“Where did you get this?” he asked.
Henry watched him carefully. “A man saved our family in a storm twenty-seven years ago. This belonged to him.”
Caleb’s fingers closed around the watch. He knew the three stars, because he had scratched them himself on a Sunday afternoon while his father pretended to be cross about a ruined birthday present.
Before he could ask another question, the front door rattled under a heavy knock. Through the swirling snow, a figure in a dark sheriff’s uniform stood beneath the diner’s red sign, one hand braced against the frame and the other holding a flashlight.
Caleb opened the door, and Sheriff Daniel Rourke stepped into the warmth with snow clinging to his shoulders. He was a broad, silver-haired man with tired eyes, and the moment he saw the watch in Caleb’s hand, all the color seemed to leave his face.
“Where,” the sheriff asked, his voice suddenly unsteady, “did you find Elias Morgan’s watch?”
For a moment Caleb could not hear the wind or the rattle of the old stove. He heard only the name his mother had spoken so often when he was small and so rarely after the county mailed its final report.
“You knew my father,” he said. The words came out flatter than he intended, and he disliked how quickly a boy’s hurt had returned to a grown man’s voice.
Rourke removed his hat and set it on the counter. “I worked beside him. I was a deputy in the winter of ninety-nine, and he was the only plow operator I ever met who could tell you the weather by listening to the engine.”
Henry pushed himself upright in the booth. “The man with the orange coat. You know who he was?”
The sheriff looked from Henry to Ruth, then to the boy tucked between them. “Tell me what happened on that road twenty-seven years ago.”
Caleb remained standing with the watch in his hand. He was suddenly afraid of the answer, because for most of his life the worst part of losing Elias had been not knowing why he chose a road the county had told him to avoid.
Henry began slowly, as if every word had to be lifted from beneath snow. On Christmas Eve of 1999, he and Ruth had been taking their nine-year-old daughter Grace to see her grandmother when a snowbank forced their station wagon into a drainage ditch beyond the old quarry turnoff.
The car tipped onto its side. Henry injured his shoulder trying to force the door open, Ruth could not reach the back seat, and Grace, who had been wearing a little red coat, was wedged against the passenger window as the temperature inside fell.
“We thought a truck passed us,” Henry said. “We flashed the interior light, but it kept going, and I remember thinking that was the last person we’d see.”
The truck came back. A county snowplow stopped against the shoulder, and its driver climbed down without waiting for the wind to ease, carrying a flashlight, an emergency blanket, and a length of rope.
“He opened a space big enough to get Grace through,” Ruth continued. “Then he helped Henry move so I could crawl out. He took us to an old maintenance shed where there was a working heater, and he stayed until he knew we could breathe and speak without shaking.”