Half of West Twenty-Sixth was dug out. A kid in a snowmobile suit was working his way down the block with his father's snowblower at five dollars a car, and most of Dolores's side was done already, a minivan and the gray Taurus at her curb and a pickup with a ladder rack, down to the tires, with the snow thrown up in walls between them. Eight inches had come down in the night. I'd driven home from Hammond Road at the back of a plow with the transmission whining and the heater going, and gone to bed on top of the covers in my coat, and called Ruth Ann Sorensen's number first thing and got a woman's voice that said her office would be open Monday at nine. The sky was the color of a nickel, and I'd had two hours. The kid had his hand out before I had the truck door shut. I told him I was only visiting and went up the stairs.
She opened the door in a brown quilted robe with her hair flat on one side and her work shoes on. I said good morning, and she didn't answer it. Dolores answers about a third of whatever you say to her, and she picks the third.
"Mister's up," Dolores said. "He ate."
I had a twenty folded in my fist, and I held it out. She looked at it the way she looks at a check from the school district.
"Put it away," she said.
"For the food," I said.
"He ate what I made. It cost me nothing." She didn't take her eyes off the bill. "You pay for things that cost something."
I put it away. I was going to say thank you for the fourth time and found I had nothing left to say it with. I stood there with my hands in my coat pockets. Her eyes went to my wrist. The cuff had ridden up, and the hair tie was there on my skin, green and gold, with a red line under it where I'd been at it all night.
She looked at it for about as long as it takes to ring up a coffee.
"I found her hair tie," I said. It came out high and fast. "Birdie's. The other one. In that car, Dolores, down in the seat, in the crack. Where it's been all this time."
She didn't move. Behind her the apartment was quiet except for a radiator ticking.
"Take your boy home, Dorsey," Dolores said.
"Mom!" Owen yelled.
He came around the kitchen doorway in yesterday's socks with his coat on one arm, running, and slid the last four feet on the linoleum and caught himself on her robe, and she let him.
"Mom, I'm up nine pretzels," Owen said. "I'm up nine, and if I don't tell you I had pop at midnight, Dolores owes me two more."
"Pop?" I said. "At midnight?"
"Special occasion," Dolores said.
"What special occasion?" I said.
"Can't," Owen said. "It's a deal."
"Mister," said Dolores. "Coat."
He zipped his mouth shut with two fingers and threw the key over his shoulder. She shut the door on us before we were all the way out of it. I stood on the landing with the smell of Pine-Sol on me, too tired to fight about pop. I'd have let him have the whole machine.
\ \ \*
Owen doesn't miss anything that's attached to a person. In the truck he found my coat first.
"You smell like the Sunoco."
"I stopped for gas."
"That's a lot of gas."
I rolled the window down an inch. Then he found my wrist.
"Is that Aunt Birdie's?"
"Yes."
"You said there were two."
"There were."
"Where's the other one?" Owen said.
"Somewhere safe."
He nodded slowly, with his chin on his zipper. "Technically," he said, "that's a set."
I drove. He turned and watched the street go by instead, the shoveled walks and the kids dragging sleds up the plow ridges, a whole Sunday going on without us.
Lou's phone rang eleven times and went to the recording, the one where he says "Moynihan" and then stops, like you're supposed to give a name. I called four times between Dolores's curb and my own, and again when I woke up on the couch with Owen's cartoons going and a crick in my neck.
I'd told him six o'clock, and I'd told him Hammond Road.
Owen came with me because I had nowhere to put him. Lou lives in Millcreek in a brick ranch at the end of a cul-de-sac, with a wreath still on the door from Christmas, and nobody had shoveled. The snow lay in the drive and up the walk in one smooth piece with no prints in it, and the Sunday paper stood upright in its plastic bag in a drift at the mailbox. The garage door was down, and the truck wasn't anywhere.
I rang the bell and knocked and stood there on Peg's mat, and nobody came.
"Nobody's home," Owen said from the bottom step, with his hands up his sleeves. "Technically."
