Kovach ate lo mein out of the carton standing up at my kitchen counter, with her coat on, like she might have to leave in the middle of a noodle.
"I'm not here," she said. "You understand me? I'm home on my couch watching the Penguins lose."
"Okay."
"Say it, hon."
"You're not here."
"Good." She dug in the carton with the plastic fork. "Because none of what I'm about to tell you is mine to tell, and if it comes back on me, I'll say you made it up, and they'll believe me, because look at you."
I looked at me. I was in my rink fleece with the salt line still on the knees, and I hadn't eaten since the pretzel I didn't finish at noon. In the front room Owen was packing his backpack for my mother's, out loud, arguing with himself about whether a stuffed walrus was too babyish for a sleepover that was going to last "a while," which is what I'd told him, because I didn't have a number.
"Bring him," I called.
"I'm not going to sleep with him," Owen said. "He's just coming."
Kovach smiled at the carton. Then she stopped smiling and set it down.
"Fire marshal walked the barn this morning," she said. "Gas. Two cans, maybe, from the tracks. Somebody walked it in from the lane to the side door, in the new snow, so after ten o'clock. And here's the part. There's no device. No timer, no candle in a coffee can, no cigarette in a book of matches, none of the cute stuff. Somebody stood in that barn and struck a match and walked out."
"Okay."
"The winery down the road has a camera on its sign, because kids keep knocking the sign over. One set of headlights on Hammond Road all night. Twelve thirty-eight." She picked the carton back up, like her hands didn't know what else to do. "And your vineyard man across the road. The one who gave the troopers that Grand Prix plate at four-thirty. He gets up about ten to one to use the bathroom, and a car goes by his window. Gray sedan. No light on the plate. He goes back to bed. At ten after one he sees orange over the barn roof and he calls nine-one-one."
"Gray," I said.
Half the cars in Erie are gray in February. The salt does it. My truck was gray by the end of every January and it's supposed to be blue.
"Your guy went in the back of a cruiser at seven fifty-five," Kovach said. "He was in a cell at twelve thirty-eight with a booking officer for a babysitter. He left that barn at four. Nine hours leaves a device. There's no device." She ate a noodle. "And his can went in his tank, behind that Sheetz. A man with a warrant out doesn't stand under the pump lights twice a night. He fills a can once and keeps the heater going on it. Saturday night that can was sitting empty in our impound lot with the rest of the car."
I sat down at the table.
"Then Dale," I said. "The call. Nine fifty-two."
"Corry police walked into the Legion this afternoon and showed the bartender a picture." She pointed the fork at me. "Dale was on a stool Saturday from eight till two in the morning. She's got his tab. Eleven Yuenglings and a basket of wings. The call was, can you find me bail money. Dale said he'd ask around. That's the whole call."
"His truck wasn't home."
"His truck was at the Legion. Dale's not stupid, he got a ride." She ate. "So it's not Dale."
"Then who?"
She didn't answer that. She chewed for a while and looked at the refrigerator, where Owen's spelling test from the week before was stuck up with a magnet shaped like a pierogi. Ninety-five. Dolores would've docked him for the eraser marks.
"There's one more thing," she said. "And I really shouldn't."
"You already shouldn't."
"Yeah." She put the fork down in the carton and left it standing up. "Saturday. Twelve-thirty in the afternoon. A call comes in on the desk line to patrol. Retired detective, very polite, gives his old badge number like they'd still have it. He gives them a tan Grand Prix and the plate, says the man with the warrant is in it, says he's out in North East and he'll probably come home on Route Twenty, sometime after dark if he's smart. That's why there was a car sitting at the city line, Nell. That stop was him." She waited. "Your Lou."
I'd texted Lou at twelve-twenty. I'd been standing in a vineyard with my phone in one hand and a fistful of Garrett's coat in the other.
"He said he called the barracks," I said. "He looked at me in my mother's kitchen in his socks and said, Nellie, I called the barracks."
"Maybe he did, after. He called us first." Kovach wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. "He didn't say anything about you being in the car. I'll give him that. I don't think he knew you'd be stupid enough to still be in it at eight o'clock."
I got up. I went out the front door in my socks, down the steps, across the snow on the walk, and I opened the Ranger and leaned across the seat and opened the glove box and took the sandwich bag out from behind the registration. My feet were soaked before I got back to the door. I put it on the counter next to her lo mein.
She looked at it without touching it. The green cloth. The gold thread. My knot, small and ugly, pulled tight.
"Okay," she said, finally, very quiet, and took a clean evidence envelope out of the inside of her coat. She slid the bag into the envelope without opening it. She wrote on the flap with my pen. "Who'd you tell?"
"About this?"
"About North East. About the car. About the police going in the morning. Who'd you tell?"
