At the festival grounds a man in a pink vest told Leah she couldn't come through the gate without a wristband.
“I'm looking for my daughter.”
“Everybody's looking for somebody.”
He sat on a folding chair in the shade of a little canopy. Beside him, a cardboard tray held three abandoned cups of iced coffee, each at a different stage of failure. Beyond the gate, people pushed carts across the grass. Someone was testing a bass note that Leah could feel in the soles of her feet.
“Kit Mercer. She works here.”
“Call her.”
“I've done that.”
“Then she'll come get you.”
Leah looked past him. The stage rose beyond a row of concession trailers, pale and skeletal in the evening light. The lake lay behind it. A man on a ladder held one end of a banner while a woman beneath him shouted that it was upside down. It was an argument that appeared to have begun some time ago.
“Can you call Devon?” Leah asked.
“Devon who?”
“Hale.”
The man picked up his radio. “You delivering something?”
“No.”
“Then park there. Not in front of that gate. There.”
He pointed and turned away. Leah went where he told her. It was too far from the entrance, but she did it.
She had left Nell a message saying she would be late and not to wait at the yard. Nell had answered with a question mark. Leah had not answered that. The small cowardice had begun to feel expensive.
Devon came through the gate carrying a coil of cable over one shoulder. He wore cargo shorts and a shirt that had once been black. His glasses kept sliding down his nose, and he pushed them back with the inside of his wrist.
“Is she here?” Leah asked.
“No. I told you tomorrow.”
“She said that before—”
“Before what?”
Leah glanced at the gate man. He had recovered one of his coffees and was assessing it.
“Can we talk somewhere?”
Devon looked at the cable on his shoulder as if it might have an opinion. “I've got about three minutes.”
They moved into the shade beside a truck. A temporary sign on its side read BAYLINE WEEKEND, AUGUST 14–15. Somebody had drawn a fish on it and given the fish an enormous joint.
“She's with people I used to know,” Leah said.
“Okay.”
“I don't think it's a good situation.”
He closed his eyes briefly.
“This isn't about the stage.”
“What stage?”
“Whatever she's told you we're buying.”
He let the cable slide off his shoulder onto the grass. “We aren't buying anything. We don't have the money.”
“How much?”
“You know how much.”
She did. Sixty thousand dollars. Last December she had looked at the plan Kit brought home: a used mobile stage with sound equipment, a seller in Indiana, a loan application, a forecast printed in three colors. Leah had asked about insurance. Kit had shown her the insurance estimate. Leah had asked about winter work. Kit had shown her the winter plan. By the end of dinner she had run out of sensible questions and begun asking the same ones in different words.
Then she had called Devon.
“I thought she'd changed her mind,” Leah said.
“Because she stopped talking to you about it?”
He took off his glasses, wiped them on his shirt and made them worse.
“We're not kids you have to keep from drowning. The thing folds. It travels. We've got people who'd hire us if we had it. We don't think we're going to get rich.”
“I'm not here to fight with you.”
“I'm at work. You're here. You called.”
“Did she tell you she was looking for money?”
“She said she might have a way.”
“What way?”
“She didn't tell me. I thought she meant you.”
From beyond the gate somebody shouted his name. Devon turned, raised a hand, then looked back at Leah.
“Is there something wrong with her car because she's done something?”
Leah could have told him. She could have shown him the photograph. Asked what he knew about the old man standing beside Kit. Let somebody else into the problem before she made it bigger.
Instead she said, “I'm finding out.”
He bent and lifted the cable.
“Don't go to her apartment and make her roommate let you in.”
“I wasn't—”
“You did last time.”
“She hadn't answered in two days.”
“She was in Columbus.”
“I didn't know that.”
“Yes. That's what not telling you looks like.”
He didn't say it cruelly. That made it harder to bear. A little wind moved across the lake, stirring the dusty grass. Somewhere on the grounds someone started a generator and the bass note stopped.
“If she comes tomorrow, call me,” Leah said.
“I'll tell her you came.”
“Devon.”
He waited.
She had nothing she could ask without asking him to do it again. Work behind Kit's back, for her own good. Devon put his glasses on and walked back through the gate.
Leah stayed beside the truck for a moment. A young woman carrying a crate of bottled water stopped and looked at the fish on the sign.
“Every year,” she said to no one in particular.
Then she went on with her work.
Leah drove to a gas station and sat at a pump without filling up. Her phone lay on the seat. She could call the sheriff's office. She could say her daughter was with a man who had served time for armed robbery. She could say he had asked her to drive. She could start at the beginning, tell them why he had asked her and why Kit knew him.
