The assisted-living home sat on a hill above the river road, in a brick building that had been a school once. Amos had driven past it a hundred times without thinking he would ever walk in with a sergeant beside him and a folder under his arm.
Delgado drove. His cruiser made paperwork look official, and paperwork was the point.
"He's on the second floor," the woman at the desk said. "Mr. Weiland. He told us you were coming. He's been up since six. He made them change his shirt twice."
Gus Weiland sat by the window in a chair that was too big for what was left of him. Eighty-four years had pared him down to bone and intention, but his eyes were unchanged β pale, exact, and not in the habit of missing anything.
"Amos Keller," he said. "You got old slow. That's the trick of it. Sit down. Sergeant, you can sit too. I already told the girl I'm not dying today, so nobody has to whisper."
Delgado set the folder on the table and explained, plainly, what they were asking: a statement, in Gus's own words, about the closing of the Harrow Fertilizer plant and the capping of the equalization basin. For the state review. For the record.
"The record," Gus repeated. "Thirty-nine years the record's been whatever Brooks's lawyers said it was. All right. Ask me."
Delgado asked about the basin first. Gus's hands, resting on the arms of the chair, tightened once and settled.
"The basin was supposed to be lined and backfilled in lifts, compacted, with a cap you could build a road on. That's what the drawings said. What I got told, in the site trailer, was to cap it thin and cap it fast, because the development money was already moving and nobody was going to dig up a farm field to check. Brooks's men. Not Brooks himself β he never said a dirty word in his life. His men said it, and the bonus for early completion said it loudest."
"And the shaft?" Amos asked.
"The shaft was the plant's old drain riser, down into the basin works. It was supposed to be grouted full, top to bottom. They grouted the top six feet so it would pass a look-down inspection, and they sealed it and forgot it. I signed the sheet that said otherwise." Gus looked at the window a moment. "I want that in the statement. I signed it. I was forty-seven years old and I had a mortgage and I signed it. I've had a long time to decide how I feel about that, and what I feel is that it goes in the statement."
Delgado wrote. The room was quiet except for the pen and the radiator ticking.
"You found the shaft again in oh-nine," Gus said to Amos. "Halvorsen told me, before he passed. You didn't come to me. Why not?"
"Because you'd have told me to stop," Amos said. "And I wasn't going to stop."
"No," Gus said. "I'd have told you it wasn't yours to carry alone. And you'd have not listened, same as you didn't." He shifted in the chair with effort. "You were the only one who kept the logbook. I counted on it. I sat in this chair some nights and I did the arithmetic of you β your little pump, your gauge readings, your stubbornness β and it was the only number in the whole business that came out honest. That's not a compliment, Amos. That's an old man confessing he let a younger one do his shift for fifteen years."
"Gusβ"
"Put it in the statement too, Sergeant. That I knew, and that I was relieved someone was doing it, and that relief is its own kind of cowardice."
Delgado wrote it down. When the statement was finished, he read it back aloud, every word, and Gus listened with his eyes closed and corrected him once β a date, December, not November β and then he took the pen in a hand that shook and signed his name slowly, the way a man signs something he intends to be final.
At the door, Gus caught Amos's sleeve with surprising strength.
"When it blows β and it's going to blow somewhere, someday, thin as they left that cap β you get the people out first and the gauges second. Hear me? People first. You've been keeping that court standing with a trash pump and a notebook. That's not engineering, son. That's a man standing in a hole with his finger in it. The state can take it from here, if they'll move faster than the water does."
Outside, the sky over the river was the color of a wet newspaper, and Delgado studied it a moment before unlocking the cruiser.
"He's sharper than half the witnesses I've deposed," he said. "That statement's going to matter."
"It already mattered," Amos said. "He just needed somebody to finally ask him."
Chapter 17: The Rain