"Lou. I texted Lou." I counted it on my fingers, which I hate doing. "And Dolores, because she had Owen. I called her from the vineyard to say we'd be back by dark. And Saturday night from the lobby I told her he was arrested and they were going out in the morning, because I needed her to keep him overnight."
"Dolores is the snack lady," Kovach said, and wrote it down. She writes everything down. "And the desk sergeant. And the trooper who called you at one-twenty-five. And whoever the sergeant told, and whoever the trooper told." She closed the notebook. "Half the building knew by ten, hon. That's not an answer, that's a phone book."
"The owner," I said. "The dead owner. They must have a name."
"Troopers are sitting on the owner. It's an estate. Some lawyer in Arizona handles it. They're not sharing with city, because city's the department with the lineup problem." She buttoned her coat to the top. "And I asked Sheetz corporate for the pump cameras on Route Twenty, Saturday night this time, because a man who burns a barn buys gas somewhere. Their security people haven't called me back. They'll call me back in March."
At the door she stopped with her hand on the knob.
"Where's the kid sleeping?"
"My mother's. Starting tonight."
"Good," she said. "Keep him somewhere I could find him."
\ \ \*
My mother's porch light was on. Lou's truck was in the driveway, not hiding anymore, with its windshield scraped clean, and when I knocked, he was the one who opened the door. Cardigan. Socks. A dish towel over his shoulder like he lived there, which I guess he did.
Owen went under his arm and into the house with the walrus and the backpack and didn't stop, yelling for his grandmother. The TV was going. Somebody on it was being found not guilty of a dog.
"Nellie," Lou said.
"You called in the plate."
He didn't make the sound. He didn't lift anything. He just stood in the door and let the cold come in past him.
"I did."
"Twelve-thirty. I sent you that text so somebody would know where I was if I didn't come home. That's what it was for. And you called in his plate."
"I called it in because a man with a warrant on him had you in a car in the middle of nowhere," Lou said. "That's what I did. I'd do it again tomorrow. And then I called the barracks, I did, I called them after, and they said a car in a barn is a car in a barn."
"You stood in that kitchen and told me you called the barracks. Like that was all."
"It was most of it."
"It was the part that makes you look good," I said.
My mother came up behind him in the hall with her hand on his back, and she looked at me over his shoulder, and I could see her deciding not to say "Eleanor." I put my boot on the sill so he couldn't close the door, and then I didn't know what I wanted it there for.
"He's got school at eight-fifteen," I said. "He doesn't eat the crusts. Don't make him."
"I raised two of you," my mother said.
I took my boot off the sill. Lou shut the door slow, like he was trying not to wake anybody, and through the little window in it I watched him take the towel off his shoulder and stand there holding it.
\ \ \*
Joanne called at two-forty. I was in the truck, in my own driveway, with the engine running. I'd been there since one. I'd tried the bed and the couch and the kitchen floor, and the truck was the only place my legs would stay still.
"He's up," she said. "I'm sorry, I know what time it is. He's sitting in the dark with his box. If you're coming, come now, because by six he'll be asleep and he'll say he never called you."
Pleasant Ridge Manor is up off Peach, past the Lakeview, on a hill where they put the places nobody wants to drive by. The plows hadn't been through. I took Peach the whole way, and I made a deal: if every light on Peach was green, he'd remember. I knew it was stupid when I made it. The light at Twenty-Sixth was red, and I sat there at it with nobody else on the road for a mile in either direction, and I went through it before it changed, which isn't how the deal works.
Joanne met me at the side door in a parka over her pajamas. She was apologetic about everything, about the hour, about the smell, which was soup and the kind of cleaner they use in schools, about her father.
"He won't let me turn the light on," she said. "He says it hurts. And he talks slow. Let him. If you hurry him, he quits."
His room was at the end of the hall. There was a bed with a rail on it and a dresser with a TV on top, off, and a window looking down the hill at the lights on Peach. Walt was in a wheelchair by the window with a blanket over his knees and a green metal cash box on top of the blanket, the kind with a handle and a little key. He was a small man. He'd been a bigger one, you could tell from how the pajamas hung. The left side of his face had slid a little, like a store awning after a heavy snow.
"Mister Brzezinski," I said. "I'm Nell Dorsey."
"I know who you are." It came out slow, in pieces, with air between them. "I seen you. On the TV. Twelve years ago. You're the sister."
"Yes."
"Sit," he said. "Sit down. You make me look up, I get dizzy."
I sat on the edge of the bed. Joanne stood in the doorway a second and then went away down the hall, and I heard a chair scrape out by the nurses' desk.
He didn't say anything for a long time. He had the key to the box on a shoelace around his wrist, and he worked at the lock with his good hand, and it took him four tries, and I didn't help him. When it opened there were receipt books inside, a stack of them, the old kind with the yellow carbons, held together with a gumband that had gone stiff and cracked when he pulled it.
