His mother took a casserole from the refrigerator and set it on the counter. "Dinner in forty minutes," she said. "And please find Rascal before it gets dark. The weather report says the ridge is going to get the worst of the storm."
Eli looked toward the back door. The leash hung where it belonged, but the dog's water bowl stood untouched. A small, sudden suspicion tightened in his stomach. He called Rascal's name and heard nothing. When he went outside, he found the bottom corner of the backyard fence pushed outward and a patch of muddy paw prints leading toward the trees.
"You've got to be kidding me," he muttered.
He called through the kitchen window that he was going to get the dog and would be back soon. His mother told him to take his phone and stay away from the ridge road. Eli said he would, because he intended to. Then he followed the paw prints past the old sycamore, across a patch of wet grass, and toward the creek where Rascal always found something unreasonable to investigate.
The path followed a shallow drainage ditch and climbed behind the hardware store before breaking into a narrow trail between two properties. Eli knew it better than the streets in town. He had walked it with Jonah while learning how runoff changed the shape of land after heavy rain. He knew the places where the creek flooded first, the bridge with the loose plank, and the blackberry thicket that caught at sleeves even when its branches were bare. On an ordinary afternoon, he would have enjoyed the walk. That afternoon, he was listening for the jingle of Rascal's collar and watching the sky turn the color of old steel.
At the edge of the north woods, he found a muddy paw print on a fallen log. A little farther on, he heard a bark, distant enough that he could not immediately place it. Then he saw the torn section of chain-link fence that marked the boundary of the Iron Hollow property.
Eli stopped so abruptly that his boots slid in the mud.
Everyone in Callaway Creek knew the Iron Hollow Motorcycle Club. Its members rode machines large enough to make shop windows tremble when they passed through town. They wore dark leather vests with a patch depicting an iron hammer beneath a hollow mountain, and their annual late-November gathering brought people from surrounding counties to the old industrial clubhouse on the ridge. Children told exaggerated stories about what happened inside, while adults tended to speak with more caution and less certainty. The property had a reputation, but a reputation was not the same thing as the whole truth.
Last spring, when floodwater had swept through the south side of town, club members had spent three days pulling soaked furniture and broken appliances from people's houses. Eli had watched two of them repair the engine of Mrs. Patel's delivery van outside the corner market. Nobody had asked her for money. On another occasion, his mother had pointed out a row of motorcycles parked outside a community fundraiser and reminded him that appearances were a poor substitute for actually knowing people.