She knew what Walt had been convicted of. For years she had followed the case from a distance, searching names after Kit was asleep. Rosa too. The investigators had found Leah under her own name after she took Kit out of town. They had asked about the gray car, Walt, where she had been that Friday. She remembered a man's wet coat over the back of a chair and Kit asleep against Marlene's shoulder in the other room. She remembered leaving the second interview certain somebody would stop her at the door.
They hadn't charged her then. She had built a life beside that fact, careful not to look at it too long. Walt and Rosa had not given the full account either, each for reasons she had been happy not to ask about. None of that meant the next person asking questions would reach the same end.
A woman pulled up beside her in a minivan, got out and opened the back door. A small boy was crying inside.
“I told you not to drink it that fast,” the woman said, and Leah heard herself in the tired irritation. The boy cried harder. The woman stood with a packet of wipes in her hand, looking at the sky as if somebody up there might take a shift.
Leah got out and gave her the roll of shop towels from behind the seat.
“Keep it,” she said.
The woman thanked her and reached into the van for a clean shirt.
Leah's phone rang while she was filling the tank.
“You went to Bayline,” Walt said.
She looked toward the road.
“Kit called. Said Devon had seen you. Before you start looking for me in the bushes.”
“Put her on.”
“She's not with me right now.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because she keeps not being with me right now.”
Leah watched the numbers turn on the pump.
“Why send the car?”
“You'd have hung up.”
“You don't know that.”
“You did last time,” Walt said. “Six years ago. Same number, same woman answering. I tried going on with my own life afterward. Wasn't much of a life, but I tried. Would you have come?”
She stopped the pump before the tank was full.
“She didn't crash getting out of a bank,” he said. “If that's what you're thinking. Car got scraped up on some private ground while she was trying to do something she can't do. Took a bend wrong, hit a barrier. Nobody chasing her. Nobody else hurt. She's a lousy driver when she's scared.”
Leah closed her eyes.
“You put her behind the wheel?”
“She put herself behind it. Used your name to get the seat. Told a man who'd heard of Lark she was taking over the driving. Rosa thought that was funny until we needed a driver. Then it stopped being funny.”
“And you let her.”
“For one little job. Which we got through. Afterward I thought I'd rather not die in a ditch.”
So there had already been a bank job. Leah opened her eyes. All the ordinary things were still there: the pump, the receipt curling out of its slot, the woman folding a wet child into clean clothes.
“Where will she be tomorrow?”
“With us.”
“Inside?”
“I don't do the assignments for her.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I expect you know what it's like when somebody's decided something and doesn't ask you.”
She hung up.
He called back. She let it ring.
At the yard, Nell had left the office light on. Kit's car sat behind the chain-link fence. Leah went in and stood beside it. The sneaker she had put on the seat was still there, its laces threaded with cheap silver beads. Kit had bought those beads when she was twelve. Leah remembered sitting at the kitchen table, holding one end of a lace while Kit tried to force it through a hole too small for it.
She took out her phone.
Kit, she typed. I'm going tomorrow. Call me before I get there.
She stared at the words. Going where? To do what? She erased the message.
Then she called Walt.
“Nine,” she said.
He did not sound surprised. “I'll be here.”
“I'm bringing my own vehicle.”
“I've got a car. You can take that.”
“I'm bringing mine.”
“Your name on it?”
“Not painted on the side.”
“Still yours. Still goes home to you.”
She looked at the office door, where Nell had put a strip of tape across the cracked pane so nobody would cut a finger. There was always another thing to fix, another person waiting to tell her what was sensible.
“I know where it goes.”
“Then you know what I'm saying.”
“Don't tell me what to bring.”
She ended the call before he could answer. There was satisfaction in that, a tiny ugly satisfaction. She recognized it. Being the person who knew how a thing had to be done.
She went into the office and took the keys to the old dark-blue service wagon from the hook. It was registered to the business, one of the three vehicles she had spent years keeping paid for and working. It had a dented rear door, an empty tool compartment and a driver's seat that fit her back better than the pickup's did. It was not invisible. Nothing she owned was.
Nell had put the zucchini in the refrigerator. On the counter was a note in her square handwriting.
Call me when you get home. Not the machine. Me.
Leah stood beneath the fluorescent light, holding the keys.
She called. When Nell answered, Leah said she had seen an old friend and Kit was all right.
Then she took the wagon home to get some sleep.