Read The Searcher for Free Online Page A

shoulders straining against the weight of it as she heaved back and tipped it in the hole.
    Dry earth whumped down on the wooden lid of her husband’s coffin.
    Wood. Fifth anniversary is wood. Jim had told her that.
    They had spent their first anniversary here in this town, a break from study so he could show her the place where he hoped to be sheriff one day. He had introduced her to everyone, taken her dancing at the band hall where everyone knew him, and taken her riding in the desert, where they’d made love on a blanket by a fire beneath the stars, like there was nothing else but him and her and they were the only two people on earth. She had bought him a tin star from one of thesouvenir shops and given it to him as a present, a toy sheriff’s badge to keep him going until he got a real one.
    First anniversary is paper— he had told her with a smile— tin is what you give on the tenth.
    She had always loved it that he knew stuff like that, silly romantic stuff that was all the more sweet and surprising coming from the mouth of such a big guy’s guy like he was—like he had been.
    He never got to pin the real badge on, and the gift of wood she ended up getting him for their fifth anniversary was this pine box lying at the bottom of a six-foot hole.
    She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and it came away wet.
    Goddammit . She had promised herself she was not going to cry. At least there was no one around to see it. She didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. She didn’t want to give them a damned thing, not after they had taken so much already.
    She remembered the last time she had seen Jim alive, sitting behind his desk in his office at home, looking as if he had been crying.
    I need to fix this —was all he would tell her. The town needs fixing.
    Then he had stuffed some papers in his case and driven off into the evening. But it had been Mayor Cassidy who had driven back, knocking on her door at three in the morning to deliver the news personally, his words full of meaning but empty at the same time.
    Tragic accident . . . So sorry for your loss . . . Anything the town can do . . . Anything at all . . .
    She hauled another shovel load into the grave, then another, numbing herself against her sorrow and anger through the real physical pain of burying her husband. And with every shovelful of earth she whispered a prayer, but not for her dead husband. The prayer she offered up, as tears smeared her face and the smell of smoke drifted upfrom the desert below, was that the wildfire was actually a judgment, sent by some higher power to sweep right through the town and burn the whole damned place to the ground.
    Anything the town can do —Cassidy had said, his hat in his hands and his eyes cast down. Anything at all.
    They could all die and burn in hell.
    That was what they could do for her.

10
    â€œH OW DID HE DIE ?”S OLOMON KEPT HIS VOICE CALM BUT HE FELT LIKE howling and breaking something. His frustration was like a physical thing, a storm raging inside him, a stone weighing him down. Being confined in the tin can of the ambulance wasn’t helping.
    â€œCar wreck,” Morgan said, his eyes still looking up and out of the side window, toward the slopes of the mountains. “He was driving late at night, fell asleep at the wheel or maybe swerved to avoid something and ended up in a ravine. Bashed his head and cracked his skull. He was dead by the time we found him.”
    Dead by the time I found him too . . .
    Solomon stared past Morgan and out of the window. The town was starting to rise from the desert in scraps of broken fence and crooked shacks with rusted tin roofs or no roofs at all. None of it seemed familiar. “Where are all the people?”
    â€œOh, those are the old miners’ houses,” Morgan said. “They keep it like this for atmosphere, I guess, a curtain-raiser for the tourists before they get to Main Street. Most people