Trooper Alicia Grant came up the walk in the late afternoon with a folder under her arm and the unhurried stride of a woman who had learned that bad news arrived just as fast at a walk as at a run. Boone watched her through the screen door. He had been expecting somebody official ever since Sarah Larson stood at pump seven and changed the weather of his life, and some part of him was almost relieved that the official somebody wore a uniform he respected.
"Mr. Hartley," she said. "Got a few minutes?"
He held the door. She took the chair he offered and declined the coffee with a shake of her head, then changed her mind and accepted it, and he understood that the coffee was a kindness she was doing him, a way of making this a kitchen conversation instead of an interrogation. She set the folder on the table but did not open it right away.
"I want you to have the whole picture, because pieces of it are going to reach you anyway, and I'd rather they came from me. Daryl Ketch served four years of a six-to-ten. Good behavior, a program certificate, a parole board that believed him when he said the word remorse. Six weeks ago he stopped reporting to Officer Krol. Three weeks ago he missed his second check-in, and the warrant went out."
"Where is he?" Boone asked.
"That's the part nobody can hand you, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise." She opened the folder then. A photograph, a printout, a sheet of handwriting she turned so he could read it. "What I can tell you is what he said inside. He talked about you, Mr. Hartley. Not by the month, but regular. The man who named me โ that's his phrase. According to two separate sources he told a cellmate the debt runs the other way. That he paid for something and intends to collect."
Boone sat with that. The kitchen ticked around them, the clock over the stove, the refrigerator's low hum. He had imagined this man's face a thousand times in the dark and found now that the photograph in the folder was smaller than the one in his head, balder, older, ordinary as a grocery clerk.
"You're telling me he's coming here."
"I'm telling you we don't know where he is, and that a man who talks the way he talked doesn't usually run toward nothing." She closed the folder. "So here's my advice, and I want you to hear it as advice and not an order, because I can't order you. There's a motel out by the interstate. Decent place. You could stay a week or two while we work this. Costs the Commonwealth nothing because I'd be asking you as a favor. Second, whether you go or stay, we put your street on a drive-by schedule โ a trooper past your house four times a night, varied hours. Third, anything. A car you don't know. A knock you didn't expect. You call me direct. Not the barracks. Me."
"I won't go to a motel," Boone said.
"I know," she said, and there was no surprise in it. "I had to ask out loud."
"The drive-bys I'll accept. And the card."
She took one from her breast pocket and laid it face up on the table between them, her cell number written on the back in blue pen. "Anything includes nothing, Mr. Hartley. If you wake up at three a.m. certain of something you can't name, that qualifies."
He walked her out when she was done. At the patrol car she paused with her hand on the door. "One more thing, and I'd say it to anybody. Don't go looking. I understand the temptation better than you might think. But the day you go looking is the day I can't keep you on the right side of this."
"I'm not looking," Boone said. "I'm waiting. There's a difference, and I know where it is."
She studied him a moment longer than the conversation required, nodded once, and drove away down the quiet street. He watched until the cruiser turned at the corner.
Boone stood in the kitchen afterward with her card in his hand. Four years of sympathy cards had gone into a drawer. A preacher's card was in there. A grief counselor's, a lawyer's, an insurance man's. He could have put this one in the drawer with the rest of them, and the fact that he did not was not lost on him. He took a magnet shaped like a strawberry โ Willa had brought it home from a school fair, and it had outlasted everything โ and he put Alicia Grant's card on the refrigerator door, at eye level, where the light from the window struck it.
Then he made himself a sandwich he didn't want and ate it standing up, looking at the card, while the street outside went on being ordinary.