Ruth Ann Sorensen has her office on State Street, up a flight of stairs over a shoe repair, and the whole stairwell smells like glue and leather. I got there at nine-thirty on Monday with a coffee I'd bought and not drunk. Lorraine had given me the morning off with a look that said the boards and I would be talking later. Owen was at school, with my mother to pick him up, and a note in his folder from me that said Wait, underlined twice, which he'd read out loud on the porch in the voice of a man being sentenced.
Garrett was already there. He'd put on a shirt with a collar, white, too big in the neck, and he sat on a wooden chair in the waiting room with his hands on his knees. He stood up when I came in. I didn't say good morning.
Sunday had gone by. I'd spent it with Owen on the living room floor building a city out of cereal boxes, and he'd forgiven me about halfway through, at about the hospital. Lou had stopped at my mother's after church, I knew, because she'd mentioned it, with the TV going behind her, to see she was eating. I'd said fine. I hadn't said anything about a creek.
"Ms. Dorsey." Sorensen came out of the inner office with her hand already out. She's in her fifties, small, with short gray hair and a voice like a good cup of tea, the kind of voice you tell things to without meaning to. She shook my hand like a person closing a deal. "Thank you for coming. I know what this is costing you. Please come in."
"I'm not signing anything," I said.
"I haven't asked you to." She smiled. "I'll ask you some questions. You answer the ones you want. That's all this is. Think of it as an interview. I interview witnesses before I ever put one on the stand, and I want the conditions of your identification, which is the part none of us has ever heard." She turned. "Mister Rudnicki. The hall, please."
"Yes," Garrett said.
"A witness shouldn't be able to see the person she's describing."
"I understand."
He went out. The paralegal, a young man named Dana with a pencil behind each ear, held the door for him. I went to the doorway and watched him sit down on the bench in the hall, under a framed print of a sailboat, and fold his hands.
"I'll be a minute," I said to Sorensen.
I went out and stood in front of him. He looked up, and then, because I was standing, he got to his feet again. He did it slowly.
"Why am I here?"
"Because she will show you what the trial made public. I have one thing to say, and I will not say it twice." He was keeping his voice very low. "Please read only the autopsy."
"Why?"
"Because I would like you to see what is in it," Garrett said, "before anyone tells you what it means."
"What's in the rest?"
"Nothing I am afraid of," he said. "It is only a lot of paper. Read the one."
"Okay," I said, and went back in.
\ \ \*
Her office had a green rug and a long table with a lamp, and a window that looked across State Street at a bank, and nothing on the walls except a diploma and a map of Erie County with colored pins in it. Dana put two stapled packets in front of me and shut the door.
"The first is the report of the medical examiner," Sorensen said, "the doctor who looked at your sister's body. An autopsy. It's a public record. It was read in open court. The second is the transcript of your own testimony, October of two thousand fourteen. That's public as well. I'm not showing you anything else today. The rest is our work, and it isn't mine to hand to a witness." She sat down across from me and folded her hands. "Take your time. If you need to stop, say so."
The autopsy was nine pages. It was stapled in the corner, and it had a gray stamp on every page that said it was a copy. I read it with my finger under the line, the way Owen does. Decedent is a well-developed, well-nourished white female, appearing the stated age of sixteen. I stopped at that. I went on.
It wasn't hard to read. I'd been afraid it would be a language, but a doctor wrote it, and a doctor had had to write it plain for a judge. It said what had been found, one thing and then the next, as if setting out the contents of a drawer.
Her right shin was broken, in the middle of the bone, clean through. Transverse fracture of the right tibia at mid-shaft, consistent with a fall from a height. Her coat, a white down jacket, was torn at the right hip, a ragged tear about the length of a hand, and some of the down had come out of it. Tear, right hip, with loss of down, consistent with a struggle. A list of what she'd had on her: boots, jeans, a phone in the coat pocket, forty-one cents, a lip balm. A mitten, white, knit, on the right hand. Left mitten not recovered. No jewelry. No hair accessories.
