I told Owen at my mother's kitchen table, over his cereal, since he'd slept there. He put his spoon down in the bowl, which is not a thing he does, and didn't say anything the whole time I stood in the hall with my keys, which is a record. I could hear him breathing through his nose. When I went to leave he walked me to the door and shut it behind me, not hard, which was worse, and my mother stood in the hall and watched me over his head. She'd keep him till six. She didn't ask where I was going, and I didn't say.
Saturday's my short shift. I do the early flood at six and I'm out by eight-thirty, because Benny takes the afternoon. By quarter to eight the lobby was already full of parents in puffy coats holding travel mugs, and kids in rented skates clacking across the carpet on their blade guards, and a folding table by the ice door with a clipboard on it and a pen on a string.
Cody was behind the table. He had a navy Squirts jacket on, zipped to the chin, and a whistle around his neck, and a smile he was giving to everybody. He was telling a mother her son had a great build. I stood at the end of the table until he noticed me.
"Nell. Hey." He tipped the clipboard toward me, like a waiter. "Owen's third. I got him down early. You want to sit him in the front row?"
I took the marker off the rental desk. It's a black permanent one for writing sizes on the tape, thick as a thumb. I took the clipboard out of his hand, which he let me do, and found the third line, OWEN DORSEY in round blue capitals, and I drew a line through it. One long line, left to right, so the marker squeaked on the plastic, and then a second line in case anybody thought it was an accident.
The mother with the travel mug stopped talking. Two kids in the line looked up.
"He's not coming," I said.
Cody looked at the line. He looked at me. For a second there was nothing on his face at all, like a TV between channels, and then it all came back at once, the smile, the eyebrows, a little shrug.
"Totally your call, Mom," he said. "Door's open." He took the marker out of my hand, capped it, and put it in my shirt pocket. His fingers were at my chest for about as long as it takes to say it. "You change your mind, we've always got room."
I went back out through the lobby with the pen in my pocket and the whole row of parents not looking at me. Benny was in the machine room doorway with his arms folded.
"You want a ride?" he said. "To wherever?"
"I'm walking."
"It's across the road," Benny said, slowly, as though I might have thought it was Texas.
\ \ \*
Garrett had his window down an inch. The dash had a long white crack across it, from one side to the other, with the vinyl lifted along the edge like a lip. He'd run a strip of masking tape along it, and printed on the tape in capitals, in blue ballpoint, one word: DASH. I got in.
"Did you eat?" he said.
"No."
"There is a bag on the floor. It is only bread and peanut butter."
I ate it. I hadn't known I was hungry. We went down Thirty-Eighth, and then Cascade, and then the long way up it, past the places I'd been told to stay away from, the bank lot and the Sunoco, and I kept my eyes on my hands.
"I called Detective Kovach," I said.
"Yes."
"She says Monday. She says she can't knock on a boat lot."
"That is a reasonable thing for her to say."
"It's not a reasonable thing."
"No," he said, after a while. "It is also not unreasonable. It is how it is."
The sky had gone white and low. The thaw had come in overnight, a few degrees, enough to make the roofs drip, and the snowbanks on Cascade had gone gray and glassy, with black water running at the curb. At Eighteenth he turned in at a place where I'd have gone past a thousand times: a gap between a fence and a utility pole, a gravel track under the snow with two ruts in it where dog-walkers had gone before us. It went down. It was the kind of lane you'd think was somebody's driveway. At the bottom there was a turnaround, and a chain across it with a sign, and beyond the chain, the railroad.
The trestle is black. It's all black steel and rivets, a long iron bridge going over the creek on two stone legs, and from underneath it looks like something that's been waiting a lot longer than twelve years. Water ran under it, open in the middle and dark as a bottle. Along both edges was a shelf of white ice about as wide as a sidewalk.
My mother's house is six blocks from the shelter, and from here it was less than a mile. I'd lived my whole life within a mile of this and I had never once turned down the lane.
\ \ \*
"I do not know exactly where," Garrett said. He'd stopped the car at the chain and not turned it off. "There are photographs in the record. A flat rock with a root across it, on the near side, below the first leg. I have not been here either. I have only seen it on paper."
"You've never been?"
"I was not allowed." He looked at the trestle. "I would not have come without you."
I opened the door. I was out and at the chain and ducked it and stood at the top of the bank.
It's a bank. I'd thought of it as a hill, a place you could have walked down in a bad moment, and it wasn't one. It dropped about twelve feet at the angle of a staircase, frozen clay and dead brush and a dirty crust of old snow, with a skin of ice over all of it where the thaw had run down and refrozen. A rotten fence post stuck out of the middle with a ribbon tied around it, red once, gone pink. I don't know whose. It had been there long enough to be part of the post. At the bottom, a flat rock the size of a bread loaf, and a root across it.
"Walk it," Garrett said behind me. He'd gotten out. He'd stopped a few yards away with his hands in his coat. "That is all I ask. Go down it in the dark in your head. Then tell me she did that on a broken leg."
"What broken leg?"
He didn't answer.
I went down. I didn't walk it. I sat on the top and let myself go and slid on the seat of my jeans, grabbing at brush, my shoes going out from under me, and I hit the bottom with a bang that went all the way up my back and sat there in the snow with my breath coming out in clouds. The creek was louder at the bottom. It made a sound like something being poured, and under that, a ticking, the ice letting go of itself a little at a time all along the edge.
I got up. The rock was in front of me. A dark patch of ice came off it toward the water, a shelf about as long as I am, thin and gray and a little wet on top. It had a flat spot at the end of it, a place where something could lie down.
I stepped onto it.
