Hold the Dark: A Novel by William Giraldi Read Free Book Online Page A

human one. Most are pushed on by appetites no more complicated than a wolf’s. A wolf expelled from its pack will travel hard distances to find another—to be accepted, to have kin. It wants to stanch hunger, sleep off fatigue, make itself anew. He understood that. But Medora Slone. How could he explain this? Why did these people refuse to acknowledge him? They began leaving the cabin by twos and did not come back.
    He creaked from the armchair to take another pull of whiskey, alone now in the Slones’ cabin. At the open front door he squinted out into a mass of ebon silence and could not fathom where these people had gone. Shouts came from somewhere in the village. The barking of sled dogs. Another snow machine screaming through trees. When the wind lifted it carried clouds of snow into the cabin and Core closed the door. He built a hasty fire in the hearth, half surprised he could do it with hands so shaky.
    He unpeeled the caribou suit from himself and returned to the armchair, woozy from two pulls of whiskey. From the day’s long hunt. He thought of water and food but couldn’t move. The heat of the fire flared against his face and he thought then of the husband, of Vernon Slone. Of how these facts would reach him. Of how a husband and father is ravaged by this.
    And what he remembered before he blinked into sleep was his own father just after his mother had left the family for reasons no one knew. Ten years old, Core had thought his father would retreat into drink or Jesus. But instead he went to the cinema every night, that one-screen theater with the neon marquee in their nothing Nebraska town. Oftentimes he stayed in the theater to watch the same movie twice— Spartacus , Exodus , Psycho . Core would walk down to Main and Willow to search for him after dark. He’d steal into the exit door of the theater and find his father there—alone before those colossal talking faces, snoring in the chair with an empty bucket of popcorn aslant on his lap.
    * * *
    Police were in the Slones’ cabin now, three white men wearing civilian clothes, winter hunting garb. Upright in the armchair, Core woke to the sound of their wet boots grating against the wood floor. He’d been asleep nearly two hours, he thought, maybe more. He wiped the spittle that had run into his beard, then stood to speak to the man who looked in command, the one with the crew cut, the russet beard, the cigarette behind his ear.
    Donald Marium introduced himself to Core; he had the soft hand of a barber and beneath his beard a creaseless face. Core spoke too quickly—who he was, why he’d come, what he’d found—and Marium told him to sit, to breathe. He went with the two others into the root cellar to see the boy, and minutes later came back to Core, told him to begin his story, to begin where it began. They sat at the table and smoked.
    When Core finished his telling, Marium said, “Tell me again, please, why she asked you here.”
    “I don’t know that. She’d read my book on wolves.” He glanced about the room for his book but could not see it. From the pocket of his flannel shirt he took the letter Medora Slone had written him and passed it across the table to Marium, who read it in silence.
    “And you decided to come here why?”
    “To help,” Core told him. “She said wolves had taken children from this village. It’s in the letter. See for yourself. She said no one would help. I came here to help.”
    “Wolves did take two kids from here last month. They weren’t found. We came here to try and help these people, but I’m not sure how anybody can help that. You can’t just walk onto the tundra looking for wolves.”
    “But no wolf took Bailey Slone,” Core said.
    Marium flattened his filter into an ashtray, then stood back from the table. Core did the same.
    “We’ll have to get it all figured out.”
    “Are the others on their way?” Core asked.
    “The others who?”
    “The others. The police to find Medora Slone.