I read it twice. My finger moved down to the last page, and the last paragraph, and stopped.
Cause of death: drowning. Froth in the airway, water in the lungs and stomach, consistent with the decedent breathing at the time of immersion.
"What's that mean?" I said.
Sorensen didn't answer right away. I looked up. She was looking at me with her hands very still on the table, and with a face I hadn't seen on her yet, not warm and not hard.
"It means she was alive when she went into the water," she said. "She took it in. She breathed it. The doctor says so, in so many words. It's not in dispute. Nobody argued it at trial, because it wasn't what the case was about." She said it all in the same even voice, as though she was reading it off a card. "The theory was that Mister Rudnicki struck her, or grappled with her, at or near the bus shelter, and that she broke her leg falling down the bank, and that he left her. Which she survived, for a time."
"She drowned."
I didn't say anything. I looked at the page. "I want to ask you about the coat," Sorensen said. "The tear. The prosecutor called it a struggle, and the down that came out of it, a struggle, and that was the end of it. Nobody ever asked the lab to look at it." She tapped the table once with a finger. "Not against anything. Not against a car, or a fence, or a railing, or a belt buckle. Nobody asked what had torn it. It was torn, a man had put his hand on her, so he tore it. Nobody ever asked, and they had the coat, and it sat in a box for twelve years."
"Why didn't anybody ask?"
"Because they had you." She said it gently. "They had a witness who was certain. You'd be amazed what a certain witness saves a department."
I picked up my coffee. It was cold. I put it down.
"And there was no lawyer at the lineup," Sorensen said. "Did you know that? Mister Rudnicki was brought in at ten on Sunday morning. He sat in a room until the evening. He asked for a lawyer on two occasions, according to him, and was told one was on the way. There wasn't a lawyer at the lineup. There wasn't a lawyer when you picked him. There isn't a requirement, in Pennsylvania, at that stage. It isn't illegal. I would call it unwise."
"I was nineteen," I said. "I didn't know what was supposed to be at a lineup."
"No," Sorensen said. "Why would you?"
\ \ \*
The transcript was bound in a blue cover. It was forty pages, and I went to the middle by the tab, and it was my name at the top of the page in capitals, ELEANOR DORSEY, SWORN, and under it Lou's voice, I could have told you it was his, though it was only a prosecutor, a young man with a name I'd forgotten. The page said Question and Answer in capitals down the left side. I read it the way you read a menu in a language you used to speak.
Question: And what did you see when you came to the corner?
Answer: My sister at the bus shelter. And a man with her.
Question: What was he doing?
Answer: He had his hand on her arm.
Question: And when you sounded your horn, what did he do?
Answer: He looked up.
Question: Did your sister appear to be trying to get away from him?
Answer: No. I don't know.
I put my finger on it. It was sitting there at the bottom of a page, a line and a half, with nothing after it. The next question was about the time.
"Read me that last one," Sorensen said.
"It says, did she appear to be trying to get away from him. And I said no. I don't know."
"Which did you mean?" Sorensen said.
"I meant I didn't know."
"You said no first."
"I said no, and then I said I didn't know."
"I'm not going to tell you what to make of it. I'd only like you to notice the order." Sorensen's voice hadn't changed. "Some other things. How far were you from the shelter?"
"Thirty feet. Maybe."
"How fast were you going?"
"I don't know. I was slowing down. Ten miles an hour. Fifteen."
"And how long did you see him?"
"I saw him—" I stopped. I looked at her. I could feel Dana's pencil, behind me, not moving. "A couple of seconds. I honked. She turned around. She gave me the finger. I drove."
"Two seconds."
"About."
"At fifteen miles an hour, in a snowstorm, at midnight, from the driver's seat, through a windshield." Sorensen waited. "And your lineup was less than two days later. You saw him on Sunday, at seven in the evening, in a room, with a number. How many times, in those forty-three hours, had you seen a picture of him?"
"None."
