Thursday, 7:10 a.m.
"Rae Solberg. Wisconsin Department of Safety and Professional Services." She turned the wallet so I could read it and closed it, one motion. "Dr. Quist called our after-hours line last night about your Schedule II log. He was kind enough to meet me at the road."
Osric had stopped at the bumper of the Ram with a freezer bag in one hand and my green log book in the other. He was looking at a spot on my gravel six feet to the left, with the face of a man watching his own dog get put down.
"He left early," I said, before she could ask again. "A job up north. He's a farrier. He goes where the feet are."
It came out level. I have a voice for owners and another for the dead, and I found there was a third, which I had never had to use in daylight.
"Where up north?"
"He'll have a client's name in his phone. He took it." I made myself lean on the doorframe. "It's dead most of the way to the lake."
She wrote nothing down. She looked at me for as long as it takes a hand to find a heartbeat, and then she said, "I'd like to start with the truck."
She wore gloves. I unlocked the drug box at the tailgate and she went past everything in it to the one bottle that mattered, as if she'd been told where it sat, and held the pentobarbital up to the sky.
"Your log says this was opened on the ninth and used twice. I'd expect it about here." She marked the glass with a fingernail, then moved the nail down. "It's here. That's a horse."
"Duster. A logging truck hit him on Hatchery Road last night and I put him down on the shoulder with a flashlight in my teeth. I didn't write it. I was standing in a road."
"Then write it now, dated now." She held out a pen and waited while I did, and read it upside down. "A late entry I can live with, on its own. I look after the controlled-substance side; your license is the Veterinary Examining Board's business, and they'll hear from me either way. But a short bottle and a husband nobody can find is two things together, Dr. Sorley, and I don't like them together. If he isn't back by the end of the day, I'll be talking to the sheriff. If he is, I'd like to meet him."
She stripped her gloves and put them in her jacket pocket, and got into the gray sedan, and backed out of my yard as slowly as she had come in.
* Osric waited until she'd turned onto the road. "I told her about the horse because it's a Schedule II. I didn't tell her anything else, because I don't know anything else." He was talking to the truck. "You've got a look on you I haven't seen since Holm died. Where's Callum?"
I could have said it again. I'd said it to a state investigator's face and it had held. But this was the man I had put my whole back against every Tuesday since May, and he had driven out at dawn to stand beside a badge and be hated for it.
So I told him, badly, out of order: the mare and the voice, the stair, the cocoa, the man who hadn't woken. He sat down on the running board of the Ram as if I'd cut a string.
"Duster," he said at last. "That's why I believe you. You put that horse down with your hands shaking and talked to Bethany Kuehl ten minutes about what he'd had for breakfast. A woman with a plan doesn't do that." He rubbed his face with both hands. "Hanne. About the letter. Northline. I ought to have—"
"Not in my yard," I said. "Not today."
He heard his own words come back to him, and took them, and shut his mouth.
I had told him everything, and I didn't know yet whether I had told a friend. He had my figure and my log and my vial, and last night, when a truck sat at my culvert with its lights off, I had no idea where he'd been. I found I couldn't ask. If I asked, I'd have to believe the answer.
"Who was at the counter on Tuesday afternoon? The caller had our figure."
He put Marit on speaker on the running board between us, and she read the Tuesday tape off the paper. "One-oh-eight, Mrs. Landvik, wormer. One-twenty-two, E. Tiede, fly spray. One-twenty-four, a woman from Cumberland, a leg wrap. One-thirty-eight, the UPS man, and he doesn't count. Two-oh-five, one of the Brenner boys, hoof dressing. I don't remember faces, Hanne. I remember what they bought."
Osric hung up before she could ask about the state car. "We've fought about three ninety-one two across that office every Tuesday since May with the door open. Anybody at that counter could have sung it back to you."
"Tiede was at that counter. And Tiede's got a scanner."
"Emil Tiede buys fly spray every April and asks me to explain it. He can't work the card reader."
"He can work a scanner."
You've got iodine on your eyebrow. It was the first thing Callum ever said to me, and on Wednesday I had asked him for it back in my own yard like a test, and he had passed, and I had gone on to look inside his mouth with a plate. I went into the mudroom and came out with the pole. Osric looked at it, and at me, and decided not to say what he was thinking.
"Call me by nine," he said, "or I call the sheriff, and to hell with the water."