He was right. Nobody had come out of that house since before the snow, and nobody had gone in, and what came into my head was something Lou had said to me in the bleachers, in the voice of a man mentioning the weather. I stop at your mother's Sundays. Just to see she's eating.
\ \ \*
The green Ford was in my mother's drive.
It sat there with the whole night on it. The plow had thrown a ridge across the foot of the drive and the truck sat behind the ridge, with a flat white tablecloth of snow over the hood and the roof, and the side mirrors capped like two small hats. Nobody had brushed the windshield. There were no tracks in front of it or behind.
"Is that Lou's?" Owen said.
"Stay in the truck."
"I'm nine."
"Get out of the truck, then."
My mother's door was unlocked. The house smelled of onions and butter. In the front room the TV was going, some church service with the sound low, and Owen went to it like a dog to a bowl, with his boots on, and nobody yelled about the boots.
She was at the stove in her apron. She had lipstick on. She'd done her hair. There was no cloth on her eyes and no dark room, and she turned around with the wooden spoon in her hand and her face went through three things before it settled on none of them.
Lou was at the kitchen table. The table was set for two, with the good napkins, the ones from the cedar chest. He had the Times-News sports section in front of him and a mug, and he was in his socks. His boots stood on the mat by the door, side by side, with the laces tucked in, and his Steelers hat hung on the hook by the back door where my father's cap used to be. He half got up when he saw me and sat back down.
"Nellie," Lou said.
"You didn't answer my text," I said.
"Now, I—" Lou said.
"Six o'clock. I said six. I said Hammond Road."
"He's been here since six o'clock last night, Eleanor," my mother said.
I looked at her. She looked at the spoon.
"Since six," I said.
"Since six. He brought a chicken," my mother said.
"You had a migraine," I said.
"I had a headache. I had a head." She put the spoon down on the rest and wiped her hands on the apron, one finger at a time. "I had a day."
"Yesterday was the seventh, Mom," I said.
"I know what day it was," my mother said. "I know it better than you do. I've known it every morning for twelve years." Her voice stayed low. That's the worst of her. "And for one of them, just the one, I wanted somebody in this house who wasn't going to look at me the way you look at me. I'm allowed something, Eleanor."
"Him," I said.
"Since the fall," she said. "Wednesdays, mostly."
"The friend," I said.
"The friend," my mother said.
I couldn't have told you what my face did. I know I stood there with my coat on, in my mother's kitchen, with Lou Moynihan in his socks at her table, the man who'd raised the blind on six men and said take your time, and the man who'd put a boy's face on a blotter and let me stare at it. He had a plate in front of him. He'd been eating her pierogi.
"I should've told you," Lou said. "I didn't know how. I wanted it to be—"
"You never answered me," I said.
"Honey." He said the next part lower. "You ever hook something so heavy you don't know if you want it to come up? That was me with this, since the fall. I'm not asking you to like it."
"I called the barracks," he said to the table. "I got your text at twenty past twelve, standing at my own kitchen sink. I thought, she's out in some field with that man. I thought, I'll make a call. So I made it. I called the barracks, Nellie. I called them."
"What did you say?" I said.
"That a girl I know was out in North East, and where." He turned the mug a quarter turn. "They said they'd look into it."
"They sent nobody," I said.
"That's not on me," Lou said.
"And at six o'clock?"
"I was here. I didn't know what else to do, so I came here."
"With your truck. All night."
"Where else would I be?" Lou said.
The pierogi were on a blue Corelle platter at the edge of the counter, thirty of them, steaming, with fried onions heaped on top. I put my hand down on the counter to hold myself up, and it caught the platter's edge, and the platter went. It didn't break. It's Corelle. It hit the linoleum and spun like a coin, and pierogi went everywhere, under the table, under the stove, one all the way to the doorway of the front room, and for a second nobody breathed.
"Is somebody dropping stuff?" Owen yelled.
"No," my mother said.
Lou got down on his knees. It took him a while, on the linoleum in his socks. He started picking them up with his big hands, one at a time, and putting them back on the platter, the way you'd put back eggs.
