Lou said eleven inches. I didn't believe him.
I'd parked at the end of the road behind the Bayfront, where it stops being a road and turns into a ramp, and a row of pickups was parked nose to the water like they were waiting to be let in. It was ten past seven. The sun hadn't made up its mind. Out past the ramp the bay went on flat and white and bumpy, with a single line of tire tracks running out across it, and little orange flags, and past the flags, small and square and scattered, the shanties.
Off to my left, the marina lot. Rows of boats on blocks in white shrink-wrap, big and humped and tied down, like something that had been put to sleep in a field. I didn't turn my head that way. I looked at the ramp.
I'd gone through the creek on Saturday to my thigh. I stood at the edge of the bay in my work boots with that in my legs, and a man came down the ramp behind me in a Carhartt coat with a bucket and a sled of gear, and drove a spud into the first ice with one swing, and kept going. He didn't look at me twice. He walked out on it like it was a sidewalk.
I put one foot out. Then the other.
It makes noise. That's the first thing nobody tells you. Under your boots it groans and pings, long falling notes, like somebody dragging a wet finger around a glass, and every so often it booms, one big flat crack somewhere out in the middle that you feel in your teeth. I stopped for the first one. The man with the sled didn't, but he slowed down and looked back at me.
"First time?" he said.
"Out here, yes."
"Stay off the dark parts."
"Which are the dark parts?"
"You'll know," he said, and went on, and I stood there another full minute deciding whether that was a joke. I could see a quarter mile of it ahead, and I didn't take my eyes off the tire tracks, and I walked every inch of them.
Lou's shanty was a green plywood box with a stovepipe, eight feet on a side, out past the last of the flags. It had a door with a hasp and a hand-lettered sign across the top in white paint, NO WIVES, and the paint had been done by somebody who could really letter. Peg, I thought. I'd never seen it before. It had probably been there since before I was old enough to have a reason to come.
I knocked on the sign.
"Shut it behind you," Lou said. "You're letting the heat out."
\ \ \*
Inside it was ten degrees warmer and smelled like propane, minnows, wet wool and a thermos of coffee that had been on the burner too long. A little heater glowed in the corner with its grille red. Two five-gallon buckets for seats. Two round holes cut in the plywood floor, each the size of a dinner plate, with black water in them and a skin of new ice crawling in from the edges. A radio was going low, two men arguing about the Penguins.
Lou sat on the far bucket in his Steelers hat with a jig rod in his lap and his boots flat on either side of a hole. He didn't get up. He'd been out there since five, he said, and he hadn't had a bite.
"You know what you do when they're not biting?" he said. "Everybody says the fish went deep. Fish didn't go anywhere. You move the hole." He nodded at the other bucket. "Sit down, honey. You'll want to."
"I'll stand."
"Suit yourself."
I stood. The ceiling was low enough that I had to hold my head a little bent. He looked worse than I'd seen him. Gray under the tan, like the color had been taken out and put back wrong. He'd shaved, but he'd missed a place under his jaw.
"Where did I wait," I said. "Before the lineup."
"You know where."
"I want you to tell me."
Lou jigged the rod a couple of times, small, and watched the hole. I let the radio fill it. One of the men on it said somebody's defense was a joke, and the other said it was a joke with a salary.
"My office," Lou said. "Second floor. Twenty minutes, about. They'd brought you in from the house, your mother was down the hall, and I put you in my chair and shut the door. I had to take a call. There was a lot going on that Sunday. I had a dead girl and two uniforms on a lead that went nowhere and the chief on the phone every hour."
"A radiator," I said. "And a cup of pencils."
"That's right."
"It's all I can see." I held on to the edge of the plywood wall. "I've tried. Last night, in the dark, I tried to put the desk in front of me, and it's the radiator, banging, and a Steelers mug with pencils in it. And then it's the hallway. There's nothing in between."
"It was my mug."
"Lou."