"You're certain."
"I was in a room waiting for twenty minutes. I looked at a radiator and a pencil cup."
"Yes," she said. "I'm sure you did."
She let it sit. Then she turned a page in her own folder, a different page, from a file I wasn't going to be given, and said, in the same voice, "Now the tip, if you don't mind. The anonymous call, Sunday morning. Mister Skarupa, the owner of the diner, was sworn at trial. He identified the time card. Mister Rudnicki had clocked out at twelve-fifteen. That was entered. But the call that sent officers to his door that Sunday, according to the record, was a call from the diner. No name. The caller wasn't sworn. No one has ever said who made it, and the department says it is not in a position to say."
"Lou told me it was his boss."
"Detective Moynihan has been generous with the word boss." She closed the folder. "I don't say that it matters. A tip isn't evidence, the judge told the jury so. It's only the reason somebody knocked on a door."
I looked at the transcript. My finger was still on the line. No. I don't know.
"When you're ready," Sorensen said, "I'd like to take your account of all that, in your own words, and put it on paper. Not today. I wouldn't ask you today."
"I'm booked to swear the other way on the sixteenth."
"I know you are." She said it without any weight at all. "The district attorney's office has you at ten. You'll hear a great deal between now and then, from a great many people who care about you."
"Everybody wants me to say something."
"Yes," Sorensen said. "I do too. I want you to know that I do."
I stood up. My chair went back and hit the wall.
"I'm going to take a minute," I said.
\ \ \*
There's a stairwell at the back of the building, behind a door with no sign, concrete and a metal rail, with a window on the landing that looks at the back wall of the shoe repair. I got to the landing and sat down on the top step and put my head between my knees. I did it because I'd seen people do it in movies and I couldn't think of what else to do with my head. It was heavy, and I held it up with my hands.
Alive when she went in.
I'd thought of her in the water for twelve years. I'd thought of her in the water the way you think of a name you can't read, a shape, a cold place, a fact. I'd thought, she was already gone. I'd thought, by then she was already gone, it was over before the ice.
Somebody had put her down on the ice and she'd been alive. For how long? A minute? Ten? She'd been sixteen, and the ice was thin at the edge, and she'd had a broken leg, and she hadn't gotten up, and the creek was pouring.
I counted the stairs to the street. There were twenty-two. I told myself that if I could get to the bottom before I thought about the water again, it would be a different thing, it would be something I could carry. I got as far as nine.
The door opened above me.
He didn't come down. He stopped at the top of the flight with one hand on the frame, in his too-big collar, and looked down at me for a while. I could see how it would go, the kind thing, the I am sorry. He didn't say it. He stood there. Then he came down, slowly, one step at a time, and sat on the stair above mine, a good two steps up, and put his hands between his knees.
I waited for him to talk.
"You read the rest," he said.
"I read the testimony. Mine. I read the tip."
"I asked you to read the one."
"I know what you asked."
"Yes." He nodded. "I would have liked you to do what I asked."
"You wanted me to read that and feel something," I said, "and not read anything that might make me think."
"I wanted you to read it before anyone else told you what it meant."
"She said it means she was breathing. She told me. I didn't need you."
"No," Garrett said. "That is true."
The window on the landing was gray. A pigeon was walking along the ledge outside it, in no hurry. He watched it. I watched him watch it. He had a long, plain face, a tired face, and I couldn't find anything in it but a man looking at a pigeon.
"Mister Rudnicki?"
It was Dana. He'd come out on the landing above us with a pink message slip held out in front of him. He looked at me and then at the floor and said, apologizing as he said it, "I'm sorry. The investigator called back. About the list. She says she can go over it with you at two if you can come back, because she has to drive to Pittsburgh at three, and she said it was—"
"It is not for today," Garrett said.
"I only—"
"Thank you, Dana. It is not for today."
Dana went back in. The door shut. Garrett was looking at the pigeon again, and his hands had come together between his knees and were holding each other.
"What list?" I said.