Page 53 of She Autumn Be Mine

“Oh, fuck.” She left me. She ran. Trig had warned me… I thought if I was there for her, built her trust, became the good, the man she needed she’d never run.

I stared out the window of the cabin, watching the leaves on the cottonwoods fall. The note slipped from my hand like it was one of them.

The thing that hurt the most was she ran to draw fire. She’d taken herself off the board so Marlene would have nothing left to aim at—but her.

SEVENTEEN

Retreated

JAKE

Autumn’s phone was on the kitchen counter, still plugged in, charged to a hundred percent and useless as a rock. That was the first thing that told me how bad it was. My wife had run before. She knew phones could be tracked, and she’d left hers behind on purpose. The second thing was in the cupboard, behind the flour, where the old coffee can lived—the one that had held her measly three hundred dollars back when three hundred dollars was everything she had in the world.

Empty now. She’d kept it. All this time. Through the wedding, the insurance card, the I-do’s—my wife had kept her running-away fund fed and ready behind the flour, because some part of Autumn had stayed packed our whole marriage even as she spoke about trusting me and forever.

She’d run. No denying. Not once that last day had I checked on her. I thought she needed space. I gave her space. Figured we’d talk it through over dinner.

She’d had most of a day’s head start before I ever read the note. The sheriff had his own guys out looking for her—no missing-person circus, not yet.

By dawn the ODRR mess hall was our own command center. Ash ran the map like the foreman he was, setting up county grid squares covering from here to the interstate. Knox took the south roads, Colt east and west. Carter worked the phones contacting bus lines, rental counters, even the airport in Billings. The Wylde sisters printed flyers with the good photo of my wife and son from the wedding and with Willow and Ro, they drove everywhere from here to Lewistown posting them.

Harper kept the coffee urns going around the clock with Avery delivering every pastry and pie they had from the Copper Cup. Eldon laid out meat and cheese and his good bread and kept it filled at all hours. “No one searches hungry,” he said.

The whole town joined in the search for Autumn and Stetson.

It’d been two days and nothing.

We figured she’d ditched the car early, maybe in a barn, maybe traded it. The theory nobody said above a whisper was Wyoming: that she’d gone south to face Marlene Eaton alone, trade herself for our peace the way I’d told her Renata did it. Fuck, why did I tell her? The thought put a chill in my blood.

Cash had reached Nanette at her father’s bar, and confirmed she hadn’t heard from her, but that put the old friend into a panic about it. Of course, Cash was more than happy to be the man consoling her.

Gavin got on the phone with the Sheridan County sheriff, cop to cop, and Sheridan pulled their interstate camera runs for forty-eight hours of southbound traffic. According to them, her car never crossed into Wyoming. It should have been a relief to hear—it just meant she was out there in the big empty world with our son, invisible to me, exactly what Trig had warned me about, that’d she run.

The one door the Wyoming coordination opened: with an active search running, Sheridan gave Cash’s questions official cover. The PI went from rattling doors to reading records, and he called me twice a day—once about Autumn’s trail, once about the other trail he was pulling on Brantley Eaton.

Had he gotten to her? Was the note a fake? I kept a copy of it in my pocket—the sheriff taking the original for fingerprinting just in case.

The evening of the second day, hopeless, I walked out to the pumpkin patch alone and reread the note again a hundredth time.

The fall season was almost over. The patch sat picked clean, wagon ruts frozen in the mud, corn shocks going gray, the hay-bale photo stage still standing where Rayna had bullied us into being a family before we were one, just to enter the photography contest. The wedding arch stood bare against the sky, Dot’s silk flowers packed away somewhere for keeps.

I stood at the mini-pumpkin bin and came apart, holding onto the edge of it to stay upright.

Stetson had claimed his first gourd here, slapped it twice and bit it. I’d sorted a whole bin for the best pumpkin. My son had carried that little pumpkin around till it went soft. Only my father’s whittled goat became his next baby obsession.

I’d married his mother fifty feet from this spot with a hat between our faces and a whole county cheering—and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing them.

“Why’d you give her space, McCall,” I complained. Nobody answered. I’d have taken anybody’s answer. Trig’s. Even the goat’s.

My phone buzzed from Ash at our command center. I ran back as fast as I could.

When I entered, Gavin held up a hand for quiet, his phone to his ear, and then he covered it and gave it to us all.

“From the tip line. A motel owner in Roundup—the Sagebrush, a cash-only outfit, says a young woman took a room two nights ago, paid cash, and parked her car around back under the carport. A sweet boy with her, and she tipped the cleaning lady.” His eyes came to me, and there was something in them I couldn’t read yet. “He saw the flyer on the noon news and called it in. Jake—she checked out this morning.”

The room erupted—this morning, headed where, get somebody up there—and Roundup was north, she’d gone north while every one of us reasoned south, to Wyoming. Why North?

My phone rang again. It was Mom.