"Take it to the troopers," I said. "Tonight. I'll walk in and put my phone on the desk."
"And I will be in the back of a car before your phone is out of your hand." Garrett sat with his palms on his knees, looking through the windshield at the Sheetz pumps. "They have a paper with my name on it. The first thing any trooper does with a man like me is read it."
"They'd read the pictures."
"They would read that the man with the warrant took the witness to a barn, and that the witness broke the lock. I have been in a room with the Commonwealth. I know what they do with a story that helps me. They look for who typed it."
"Then Sorensen."
"Her office opens Monday at nine. Her investigator is in Pittsburgh until then. I called her service and left a message that said nothing." He looked at the clock. "Will you wait until Monday?"
"I wedged a vine stake in the door. That's the lock. That's what's on it."
"Nobody has gone in for twelve years," he said. "In two days, perhaps nobody goes in."
We sat. The lot filled up and emptied, pickups and minivans, people running in for hoagies and running out. A kid in a Sheetz shirt came out and chased a cart across the ice. I had a coat pocket with a hair tie in it, zipped, against my ribs, and every time I breathed I felt it there.
When the light started going out of the lot, I thought about Dolores, and about dark, which I'd promised. I held the phone and didn't dial. I didn't know what I'd say. Dinner, she'd said. Not the night. That was a yes for dinner and a no for the rest, and I'd have taken less.
At six I took the phone out and looked at it. I'd told Lou six. Nobody had called and nobody had texted, and the last thing on the screen was my own message, sitting there with its small gray word under it. Delivered. I put it away.
Later I held my hands up in the dome light to see what they were doing, and they were going like I'd been on the machine for eight hours.
"Shall I drive?" Garrett said.
I said yes.
\ \ \*
He took Route Twenty at four miles under the limit with both hands on the wheel and his signal on for every turn, even the ones that weren't. It was dark and clear and bitter, no snow yet, the stars out over the vines and every window in every farmhouse lit. Neither of us said anything for forty minutes. He'd turned the radio off. I leaned my head on the cold glass, and at some point I stopped shaking and my whole body went heavy, like it had been poured.
At the Erie city line the road gets a name and a sidewalk. A bank on the right has a lot with a hedge, and a cruiser was sitting in the lot behind the hedge with its lights off. It pulled out behind us after we'd passed. It didn't hurry. Then the light bar came on, red and blue all over the inside of the car, and Garrett said, very quietly, "Keep your hands where they can see them."
He pulled over. He put the window down. The officer came up on his side with a flashlight, a young man, and bent to look in.
"License and registration."
"Yes." Garrett took them out of the visor and the glove box slowly, one at a time, and handed them over.
"You know you've got a taillight out, sir?"
"I am sorry. I did not know."
He was the one who'd said it was only a light.
The officer's flashlight went across the car and onto me. "Ma'am? Can I get your name?"
"Nell Dorsey."
The light stayed on my face a second longer. He straightened up, and I watched him walk back to the cruiser and sit in it with the door open, talking into his shoulder. A second car pulled in behind the first one. They stood together at the back of the Grand Prix, two flashlights, looking at the broken lamp and at the plate and at each other.
"Step out of the vehicle, sir."
Garrett got out. He did it slowly. He put his hands on the roof of the car, flat, and I saw him count something under his breath while they did it, the clicks of the cuffs. "Garrett Rudnicki," the first officer said, "there's a warrant out for you, and I'm going to ask you to stay still."
"I understand."
The second one came around to my side and opened my door. "Ma'am, I need you to step out."
"I haven't done anything."
"You're Eleanor Dorsey." He said it like a thing he'd been told once, at a roll call. "You're the witness."
"I'm the one who was in the car."
"Yes, ma'am. You're the witness in the case. In his passenger seat." He waited. "I need you to step out."
I stepped out. The snow hadn't started yet and the sidewalk was dry salt, and a bus went by and everybody on it looked. They put Garrett in the back of the first cruiser with his hand on top of his head, and he turned around once, before the door shut. He looked at me. Then he looked down at the phone in my hand.
