You can't stop Big Sue, but you can aim her. I brought her around the north end in the tightest turn I've ever made on her, water still pouring out the back, and put her nose at the gate and stood on the brake. She slid the last few feet. I didn't shut her off. I left her running and jumped down onto the rubber mat in my rink shoes.
The mat runs thirty feet behind the boards to the bleachers. I've walked it ten thousand times. I ran it, and the slush in the grooves came through my soles, and I got to the bottom row with my hands already out and took Owen by the hood of his coat and pulled him down onto the floor behind me.
"Ow," he said. "Mom. That's my neck."
The man didn't get up. He stayed where he was on the end of the second row, holding the popcorn bag out over the spot where Owen had been, like nobody had told him yet the kid was gone.
"Get away from him," I said.
"Yes." He set the bag down on the bleacher beside him, carefully, so it wouldn't tip. "I did not come here for him. He sat down and asked what I was doing, and I said I was watching the machine."
"He said you knew Birdie."
"He asked if I knew anybody who skated. I said I knew his aunt a little, a long time ago." He looked at Owen once and then at me, and he didn't look at Owen again. "I should not have said it. I did not think he would know her name."
"She's my aunt," Owen said from behind my legs. "Technically she's dead, but she's still my aunt."
"Owen. Corner table."
"I'm just saying a fact."
"Corner table. Now."
He went, slow, the way he goes when he wants credit for going. I could hear Big Sue idling at the gate behind me, that low cough she does when she's been left on, and somewhere in the lobby a little kid was crying about a skate lace. All of it was very loud and very far away.
Up close, Garrett Rudnicki was just a man on a bleacher. I'd had twelve years of number four against a painted wall, and here he was with a chipped thumbnail and a wet cuff on his sweatshirt, a man you'd let go ahead of you at the deli counter.
"Is it all right if I write something down for you?" he said.
I didn't say anything. He took that as a yes. He took a blue ballpoint out of his sweatshirt pocket, picked the popcorn bag back up, and printed a phone number down the white stripe, small and even, every digit the same height. He held it out.
"I am not asking for today," he said. "One afternoon. Daylight, anywhere you pick. You can bring anybody you want. After that, if you tell me to go away, I will go away, and you will never see me again."
"You're out a week," I said, "and you're at my job. With my kid."
"I know how it looks."
"You don't know anything about how it looks."
"Not here." His eyes went past me, to the lobby glass, and came back. "Not with your son in the building. I should not have come inside. I wanted to see you somewhere you were not afraid, and I did not think it through."
"I'm not afraid of you."
"Then one afternoon," he said.
I took the bag out of his hand and closed my fist on it. It's a thin bag. The bottom split and popcorn went down my wrist and over the bleacher and through the gaps between the seats onto the concrete underneath, and some of it went on his boots, and I kept squeezing until there was nothing in my hand but a wad of wet paper and butter salt. Then I threw it at him. It hit his chest and dropped in his lap.
From the counter, through the open ice door, Dolores said, "Somebody's sweeping that. It's not me."
Garrett stood up. He's taller than I'd let myself remember. He brushed the popcorn off his boots, one boot and then the other, and he went down the steps on the far side, away from us, and out through the lobby without looking at anybody. He left the bag on the bleacher where it fell. Through the glass I watched him cross the lot to a tan car with a crumpled back fender. He put his turn signal on to leave an empty parking lot.
When I turned around, Owen was on his knees under the bleachers picking popcorn up off the concrete one piece at a time and putting it in his pocket, because somebody had said somebody was sweeping it.
\ \ \*
Benny shut Big Sue off. He came and found me in the sharpening room afterwards, where I was holding on to the edge of the bench.
"You left her running at the gate," he said. "You know how hot that conditioner gets with no water going through it?"
"No."
"Hot." He looked at me a while. "You want me to call somebody? Who do you want me to call?"
I'd already called. Detective Kovach had said she'd come herself, and she'd said it like she meant it, and then she'd said it would be a while.
The while was an hour and a half. I spent most of it in Lorraine's office, because Lorraine had seen the popcorn and the running and the man walking out, and Lorraine manages a city building, and her first feeling about anything is a form. She had the incident book open before I sat down.
"Did he touch Owen?" she said.
