was too old to go down there and help. Felt real bad he couldn’t help, Ed says. But didn’t give his name and didn’t stick around.”
She looked off and said quietly, “Poor old feller. Didn’t they get his number from the call?”
“He called from a pay phone.”
“At the gas station?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Now who’s getting all sheriffy?”
She held his eyes. Outlasted him.
“The old feller is a dead end, Deputy,” he said. “Called and vanished. But thank God he called.”
They were silent. Then he looked at her and said, “What is it, sweetheart?”
She shook her head. She wouldn’t cry again. If you tell him you wish you’d never asked Caroline Price to loan you bus fare you are just telling him that the only reason Caroline Price is dead is because you were coming home to see him, because he’s so sick. Because he is dying. All of which he already knows.
She gripped his hand tighter. “I just wish I’d never left, Daddy. That’s all. I wish I’d never gone back down there after Christmas.”
“Sweetheart, I never could’ve let you do that. I needed you to be in school. You should be there now.”
“But we don’t have time, Daddy. There’s not enough time.” Now came the tears. She couldn’t stop them.
“Sweetheart. We’ve had lots of time. Your whole life. And they have been the best damn years of my life. Hell, I wouldn’t trade another hundred years of living if it cost me one day of knowing you. Do you believe that?”
“No. You’re exaggerating.”
“The hell I am.”
He watched her. Then he smiled, and patted her hand again. “Can I get you anything? Aren’t you hungry?”
“No, thank you.”
She looked at the cast, looking closely at the purple surface of the plaster, the edges of the individual strips where they’d been layered and shaped by another person’s hands before they dried into this hard shell. She wiggled fingers that did not look like her fingers so much as the pink legs of a creature that lived inside the shell. She said, watching the wiggling legs, “I thought of something when I was under the water, Daddy. Something I hadn’t thought of in a long time. Someone, I mean.” She didn’t look up. She could feel him waiting. Could feel his tightening heart between the dying lungs. “She was blond, wasn’t she,” she said. And now she looked at him.
“Yes,” he said.
“Long blond hair.”
“Yes.”
“I remembered that when I was in the water.”
“You were just a little girl then. You shouldn’t have known about such things.” He turned his head to cough. “I never should’ve had you in the car with me.”
“That didn’t make any difference, Daddy. We all knew. We’d stand around on the playground and say her name: Holly Burke.”
She saw the effect of this name in his eyes, darkening the blue like a cloud over water. He’d not found the girl’s killer—or had not found the evidence the law required. Had never given her that, given her family that, and now he never would.
“She seemed so old to us then,” Audrey said, “so grown-up and mysterious. But she doesn’t seem old now. She seems young. Even younger than she was.” The beautiful hair, that long fine girl’s hair, lit up and swaying in the current, in the lights.
He squeezed her good forearm. “I wish you wouldn’t think about that.” He patted her—kept patting until she looked at him and he stopped.
“There’s something I didn’t tell the deputy—the sheriff,” she said, and the moment she said it she felt him grow tenser yet. She felt his heart begin to slide.
“That’s all right,” he said. “It takes time, sometimes, to remember things. The brain just kind of . . .” His mind was running to the worst, she knew: What hadn’t she told him about those two boys, what they’d done to her?
She shook her head. “It’s nothing like that, Daddy. I just didn’t want to tell the sheriff something I wasn’t sure about. And I’m not sure I didn’t just imagine this.”
He waited. Watching her run her fingers up and down the purple cast.
“What is it, sweetheart? Tell me, and I’ll tell the sheriff if I think he ought to know. I’ll tell him you’re not sure—how’s that?”
She nodded. Then she told him about the scratches on the one boy’s face, the one who grabbed her. The scratches were fresh, but she knew they didn’t come from her own fingers; they ran small and neat across his face, ear to nose, like