"I'm getting there." He put the rod down across his knees. He took his hat off and looked into it, and put it back on. "He'd been picked up at ten that morning. You know that. I had a photographer take him. A booking photo, four by six, off the printer. Front view, with a card under his chin. He was twenty-four and he looked about sixteen, with his eyes wide open and his hair still flat on one side from the pillow. I'd taken it out of the folder to look at before I built the lineup. I wanted to see who I was looking for fillers for." He breathed out. "And I got called out, and I left it on the blotter. Face up."
The heater ticked. I didn't say anything. I couldn't have.
"I came back in, and you were standing at my desk," Lou said. "With your back to the door. You'd got up out of the chair. You were looking down at the blotter, and you were white, honey. White as that bucket. Like you'd seen a ghost. You didn't hear me come in. I said your name, and you didn't turn around. So I walked over, and I turned it over, face down, and I said, 'Sit down, Nell.' And you sat. And I went and got you a ginger ale."
"That was after."
"That was after. I got the ginger ale after." He rubbed his knee. "I never wrote it down. I never told the DA. I never told Zielinski. Not at the trial, not on the stand. Nobody asked me if you'd seen him before you saw him, and I didn't say it."
"I don't remember a picture."
"I know you don't."
"I don't remember it." My voice had gone up and I brought it back. "Lou, I would remember."
"You remember the radiator." He said it gently. "That's what a mind does. It keeps the radiator."
I stood in that box on top of eleven inches of ice with a space heater breathing on one side of my legs, and I tried it again. I put the desk in front of me. The blotter. The mug. A green blotter, a big one, the kind with leather corners. I reached for what was on it, and I got nothing, a smooth place, like when you run your hand over wallpaper in the dark and there's supposed to be a switch.
"Did you leave it there on purpose?" I said.
He didn't answer for a while.
"I've been over it every which way for twelve years," he said. "Like a stone in your shoe, you can't get it out, you can't walk on it. I was tired. I was sixty hours without a bed. I left a lot of things on that desk. I told myself that." He raised his eyes. "I've never been sure it was an accident."
\ \ \*
Neither of us said anything. The men on the radio went to a commercial for a mattress store.
"Nine seconds," I said.
"I know."
"I used to think that was how good I was." I'd started laughing and didn't like it. "The lawyer said it at the trial. Nine seconds, like I'd been quick. Like I walked down that line and the face leapt out. And all I was doing was looking at a face I'd seen already."
"You don't know that."
"I was white. You just said it. I was white before you said anything. Before you'd shown me a thing."
"You were white," Lou said. "Which could have been the picture, or it could have been the Sunday, or the dead sister, or being nineteen in a police station. You were a kid. You'd have gone white for a parking ticket."
"So I picked a picture."
"You picked the man."
"You don't know that."
"No," Lou said. "I don't. Neither do you." He looked at me then with his whole face, and it was the first time since the Christmas card that I'd seen him with nothing in front of it. "Neither do I, Nellie."
I sat down on the other bucket. It put me low, my knees up, the hole between my boots, and I looked into the black water and my own shape was in it, and the red of the heater, and nothing else.
"He said you'd tell me something," I said. "Garrett. He said ask you where I waited. He didn't know. He said he didn't know what was on the desk."
"Course he didn't. He's guessing. He's a smart man who's had a lot of time." Lou spun the reel a half turn. He didn't look at the line. "Here's what I came out here at five o'clock in the morning to figure out, honey. How I say to you what I just said, and you still don't sign his paper."
"Lou."
"Because that's what it comes to, isn't it? I give you that, and you say, well, then, I was wrong, and I put the wrong man away, and you take it all back. And that's the end of it." He turned the reel the other way. "And I want to be the man who was right. That's the God's truth. I've spent twelve years being the man who ran the lineup that put away the guy who did it. I don't know who I am if that's not so."
"You gave me a ginger ale."
"I did."
"You said I did good."
"You did," Lou said, and for a second I thought he was going to cry, and then he didn't. "You did good. That's the thing. You were sure."
"I was sure of a picture."
I said it flat, and I heard it hang there in the box, and neither of us picked it up.
I said, "Cody Hartzell."
"Who?"
