Forty. Forty five.
The hose went slack.
In the sudden quiet the street could hear everything: the dripping of the fence, the cruiser ticking, Holt breathing hard like a man who had run somewhere. Down at the mouth of Ashbury Lane, a car had turned in fast, an old sedan with a paramedic's sticker in the back window, and it was coming up the block toward 422 with its purpose written all over it.
Aaron Greer had arrived.
Chapter Six
The Credential in the Clear Holder
The water stopped the way weather stops, all at once and too late to matter. Naomi Greer stood in the middle of her own front walk with her blouse pasted to her shoulders and her gray hair darkened flat against her head, and she did not wipe her face. She let the water run off her the way she had let his voice run off her, without hurry, without flinching, as if dignity were simply a matter of deciding what deserved a reaction and what did not.
Holt still held the hose. It hung from his hand at an angle, dripping onto the grass, and his chest rose and fell with the effort of a man who had spent something and was only now beginning to count the cost. Behind him, at the cruiser door, Daniel Price had not moved. The whole street seemed to hold the same breath. Porches up and down Ashbury Lane had filled without anyone noticing them fill, neighbors in robes and work clothes, Evelyn Porter across the street with one hand pressed flat against her chest like a woman keeping her own heart in place.
Naomi reached into the pocket of her gardening apron. The apron was soaked through and the pocket sagged with water, and her fingers came up holding a clear plastic holder on a plain cord, the kind of thing courthouse staff wore through metal detectors a hundred times a week. She held it the way she held everything, level and unhurried, and she turned it so the light caught it and the seal faced out.
She did not raise her voice. She had spent thirty years in rooms where raised voices were a confession of weakness, and she spoke now the way she spoke from the bench, each word placed like a paperweight on a page that the wind wanted.
My name is Naomi Greer, she said. I am a judge of the United States District Court. This is my house. That is my hose. And you, Officer, have just spent the better part of a minute spraying a federal judge with it because three drops of water touched your trousers.
The silence that followed was not empty. It was the sound of a street recalculating. Somewhere down the block a screen door eased shut with terrible gentleness. Evelyn Porter lowered her hand from her chest and said, quite clearly, Oh, Lord, into the stillness, and nobody shushed her because everybody had been thinking it.
Holt laughed. It came out of him before he could stop it, the same laugh, the one he had used when she asked for his badge number, the one he had used a dozen times that morning as a way of saying that her questions were weather and he was the climate. But this time the laugh found nothing to hold on to. It went out across the wet lawn and came back to him alone, thinner than it left, and it died in his throat while his face was still arranged for it.
That was the moment, Aaron said later, when he rounded the corner in his car and saw his mother standing soaked and straight as a fence post, and saw the officer understand. Aaron had driven across Portland with his hazard lights blinking and his mother's phone ringing unanswered in her apron pocket, and he arrived in time to watch a man's whole life tilt on its axis, quietly, in the morning sun.
Sir, Daniel said from the cruiser. It was the first word he had managed since the water started, and it came out cracked. Sir, she said she is a judge.
I heard her, Holt said.
He was looking at the credential. The clear holder turned a little on its cord in Naomi's steady hand, and the gold seal caught the sun, and the photograph beneath the plastic showed the same woman, dry and unsmiling, in a black robe. The neighbors were looking at it too. Whatever Holt said next would be said in front of all of them, and some part of him, the part trained by thirteen years of porches, understood that the audience had changed sides.