Hank stood at the edge of the road and made himself not run.
Every instinct in him wanted to go plunging out into that field after the footprints. Forty years ago, he'd have done it. He'd have been lost inside of a minute, and then there would have been two people out there instead of one.
He went back to the truck.
"Somebody's out in the field," he told the boys. "Walked off from that car. Footprints are gone already."
Avery's face went white. Marco reached for the door handle.
"Sit down," Hank said. "Not one of us goes out there on foot. Not yet."
He grabbed the CB. "Ohio Valley to county garage. Got a car in the ditch on Sugar Run, half mile below Ridge Road. Engine running, driver gone. Somebody's on foot in the Lindqvist pasture. Call the squad, call the sheriff."
"Copy, Ohio Valley," Lynn said, and he heard her voice tighten. "They'll be a while. Roads are bad."
"I know they're bad," Hank said. "I'm the one plowing them."
He sat for ten seconds with his hands on the wheel and thought.
The footprints had gone out across the road and into the field. The field ran downhill from the road toward the creek, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest, across Sugar Run and down the slope.
A person lost in a whiteout doesn't walk straight. They can't.
They turn away from the wind without knowing it, to keep it out of their face. In the dark, in the snow, with nothing to see, they'll drift downwind and downhill every time.
Hank knew that because he'd done it himself, on I-70, in 1981.
"She's going downwind," he said. "Down toward the creek."
"How do you know it's a she?" Marco asked.
"Footprints were small. And there was a hospital badge on the dashboard." Hank put the truck in gear. "Avery, get the spotlight. Marco, you watch the right side for the fence."
At the bottom of the Lindqvist pasture, there was a fence. Hank had plowed past it on Sugar Run a hundred times in good weather. Four strands of barbed wire on wooden posts, running along the low end of the field from the road all the way down to the creek.
Something solid. Something that didn't move.
He drove the plow slowly down Sugar Run to where the fence met the road, and stopped with the headlights pointed along the fence line. Avery swung the spotlight out the window and down the row of posts.
Then Hank put his hand on the horn and held it down.
The International's horn was an old air horn, loud enough to wake the dead in three counties. He blew it long, then stopped. Long, then stopped.
Long, then stopped, a slow and steady rhythm, the same three-count over and over, so whoever was out there would hear it wasn't random. So they'd know somebody was calling them.
"Watch the fence," he said. "Watch for anything that moves."
They watched. The snow blew through the spotlight beam like smoke. The horn bellowed out over the dark field.
Two minutes went by. Then three.
"There," Avery shouted.
Seventy yards down the fence line, something dark was moving. A shape, low against the snow, one hand on the top wire. It was coming toward the light.
Marco was out of the cab before Hank could stop him. But he did it right. He went straight to the fence and grabbed the top wire and followed it hand over hand, the way Hank had told him an hour ago, and he never let go of it once.
He came back with a young woman leaning on his shoulder.
Her name was Kaylee Delaney. She was thirty-one, a respiratory therapist at the hospital in Marietta, coming home from a twelve-hour night shift.
She lived on the next farm over with her husband, Mark, and a blind-eyed mare named Juniper. She'd slid into the ditch, couldn't get out, and saw what she thought were the lights of the Lindqvist farmhouse across the field.
"I thought I could walk to it," she said, shaking so hard her teeth clicked. "It looked so close. And then it was gone, and I couldn't find the road, and I couldn't find the car."
"What'd you do?" Hank asked.
"I walked into the fence," Kaylee said. "Cut my hand on the wire. And I thought, well, at least it's something. So I held on to it. And then I heard the horn."
Hank wrapped her in the wool blanket Lorraine kept behind his seat and turned the heater up as high as it would go. Avery poured her a cup of coffee from the thermos. Her hands were too cold to hold it, so he held it for her.
"Fence saved you," Hank said.
"The horn saved me."
"Well," Hank said. "The horn told you which way. The fence got you there."
They drove her home. Mark Delaney was standing in his driveway with a flashlight, in his coat over his pajamas. He'd been calling her phone for an hour.
The squad met them there and checked Kaylee over. Cold, they said, and a cut hand that would need a couple of stitches, and very lucky. Earl Whitaker pulled in behind the squad in his Crown Victoria, took one look at the orange plow and the old man climbing down out of it, and shook his head.
"Hank," Earl said. "You're retired."
"People keep telling me that," Hank said.
They plowed until six in the morning. All thirty-one miles. Ridge Road, Sugar Run, Lutz Hollow up to the barricade, the back of Creek Road.
The storm dropped twenty-three inches before it quit.
On the last run down Creek Road, with the sky going gray, Hank pulled over and let Avery take the wheel. Marco sat in the middle. Hank rode shotgun and watched the right side of the road, and every few minutes, he pointed.
"Ditch line," he said. "See it there? Follow the ditch line."
Avery followed it all the way to the county garage.
Lynn Carver met them at the door with a box of doughnuts from Dot's and asked Hank if he'd be willing to do it again until she could hire somebody. He said he'd think about it. Then he said he'd do it if she hired the boys too, and taught them right, and Lynn said that sounded like a deal.
Hank drove home in his own pickup with the sun coming up over the plowed road. Lorraine's empty thermos rolled back and forth on the dashboard, and he didn't bother to stop it.