“When?”
“The night of the accident.”
Her face crimped in confusion. “Well, I mean, I already told the sheriff, Officer. I never saw those boys.”
Sutter watched her face, her eyes.
“Yes, I know. I know that’s what you told them.” He gave her a smile. “But just to be clear, Pamela: You saw nothing of those two boys whatsoever?”
“No, sir.”
“They never came into the station while you were here?”
“No, sir. I’ve seen plenty of boys come in here at night. I’ve seen some pretty sketchy characters. But no real trouble, ever, and I’ve been here, oh gosh, two years come March.”
He watched her. “What about their truck?”
“What about it?”
“Well, ma’am, what kind of truck was it?”
“I couldn’t tell you, Officer. I couldn’t even say it was a truck.”
Sutter looked out the window. “I guess it’d be hard to miss a truck pulling into the station, if you were sitting right here the whole time.”
“I was sitting here, all right. The whole time. I went to use the ladies’ once, but that was a good hour before those girls ever got here.”
“And you saw the girls’ car—the RAV4?”
“Yes, sir. They pulled up for gas right there at pump number one.”
“Mm-hmm,” said Sutter. “And how do you figure you never saw that truck?”
The woman sat up a little straighter. Somehow, the softness had left her face.
“Well, Officer, either that truck was never here, or else it was parked off to the side, same as you did.”
Sutter coughed into his fist.
“That’s sensible, Pamela. That helps a great deal. Thank you very much.”
“I’m only trying to help, Officer. I feel awful bad for those girls. But the first I ever heard of those two boys was when the sheriff came asking about them earlier, and I’ll tell you what I told him: if those boys were here, they’d of had to park where you parked, off to the side, and then they’d of had to walk around the back of the station to get to the restrooms on the other side. Otherwise I’d of seen ’em go by the window there.”
Sutter looked to the firedoor at the rear of the building. “You reckon they went tramping through the snow back there?”
“No, sir. There’s no snow back there. We’re required by law to keep that sidewalk clear of snow and ice. It goes clear around the building. But I don’t know why anybody would go back there, unless they just plain didn’t want to be seen.”
Sutter stood looking at the back door. Then he looked out the window again.
“Did you see the girls leave?”
“I sure did.”
“How did they look?”
“Sir?”
“Did they seem frightened, upset?”
“They just seemed in a hurry. I figured they were trying to get out of the weather. It was sleeting pretty good. As you know.” She shook her head. “I sat here a good half hour before I realized they never brought the key back, and by then every sheriff’s car and ambulance and fire engine in the county was going by, and I just sat here wondering what in the world—”
“I’m sorry, Pamela—the key?”
“The key to the ladies’,” she said. “They took off without ever giving it back. Ron had to put in a whole new lock, cost him forty-five dollars.” She lifted the new key from below the counter to prove it.
“May I?” he said, and she handed it over. The new key was attached by a loop of shoelace to what looked like the sawed-off stick-handle of a plumber’s helper drilled through with a quarter-inch bit. ladies inked along the shaft in a blocky, near-angry hand.
“Can I ask, what was the old key attached to?”
“A backscratcher.”
“A backscratcher?”
She rolled her eyes. “I know. Ron asked the sheriff and them did they find his backscratcher in the girls’ car and they looked at him like he was crazy.”
“They didn’t find it,” Sutter said simply.
“No, sir.”
“Can I borrow this a minute?”
“Oh, sure. But they’ve been all in and out of there already, the sheriff and them.”
“I know. I just want to see for myself. If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind. It’s just around the side of the building.”
“Thank you.” He began to lift his hand to the brim of his hat but stopped himself, as he was wearing no hat. At the door he turned back.
“Where was it from?”
“Sir?”
“Where’d the backscratcher come from?”
Her face clouded—and then brightened: “Phoenix, Arizona,” she said. “That was printed on it. Don’t ask me how it ended up here.”
He went around the side of the building and unlocked the ladies’ and flicked the switch and stood in the humming light. The dirty tile floor and the reek of old urine. A dinged sheet of aluminum where a mirror would normally hang, engraved forever with obscenities. Did the ugliness of places bring out the ugliness in people, or was it the other way around? He shut the door and stood where she’d stood. He sniffed the air and he could smell it: the hand over her mouth, the greasy right hand. His heart was pounding and he patted down his pockets before he remembered he’d left them in the other jacket, in the car, his smokes, and what a way to go, his heart banging itself to pieces because he couldn’t get his hands on his smokes—and on the very spot where his daughter had been cornered by those boys, those reeking punks, and would these be his last thoughts, these angry and hateful images, these smells?
That other time, when he’d woken up in the hospital, he’d had no warning, and no memory of any of it—no visions, no lights. Just nothing. Helping his deputies move desks around one second, in the hospital the next. The deputies, Halsey and Moser, had worked on him until the EMTs arrived.
You were just all the way gone, Sheriff, Wayne Halsey said later, and the doctor confirmed it. Full cardiac arrest. Full stop. Lights-out.
And it was those tests that led to finding the cancer. Double-whammy day.
But no connection between the two? he’d asked the doctor.
Other than the smoking? No. I’d say you mostly inherited the heart. It’s an old heart.
An old heart?
Older than you.
Will it last?
How do you mean?
I mean will it do the job before the cancer.
It darn near did.
What about those stents?
A temporary fix, said the doctor. What he needed was bypass. Double, maybe triple—he couldn’t really say until he got in there. And that was that. Sutter had watched his own father go through all that, a year of recovery only to die six months later sitting in his chair watching baseball.
He never told her about the heart. The cancer was enough. Audrey still in high school then. Nineteen when the cancer came back, a college girl, and he only told her because the money was running out and you didn’t want your daughter getting some kind of notice that her daddy had failed to pay her tuition. Or that her daddy was in the hospital taking his last breaths.
He did not want her to come home—had made her promise not to, but she’d broken that promise, and otherwise would never have come to this stinking place, would never have stopped here for gas with Caroline Price.
And if Caroline Price had not been with her, with her pepper spray and her toughness?
Caroline fought, Daddy. She fought them so beautifully.
He swept his beam all around the cleared pavement in front of the bathrooms and over the heaped up snow at the pavement’s edge and over the snowy, undisturbed reaches beyond—did he throw it? And how far could he throw it? Sutter ran his beam up the boughs of a solitary pine tree, then followed the beam down the length of sidewalk behind the building and around to the other side and trained it on the spaces where he’d parked next to the old Ford wagon. Then he took the key back to Pamela and thanked her again.