Chapter 14: The Sighting
The trucker was a regular, a hauler out of Youngstown named Pete who took his coffee black and his news the same way, and he waited until Otis had wiped down the counter twice before he said it.
"Two nights ago. Tuesday, late. I was fueling on seven β diesel island, far side β and there's a guy standing by the ice machine not buying ice. Just standing. Hat down. Watching the pumps." Pete turned his mug in a slow circle. "I didn't think nothing of it till I saw the picture on your corkboard this morning. Otis, that's him. That's the face. Older, thinner, but I'd sign to it."
The photograph on the corkboard was there because Alicia Grant had put it there herself, with Otis's permission and a card beneath it. Do not approach. Call. The diner had been studying it for a week the way people study a weather map.
Otis called Grant first and Boone second, in that order, having thought about the order in advance. Grant's voice on the phone was the sound of a door being quietly locked. "Nobody tells Boone anything different from what I'm telling you," she said. "It may be nothing. Men stand by ice machines. But we work it like it's something."
For two evenings the plaza was a theater with the play removed. Troopers fueled there at irregular intervals, unhurried, thorough. A plain car sat the second night in the motel lot across the road with its windows dark. Boone worked his regular shift because Grant had asked him to β "Nothing changes visibly, that's the whole of it" β and if his hand was slower on the pump handle and his eyes went oftener to the road, the only man who could have said so was Otis, and Otis said nothing.
Nothing happened. Nothing, thoroughly and expensively, for two nights. The plain car went away. The truckers stopped telling the story. And Boone had begun β against instructions he had given himself β to permit a small, tired hope that Pete had been wrong, that a face on a corkboard can colonize a man's memory in forty-eight hours, when the super at Sarah's building mentioned it to her in the laundry room, conversationally, while the dryers thumped.
A man had come by the building on Friday, the super said. Nice enough. Asked which unit was the nurse's β said he was a cousin, in town, wanted to surprise her. The super, who had buried two husbands and feared neither God nor man, had told him the building didn't give out units and watched him leave by the alley gate. She hadn't thought about it again until she saw Sarah's face just now.
Sarah called Grant from the stairwell with her back against the painted block wall, and by the time she had finished, the geometry of the whole thing had changed shape in her chest like furniture being dragged in another room.
Because it had all been drawn one way β Ketch's grievance, Ketch's debt, the man who named me β a straight line across four years and two states ending at Boone Hartley's door. She had carried the warning to the end of that line like a letter to its address. It had never once occurred to her, standing at pump seven with June Hartley's last words burning in her mouth, that the line might bend. That the collector might come collecting from the messenger first. That she might not be the letter. She might be the address.
"Nurse's" β he had asked for the nurse's unit. Not a name. A woman who could be found by her job and her building and the laundromat stairs, a woman with a fire-escape garden and a seven-year-old who watered tomatoes with a measuring cup, exactly four cups, no negotiation.
Grant was at the building in twenty minutes. She did not say it might be nothing. She walked the alley gate and the stairwell and the sightlines from the street, photographed the super's door and the landing and the laundromat windows, took the super's statement in handwriting so careful it made Sarah want to cry, and then stood in Sarah's small kitchen and said the thing Sarah had already decided in the stairwell and was only waiting to have said back to her by someone with the authority to make it real.
"We're moving you tonight," Grant said. "Both of you. I'll explain where when Otis says yes, and Otis is going to say yes. Pack like it's a week. Poppy's school things, the fish, all of it."
Poppy, from the doorway, holding the geranium pot with both hands because she had decided it was coming: "Is this a secret mission?"
Grant looked at her with the first unprofessional softness Sarah had seen. "It's an adventure with rules," she said. "Your mom knows the rules. You follow your mom."
"We're extremely good at rules," Poppy said. "Ask anybody."
Chapter 15: The Move