Wednesday, 10:02 p.m.
"Monday," I said. "The Moens'."
He waited. He is good at it; he can wait longer than a cow.
"The Belgian. He was down and thrashing in a corner of the loafing shed by the time I got there, and I dosed him three times in two hours. He's eighteen hundred pounds." The words came out level, and the level was a relief. "I used the whole vial. It's in my head that I tossed it in the truck and thought I'd log it once I got home."
"You thought."
"I got home a little after nine. I didn't open the book."
Osric turned the empty vial in his fingers. The yard light made a small bright bar down the glass. "Five mils of Dormosedan. Fifty milligrams." He said it to the vial. "That's a hell of a colic."
"It was a hell of a horse."
I heard myself, and it sounded like the truth. I had been to the Moens' on Monday. It had been a colic. Somewhere in the past forty hours a vial had gone empty, and that was the only place in my week with room for it. I set it down there and felt it settle, and was grateful.
"Okay," Osric said, the way he takes a lab value he doesn't like. He set the vial on the lid of the box. "Then it's a paperwork problem. Where's the log?"
"On the dash."
He went round to the driver's door and reached in for the green book. He paged back through it with one thumb, glasses pushed up on his forehead: Tuesday, my handwriting, ace, about 8 mL, remaining. Monday, blank. Tonight, blank.
"Hanne," he said, and shut it. "Where's the pentobarbital?"
"In the box."
"I know where it is. I've counted the bottle of Schedule II you opened on the ninth for the Fjelstads' pony." He didn't look at the box. He looked at me. "It's short a horse. There's a dead horse on the shoulder of your road, and nothing in this book. You put a horse down tonight and didn't write it."
"I was going to."
"When?"
"When I got back to the house. Osric. He was in the road with his pelvis in three pieces, I had a phone in one hand and a light in my teeth. I wasn't thinking about a log."
"I'm not calling you a bad vet." His voice was quiet, which is worse with him. "It's Schedule II. The count is a fence, Hanne. You don't get to say the cow was only leaning on it. My name is on that registration too. If it's short, it's short on both of us."
"Then I'll write it now."
"With what number? You'd give me one you can't swear to." He glanced up the road toward the culvert. "I'll get the hauler out at first light." He rubbed his eyes with a knuckle. He looked, all at once, fifty-two and tired. "What's going on with you? You've been off since yesterday. Wednesday you walk out at half past eleven with a face like an unmade bed. Marit says the bank called the clinic line asking for you. Twice. The man wouldn't leave a message, only that it was about the cash request for Friday. What cash request?"
I had not expected the bank. It came up under me like the ninth stair.
"Refinance," I said.
"On a note I'm forty percent of?"
"It's nothing."
"It's not nothing. Your husband's truck is in the yard and there's one lamp on in the house and you haven't asked me to look at anything." He looked past me at the kitchen window. "Where's Callum?"
"Asleep."
"At ten."
"He's had a virus."
"Han."
A man I had been ready to be afraid of for a day and a half stood in my yard with his hair on end and a vial in his hand, using the short name that has only ever been Callum's.
"Resolution of my interest," I said.
He didn't move.
"By June thirtieth. Contingent upon resolution of Dr. Sorley's majority interest. I read it this morning, under your mug. I'd like to know what you're calling that this week, Osric. A rope? A bow?"
His face went through several things and picked none. "I said out," he said. "You read it anyway."
"Yes."
"That's not what that says."
"Then say what it says."
His mouth opened, and he almost did it. Then he shut it, and looked at the yard, at the barn, at the lit square of the kitchen window where nobody stood.
"Not in your yard," he said. "Not tonight, with a dead horse. I'll tell you. I'm not going to do it like this."
"Then don't."
"I'm going to report the log tonight," he said. "The pentobarbital. I'm sorry. A bottle short with nothing written, and the bank calling, and you looking like that. I'm not sitting on it. If I sit on it and it's what it looks like, I'm the one who did it."
My own laugh came out of me, no bottom in it. "Report it."
"I'll say you were on the road with a broken horse. I'll say what happened."
"Do."
