6. PATIENCE
six
"PATIENCE"
They drove out to look at the rim in daylight because Casey wanted the approach in his head before he ever brought the dog. Hannah went because she could not stand to be the one who waited at home while other people did the looking.
The county road ran north out of Bemidji through birch gone bare and pine still holding.
The truck rode high and warm and loud. A classical station played low, the only one Casey ever left it on, and Mose breathed slow in the back where the fold-down had been let down for him.
Hannah kept her hands in her lap and watched the country go by.
For the first time in eight years she felt like she was moving toward her sister instead of away from her.
She had spent those years being very good at not driving north.
There were whole roads she had quietly removed from her life, exits she took the long way around, a county she had not entered since the week she identified a body in it.
And here she was riding into all of it in a warm truck with a man who smelled of woodsmoke and dog, and the country that had been a wound was just country again, birch and pine and the long low sky, and she made herself look at it instead of through it.
"Tell me what we're doing today," she said. "So I'm not just along for the ride."
"We're not going to the rim itself. We're going to the pull-off above it.
" He drove with his eyes moving over the country, reading it.
"I want to see the approach in the light.
Where a man parks. Where the wind sits in the afternoon.
What the dog will be smelling besides what I want him to smell.
You don't bring an old dog up cold to a place this important. You scout it like a job."
"And today's not the day you run him."
"Today's the day I decide what day to run him." He glanced at her. "That's most of the work, deciding the day. The running's the easy part."
She filed it away with everything else he had said, and watched the woodlots go by.
"I keep coming back to Hagen," Casey said, a few miles on.
He had both hands on the wheel at ten and two. His grip had tightened, and she was learning that his grip told her things a beat before his face did.
"We have a match," he said. "We have a man with a name and an address eight miles south of town. Everything in me says close the distance. I could be there by midnight. Knock on his door at seven, before he's awake enough to lie well."
"That's not how a witness works."
"No?" The grip tightened another notch. "Tell me how it works, then. You're the one who reads people for a living."
"You want a man's truth, you control the room you ask for it in.
" She kept her voice in the bedside register, the one that had walked a hundred people toward things they did not want to face.
"You don't go to him hot. You wait until the state can put a wire on you and a script in your hand.
Then you sit in his kitchen, ordinary as weather, and you watch his hands when you say the dead girl's name.
You only get to ask him once. So you wait until the once will hold. "
He was quiet a moment. The birches went by.
"I've spent eighteen years learning to move fast," he said. "It's most of what I am."
"I know. I'm not asking you to stop being it. I'm asking you to spend it on the dog instead of the door."
"Okay," he said.
"Okay," she said.
And that was the whole of it. She understood, sitting in the warm cab with the bare trees sliding past, that the okay had cost him something real.
He had just set down eighteen years of training because a hospice nurse told him a better way to wait.
A man who set his training down for you was telling you a thing he did not have the words to say out loud.
She put it away carefully, where she kept the things she was not ready to take out and look at.
Then she did the other thing she had ridden up to do, which was bring him the number she carried.
"There's a clock," she said. "I haven't put it on your table because I didn't want it to be your weight.
But it's mine to say now." She named the date.
She did the subtraction aloud, the weeks from here to the edge of the civil window, the window the lawyer had called not generous.
"After that, a court can still hear it. But the easy door is shut.
So I need you patient, Casey. I do not need you slow. "
"Those aren't the same thing." The grip on the wheel eased a notch.
"No. Patient means a dog quartering a hill as long as it takes. Slow means standing at the bottom and hoping. We don't have room for slow."
"Then we won't be slow." He said it like a vow, which surprised her, and she looked over at his hands on the wheel and felt something land in her body a half-second before her mind gave it leave.
The set of his wrists. The old burn scar on the back of one knuckle.
She looked back at the road and was annoyed at herself and kept watching the trees go by.
The pull-off was a gravel scrape above the quarry, screened by jack pine. Casey stopped the truck and got out and stood with his hands in his pockets and read the place for a long time, and Hannah stood beside him and tried to see it as he saw it.
"Afternoon wind comes up the face," he said, pointing with his chin.
"Carries everything off the water and up over that lip.
