Benny was on my couch when I left, with his boots off and the remote on his knee. Owen sat on the floor at his feet watching a man on a laptop rebuild an Olympia from the frame up, and the two of them hadn't said anything to each other in ten minutes, and neither one wanted me to interrupt.
"Where are you going?" Owen said, not looking up.
"Out for an hour or two."
"That's not a place."
"It's a restaurant."
"Then bring me a pie," he said.
"I'll see."
"That means yes," he told Benny.
"That means depends," Benny said, and turned up the man with the laptop.
\ \ \*
Rudy's is a family restaurant on upper Peach with a sign shaped like a coffee pot. They give you a laminated menu with a photograph of every dish, a pancake the size of a hubcap, a hot turkey sandwich with a lake of gravy, and they've never once been busy at six o'clock on a Friday in February. The hostess pointed to the back booth with her pen.
Cody was already in it. He was on the far side, against the wall, with his hands folded on the table in front of him, in a collared shirt and no quarter-zip, and he looked as if somebody had washed him. He'd shaved.
Next to him sat a man in a camel coat. He hadn't taken it off. He was somewhere past fifty, with a yellow legal pad squared up in front of him and a pen that he clicked once as I sat down, the way you'd test a microphone.
"Miss Dorsey," he said. "Gerald Fogle. I represent Mister Hartzell. Thank you for coming."
"I'll have coffee," I said to the waitress, who had come up with a pot and a name tag that said DARLENE, and she poured it without looking at any of us, and went away.
"Nell," Cody said.
"Mister Hartzell," Fogle said, "I'd ask you to let me."
"I hear you, and I want to apologize for—"
"Cody," Fogle said, and Cody stopped and picked at the edge of the menu with his thumbnail like a kid outside the principal's office.
Fogle clicked his pen again.
"Mister Hartzell would like to make a statement. He will make it to you, here, in my presence, and he's prepared to make it to the district attorney at any time. It has three parts. One." He put the pen down on the pad. "On the night of the seventh of February, two thousand fourteen, at approximately eleven thirty-five in the evening, in the kitchen of a residence on West Eleventh Street, Mister Hartzell had physical contact with your sister, Bridget Dorsey, which was not welcome. She scratched him on the left side of the neck. He has had twelve years to regret it."
"I was eighteen," Cody said.
"Cody."
"That's a fact." He didn't look at me. "I was eighteen, and I'd had six beers, and I put my hands where I shouldn't have. She said no. She meant it. She went at me with her nails, and I let go. She went out of the kitchen."
I held the coffee in both hands and didn't drink it. I was looking at the left side of his neck, above the collar, where there was nothing now, a place like any other place. I'd made a whole building out of it.
"To be fully transparent," Cody said, "I think about it."
"That is not part of the statement," said Fogle.
"I'm saying I think about it."
"Two," Fogle said. "At eleven fifty-eight that night, Mister Hartzell was in the living room of the same house, in the presence of numerous people. He remained there until two fifty-eight the following morning. He did not leave the house. Look at this."
He took a phone out of the coat and slid it across the table, face up, with a photo on it.
It was a living room. A beige couch with somebody's plaid blanket on it, and a lot of people in coats and socks, and in the middle of them, with a red plastic cup in one hand and a wad of paper towel pressed against his neck with the other, a skinny kid with a buzz cut and a huge grin. The corner of the picture said eleven fifty-eight at night.
I swiped. It was a thumb on glass. The next one, a flash going off in a hallway, eleven fifty-nine. The next, a different phone, a boy standing on a coffee table. They went on and on. One in a basement, one on a porch, one of a girl I thought was Tasha, with her face turned away from the camera, laughing at somebody off the side. The kid with the buzz cut was in every third one. The paper towel got smaller. Then it was gone, and there was a red line on his neck, and he was holding a cat.
The last one was at two fifty-eight in the morning. He was asleep on a beanbag in a basement, with his mouth open. Somebody had drawn a mustache on him in marker.
"There are sixty-one photographs," Fogle said. "On seven different phones, each with its original file information. And there are thirty people at that party who are willing to say what they remember. Two of them are now police officers."
I put the phone down.
"We provided these photographs, and the list of who took them, to a defense investigator in November," Fogle said. "An investigator from the clinic in Pittsburgh, working on Mister Rudnicki's behalf. Mister Hartzell was unwilling to give a DNA sample at that time, on my advice, and I do not apologize for it."
"November."
