Kit pulled into the business-account gas station. The fuel gauge was low, and Leah needed water to clean her hand.
Three pumps, a shop, a sign advertising minnows in letters more optimistic than the building. The lot was full of boat trailers. Leah looked at the fuel gauge, irritated with a machine that had done nothing except describe its condition. Kit stopped at the outer pump.
Kit parked and got out first. Leah followed slowly, keeping her right hand away from the grab bar. Keith Bender stood near the air hose with a loose tire at his feet. He knew them both. She had towed his plumbing van in January, and he had brought Kit a box of tiles for a mosaic years before that.
“Leah. Hey.”
She nodded. Kit had gone to the drinks machine. Keith began to ask about work, then noticed her hand.
“What did you do?”
“Caught it.”
He reached for the tire as if he was about to make a request, thought better of it and straightened.
Leah looked toward the shop. Inside, a television over the drinks refrigerator showed a local news presenter. A still picture filled the screen beside her. The blue wagon. Another image, closer, of a woman outside the festival service building.
Leah stopped breathing.
Kit came back with a bottle of water. She followed Leah's gaze. Keith turned too, slowly, because something had gone still that he could feel without understanding.
“That's—” he began.
“Keith,” Kit said.
Her voice did not rise. She held the bottle against her leg.
“We need to leave.”
Keith was looking at the screen inside.
Leah's own phone rang. Nell.
She answered because not answering had become another way of asking Nell to carry something.
“I told him I saw you,” Nell said. “He's asked me again whether you've called. You need to speak to him.”
Leah shut her eyes briefly.
“Okay.”
“He wants you to call him. Today. And the public appeal has the white flatbed in it now. They added it this morning. It isn't only the wagon people are looking for.”
“You've seen it?”
“On my own screen. You can look too.”
No offer to help. No warning about where the officers would go next. Just Nell giving her the fact that the life Leah had left behind had started answering questions without her permission.
“Thank you for telling me,” Leah said.
Nell ended the call.
Keith was staring at the truck now. The blue name on the white door, the woman standing beside it, the young woman with the water bottle. A little pile of recognizable things arranging themselves.
“Is that you?” he asked Leah.
Kit opened her mouth. Leah held up a hand.
“Yes.”
Keith looked at the tire at his feet. For a second he seemed embarrassed by it, by the request he'd nearly made before he knew. Then he stepped back.
“You need to go,” he said.
She nodded.
“I mean to them. Whoever's looking. You can't just keep—”
“I know.”
He didn't believe her. He was right not to. Leah walked toward the shop to pay for fuel, then stopped when the woman inside came to the door with a phone in her hand.
“Are you the Mercer woman?”
There was no good way to answer that. Leah had made the name a business. Put it on signs, shirts, invoices, trucks. She had spent years teaching a town to say it when they needed something.
“I'm not looking for trouble,” the woman said.
“Neither are we,” Kit said.
The woman looked at her. Kit's face changed. She heard the sentence she'd offered and let it fall.
“I'm sorry,” she said. “That's not true. We brought it. We'll leave.”
They returned to the truck without fuel. Kit got behind the wheel. Leah pulled the passenger door with her left hand, but the latch failed to catch. She tried again. It bounced. For a second both women stared at it with a fury too large for a door.
“Lift it,” Kit said.
“I can't with this hand.”
“Wait. I'll get it.”
Kit leaned across and lifted the door while Leah pulled. It finally closed, hard enough to make them both flinch.
Then they laughed. Not because it was funny enough, but because the truck had refused to let them make an exit and there was nothing dignified left to protect.
Leah stopped laughing first. Across the lot Keith had his phone to his ear. The shop woman stood in the doorway watching. They were not going to forget.
“There's another station on the main road,” Kit said. “Pay at the pump. No account.”
Leah nodded. Kit took them there. It was busier, and nobody asked them for a favor. Kit paid with her own ordinary bank card, taking it from a separate pocket, not touching the cash in her bag. Leah sat on the passenger step while the fuel ran in and watched every person who came out of the shop.
A police car passed on the main road. She turned her head before she could stop herself. It kept going. That did not mean they were safe. It meant a car had passed.
When the tank had enough, Kit put the nozzle back. She bought sandwiches and a cold drink from the shop, then climbed in. Leah still held the first bottle of water between her knees.
Leah lifted the bottle. Her hand was shaking.
“There isn't anywhere quiet left,” she said.
Kit nodded.
“I know.”
Kit drove along the public road, in the truck with Leah's name on both doors. Leah reached for the water bottle, forgot the hand and hissed. Kit took the next safe turnout without being asked.
Walt called while they were parked. Kit saw the name on the screen before Leah picked it up.
“You want me to—”
Leah shook her head. Kit put it on speaker and set it on the shelf beneath the radio.
“Lee.”
“I'm here.”
“Where?”
“With Kit.”
He took a breath. She heard it through the speaker, a small rough drawing-in that made him sound older than he did in person.
“Good. Then I can say it once.”
Kit leaned back against the seat, arms folded, looking at the phone.
“I'm asking you to drive,” Walt said. “Not her. Me and you. You've got the truck. I'll make it worth your while.”
“I'm listening.”
Kit turned toward her. Leah kept her eyes on the windshield.
“Fifty thousand,” Walt said. “For you. She gets the other thirty when we're clear. We get my boat out of here, get settled somewhere, and that's it. No more jobs. I'm tired of jobs.”