"Leave them," my mother said.
"I've got them, honey," Lou said.
"There was a car in that barn," I said, to the top of his head. "The car, Lou. A Buick. It had her hair tie down in the seat. It burned last night."
He stopped with a pierogi in each hand.
"A car," he said. "Twelve years I had a man in my head, and it was a car." He didn't look up. His shoulders went up and came down. "Then somebody didn't want it looked at. Or somebody wanted it gone for him."
"For who?" I said.
"Don't ask me," Lou said. "I'm picking up dumplings."
"He told me, you know," my mother said. She said it to me, over his bent head. "About the picture on the desk. Thursday night. He sat in that chair where you're standing and told me the whole thing."
"And you let him in," I said.
"I'd rather have a man who tells me." My mother's chin came up. "Nobody's told me one true thing in twelve years, Eleanor. He did."
I looked at the linoleum. There was a pierogi by my boot, with its edge split and the potato showing.
Nobody had said honey to her in that voice in the whole time I'd been alive. I noticed it, and I'd have liked not to. I stood there while he gathered up pierogi off my mother's kitchen floor and she watched him do it with her mouth thin and her hands knotted in her apron, and the church service went on in the front room, very small.
When I got Owen's boots on in the hall, she came out of the kitchen behind us with the dish towel over her shoulder. She didn't say anything about the floor. She looked at the front of my coat and then at my face.
"Did you eat?" she said.
"No," I said.
"There's a chicken," she said.
"I don't want his chicken, Mom," I said.
"It's my chicken," she said. "He just carried it."
She put a foil packet in Owen's hands, warm through the foil, and shut the door on us, and I stood on the porch with it steaming in his arms and my mother's silhouette going away down the hall.
\ \ \*
Owen got to keep a pierogi. He said three seconds counted. He ate it in my kitchen with his boots finally off, at the table with his math folder, while the window over the sink went from white to blue.
My phone went. It was Kovach, and she wasn't chewing.
"I'm going to tell you something," she said, "and then I'm going to stop and eat a cracker. So you know how serious."
"Okay."
"Lou Moynihan. I pulled his logs, and I didn't tell you why, and I'm sorry." A drawer slid. "The night of the party. The seventh of February, two thousand fourteen, into the eighth. There was a pileup on Interstate Seventy-Nine at Thirty-Eighth Street. Thirty-one cars, the first squall of the winter. They called out every detective in the building. He's on the scene sheet from eleven-fifty at night until three-forty in the morning. I've got a retired trooper who remembers him running traffic with a flashlight in a Steelers hat."
I sat down.
"She died between one and two," Kovach said. "He was on Seventy-Nine. Forty people signed that sheet, he's the third name."
"He couldn't have been on Cascade."
"He couldn't have been anywhere near Cascade. And last night?"
I'd had a place built for him. I'd been building it since the shanty, board by board, and I sat there at my own table with nothing to put in it.
"Nell?"
"Last night. His truck's under eight inches in my mother's driveway. It's been there since before it started to snow."
"Then it didn't go to Hammond Road, did it." She was quiet a second, and I heard a pen. "The fire marshal walks it in the morning. I'll know more Monday, and I'll tell you what I can, which is going to be less than you want. And that's Lou. I'd say I'm sorry about your mother, but I don't know which direction to say it."
"Neither do I."
"So I'll tell you what that leaves." I heard her unwrap something. "It leaves your guy. And whoever he's got helping him. Because a man in a cell can't strike a match, hon, and somebody did."
Owen had looked up from his long division at the word cell. "Mom," he said. "Is Garrett in a cell?"
I put my hand over the phone. "Do your math."
"That's not an answer. That's math."
"It's the answer I've got." I turned to the window, to the blue going out of it. He didn't go back to his long division. I could feel him not going back to it, between my shoulder blades, the whole time Kovach breathed on the line.
"Nell," she said. "One more thing. A woman brought in a mitten this afternoon."