The door opened before Tess's knuckles reached it.
Curtis Lyle stood there in a gray cardigan with a plate in both hands. She had parked at the bottom of Orchard Road so he wouldn't see her coming, and she was here on her own Saturday with a final written warning in her file and a license she could lose.
How long had he been standing behind that door?
"Doreen's lemon bars," he said. "I can't eat them and I can't throw them out. Come in, sweetheart."
She took one so she wouldn't have to refuse the plate. Powdered sugar came off on her fingers. In the living room there were two chairs facing each other across a rug, his with a coil of clear oxygen tubing on the arm, and the other by the window with an afghan folded square on the seat. He steered her around that one without looking at it.
Tess did not sit.
"I read Dr. Pettibone's autopsy yesterday," she said. "At the hospital. Blood alcohol, 0.02 percent."
He lowered himself into his chair, slowly, a hand on each armrest. "Point two oh. A typist's slip, honey. Your grandfather was drunk as a lord and happy about it."
"There was frothy fluid in his airways. He was alive when he went in."
"A drowning man breathes the river. That's what drowning is."
"He had a torn pocket in his fist. Tan twill, brass snap."
Lyle smiled, and it was a good smile, tired and fond. "I had eleven reserve deputies in tan on that river, sweetheart. Half the men in town. The barber. Both Pruitt boys. Ray Brody, for that matter, it was his one summer with a badge. Tan is half the county, sweetheart, and the other half wore it to watch."
Tess let the name go by. She had a list and it wasn't finished.
"The watch stopped at nine forty-one. Everyone says he went in after the fireworks ended."
"They stopped six minutes for a wet fuse, that's all. Folks remember the quiet and call it the finale."
"Someone cut two pages out of Pettibone's film. The tape is still tacky."
"I haven't been in that hospital basement since Doreen died."
He said it fast, and his eyes went to the chair by the window and came back.
Tess wiped her fingers on her jeans. "You pay Elias Kerrigan's lot rent."
"I do." No pause at all. "Nobody else would. A man like that, nobody's nephew, nobody's neighbor. You can call it a crime if you like. I call it Tuesday."
"You're his proxy. You ordered lorazepam at nine every night."
"He climbs the walls at nine. Ask any nurse."
"I am the nurse."
"Then you know." He said it gently, and that was the worst of it.
She counted his breathing without meaning to, the way she counted everyone's, and made herself stop. "Why did you sign it, Mr. Lyle? Approved, C. Lyle. Ten-thirty. Accidental."
He was quiet for long enough that the refrigerator in the kitchen kicked on.
"I carried your grandfather up from the lock," he said. "A man that size, and all the water coming out of him. He went down the bank easy and he came up it like he'd grown roots. I feel it in my back when I lie down." His hand moved on the armrest, once, toward the afghan chair and no farther. "You think I'd put my name on a thing like that for fun?"
"I think you put it there on purpose."
"Sit down, Tess."
"No."
"All right." He reached into the cardigan pocket and took out something small and black, no bigger than a deck of cards. He turned it over in his palm, and pressed his thumb down.
"I read Dr. Pettibone's autopsy yesterday," said her own voice, thin and flat and certain. "At the hospital."
He clicked it off.
The room had gotten very small. Sugar was still on her tongue.
"The records basement is restricted," Lyle said. "You know that. Dolores Kemp would swear to it, and so would your supervisor, and so would the badge reader on that door." He set the recorder on the arm of the chair, next to the tubing, where she could see it. "Gail Ostrander gets this Monday at nine o'clock in the morning. Unless you take a lemon bar and go home, and let an old man and his friend have what's left."
She thought of February. She thought of Dale Hendricks, and of how a written warning only has room for one more line.
If she said yes, it would all stop. She could feel exactly how it would stop.
"I'm not going to promise you that," she said.
"Sweetheart." Very quiet now, the gravel gone to something softer. "Think about what you're choosing."
"I am."
Her hands were steady. She checked them, the way she checked a patient's, and they were. She walked to the door and he did not get up to stop her, which was somehow worse than if he had.
She had the knob in her hand when he said, "Wait. One more."
He was standing now, holding the arm of the oxygen chair, and in his other hand he held a card in a clear sleeve. He crossed the rug and put it into her palm the way you'd put a coin in a child's.
It was a sheriff's arrest card, soft at the corners, typed on a machine with a dropped letter e.
*KERRIGAN, ELIAS R. Arrested July 3, 1979. Drunk. Assault on MAHAFFEY, LEONARD J., at the lock, re: dispute over lock fee. Released July 4, 1979, 12:00 noon.*
Noon. On the Fourth. Hours before the fireworks.
"Elias told you Lonnie was in his gates," Lyle said. "He told you he watched. Did he tell you he'd put his hands on him the day before?" He stepped back and let the door swing wider, into the daylight. "Next time you sit with him, ask which of his shirts is missing a pocket."