"No."
"Did he touch you?"
"I threw a bag at him."
She wrote that down. I wished I hadn't said it.
"If he comes back," she said, "and something happens to a child in this building, that's the city. You understand? That's not you and me, that's the city." She underlined something twice. "Where's Owen now?"
"Corner table."
"Keep him there."
I could see him through her office window, bent over his math folder with his hood still up. He'd lined up the popcorn from his pocket along the edge of the table in a row, and he was eating it one piece at a time, in order.
At ten after four I went out to sweep the bleachers, because I needed my hands on something, and the Squirts were coming on. Squirts aren't Mondays. They lost a Thursday to the weather before Christmas, and Lorraine sold them the Monday four-fifteen until they made it up. Twenty little kids in pads too big for them, clacking down the mat like ducks, and their coach behind them carrying a bucket of pucks.
Cody Hartzell is the face on the billboard at Peach and Interstate Ninety, the big one for his father's boat lot, him in sunglasses pointing at you: LET'S GET YOU ON THE WATER. In person he's shorter. He coaches for free, and the moms love him for it. He had the whistle in his teeth when he came over, and he talked around it.
"That him?" He pointed with his chin through the lobby glass, out across Thirty-Eighth, where a tan car was sitting in the Dunkin' lot with its engine running. "The guy from TV? He's been over there since I pulled in."
I looked. I hadn't looked before.
"You okay?" Cody took the whistle out. He stood close, closer than people stand, and he smelled like the cologne they sell at the drugstore register. "Seriously. You want me to walk you to your truck later, Nell? I'm here till six. It's no trouble."
I don't remember telling him my name. Everybody in Erie had seen my name in the paper in December, so maybe I didn't have to.
"I'm fine," I said.
"I hear you." He put the whistle back. "Offer stands."
He went out onto the ice and blew it, and twenty kids fell down at once.
\ \ \*
Detective Kovach was a big woman in a down coat with a badge on a lanyard and a sleeve of peanut butter crackers from the machine in the lobby, the orange kind. By the time she pulled into the lot at four-thirty, the tan car across the street was gone.
"Sitting in a donut place," she said, "is not a crime either, hon. If it was, I'd be doing life."
She stood behind Lorraine's chair in the office and watched the lobby camera, and Lorraine ran it back for her with the mouse. It's a black-and-white camera up over the doors. It makes everybody look like they're robbing a bank.
There he was, coming in. Gray sweatshirt. He went straight to Dolores's counter and bought a small popcorn and stood there while she made change, and then he went into the rink and out of the frame.
"Three-oh-one," Kovach said. She ate a cracker. Lorraine fast-forwarded. My own back went across the screen, running. Then Garrett, coming out with his hands empty, holding the door for a woman with a stroller. "Three-oh-five. Four minutes. He came in, he bought your kid popcorn, he left when you told him to. He held the door for a lady."
"He sat down next to my son," I said.
"He sat in public bleachers, and your son sat down next to him. That's what the man's lawyer is going to say, and it's what the tape says." She folded the cracker wrapper into a square.
"You told me he wasn't on anything," I said.
"I told you he's not on anything. That wasn't exactly right, and I'm sorry." She said it plain, like she was telling me I had a flat tire. "He's on a piece of paper that says stay in Erie County and show up to court. That's it. Nobody wrote your name on it."
"You said if he came near me you'd come yourself," I said.
"And here I am," Kovach said. She held up the crackers. "With dinner."
"Then write my name on it," I said.
"I can't." Kovach looked at Lorraine and then at me. "Look. What I can do. I can call the DA right now, in front of you, and ask him to go to the judge and add one line to that paper. Stay away from Eleanor Dorsey."
She did it standing up, in the corner by the filing cabinet, with her back to us. I only heard her half. She said "Kovach, Major Crimes" and "the witness" and "the rink, today, with the kid," and then she listened a long time and said "Uh-huh" twice and "Friday the sixth?" and "That's the best you've got," and she hung up.
"Okay," she said. "The DA's filing it tonight. It's called a no-contact condition. Means he can't come near you or call you. But his lawyer gets to argue, and the argument's not till Friday the sixth of February."
"That's eleven days," Lorraine said.
"Eleven days," Kovach said.