Leah could feel Kit looking at her. Fifty thousand dollars had a different shape from two hundred and forty. It fit particular holes. Payments, wages, the mechanic's estimate she hadn't opened. It was enough to change a month. Several months. Enough to let her pretend she could still go back and repair the piece she had broken at Mercer Roadside.
She did not say that it wasn't tempting. Kit was sitting beside her. There was no point teaching her another kind of lie.
“You can drive your own truck,” she said.
“Not all day. Not the way my leg's gone. And I'd rather have you. I said that from the start.”
“You wanted the old money from the start.”
“I wanted a lot of things. Look how that turned out.”
She looked at the gravel slope above the lake. People stopped here for a view, for wind off the lake, for a place they weren't expected to do anything. Leah hadn't sat looking at water without checking the time in years. Walt wanted that life so badly he could make any number sound reasonable on the way to it.
“Rosa?” she asked.
“She can't come. You know that.”
“You'd leave her at the motel.”
“She's got twenty-seven thousand dollars and a phone. She can make a choice.”
Kit's hands tightened beneath her arms. Leah saw it in the corner of her eye.
“She made one,” Leah said. “She's taking the bank money to a lawyer.”
Silence. Not long, but long enough for the sound of a passing vehicle to fill it.
“You told her to do that?”
“No.”
“Did you?”
Leah looked at the phone. “She can make a choice. You just said.”
He breathed out. A door shut at his end of the call. She pictured him getting into the pickup, setting his bad leg into place with his hands. He was not a voice in a machine. He was the man she had left outside the car, the man who had made her laugh about a dog, the man who had pushed Rosa and kept the bag.
“All right,” he said. “Then we don't hang around.”
“You should give back the money.”
“You first.”
Leah sat back. She let the words stay between them.
“I can't give back yours,” Leah said. “I can stop taking somebody else's.”
“Is that what we're calling it? You didn't mind carrying the bag.”
“No. I didn't.”
Kit turned toward the window. Leah could see her face in the glass, listening.
Walt's voice softened. “You still could. We were good, Lee. You and me. You know that. Not everything was what happened at the end.”
She remembered the gray sedan, the way he had ducked his head getting in, the little slap he gave the dash when they were out of immediate danger. More than that, she remembered being young and very good at something somebody needed. It had felt like a life without doors.
She rested her left hand over the cloth covering her right.
“I know.”
“Then why do this the hard way?”
Leah looked at Kit. Her daughter met her eyes, then looked away. She was not going to supply the answer for her.
“Because you want me to leave Rosa,” Leah said. “And you want me to spend her future and call it a share. I know how to do that already.”
Walt said nothing.
“No,” she said.
He laughed once, without humor. “She got to you.”
“I'm here,” Kit said.
“Kitty—”
“I didn't get to anybody. She answered you.”
The quiet changed. Leah had the sense of a door closing in a room she could not see.
Walt waited for an answer that would put them back inside his invitation. Kit looked at the phone.
“I'm not driving you,” she said. “I told you.”
He ended the call without goodbye.
Leah took the bottle in her left hand. The water tasted warm and metallic, though it was the same water they'd bought ten minutes before. Kit watched the phone until the screen went dark.
“He's moved the marina appointment up,” she said.
“He told you?”
“He sent a message while you were speaking to Nell. Three instead of four. He wants to show me he can do it without me.”
She held out the phone. A photograph showed the boat beside a shed, the blue canvas folded back. Beneath it Walt had written: Gordon can do three. I'll be gone after. Last chance to stop being stubborn.
Leah looked at the picture. “He has to pay the man.”
“Sixty. In cash. Gordon said he wants to count it on the table before he signs anything. Walt complained about it half the night.”
“He'll take it out of the bag.”
Kit nodded. “He keeps that where he can see it. He's not leaving it in a room for anybody.”
They sat with the phone between them. The people on the road kept moving, driving toward late lunches and boats and houses they could still go into.
“We can call Bell,” Leah said.
Kit looked at the card in the cup holder. “You can.”
“So can you.”
Her daughter nodded. She didn't pick it up.
“I want it away from him,” Kit said. “I want him to have to ask somebody instead of telling us when we're finished.”
“The rest of your thirty.”
“That's in there too.”
Leah looked down at the cloth around her hand. She had tried to make one person stay by taking the thing he needed to leave. Now she was planning to do it again with a different object.
“I can't pull it off him,” she said.
“I can get nearer. He'll want me to ask for it.”
“You think he'll believe you?”
“He'll believe I want the money.”
Leah let out a breath. That part was true. It was true of both of them, no matter what they intended to do with it afterward.
Kit put the phone away and turned in her seat.
“If there's a gun, we don't stand there having an argument.”
“He always has it.”
“Then when he takes it out.”
Leah nodded.
“Gordon has to know,” Kit said.
“The sale stops if he knows.”
“I know.”
Leah looked through the windshield. The turnout ended in a gravel slope above the lake. There was no path down, just weeds, a bent can and the water beyond. She had used every open road to reach another place where there was no good turn.
“If you need the truck,” she said, “I'll bring it.”
“Not when you think I need it.”
Kit's voice had gone quiet. Leah looked at her.
“I'll look at you,” Kit said. “A proper look. Then I'll nod. That's when.”
Leah nodded.
“Say it.”
“I wait for you.”
Kit watched her for another breath before turning toward the road. She put both hands on the wheel, then took them off again.
“Your hand needs cleaning first.”
“It can wait.”
“No. It can't grip anything like that. I can't tell what you can do if you won't look at it.”
Leah looked. A bead of blood had reached the wrist below the cloth. She pressed the clean edge against it and told Kit where the first-aid box was.