By nine on Tuesday the back lot of the annex was full of people holding summonses and looking put upon. A woman in a lanyard waved him off the ramp, because it was a jury day, and he left the truck on Front Street. The nearest way from Front Street to the annex was across the courthouse lawn, and the lawn had a walkway, and for a decade he had arranged his mornings so as not to use it.
The strip began where the brick path left the sidewalk: forty feet of polished gray granite let in flush with the bricks, and set along it at intervals of a long stride, eleven bronze handprints, each cast from a child's clay hand, with a first name in raised letters beneath. At the head stood a slab of the same stone, tilted a few degrees toward the reader, the inscription cut deep and filled black.
FOR THE ELEVEN — WE BELIEVE YOU — OCTOBER 1996
He had been thirteen when it went in. His father had worn his dress uniform and stood at the back with his hat in his hands, and afterward had not wanted lunch. Evan read the names now as he would read a schedule of grantees, left to right, DESMOND to TASHA. The hands were small enough to have lain inside his own.
A boy of six or so in a school jacket knelt at the print marked KEVIN and fitted his own hand into it, spreading his fingers to reach the small ones, while his mother held up a phone. Farther along a woman in a church coat set a pot of yellow mums at the edge of the granite. The bronze had gone dark except where hands touched it. KEVIN's fingertips were rubbed to gold, and so were TASHA's and SAM's. A few others, IMOGEN and LUKE among them, had the brown, quiet look of old pennies, as if nobody had stayed in town to polish them.
The path ran straight along the strip, and a man in a hurry could have walked its whole length without noticing there was anything to avoid. Evan stepped over each print at the same height, as a man steps over a row of anything on a path.
The Circuit Clerk's public-file window was a few feet from the terminal he had used on Thursday. He filled out a request slip for Teague v. State and printed his name on the requester line, E. Dunmore, because the hand had done it on so many such slips before the head formed an opinion. The clerk rolled out the cart herself: three accordion folders, a banker's carton, and a sign that said PENCIL ONLY.
He took the table by the window and started with the petition, twelve pages without one adjective. A jury had been shown photographs of a room cut open, and nobody had told them the county did the patching. Two years ago the Clinic had found the county's own work order in a facilities box.
restore wall & floor after SO search
In Exhibit Nine his father identified the photographs as fair and accurate. On the sixth page there was a redirect, one question and a two-word answer, which he read once and did not go back to. A footnote mentioned a seized children's book the State said she had used to prime them.
He asked at the counter whether the State's trial exhibits were on file. The clerk slid back a wire door behind her to show him. On a rolling shelf in a caged room stood fourteen gray archive boxes, each with a white sticker: SEALED 2009-SM-014.
"Not that the State's Thirty-one is in there," she said, making conversation. "The original walked off in ninety-eight. Kid's drawing. There's a photocopy in your cart."
He said he would look at it later, and left the photocopy where it lay.
The original was in a glassine sleeve in a banker's box in a steel cabinet in his garage. He had put the box in that cabinet himself last June, on a hand truck, without opening the lid, and the cabinet had stood locked through the year in Carrick and come down to Larch Street on the movers' truck with the box still inside.
The only person who had sat outside the whole of it had been eleven and told to stay put.
He came down the courthouse steps at twenty to one, and a woman was coming up them.
She was tall and narrow and dressed in the brown of someone who did not care to be looked at, with a soft leather briefcase on a strap mended at one end with black thread, and she was reading her phone as she climbed. She saw him at the fourth step from the top and stopped.
"Mr. Dunmore."
"Yes."
"Frances Liddell." She did not offer a hand. She offered a fact. "The clerk's office rings me when a name I know signs the public-file slip. The name is the one on the green card." She put the phone in her pocket. "You've had two letters and two voicemails."
He had stood in front of many people who needed to hear that a title was clean, and he had learned what his face did in those minutes, and he kept it there. He had also come down a step while she spoke, without deciding to. "It's been a hectic move."
"I'm sure it has." Her attention was not hostile and was not going to be put off. "I've had that house in photographs for two years. I'd like to see it in person." She glanced at his hands, and then at his pocket where the tape made its shape. "The Act gives a person one petition. You have until the twenty-third. After that she's done. I don't say forever to my clients much, Mr. Dunmore. I'd say it now."
"I understand."
"Good," said Frances Liddell, and went on up the steps.
He sat in the truck on Front Street with the window down and looked at the phone for four minutes, and the call, when he made it, took two. Brett Kostick answered over a table saw and turned it off to talk, in a large, easy voice that had never had reason to doubt itself. Evan said the schedule had changed. There was rain in the forecast for the weekend and the week after, and the wall wanted to come out on a dry day, and was there any chance of Thursday.
"This Thursday?" A pause, a page turning. "I've got a dumpster free Thursday. I can bring two guys. Nora's got me down for the twenty-eighth, I'd want to clear it with—"
"I'll clear it with Nora. Thursday, eight. The front bedroom. The east wall down to the studs, and pull the patch in the floor while you're in there. You can leave the cellar."
"You want the cellar left. Okay. You'll be there?"
"I'll be at a closing in Mercer. My wife's at work by eight-thirty." That was true, or true of every Thursday. "There's a lockbox on the gas meter at the side of the house." He had hung it there himself in August. Nora had a key of her own, which he had cut and handed her in September, for Brett, when she said the man would want to measure. He gave Brett the four digits. He had spent longer on a legal description.
When he hung up his mouth had gone dry, and it stayed dry. He looked at the courthouse, where it stood at the head of its lawn with the flag standing straight out in a wind he could not feel, and started the engine.
On Wednesday afternoon his father sat at the window at Linden House with the sun on one side of his face and a nick under the jaw where the aides had shaved him badly. Out in the lot a county crew in orange vests was patching the curb cut, the one where the wheelchairs caught, and his father was watching them work.
"Dad."
"Del's boys rush." He said it to the glass. "Did they patch it right?"
"What's that, Dad?"
"The floor." His father turned. His eyes were clear and attentive, and there was someone in them, a man watching a load come in, checking the count. "Did they patch it right? They always rush. You have to stand over them."
Evan sat on the edge of the bed. He put his hand on his father's wrist, on the cardigan cuff, which was buttoned wrong. "I didn't see the floor, Dad."
"No," his father said. "You stayed put."
He waited while a shovel rang on the new asphalt below the window, and when Evan looked back the man who had been checking the count was gone, and his father was watching the crew as he might have watched strangers. Evan went to the glass and looked at the curb cut himself, the black patch and the yellow paint, and could not have said whether it was right.
"Have you eaten?" his father said.
Mara was in the kitchen when he got home, at ten past six, with her sleeves pushed up and three onions and a pan already warm on the stove. She didn't look round as he set his keys in the dish and lined the salt cellar up with the edge of the counter.
"Brett called the house," she said.
The knife went through the first onion and struck the board. She made the next cut.
"Around four. On the landline. It's the only number my mother had for the kitchen." She turned the onion. "He said Thursday. I thought it was the twenty-eighth."
"Weather window," Evan said. "There's rain coming."
The knife went on through the onion.