"The twelfth," Fogle said.
I'd been holding the coffee so long it was cold. I set it down. There was a ring on the menu, around a photograph of a pancake.
"Garrett knew," I said.
"I couldn't say what Mister Rudnicki knew. I can say that his side has had these photographs for almost three months."
Cody said, "I didn't kill anybody."
"Cody—"
"I want it on the record. I want somebody to say it." He was leaning across the table, and his voice had cracked in the middle. "You've been looking at me for a week. My dad's lot, Nell. The coaching, I do that for free. I've got a kid on that team who won't come to practice because his mother saw the video. I made a pass at a sixteen-year-old girl in a kitchen and she hit me, and it's true, and I'm sorry. But I didn't kill anybody. I was in a living room with a cat."
"That is the second part, Mister Hartzell," Fogle said. "I'll do the third." He picked up the pen. He didn't click it. "This afternoon at four-forty, my client filed a complaint with the Erie police. Simple assault. It concerns an incident on the premises of his place of business this morning. I'm telling you in person because I think you would rather hear it in person than from an officer at your door. That is all."
"Simple assault," I said.
"It means he doesn't say you hurt him badly. It means you put your hands on him in front of witnesses, and he'd like it on paper." He stood. He took the phone back and put it in his coat. "I think that concludes what we had to say. Cody."
Cody didn't get up at once. He sat there with his thumbnail on the menu and his face the color of the tablecloth, and I couldn't tell if he was going to cry or throw something, and I don't think he could either.
"She was a nice kid," he said. "I mean it. She was funny."
I didn't say anything. I had a lot of things and not one that would fit through my mouth.
He got up. Fogle held his elbow, and they went out through the front, and the bell on the door rang twice, once for each of them.
Darlene came back with the pot.
"More coffee?"
"No," I said. "Thank you."
"Anything else for the table?"
"A pie," I said. "To go. Any kind."
She wrote it on her pad. She was somewhere near sixty, with hair the color of a new penny and a pencil behind her ear, and a voice that had been calling orders through a window for a long time.
"Cherry's what's left," she said. "It's not Peach Street pie. Nothing is."
"You knew Peach Street?"
"I waited tables there in the old days, before the pho." She tore the ticket off. "Skarupa's. Eleven years."
"In two thousand fourteen?"
"Off and on." She was already looking at the next table.
"There was a night cook," I said. "Dee."
Her pencil stopped on the pad. Then it went back behind her ear.
"Kitchen people kept to the kitchen," Darlene said, and went to box the pie.
\ \ \*
I called the number from the popcorn bag from the parking lot, with the pie in a Styrofoam box on the seat. It was dark by then, and the snow had started again, small and dry.
He picked up before the first ring finished.
"Nell."
"Where are you?"
"I am at the old Sears," he said quietly. "The far end of the lot, by the loading dock. There is no one here. I have been here since four."
"Stay there."
I drove up Peach with the wipers going and the pie sliding on the seat. The Sears was a block of concrete the color of a filing cabinet, with the letters pried off the front so you could see where they'd been, a ghost of that name in clean rectangles. Half the lot had no light. At the far end, past the tilted carts and a long dirty ridge of plow snow, one small car was sitting with its engine on and its lights off, exhaust going up in the quiet, a tan car with a crumpled back fender.
I parked beside it. I didn't turn the truck off. I got out and got in on his side.
He looked like he hadn't been to sleep in two days. The skin under his eyes was gray and thin, and a day of stubble had come in, and it was the first time I'd seen him look the age he was. The heater roared at the windshield and the inside of the glass was frosting from the edges. He'd put the tea in the cup holder and it had a skin on it.
"I have been calling you," he said.
"I know."
"I did not know if you would come."
"Cody Hartzell has an alibi," I said.
He didn't say anything.
"Sixty-one pictures," I said. "On seven phones. From eleven fifty-eight to two fifty-eight, in a house on West Eleventh. He's got a cat in one. Thirty people. And his lawyer says they handed it all to your investigator in November." I waited. "You knew."
"Yes."
"At Tasha's. You said not tonight. You looked like you'd been hit."
"I knew he had not killed her. I did not know how to say it to you without losing you. You wanted him." He kept his hands on the wheel. "I am aware that is not a good reason. It is the only one I have."
"I went to his lot this morning."
"I have seen the video."
"Don't."
"A man in a Penguins jacket put it on the internet. Ruth Ann sent it to me." His mouth moved, very slightly, not a smile. "It is very vigorous."