"Barn," he said. "On the news. Out North East."
"Yes."
"I seen the picture. Gus's barn." He found the book he wanted without looking. He'd been looking at it all night, I think, before I got there. He opened it on his knees to a page with the corner turned down. "I did a fender."
He held the book out. I took it. I had to tip it toward the window to see, toward the lights coming up from Peach, and then I turned my phone's flashlight on it and he flinched and shut his eyes, and I said I was sorry and kept it on.
It was a carbon, blue on yellow, in a hand that pressed hard and went uphill. I read it the way you read a receipt for something you didn't buy, every line twice.
Saturday, February eighth, two thousand fourteen. In, seven-ten. Oh-two LeSabre, maroon. Right headlamp assembly, forty. Right front fender, used, primer, ninety-five. Labor, sixty. Cash. Paid.
Down at the bottom, in pencil, under the total, smudged but not so much you couldn't read it: Dee Pasko. And a phone number.
I knew the name. I'd had it since Lou's truck: the night cook, the voice on the tip line, the DA's witness, living under some other name in Erie someplace. Two words with nobody standing behind them. Now they were in pencil on a fender job, the morning after.
"Who's Dee Pasko?" I said.
He wasn't listening to me. He was looking out the window, down the hill.
"She comes in seven o'clock Saturday," he said. "I'm opening up. I got the coffee on. She's standing at the door, there's a Buick in the lot, the light's busted out. Right side. Fender's pushed in." He stopped and breathed. "I'm telling you. I put it on the lift. And there's feathers. White ones. In the lamp. Where the glass is busted, it's stuck full of feathers, like a pillow."
I had the book in both hands. I could feel the edge of the cardboard cover pressing a line across my palms.
"I get the needle-nose," Walt said. "I'm picking 'em out. One at a time, I'm picking 'em out, and I says, goose." His good hand moved on the blanket, pinching. "Goose. I says it out loud. She don't say nothing. She's standing by the coffee. I says, you hit a goose, Dee. She don't say yes. She don't say no."
"Mister Brzezinski."
"Then Sunday they come for the kid upstairs." He turned his head and looked at the ceiling, like the room was still up there over him. "The dishwasher. They take him down the stairs on the side of my building. I seen it. I seen the TV that night. A girl in a white coat." His mouth worked. "I knew. I'm telling you. I knew Sunday. And I says goose."
"Who is she?"
"Fella come from the lawyers. Last fall. Twice." He was still looking at the ceiling. "Asks me, Walt, you remember a Buick? I says I don't remember nothing. I had a stroke." Something happened on the side of his face that still worked. "That's the one thing I can say, and they got to believe it."
"Walt. Please. Who is Dee Pasko?"
He looked at me then. He looked at me like I was the slow one.
"Dee," he said. "Cooks at Peach Street. Nights. On the line." He lifted his good hand off the blanket and let it fall. "Her brother Gus has the place out North East. Gus Wachter. Buys his snows off me every November, haggles me down every time. She's Wachter. She went back to Wachter after. After the husband."
I don't know when I got off the bed. I was down on my knees on the floor of his room, and I had hold of the arms of his wheelchair, both of them, the cold metal, and I was holding on to them so hard the chair rocked toward me on its wheels and the cash box slid on the blanket and he put his good hand on it to stop it. I didn't let go. I couldn't make my hands do it. He didn't ask me to.
The book was on the floor by my knee, open, face up.
I got my phone out with one hand. I don't know what I wanted. I think I wanted to call somebody, and there wasn't anybody to call at three in the morning, and my thumb went where it goes, to the last calls. Kovach. Joanne. My mother's house. And under them, the same number three times on Saturday. Nine-forty at night. Twelve-fifteen, from a vineyard off Route Twenty. Nine-fifteen in the morning, when I'd called to ask if somebody could please take my son.
I held the phone down next to the book on the floor. I put it right next to the pencil, so the light from the screen fell on the page.
I looked at them for a long time. I read them both, the way I'd read the receipt, every number twice.
I took a picture of the page. My hand was shaking so hard I had to take it three times, like the note on the hood of my truck, and the third one came out.
Then I stood up. I put the book back on his knees, on top of the box, open to the page, because that's how he'd had it. He didn't close it. He put his good hand flat on it.
"I'm sorry," I said. I don't know who I meant.
I was at the door. Joanne was coming back up the hall with two cups of coffee from the machine, and she said something, and I didn't hear what. I looked back once. Walt hadn't moved. He was bent over the book in the dark with his face close to it, very close, the way old men read, and his finger was on the bottom of the page, on the pencil, on the number.
"Her fender," he said. He didn't look up. "She don't want paint. I says it'll rust. She says, Walt, let it."