Lou's truck pulled into the lot at one o'clock on Tuesday, in broad daylight, and parked in the fire lane like he still had a badge to put on the dash.
I watched him through the lobby glass. He got out slow, a big man gone soft in the middle, in a Carhartt coat and a Steelers hat, and came in stamping his boots on the mat like he'd been coming here for years.
He went straight to the snack counter. I hadn't slept, and I'd stood there all morning at the rental desk handing out skates in the wrong sizes, and now here was Lou Moynihan in my rink, ordering coffee.
"Regular," he said.
"Regular means cream and sugar," Dolores said. "You want black, say black."
"Black, then."
She poured it and took his dollar and gave him his change, and he dropped the change in the tip cup, and she went back to wiping the warmer.
He came over to the rental desk with the cup in both hands. Up close he looked older than on the Christmas card. His face had gone loose along the jaw, and there were broken veins in his nose.
"Nellie," he said. "You got a minute?"
"You were on Cascade last night."
"So were you, honey." He blew on the coffee. "Not here. Come on."
\ \ \*
We sat in the bleachers on the far side, top row, under the heaters, which don't work. The lunch skate was eight old men going around in a slow line, the same eight every Tuesday, hands behind their backs like they were walking to church. Lou watched them a while before he said anything.
"I've been on him since the day he walked out," he said. "Because nobody else is. The DA's counting votes, and that lady detective's got a hundred other cases." He drank. "Somebody has to."
"You were sitting there in the dark."
"I was."
"You saw him with me. You saw me get out with a tire iron, and you sat there."
"He didn't touch you. If he'd put one finger on you, I'd have been out of that truck before you could spit." He set the cup down between his boots. "After, he drove up to the Lakeview Motor Court and sat in the lot forty minutes with the engine running. Light was on in his room till three."
"You followed him."
"I watched him. There's a difference." He looked at me sideways. "And you're not going to tell your Detective Kovach I was out there. Downtown, I'm the guy who ran the lineup. They see me on Cascade at midnight, they say I'm working on the witness. Then I'm the story, and he walks."
"Maybe you are working on the witness."
He laughed, one short one, like I'd told a joke at a funeral.
"I couldn't see his face," I said. "Last night. From the truck. He asked me could I see his face, and I couldn't."
Lou nodded slowly, like I'd told him the score of a game he'd already heard about on the radio.
"Course you couldn't," he said. "It wasn't that night." He picked the cup back up. "He set that up, honey. He picked the light, he picked the snow, he picked where to stand. He's had twelve years to pick."
"I got up close. With the flashlight."
"And?"
I didn't answer.
"And?" Lou said.
"And it was him. It was the face." I pulled my sleeves down over my hands. "I just couldn't tell you which time."
He didn't say anything to that.
"He had my picture," I said. "From the paper, the rink one. He cut it out in prison and he carries it around folded up in his coat."
"In his coat." Lou shut his eyes a second. "A man cuts a girl's picture out of the paper in his cell, and carries it around in his coat, and walks up to her at midnight. And she's sitting here telling me she isn't sure about him. You hear yourself?"
"He said he didn't hurt her. I asked him to say he wasn't there, and he said, I did not hurt your sister."
"That's a lawyer's sentence. You know who taught him to talk like that? Twelve years of lawyers." Lou rubbed his knee.
The old men went around.
"Let me tell you something I probably shouldn't," Lou said. He made the sound, the one like lifting. "You never sat through the trial. Witnesses don't. You testified and you went home, and thank God for it. So you never heard about the phone call."
"What phone call?"
"Sunday morning. Before any of it. Before you ever came in." He was looking at the ice, not me. "His own boss at the diner called it in. Called the tip line. Said the dishwasher left early that night. Lives by the shelter. Said he talked about that girl."
The ice door at the end banged. Benny was taking the cones out.
"His boss," I said.
"His own boss. Somebody who worked with him every night and knew him." Lou turned the cup in his hands. "So I want you to hear this. It was never just you. It was never just a scared kid in a room. There was a call, there was a time card, there was where he lived. You were one piece. You were the piece that saw."
"Then why do you need me?"
"Because the call's twelve years old, and you're the piece that's still here."
My phone buzzed in my coat. A downtown number. I almost let it go, and then I didn't.
"Is this Eleanor Dorsey?" A young woman, very kind, very fast. "My name's Marisa Tedeschi, I'm the victim advocate with the district attorney's office, I'm so sorry to call you at work. I know Detective Kovach spoke with you yesterday."
"Okay."
"I'm calling because with the retrial decision coming up, the assistant district attorney would like to sit down with you and go over your identification. Just to walk through it again, so you're comfortable, and then we'd have you sign a sworn statement reaffirming it. It's really just a formality."
"Swear to it again," I said.
"That's right. Would Monday the sixteenth of February work, at ten?"
Lou was watching me. He'd heard enough. He didn't say a word, he just sat there with his coffee and his whole face waiting.
"Fine," I said. "The sixteenth."
"Wonderful. I'll send a reminder. And Eleanor, if anything at all happens before then, if he contacts you, you call me first, okay? Day or night."
She gave me her number. I didn't write it down. I hung up, and my palm had left a wet print on the phone's screen, and I wiped it on my jeans, and then I wiped my hand.
"That was them," Lou said.
"That was them."
"Monday the sixteenth." He nodded. "Good. You go downtown, you say what you said, you sign it. That's the end of him." He leaned in. "Tell me you'll do that. Here. Before they've got you in a room with a box of tissues and somebody's asking you how's the lighting."
