I called him at noon on Friday from the sharpening room. It rang twice.
"Hello, Nell."
"You said you'd tell me the whole of it."
"I said when I knew," Garrett said. "I know a little more. There is a woman who was at the party that night. She saw something, and she has not said it to anybody who wrote it down. She will not open her door to me. I think she will open it to you."
"Who?"
"You should hear it from her."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know," he said. "Tasha Greer."
Friday is Maureen's night for Owen, so there was nobody to explain it to. I called at five-thirty to check, and he got to the phone before she could, and told me she'd made pierogi and he'd had six, technically seven if you counted the one that fell apart. Then he asked what I was doing tonight. I said working. I told Benny I had a thing. He said what thing, and I said a thing, and he let it go.
Before I crossed the road I stopped at the Ranger, in the hole Benny had dug out around it, and opened the glove box and took out the hair tie. I didn't think about it. It was like picking up my keys.
He was waiting at the far end of the Dunkin' lot, under the one light, with the heater going and the window down an inch so the glass wouldn't fog. I got in without being asked.
\ \ \*
Tasha Greer lives on West Eighth in the top half of a brick double with a plastic Santa still on the porch rail, and a sticker on the door from the hospital where she works nights. I know that because the porch light was on and Garrett didn't get out of the car. He turned the headlights off and stopped across the street, three houses down, behind a snowbank.
"She will not open it if she sees the car," he said.
"She's going to see the car."
"Then she will see the car after."
I walked up the steps with my hands in my pockets. In the left one I had the green hair tie, and I'd been snapping it against my wrist since the Dunkin' lot, and I'd quit when I heard myself, and he'd looked at it once and said, "Is that hers?" and I'd said, "One of two."
I'd told him the rest, which I hadn't meant to. It was dark and we were going twenty miles an hour and a person will say a lot to a windshield. I'd bought them at the flea market on Peach for Birdie's sixteenth birthday, two dollars for the pair, green cloth with a thread of gold. She had so much hair, she went through them like gum. I'd knotted one smaller than the other, a hard double knot, a bad one, because I do everything sloppy. "So it bites," I'd told her. "So it stays in." She'd worn the small one every day for months. The other was on her dresser the morning they found her.
"I took it off the dresser," I'd said. "I don't know why. I wore it to the lineup."
He'd gone still. He doesn't move much to begin with, but there's a stillness under that, and I'd felt it from the passenger seat, like a dog hearing something outside. Then he'd reached down and turned the defrost up a notch.
I rang Tasha's bell. Somewhere inside a dog that wasn't hers started barking and was told to stop, and a chain slid, and a lock turned, and then another.
\ \ \*
She opened it in scrub pants and a gray sweatshirt with a bowl of cereal in one hand, and she looked at me for a while with the spoon halfway up.
"Nell Dorsey," she said. "Oh, my God."
"Hi, Tash."
"You look like your mother." It wasn't a compliment. It was a finding. "I'm on at eight tonight. This is breakfast. You've got twenty minutes."
Her kitchen was yellow, with a paper plate of somebody's Christmas cookies going stale in the middle of the table, and a pair of white nurse's shoes under a chair. She sat across from me and ate her cereal, steadily, like she was fueling something. She was twenty-eight. She'd been sixteen. She had the same square jaw. I didn't know what to say, so I said Birdie's name, and she put the spoon down.
"I haven't said it out loud in about a year," Tasha said. "Is that who sent you? The man? He came here Tuesday. I watched him through the blinds. He stood on my porch for ten minutes and I stood behind the door and breathed."
"He says you saw something."
"What did he say I saw?"
"He didn't. He said to ask you."
"Smart," Tasha said. She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. "Okay. I've worked eleven shifts out of fourteen. I can't be careful. Here."
I didn't say anything. She looked at the cookie plate.
"It was my boyfriend's brother's friend's house," she said, "on Eleventh. Kyle's the boyfriend. Was. Kyle Hartzell." She looked up. "Kyle's little brother was there. Cody."
I felt the kitchen go very quiet.
"Hartzell," I said.