I counted it on the calendar on Lorraine's wall, which was from the propane company and had a picture of a covered bridge, and it was eleven.
"Here's the other thing, and I want you to hear it from me." Kovach sat on the corner of Lorraine's desk, and the desk creaked. "His conviction's gone. Thrown out, like the trial never happened. So now the DA has to decide if he's trying him again, and he has to decide by the twenty-third of February. You know what the DA's got, twelve years later? Half his witnesses are dead or in Florida. The DNA points somewhere else." She looked at me. "He's got you, Nell. If that man gets you to say you were wrong, there is no case."
"He didn't ask me to say anything," I said. "He asked for an afternoon."
"Uh-huh," Kovach said. "And what do you think happens in the afternoon?"
Lorraine cleared her throat. She'd been writing the whole time. She turned the incident book around so Kovach could read it, and then she took a sheet of city letterhead out of her drawer.
"He's banned," Lorraine said. "From the building and the property. I'm putting it in writing, and I'm mailing it wherever his lawyer is."
"Now that," Kovach said, "I can use. He sets one boot on this lot after he gets that letter, that's trespass, and I can put my hands on him."
"Trespass," I said. "Like a kid on a roof."
"It's what I've got." Kovach stood and zipped her coat up to her chin. At the door she stopped. "Your cell's on me now. Any hour. If he so much as stands where you can see him, you call."
"He was across the street," I said.
"Across the street's not here, hon," Kovach said. "I'm sorry. I mean that."
She went out to her car and sat in it a minute with the dome light on, writing, and then she drove away, and the lot was just the lot again.
At six I walked Owen out to the Ranger with my hand on the back of his neck. Cody Hartzell was by the doors with his bucket of pucks, and he lifted his chin at me like the offer was still open, and I didn't stop. Across Thirty-Eighth the Dunkin' lot was full of cars with their engines running, people getting coffee for the drive home, and every one of them was some color I couldn't name in the dark. I made Owen get in on my side and climb across.
"Why do I have to climb?"
"Because I said."
"That's not a reason," he said. "That's a rule."
\ \ \*
I made grilled cheese for dinner because it's the only thing I can make without thinking, and I burned the first one anyway. Owen ate both. He had his math folder open next to his plate, and he kept turning it so I couldn't see.
"Jayden's mom says you're the lady that sent the TV guy to jail," he said.
"Eat your sandwich."
"I am eating it. I'm talking while I eat it. Did you send him to jail?"
"A jury sent him to jail."
"But you told them," he said.
"I told them what I saw."
"What did you see?"
I got up and ran water in the frying pan. It hissed and spat at me. When I turned around he was watching me with his chin on his fist, waiting.
"Okay," he said. "New deal. If I do the whole worksheet with no erasing, you tell me one thing about her. Anything. Even a small thing."
"Not tonight, bud."
"Then when?"
"Not tonight."
He did the whole worksheet anyway, with no erasing, and left it on the table where I'd see it, and went to bed without being told, which is the meanest thing a nine-year-old can do to you.
I sat at the table until twenty to ten. Twice I got up and stood at the front window with the light off behind me, so nobody could see in, and looked at the street. Nothing was moving. A plow had gone by and left a ridge at the end of every driveway. The Ranger was under the streetlight where it always is, snow on the hood, the wipers down. No tan car. No man standing anywhere. I let the curtain go and went back and sat down. I washed the pan and dried it and put it away and took it out again. I checked the deadbolt three times. Owen was asleep with his mouth open and one arm off the side of the bed, the hall light on, his door open the width of a hand.
Then I put my coat on over my pajamas and went out to the truck for the hair tie.
I don't know what I was going to do with it. I just wanted it in the house. My street was quiet, plowed down the middle and banked at the curbs, and the streetlight in front of the double buzzes when it's cold. The Ranger was where I'd left it, under the light, with an inch of new snow on the hood.
There was a sheet of lined paper under my wiper blade, folded once and tucked in so the wind wouldn't take it. Nobody had written MOVE IT NELL on this one. It was printed in capitals, every letter the same height, in blue ballpoint pressed hard enough to come through the back.
TONIGHT. TWELVE-FORTY.
CASCADE AND TWELFTH.
I WILL STAND WHERE THE MAN STOOD.