I don't know what that look was. I know I held the phone against my coat.
\ \ \*
I called Kovach from the curb with the second officer standing eight feet away pretending to read a license plate.
"They arrested him," I said. "At the city line. I was in the car. They said witness, like it was a bad word."
"Okay." Her voice had gone flat and careful. It was quiet behind her now. The swim meet was over. "Okay. Where are you standing?"
"Outside a bank."
"Don't say anything to anybody about where you were today. Not one word, hon, not to the nice officer. Are you hurt?"
"There was a hair tie in the car," I said. "In the back seat. My sister's. I've got it."
There was a pause on the line.
"Don't tell anybody that on a curb," she said. "All right? I'll call the barracks myself."
"Tonight."
"Tonight. Go on down to State Street and sit in the lobby. They'll want a statement and you're going to give them one that says what you saw and nothing about what you carried."
\ \ \*
The lobby at headquarters has a bulletin board and nine plastic chairs bolted together in a row, and a flyer for a bake sale to benefit somebody's police dog. A sergeant sat behind the glass with a thermos of soup. He took my name and my date of birth and asked my relationship to the defendant.
"I don't have one."
"Reason for presence?"
"I was in the car."
He typed. I watched a box on his screen fill in, one word, and it was witness.
He phoned the barracks while I sat there. He didn't bother to turn away. He put the receiver on his shoulder and said, "Yeah, Hank, it's the city. We've got a citizen reporting a vehicle in a barn, Hammond Road, North East." A long wait. "No, it's not on fire, Hank." Another wait. "She's the witness in the Rudnicki thing, if that helps you. I know. I know it doesn't." He listened. "Morning's fine."
He hung up and ate some soup.
"A unit in the morning," he said, through the glass.
"In the morning."
"They've got a rollover on Ninety and the weather's coming. Your Detective Kovach called them too. Same answer." He didn't look sorry. "It's not going anywhere, ma'am."
\ \ \*
I called Dolores from the lobby. I'd put it off all evening, because I knew what I was going to ask.
She picked up on the first ring. I heard a clock ticking behind her, a real one, with a hand.
"They arrested him," I said. "Garrett. There's a car out in North East, and the police are going in the morning. Can you keep Owen tonight?"
She didn't say anything for the length of one tick, and then another.
"He's asleep," she said. "Leave him."
"Thank you. Dolores—"
She'd gone. I stood there with the phone against my face, picturing him on her couch under the blanket she keeps folded in thirds, with his mouth open and one sock off. She'd said not the night, and now she'd said leave him. I'd have gone down on my knees to her. It was just as well it was a phone.
\ \ \*
There's a hallway behind the lobby with a vending machine and a window of wired glass at the end of it, and through the window you can see the booking room. I'd gone looking for the ladies' room and found it instead. Nobody stopped me. Nobody was looking.
A counter, a camera on a bracket, a bench bolted to the wall. Garrett stood at a phone on the wall with a steel cord. They'd taken his coat, and he was in the gray sweatshirt I'd seen on the news. He held the receiver in both hands, close to his mouth, and dialed with his eyes shut. Ten digits, without a pause. He knew them by heart.
He said something. It wasn't long. Then he put the receiver back on its hook and stood there with his forehead almost against the wall.
The booking officer wrote on a clipboard and said to the man next to him, loud enough for the hall, "Cousin. Corry. Dale something." He shrugged. "They always call the cousin."
Dale. I stood there with my forehead almost against the glass and watched a hand come and take Garrett by the elbow and turn him away, and I wondered who in the world you call from a place like that, and what you say in a minute.
\ \ \*
Kovach called back. I was in the lobby again with my coat on.
"I'm at my sister's in Fairview," she said. "The barracks says the morning, and I leaned on them and it's the morning. That's the best I got, and I'm sorry. Now listen. You said a hair tie."