"Cody was eighteen, a senior, with his big mouth and his father's boat money, and he was trying to get with every girl in the house who was too young to say no. You know the kind?" She turned her cereal bowl a quarter turn. "Birdie was in the kitchen. It was about eleven-thirty. I went in to get ice, and I saw her at the counter, and he had her up against the cupboards with one hand on each side of her, like a gate. Laughing. He thought it was a game. I didn't think it was a game, but I was sixteen and I'd had two wine coolers and he was Kyle's brother."
"What did you do?"
"Went back out." She said it like she was reading it off a chart. "Then about ten minutes later she came out of that kitchen, and she was white, Nell. Not mad. White. Holding her hand up in front of her like it was somebody else's, and there was blood under her nails. And he came out after her with a dish towel on his neck, saying she was crazy, she was a crazy little bitch, ha ha, she scratched me, can you believe it. Three lines. Down the side. And everybody laughed, because it was Cody."
"Birdie texted me. I know she did. Come now."
"She said it out loud while she did it," Tasha said. "She was typing with her thumb and she said it, come now, like capital letters. And she said, 'My sister's going to kill me for this,' and I said, 'Nell's late, she's always late,' and she said, 'She's on her way.' And she put her coat on." Tasha's voice didn't change. "She did her hair first, in the hall mirror. She had that green thing you gave her, the tight one, with the knot, and she pulled her hair up in it hard and said, 'So I look serious.' She put on those white mittens with the snowflake and held her hands up like a surgeon. Then she said she'd wait on the corner. Ten past twelve. She said she'd wait on the corner. I said I'd walk down with her, and she said, 'Don't be dumb, it's four blocks.'"
"Eleventh to Twelfth is one block."
"Then it was one block," Tasha said. "Sue me."
I sat there. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere upstairs the people who owned the other half of the double were watching a game show, with the sound all the way up.
"The police came Saturday night," Tasha said. "Canvassing. A uniform and a lady in a coat. They asked everybody. I said she'd left by herself, she'd been fine, I hadn't seen anyone bother her. I didn't say the kitchen. I didn't say Cody."
"Why?"
"Because I was sixteen and I was in my boyfriend's house and Kyle had told me before they got there, if anybody asks, it was a good party. And because by Sunday night they had a man." She looked at me then. "They had him by supper. And I thought, well, then it doesn't matter. It's a scratch. A scratch isn't a murder. The girl at the lineup said she knew him the second she saw him."
I'd been waiting for it. It still went through me.
"That was me," I said.
"I know it was you." She pushed the cereal away. "I've been glad it was you for twelve years. I'm just telling you. Because if it was you, I didn't have to be the girl who knew about the kitchen."
I put my hands under the table. I'd gotten the hair tie out of my pocket without knowing, and was holding it so hard it hurt.
"Cody Hartzell," I said. "The coach."
"The what?"
"He coaches. Hockey. In my building. He's got twenty little kids on the ice Tuesdays and Thursdays. He's been telling my son he's got good hands." I stopped. "Tasha. He tapes his sticks."
"Oh, no," she said. She stood up. She went to the sink and ran water into the cereal bowl and stood there with it running over. "He coaches kids? He's on a billboard, I've seen the billboard, I didn't think—" She turned it off. "Is he the one who— Nell. Is that what that man wants you to think? That it was Cody?"
"He didn't say it was anybody."
"Then why did he send you to me?"
"I don't know."
"Do you believe him?" Tasha said. "The man in the car. Do you believe him, honestly, that it wasn't him?"
I looked at the cookies. I looked at her shoes.
"That's his story," I said.
\ \ \*
She walked me to the door. She did it in her socks, in the cold, with her arms wrapped around the sweatshirt, and she stood in the open doorway and watched me go down the steps, and then she stopped.
Garrett was at the bottom of them.
He hadn't come up. He was standing on the sidewalk, in front of her house, with his hands at his sides, in the light from the porch. He'd left the car and walked three houses, and he didn't say anything to her. He stood there.
"That's him," Tasha said.
"That's him."
"I'm going to be sick," she said, and shut the door.
