over. She knew to do that. She had learned to do that. How many nights?
She crossed Front Street and went down the steps to Water Street, where the old mills were.
Sam knew these buildings. Everybody in Harlow did. He had done some work down here, years ago, for a developer who had wanted to turn the Dunmore Mill into loft apartments before the money ran out. Most of the mills were still standing, hulking four- and five-story brick boxes with their windows smashed out and chain-link fences around them hung with NO TRESPASSING signs that nobody had paid attention to in thirty years. Teenagers came down here to drink sometimes. Homeless men slept here in the summer. In the winter it was nothing but wind and dark and the sound of the river moving under its ice.
Nora went past the Dunmore Mill and past the old dye house and stopped in front of a building Sam had nearly forgotten existed.
It was not a mill. It was smaller, two stories, wedged into a narrow gap between the dye house and the river wall, and it had once been a bakery. Petrakis and Sons, the faded painted letters said, high up on the bricks, under a ghost of a loaf of bread. Sam's grandmother had bought rye there when he was a boy. It had been closed since before Nora was born. The front was boarded with plywood gone gray and soft with weather. The fence around it had been cut long ago and peeled back like the lid of a can.
Nora slipped through the gap in the fence. She went around the side of the building, into the narrow alley between the bakery and the river wall, and Sam lost sight of her.
He ran then. He didn't care anymore about being quiet. He went through the gap in the fence and around the corner into the alley, his flashlight still off, his boots crunching on frozen gravel and broken glass, and stopped.