"The coach. At my rink. The one who tapes sticks." I got it out. "Tasha Greer says he was at the party, in the kitchen, that night. Birdie went at him. She scratched his neck. She texted me come now from the kitchen and left ten minutes later. And the DNA, the stuff under her nails, it's a man. It could be him. It could be him, Lou, and he's got his hand on my kid's neck three days a week."
Lou turned the name over a couple of times, with his eyes on the hole.
"Hartzell," he said. "Kid at the party. Boat family. We talked to forty kids." He shook his head slowly. "I couldn't pick him out of a boat. A lot of boys with their hands in their pockets looking at their shoes. Some of them lied, sure. Kids lie, it's a party. You find the one who didn't."
"Tasha lied. To the officer. She said she told them nothing."
"Then she lied." He shrugged. "I can't tell you what I don't have."
"You never even had the name."
"I didn't have what I didn't have," Lou said. "I had a man with his hand on a girl's arm, and a girl who saw it."
\ \ \*
His phone buzzed in his coat. He took it out with two fingers, looked at the screen, and something went over his whole face, like the light coming on in a kitchen. He turned it over on his knee, face down, quick, and put his hand on top of it.
"Who's that?" I said. "The DA?"
"A friend."
"At seven in the morning."
"People are up." He picked the rod back up. He didn't look at me, and the ears under the hat had gone red. "I'm seeing someone. Don't make that face."
"I'm not making a face."
"Well, don't." He jigged the rod once. "It's been a while. It's none of your business, and I don't want it to be anybody's business till I say."
"Peg's been gone not two years."
"I know to the day how long she's been gone." He said it without any heat in it at all. "She'd have picked her out herself. That's all I'm going to say about it."
"Who?"
"Not now."
I looked at the hat and the back of his hand and I didn't push. I'm not made for it. I'd come out across a bay for one thing, and I had it, and it was lying on the plywood between us, still moving.
"I need you to say something to me," Lou said. "Before you go."
"What?"
"That you'll sit down with me before you sign anything. Before you sign any paper for anyone." He wasn't looking at me. "That's all. Come and eat dinner, we'll talk it through. You don't have to say yes to me. Just let me say it to you first."
I stood up. I hit my head on the ceiling and didn't feel it.
"I have to go to work," I said.
"Nellie."
"I have to go to work, Lou."
I pushed the door open, and the light came in white and flat and hurt my eyes, and the cold took the heat off my face in one piece. I had one foot on the ice when I stopped and looked back at him.
He'd gone back to the hole. He sat with the rod in both hands and the hat low, a big man on a bucket in a green box, jigging for something that wasn't there. Behind him, the radio said something about the power play. He didn't call after me again. I'd have heard it.
\ \ \*
It was full day on the way back. The sun had come up somewhere behind the clouds, white on the ice, and there were more men out now, in twos, at the flags, with their sleds, and nobody looked at anybody. I walked in the tracks again. I didn't count. It booms, and I walked through it.
Somewhere past the last flag I understood I was crying, which I'd missed, because my face was too cold to tell. It wasn't bad. It was just coming down, one side and then the other.
At the ramp I sat in the truck with the engine on and the vents blowing, and put both hands under my legs and waited for the shaking to stop. It didn't. I took my phone out anyway.
His number was the one on the popcorn bag. I'd put it in as GARRETT. I hadn't had to look at the bag in days.
He picked up on the first ring. He didn't say my name this time.
"I'll sign," I said.
Nothing. I heard a heater on his end, or a fan. I heard him not breathe.
"Tell your lawyer," I said. "Tell Sorensen. Whatever the paper is. I'll come in and I'll sign it."
The line stayed open a long time. Out on the bay, small as a pin, a man was walking a sled toward a green box.
"Thank you, Nell," Garrett said.
He hung up.
I was still holding the phone when it buzzed in my palm, a text from a number I didn't know, a State Street exchange, and I read it twice in my head so I'd have it right, like it was going to be on a test.
Monday the ninth, ten o'clock, my office. Eat something first. Ruth Ann Sorensen.