I went down the steps. The light went off behind me. He looked at me and didn't say anything about it.
I walked past him to the car.
\ \ \*
"Cody Hartzell," I said, in the car.
"Yes."
"You knew."
"I knew a name." He started the engine. "I knew he had been interviewed. I knew he had refused. I did not know what anyone had seen, and I do not know it now, because I was not in the kitchen. I would not have had you take my word."
"It's the DNA. It's his DNA under her nails. Isn't it? That's what they found. Some man she scratched."
"I do not know that it is his," Garrett said.
"Don't you." I turned in the seat. "Tasha said three scratches down the side of his neck. That night. And he refused to give it. And he's got my kid in a building on ice at four-fifteen on Monday and Tuesday and Thursday with a whistle. Take me to his house. Where's his house?"
"I do not know where he lives."
"Hartzell Marine, then. It's on upper Peach. I can find a boat lot."
"Not tonight," Garrett said.
I looked at him. He was looking through the windshield at the road. He wasn't angry, and he wasn't scared. I'd have given anything for him to be one or the other.
"Why not?"
"Because it is not the time."
"Why not?" I said again.
"Trust me on this one."
"Trust you."
"For one night."
I hit the dashboard with my fist. It was a cheap plastic dash, a kind of cracked beige, and my hand went through the center of it with a sound like an egg. A bolt of white went across the vinyl from one side to the other. He didn't flinch. His hands on the wheel went a little lighter.
"I will pay for that," he said.
"You'll pay for a lot of things."
"I will take you where she was found," he said. "Tomorrow. I would like you to see it with your own eyes. You have never been."
I hadn't. I hadn't said that. I held my hand in my lap and it was hot, and I didn't ask how he knew.
"Tomorrow's tryouts."
"I will be across the road at eight-thirty. I will wait. You do not have to come."
I kept my hand under my thigh the whole way back. I kept seeing Cody's hand on the top of Owen's hat on Tuesday, the squeeze and the let go, and the flat of it coming down on the Ranger's hood. Twice. I'd thought, he stands too close, the way you'd think it's cold out. I thought about the whistle. I thought about every stick he'd taped since September, and every kid he'd put one in the hands of.
He drove me back to the rink. Fridays it's empty by six, a yellow light on over the front door and the Ranger alone in the lot, plowed in a ridge at the front. He stopped well short of the lot and let me out at the curb. I'd put the hair tie back in the glove box, where it lives. I got in the Ranger, and sat with my hand around the wheel and the engine off, until the cold came up through the seat. Then I called Kovach. She picked up on the fourth ring with her mouth full.
"Hon," she said. "It's almost nine at night."
"Cody Hartzell, the Squirts coach, was at Birdie's party. A girl who was there says Birdie scratched him across the neck in the kitchen that night. Three lines. She says she lied to the police about it in two thousand fourteen."
There was a long chew. "What girl?"
"Tasha Greer. She's a nurse at the hospital."
"Okay." A swallow. "Okay. Here's what I've got, Nell, and I'm telling you straight. A woman who lied to a canvassing officer once, who wants to say it twelve years later on a kitchen table, about a scratch. He's got a lawyer. His lawyer told the clinic's people to take a hike in November. I can write it down. I can send somebody to her on Monday and take it properly, on the record. I can't knock on a man's door at a boat lot for what somebody says somebody did at a party. And I can't give you a car outside Owen's practice, because the department doesn't do that for coaches."
"He's got my son on the list for tomorrow."
"Then don't take your son tomorrow." She stopped. "Where are you? You sound like you're in a closet."
"The Ranger. At the rink."
"Go home, hon," Kovach said. "Lock up. Monday."
I hung up. My phone went off again in my hand.
It was Lorraine. She doesn't text. She'd sent a picture, no words, then a line a minute later: Tomorrow's sheet. Coach H turned this in.
It was a clipboard photographed under the fluorescent light, a printed form with twelve lines and a pen on a string. Names in a neat round hand that wasn't a kid's. A boy named Jackson. A boy named Dylan. And the third line, in the same round blue pen, in capitals:
OWEN DORSEY.