* The donkeys saw me first. They stood at Tiede's paddock rail, the gray jenny and the one with the black cross on his shoulders, and when I came up the drive with six feet of aluminum on my shoulder they set up a sound like a gate being dragged across concrete. Nobody came to the window. Still no Volvo. Three hours and a bit.
The mudroom door wasn't locked. Out here half of them aren't. I stood on the step with my hand flat on the wood and thought about what I was about to be, in the law's eyes and a seventy-one-year-old's, and went in.
Instant coffee, lanolin, donkey. Rubber boots on a mat with their toes to the door. On the kitchen windowsill, beside a geranium in a yogurt tub, the black scanner the size of a loaf of bread muttered to itself in numbers. A strip of masking tape ran across its face with a frequency written on it in small upright figures, neat as print.
"Callum?"
The front room held a recliner turned to the window and a photograph of a woman on the mantel. Over the television hung a framed certificate in a black frame, the kind a man hangs where he'll see it from his chair: Emil R. Tiede, Doctor of Medicine. A doctor. I stood and read it twice, as I had read the fourth card. The cellar door was a heavy old thing with a bolt on the outside, and my heart went up into my ears at the bolt. I drew it and went down with the pole leading. A furnace, shelves of tomatoes, a bicycle hung from the joists over a floor drain. Nobody on a cot. What I'd carried down those stairs ahead of the needle had been hope, of a sort, and it had the shape of a man on a cot.
The stairs to the second floor were carpeted and didn't talk. At the front of the house, on the road side, was a room with nothing in it but one kitchen chair with a cushion tied to the seat, a thermos on the sill, and a folding table pulled up to the glass. On the table, on a folded towel, stood a pair of binoculars on a short tripod. Beside them a pencil lay squared to the table's edge.
I bent and looked without asking.
It came up huge and shaking and then steady: the mouth of my lane, the culvert with its ragweed, my house, the plain white side of it. The east window on the second floor, with the curtain I'd half drawn at half past midnight, so sharp I could see the wrinkle in the hem.
Nothing in that circle was a crane. I stood up. The chair had a dent in its cushion the shape of a long night.
My phone went against my hip. A text from Osric, timed 8:44. I thumbed back one-handed. Alive. At Tiede's. Don't call.
Downstairs, the mudroom door opened and shut.
* I went down with the pole leading and the cap off the needle.
He stood in his own kitchen doorway with the sun behind him and both hands in the air: a thin man in a windbreaker, smaller than I remembered, with a big nose and a fringe of white hair, a paper sack of eggs in the crook of one raised elbow and his wristwatch slid down his forearm. He was trembling from the knees up. His voice stayed level.
"I'd be obliged," said Dr. Emil Tiede, "if you'd point that at something that isn't me."
I didn't.
"The Volvo is at Odegaard's for a wheel bearing," he said. "I left it in his lot at six and walked home the long way for eggs." He looked at the needle, and at the stairs behind me, and understood where I had been. "I'd like to know why the first thing I meet in my own kitchen is my neighbor coming down from my front room holding a lance."
"My husband's gone. Someone's had me on the phone since Tuesday night, saying they have him." The pole was steady. I was surprised by that. "You told me he sleeps like a bandsaw. I hadn't said one word to you about him."
He set the eggs down on the counter, very carefully, as if they were the thing in the room most likely to break. He looked at the scanner on the sill, and then at me, and something went over his face that I couldn't read: shame, or fright, or a man deciding how much of a thing to say.
"I did say that," he said. "Yes."
"How did you know?"
"Put that down," he said, "and I'll tell you. It isn't what you think. It's worse, in its way, and I'm not proud of it."
"Tell me with it up."
He opened his mouth. Past his shoulder, through the window over the sink, the road lay bright and empty, and at the mouth of my lane a pickup had turned in. It was maroon, high and square and mud to the door handles, and it slowed at the first pothole as it always must. It had a dealer's plate frame on the front, the letters PORT ASHBY in white across a black bar. It rolled up my gravel and stopped in my yard, beside my truck, and a door opened.
Tiede turned to see what I was seeing. "Do you know it?"
"No."
I had no name for the truck at my culvert. I knew exactly where this one had come from.
"Dr. Sorley." He took a step toward me with his hands still half raised. "There's something you ought to see before you—"
"Don't call anyone," I said, and went out through his mudroom with the pole on my shoulder, and ran.