He went to the Ram and came back with a gallon freezer bag from the glovebox and held it open, and the vial went in with a small clink. He zipped it, wrote the time across the white strip, and held the pen out to me.
"Initial it."
I initialed it. Two sets of initials on a freezer bag were the most orderly thing that had happened all day.
"For safekeeping," he said. "So nobody can say we touched it." He slid the log into his jacket. "I'll keep both. Tomorrow, when you can tell me what's going on, you'll have them back. I'm not the enemy, Hanne."
It's what the enemy says. But he said it looking so unhappy that I nearly believed him.
He drove out at twenty-five past ten. I stood in the yard with the taillights going down the lane, and I thought that I had just handed the only two pieces of paper that could have shown where a bottle had gone to the one who knew my figure, who said rope, and who was even now dialing a state office to say I couldn't count. Or he was a decent, tired man with a license.
* The kitchen was as I'd left it. The eleven cards in their years across the table, the brown sleeve of films, the phone with its photograph of a boy on some stone steps. Through the doorway to the front room came the hiss of the transmitter and, under it, my husband.
I didn't sit. I stood in the door of the front room and looked at him, and came back and sat at the table with my hands flat on the wood so I wouldn't reach for anything.
Two men. I could hold them up together like two films to a lightbox. One was on my couch with a crease across his cheek and his reading glasses folded on his chest, which he swears are mine, and his boots side by side under the coffee table with the laces still done. One was wherever a voice had put him, breathing or not. Tiede had looked at the panoramic and said not the same mouth. The man on the couch had a phone in his glovebox with one number in it. She doesn't know.
And the man on the couch was warm, and had said Han into my hair.
My phone lit on the table at 10:40. The number.
I had it at my ear before it had finished the first buzz.
"I want to hear him," I said. "One word. His name. The date, what he had for supper, I don't care. If you have someone, I want to hear him say something. I've asked you twice, and I'll ask you as many times as it takes."
The line stayed open and empty when I stopped.
"You have all the proof you need, Hanne," the voice said. "It is in your bed."
"That's not proof. That's a man asleep. Anybody can be asleep."
"Then you will have to decide what you believe," it said. "Now listen, because I will not repeat it. If the man in your bed leaves that house, I will not need Callum Reeve. Do you understand what I am telling you?"
"Yes."
"He is not to go anywhere. Keep him asleep until noon on Thursday."
"He's not a horse."
"You are a doctor, Hanne. It is your profession to know what can be given to a body to make it lie still." A pause, and then, without any change at all: "It will not take long. Thirteen hours."
"And then?"
"And then you will be told where."
The line closed. It didn't click. I called the number back, and it rang without end into whatever it rang into, twenty times, thirty, like a phone in an empty barn. In the front room the receiver on my belt breathed, and I sat with the dead phone at my ear until my arm ached.
* If the man on the couch was Callum, I'd lose a night's sleep off him and a day's work, and he would be furious with me, and I could bear that. If he wasn't, the caller would keep a hostage alive as long as the man in my house stayed put. If he walked out at midnight, or at four, in his boots with the laces done, on his own errand, somebody named Callum Reeve would die in a place I didn't know the name of. I had stood in front of his truck once already that afternoon with my hands out. I couldn't stand in front of it all night. I could hide his boots, and he'd go in his socks. I could sit on the stairs, and he would lift me off them like a sack of oats, kindly, and go.
I went through the box in my head, shelf by shelf, as I would for a horse. Xylazine was too much and too fast. The pink I would not let myself finish thinking about. Bute and flunixin don't put anyone to sleep. That left the ace, the mildest thing I owned, the one every vet reaches for on a nervous horse. It would take him down slowly and let him up gently, and it could go in something warm.
Every road came out at my truck.
I looked at the cards, and the films, and my phone lying face down on the table like something that had been shot. I didn't think of what I was going to do as a wrong. I thought of it as a dose. You draw it, and you check it, and you put it where it goes.
I pushed the chair back.
The yard was cold now, and black past the reach of the light. I crossed the gravel to my truck without a flashlight, because my feet knew the ground, and my hand was on the lid of the box, going for the ace.