"He walked into State Street today," I said. "With a lawyer. He gave them a swab. Himself. Voluntary. They sent it to the state lab. They'll have it Monday."
I watched it land on him. His whole face went still.
"A swab," he said.
"What?"
"Then they have a name." He turned his head and looked at me. "A man with a name, and a lawyer, and sixty-one photographs, and thirty witnesses. That is not an unknown man. That is a boy at a party who got a scratch. That is exactly what a prosecutor wants, Nell. It lets him stand up and say the DNA that freed me was a teenager in a kitchen, and means nothing." He breathed out. "You gave them a name."
"I gave them nothing. I went over there and pushed a man into a boat."
"And he went to the police, the same afternoon, with his lawyer, and handed them the key." He said it like he was reading a bill. "I am not saying you were wrong to go. I am saying what it bought."
I put my head back against the seat. Out the windshield the snow had started to come in lines across the headlight of a plow somewhere far off on Peach, blue-white and then not.
"Ruth Ann says I must turn myself in," Garrett said. "She is right. If I go in tonight, they hold me until a hearing. Weeks. And what I need to show you stays where it is." He lifted one hand off the wheel and put it back. "I would like one day. I am asking. I know what it costs you to be here. I know about the warrant."
"I'm not going to say yes."
"I know."
"I want you to walk in. Tonight. I want you to turn yourself in, or I want you to tell me what it is. Right now. In this car."
"I cannot tell you in a car," he said.
"Then—"
"I am going to clear the windshield." He was leaning forward. "I cannot see out of it. I am sorry. It will take one minute."
He reached into the door pocket and came out with a plastic scraper, and opened the door, and the cold came in with the snow on it. He got out and shut it. I watched him go around the front of the car, a gray shape in the lit part of the glass, and put the scraper to the frost.
My nose was running. The cold, and the heater, and the day. I wiped it on my sleeve, and then I leaned across and opened the glove box for a napkin.
He keeps them from the deli, in a wad. They were on top, a clean white stack, and I took one, and under the napkins, flat in the box, filling it end to end, was a manila envelope.
It had a printed return address in the corner. SORENSEN, STATE STREET. And across the front, in a neat hand, my name.
I took it out. The flap wasn't sealed. Inside was a stapled set of pages, six or seven, typed, and across the top of the first one in capital letters: AFFIDAVIT OF ELEANOR DORSEY.
I read the first line, in the dome light, with the scraper going outside. I, Eleanor Dorsey, being duly sworn, state that I can no longer say with certainty that the man I identified on the ninth of February, two thousand fourteen, was the man I saw at the bus shelter on Cascade Street. A line at the bottom for my signature. A little box for the notary's stamp. And in the corner of every page, in small gray type that I'd never have read if I hadn't been looking for something to hate: Prepared January twenty-second.
I counted. I counted it twice, because I couldn't make it come out the other way.
The letter was the twenty-sixth.
I got the door open with my elbow. The wind took it out of my hand. He turned around with the scraper in his glove, and I threw the whole thing at him, the envelope and the pages, and they came apart in the air, and went across the front of the car in a sheet. They came down at his feet in the slush. One of them landed face up in a tire track with the lights on it.
For a second neither of us did anything.
Then Garrett knelt down in the snow, in his good coat, and picked them up one by one. He picked up the one in the tire track, and held it, and wiped it, flat, carefully, on the front of his own coat, one side and then the other, and he squared the pages together, and he stood.
"Prepared January twenty-second," I said. "I read it. It's on every page."
"Yes."
"I'm Eleanor Dorsey. I'm in your glove box. I was in there before I'd ever heard of you. Before you wrote to me." I was standing now, with one boot on the ground in the snow and one still in the car. "Four days. You had my name on a piece of paper four days before you put that letter in my slot."
"Yes."
"Was any of it—"
"I needed you to know she was running from someone who was not me," Garrett said.
The snow came down between us.
"That is the part that was true," he said. "I took you to Tasha because I needed you to hear it from someone who was in that kitchen. That the last thing your sister did was run from a person who was not me. That is true. I did not need the paper for that. I needed the paper because I have been out of prison seventeen days and I did not know how else to get a witness to sign."
"When were you going to show me this?" I said.
"After."
"After what?"
He held the pages against his chest in both hands, wet along one edge, with the snow landing on the top sheet and not melting.
"After you saw," he said.