I'll say this once. I knew better. Nobody who works with ice walks onto it that's been running water under it for two weeks, and I walk on ice for a living. But I was nineteen again, standing at the end of the shelter, and I wanted to put my feet where her feet had gone. It held for three steps. On the fourth, it made a noise like a plate being set down, and a white crack went out from under my heel in a star, and I went through.
It wasn't deep. It was to my thigh, a hard shock of cold that came up through the leg of my jeans and turned my whole left side to concrete. I yelled. I think I yelled. The creek had me by the leg, pulling, a steady pull to the right. I couldn't get a foot on the bottom. I grabbed for the ice and it came apart in my hand.
Something took hold of my arm.
It was above the elbow. A big hand, closed all the way around. And the sound went out of the world. I could see the creek moving and the white edge breaking away in chunks, and I couldn't hear any of it. My arm went hot, then stiff, and I wrenched it away so hard that I sat down in the water. It was up to my waist. He let go as soon as I pulled.
"Don't," I said. "Don't. Don't."
"I am sorry."
"Don't touch me."
"I will not," he said. He was on his knees on the good ice with both hands up, open, the way he'd held them at the shelter, and he was breathing hard. He'd come down that bank in about two seconds, and he hadn't slid. "I will not touch you. Can you get out by yourself?"
I got out by myself. I did it on my stomach, in the snow, and then I couldn't stand, and my legs were shaking so hard my teeth were doing it too.
"It's the cold," I said. "It's just the cold. I can't feel my leg."
"Yes."
"That's all it is."
"Yes," Garrett said. "It is cold."
He took off his coat and put it on the rock beside me, not on me. He stepped back. We sat there, the two of us, ten feet apart at the foot of a bank in the dull light with the trestle over us, and the creek went on pouring. After a while he stood up and looked at the ice where I'd gone through, the black hole with its torn edge and the piece of plank he'd had to get his weight onto.
"Your sister did not walk down here," he said.
"You don't know that."
"Look at the bank. Look at it." He didn't point. "A girl with a broken leg in the dark, in the snow. Nobody walks down that. And nobody falls down it and lands there." He nodded at the flat spot at the end of the shelf. "A person who falls goes to the bottom and stays where she stops. They found her at the edge, on her back, with her feet toward the water and her arms at her sides. That is not where a fall puts a person."
"What are you saying?"
"I am saying somebody carried her," Garrett said. "Somebody put her down."
I looked at his shoulders. I looked at his hands, which were big. I had watched him come down that bank like it was stairs. Then I put my face on my knees, with the creek in my jeans, and left it there.
He got me up the bank. It took him two tries, and the second one was one-handed, by the back of my coat, the way you'd carry a bag of salt, and I'm not small. At the top, he put his coat around me and shut the car door on it, and I let him.
\ \ \*
The Lakeview Motor Court is on upper Peach, a long low line of orange doors facing a parking lot, with a sign that's lost its second L. He took me there because it was nearest. My jeans had begun to freeze in the car, and he said without looking at me that he had a towel, and a hair dryer, and that he would wait outside.
Room eleven. He unlocked it and stood back and didn't come in. I didn't know what I thought it would look like.
It was very clean. A bed made tight, with the corners folded. A small table. A brown carpet. And on everything, a strip of white masking tape with a word printed on it in blue capitals, every letter the same height as the one beside it: SOAP on the soap dish. TOWELS on the shelf. COAT on a hook, KEYS on another, though there was nothing on it. FOOD on a dormitory refrigerator. On the nightstand, a lamp that said LAMP.
"I do not like to lose things," he said from the doorway. "It is a habit. Please take your time."
Then he shut the door from the outside.
The hair dryer was bolted to the bathroom wall. I'd never seen one. You stand in front of it with your jeans held up in both hands against the nozzle, and press a button and it blows hot air and stops, and you press again, and it blows. I did that for twenty minutes in a bath towel with my pants held out in front of me like a woman being searched. The window was frosted. I could hear his car outside, the engine running, and not much else.
There was a calendar on the wall over the television, from the motel office, with a picture of a pelican. January had a line through every day, small and neat, from the twentieth forward. February had no lines. The twenty-third had a box around it, drawn with a ruler.
I looked at it a while.
Then I did what I'd been told not to. I don't know who told me. I stood in front of the nightstand in my towel with my jeans steaming on the chair and opened the drawer.
There wasn't much. A pen. A pad with nothing on it. A paperback from the prison library at Albion, with the stamp on the edge of the pages. A bus schedule, folded small. And at the back, face down, a stiff little card about as big as a playing card.
I turned it over. It had a picture of the Virgin Mary with a lot of light, and on the other side, in a gold script: In Loving Memory of Dorothy Rudnicki, and a date in two thousand nineteen, and a prayer. A blue ballpoint line at the bottom, in his capitals, pressed hard: SHE WAS A CLEANER AT THE HOSPITAL. SHE WAS PROUD.
I put it back. I put it face down the way I'd found it, and shut the drawer.
He knocked at ten past twelve. I had my jeans on. They were dry, in the way a dish towel is dry after you've wrung it. He came in and looked at the room, once, the way you look at a scale, and then at the nightstand, and I watched him see it. The drawer had been open about a finger's width. I'd pushed it shut.
He didn't say anything. He went over and opened it exactly a finger, and he came back.
"What is the twenty-third?" I said.
"The date the district attorney must say whether he will try me again."
"You said two blocks. From the shelter to your room." I was holding the back of the chair. "Where were you standing, that night? Show me."
He picked his keys up off the nightstand, though they weren't on the hook. He went to the window, and put one finger on the edge of the curtain, and moved it about an inch. The light came in across his face in a long gray bar. He had his back to me.
"You can see a long way from a window at night," he said. "Farther than people think."