the car had first come to rest; too many vehicles had come and gone and you couldn’t expect first responders to concern themselves overly about evidence—and he wouldn’t have it any other way in this case—but God damn.
He doused his light and stood at the top of the bank with his arms at his sides. The breath smoking from his nostrils. Winter smell of woodfire in the air. Listening, but not a sound. Then, from downriver, traveling some distance along the ice, the baying of a hound dog. Baying. Pausing. Baying again, but answered by nothing Sutter himself could hear in all that hushed valley. He crossed the road and got back in his sedan and shut the door and sat in a darker, closer silence.
Don’t even say it, she said after a moment, and he didn’t. But then he did: “Just one more stop,” he said, and turned the key in the ignition.
There was a pay phone at the corner of the station but when he went to pick up the receiver there was no receiver, no cable, and he moved on, passing the window—the woman sitting there, at work on her puzzles, much as he’d pictured her—and stepped inside.
“Oh,” she said, looking up from her work. “I didn’t see you pull up.”
Sutter turned and looked out the pane of glass and said, “No, I guess I parked out of view, didn’t I?”
“That’s all right. I guess you can park anywhere you like, Officer.”
She sat on her stool behind the counter, soft-faced and blond. The pin tag on her chest said pamela. He took in the cluttered countertop, the disposable lighters and ChapStick and other plastic junk for sale.
“Is it about the accident again?” the woman said. “Those two girls? Just so awful.”
Sutter shook his head—somber, dumbfounded. “It doesn’t get much more awful, does it?”
“No, sir. It just chills me to the bone to think about it.”
“It had to be mighty cold in that water.”
“Well, yeah, that—but I mean seeing those two girls just a few minutes before, right here? Right where you are standing now? I still can’t hardly believe it.”
“I guess you remember that night pretty clearly, ma’am.”
“I guess I’ll never forget it.”
He stood a moment, giving the comment room. Then he said, “I know they’ve already asked you questions up and down, ma’am, but I just want to ask one or two more, if you don’t mind.” He watched to see if she would look more carefully at his sheriff’s jacket, but she did not. Good warm jacket for a cold night, if anyone cared. Beneath it he wore a plain khaki shirt, no tie, and he wore jeans and a plain leather belt and his old leather workboots. His sheriff’s hat and belt and holster, his badge, were all back home in his bedroom closet. The county-issue .45 was back with the department, turned in one year ago on his last day, as per regulation.
The woman said, “I’ll answer whatever you want to ask me, Officer. If it’ll help, I’ll answer.”
“Thank you, ma’am—Pamela, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can call me Tom, Pamela.”
She placed her hands in her lap and waited. He glanced about the cramped little store. In a dark recess at the back an exit sign glowed above a metal firedoor. Adjacent to that door was a narrow wooden door leading, he guessed, to some kind of storage room or back office.
“You tend to be here by yourself, Pamela?”
“Yes, sir. Six to midnight on weeknights.”
He’d already looked for security cameras and seen none. “It doesn’t seem like the safest of shifts for a woman alone, if you don’t mind me saying.”
She laughed. “You’d have to be crazy to come here looking for money, or any other kind of nonsense. For one thing, Ron—that’s my boss—he takes all the day cash away at five p.m., and most folks use cards for the gas anymore. Heck, I asked for this shift. It’s nice and quiet, mostly.”
“And the other thing?”
“Sir?”
“You said for one thing,” he said. “Sounded like there was another thing.”
“Oh.” She glanced toward the back, the shadowed recess, and he saw the color come to her face like a sunburn. She flung a hand and said, “I was just gonna say that Ron, my boss, comes in kind of regular. At nights. He stops by to check on things.” She fussed with the ChapStick dispenser.
“But he wasn’t here that night?” Sutter said. “He didn’t stop by?”