"It's in my pocket."
"Hon."
"I know."
"The defense is going to call that hair tie contaminated. You had it in your pocket all day. Anybody'd say you could've put it there, or anything. Put it in something clean. Put it somewhere that isn't you. Write down what time." She stopped. I heard a refrigerator open. "And Nell? Go home."
Benny came for me in the Grand Marquis with a Penguins hat on over his pajama top. He didn't ask what I was doing at police headquarters. He opened the passenger door from the inside and leaned over and cleared the seat of a thermos and a manual for the machine.
He drove to the park-and-ride nine miles under the limit with the heat on and the radio off.
"Do you have a bag?" I said, in the lot.
"What kind?"
"Clean. Small."
"Depends," Benny said. "Sandwich or freezer?"
"Sandwich."
He opened the glove box, which had in it a tire gauge, a roll of black electrical tape, four ketchup packets and a box of sandwich bags, because he has everything in there. He gave me one.
The snow had started while I was inside. The two minivans wore it like they'd been waiting. I got into the Ranger and put the dome light on and unzipped my pocket, and the hair tie came out warm from nine hours against my ribs. I put it in the bag and pressed the zipper shut with my thumbnail, and I put the bag in the glove box behind the registration, and I closed the glove box and sat there.
Then I opened it again and took out the other one, its twin, the one from her dresser that had lived in there for twelve years, and I put it on my wrist, where it had gone the first time.
Owen was asleep at Dolores's, where Dolores had said to leave him. I drove home through the first of the snow and sat up in the kitchen in my coat with the phone on the table. Around midnight I took the coat off. Around one I put it back on.
\ \ \*
It rang.
"Ms. Dorsey? This is Trooper Pruszynski at the North East barracks. Detective Kovach gave me your number." He had a flat clean voice, a man who'd been outdoors. "I'm out on Hammond Road. The barn here's on fire. A neighbor called it in at ten after one. He also gave us a plate this afternoon, a tan Pontiac, you might know something about that."
I was in the truck before he finished.
I took Route Five, then Route Twenty, in third gear with the wipers going and the road white and no plow ahead of me for twenty miles. The Ranger's rear end swung out at every light and I let it and steered into it. Somewhere past Harborcreek the transmission started to scream, a high steady note like a kettle, and I leaned over the wheel and said "Please" to it out loud. Nothing came back but the noise.
You can see it from the vineyard road. Over the trees there's a low orange light, the color of the inside of a toaster, and it moves a little.
By the time I got there, there wasn't a barn. There was a black frame with the roof gone down inside it, and the sides gone, and the snow on the ground for fifty feet around it had melted to bare gravel and black mud, and the whole thing smelled of gas. A fire truck sat at the end of the lane with its lights going around. In the middle of the black, under a beam, something low and round and melted, the size of a car, still glowing at the seams.
The man in the seed cap stood at the road in his boots with his arms folded, looking at it, not at me.
Trooper Pruszynski was younger than his voice. He had a flashlight in his teeth, and he took my phone and went through the pictures with his thumb, all five of them.
"That's a car," he said around the light.
"It was in the barn."
"I see that. Car in a barn." He took the flashlight out. "Ma'am, I'm not saying it wasn't there. I'm saying it's a car."
"There was a hair tie in the back seat. My sister's. She was in that car."
"Ma'am, I have a thirteen-year-old with forty of them. They come twelve to a pack at the drugstore." He said it kindly. "Where is it now?"
"In my truck."
"Then it isn't in the barn."
"He's in jail," I said. "The man who took me out here. He's been in jail since eight o'clock tonight."
Pruszynski looked at the fire a while. A beam went, somewhere in the middle, and sent up a column of sparks that came down on the snow and went out.
"Then he's got a friend," he said.
I was holding the phone in one hand and my left wrist in the other. I snapped the hair tie. It stung. The line came up red on my skin in the light from the fire, thin as thread, and I looked at it.