"Lou."
"I'm asking you for one thing. Tell me you're still sure."
"I just told you I couldn't see him."
"You told me you saw him up close and it was him." His voice had gone low and flat, the voice he'd had on the phone the morning of the letter, the one that turns a question into an answer. "Nobody needed to see him that night but you. You did."
I didn't say anything. I looked at the ice. Benny had the cones out, and the old men were going off one by one through the gate, and the surface was all cut to pieces, gray and white, with the lines of their blades on it going around and around.
"You don't have to tell me now," Lou said, after a while. He sat back. "I'll be by tomorrow. Coffee's cheaper than the Sheetz." He finished his. "I stop at your mother's Sundays, you know. Just to see she's eating. She doesn't eat when she's upset."
"I didn't know that."
"Well," he said. "Now you do."
He started to say something else, something that began with "Nellie, when you go down there," and I stood up in the middle of it and went down the bleachers and across the mat to the machine room and didn't look back.
\ \ \*
It wasn't time. Big Sue wasn't due out till three. I filled her anyway, too fast, so the tank foamed up and ran down the side, and I climbed up and took her out with Benny standing in the ice door with his arms out, saying something I couldn't hear over the engine.
I went too hard into the first turn and the side of her caught the boards at the north end. It's a sound like a car door in a parking garage, a big hollow bang that goes all the way around the rink. Lou turned around in the bleachers. I kept going. I went around and around with the blade down and the water going out behind me and my hands so tight on the wheel that my thumbs went numb, and when I brought her in, Benny was standing at the north end with his hand flat on a long white scrape on the kickplate.
"You hit the boards," he said.
"I know."
"You know how much a kickplate costs? You want to guess?"
"No."
"Me neither," he said. "Lorraine will know."
When I came out of the machine room Lou's truck was gone from the fire lane. His coffee cup was still up on the top row of the bleachers where he'd been sitting, standing all by itself, with the lid on. I went up and got it. It was empty. He'd drunk every drop and put the lid back on, and I don't know why that made me want to throw it, but it did, and I didn't. I put it in the trash by the door like a normal person.
Lorraine was waiting by the rental desk with her reading glasses on a chain and a piece of paper in her hand. I thought it was going to be about the kickplate. It wasn't, not yet.
"Certified," she said, and held up the green card the post office sends back. "His lawyer signed for the letter this morning. Ruth Ann Sorensen, State Street. He's banned, it's in writing, and his own lawyer has it in her hand." She tucked the card in the incident book. "If he walks in that door, whoever's on calls the police first and me second."
"Okay."
"And Nell? The boards." She looked over my shoulder at the north end, where Benny was still standing. "We'll talk about the boards."
\ \ \*
The bus came at two fifty. Owen came in pink and loud and dropped his backpack at the corner table, and Cody Hartzell was sitting there.
Practice wasn't till four-fifteen. Cody had three sticks laid across the table, taping the blades, and when Owen came up he moved them over to make room like they'd planned it. I watched them from the rental desk, through the skates hanging on their hooks. Cody showed him how the tape goes on, heel to toe, and let Owen pull a strip off the roll.
Then Owen came running across the lobby so fast his boots squeaked.
"Mom. Mom. Coach Cody says Saturday is tryouts for Squirts and anybody can come and you don't need your own skates, you can use rentals, and it's at eight in the morning, which is early but I'm up anyway on Saturdays, and he says I have good hands. He said that. He said I look like I have good hands."
"He said that?" I said.
"He said I look like it. Technically he hasn't seen them yet." He grabbed the edge of the rental desk. "Can I go? Can I please go? You're here anyway on Saturdays."
Cody was standing behind him now, with the tape roll on his wrist. He'd come over slow. He put a hand on the top of Owen's hat.
"No pressure, Mom," he said. "It's a big commitment. But the kid's got the build for it." He squeezed the hat and let go. "Eight o'clock Saturday. Rentals are fine. Think about it."
"We'll see," I said.
"That means yes," Owen told Cody.
"That means we'll see," I said.
Cody winked at Owen. Then he looked at me a second longer than he needed to.
"That was the detective, right? The old guy in the hat. From the case." He said it easy, like he was asking about the weather on the lake. "To be fully transparent, I followed that whole thing back when. Everybody did. It was all anybody talked about." He bumped Owen's shoulder with his fist. "You need anything, Nell, I'm right here Tuesdays and Thursdays. Saturdays now too, I guess."
He went back to his sticks.
\ \ \*
Owen did his homework with his elbow on the corner of the table, because Cody's sticks were still on the rest of it. At ten past three I went over to check his math, and he opened his folder, and there in the pocket on the inside, flattened out smooth like he'd ironed it, was the popcorn bag.
Red and white stripes. Grease spots. A tear down the side where I'd split it. And printed down the white stripe in blue ballpoint, small and even, the phone number.
"Why do you have this?"
"Because it was on the bleacher."
"Owen. Why do you have it?"
He shrugged. "He wrote it for you. You threw it. Somebody should keep it."
I took it out of the folder. He didn't argue. He watched me do it.
He went back to his long division like he'd settled something, and I stood there holding a greasy popcorn bag in the middle of the lobby while two moms looked at me.
I went into the sharpening room and shut the door. The wheel was cold. I smoothed the bag out on the bench, on the silver filings, and I dialed the number with my thumb, one digit at a time, checking each one twice against the bag.
It rang once.
"Hello, Nell," he said.
He didn't ask who it was. He didn't sound surprised.
"Stay away from my son," I said.
"Yes," he said.