Wrong time of day, the dog gets a whole county's worth of scent and nothing useful.
Morning's better. Cold, still, the air sitting down in the low spots.
" He turned a slow circle. "A man could stand here and watch the whole rim and not be seen from the road.
Somebody who knew the ground picked this. "
"You think they brought her here on purpose."
"I think whoever moved her knew where the wind sat and where the road couldn't see. That's not luck. That's a local." He looked at her then, careful. "You don't have to be up here for this part. I can scout a place without you having to stand in it."
"I want to stand in it." She did not explain that she had spent eight years not standing in it, and that the not-standing had been its own slow harm. He seemed to hear the unsaid part anyway, and let it be, and went back to reading the wind.
They walked the edge of the pull-off together, slow, Casey naming the ground as they went.
Where a truck could turn. Where a man would stand to be out of the wind and still see the whole lip of the quarry.
Where the brush thinned enough to carry a body down to the water without being seen from the road.
He said it all flat, in the voice of a man reading a job, and Hannah understood that the flatness was a mercy, that he was handing her the worst facts of her sister's death stripped of everything that would cut, plain words for unbearable things, the kindness she gave families with a prognosis.
"She'd have liked the light here," Hannah said.
She had not planned to say it. "That's the awful part.
She'd have stood right about where you're standing and thought, the light's good, I've got twenty minutes before it goes.
She wasn't being brave. She was working.
Nobody told her she'd walked into the last twenty minutes of her life. "
Casey didn't tell her it wasn't her fault, because she hadn't said it was, and because the cheap comfort would have insulted them both. He stood where she'd put him and looked at the light she'd described, and let it be true.
"You see them," he said after a while. "The dead. In the places they were."
"Every day. It's most of my job." She pulled the coat tighter.
"The trick is to let them be there and not make them stay.
I'm not very good at the second half. I've kept Ronja standing on this rim for eight years because the alternative was to let her lie down, and letting her lie down felt like agreeing with the lie.
" She looked at him. "That's what you've actually given me, you know.
Not the dog. Permission to let her lie down once it's true instead of once it's tidy. "
He had no answer to that, so he gave her the only thing he had, which was to not look away, and after a minute the cold moved them both back toward the truck where the old dog waited with his chin on the seat.
They drove back as the light went flat, and he came in to warm up before he sent her home, and the kitchen took them both in, the same as the first night. He poured from the enamelware pot. They did not talk much. The not-talking had stopped being a thing she had to manage.
"You'll run him at the rim soon," she said. It wasn't a question.
"When the wind's right and the ground's cold and he's rested.
A week, maybe two." He set the pot down.
"I'll know the morning when it comes. You'll be there.
I'm not doing that one without you, and not because I need the extra hands.
" He didn't finish the thought, and she didn't make him, and the unfinished half of it sat in the warm kitchen and was louder than anything he could have said out loud.
She left before the warmth could become a thing she didn't want to drive away from.
At the door, pulling on the good brown coat, she passed the front room.
The woodstove light fell on the mantel. A Christmas card stood open there, out of season, the only decoration in the house.
She did not pick it up. She read it from where she stood, four words in a careful hand. Thank you, Mr. Yates.
She did not know yet who Mr. Yates was to the person who wrote it, or who that person had lost. But she knew grief when she saw it standing on a mantel in October, because she had kept her own on a kitchen table for eight years.
She didn't ask. He hadn't offered. There was a kind of respect in not reaching, and she had just spent an afternoon teaching him that exact principle, so she let the card stand and said goodnight.
"There's a call I keep not returning," Casey said, at the door, surprising her. It was as close as he came to volunteering a wound. "Federal thing. Old business. It's been sitting two days."
"Is it the kind of call that gets easier the longer you leave it?"
"No," he said. "It's the other kind."
"Then you already know what I'd say." She pulled her gloves on. "But you get to pick the day. You taught me that this afternoon."
He almost smiled. She drove home in the dark with the heater ticking and the radio off, a habit she had caught from him without meaning to, and knew only that she had caught herself watching a man's hands, and that the catching had felt less like a mistake than she wanted it to.
She was forty-one years into a careful life.
She recognized the exact moment a careful life started to come uncareful, and she had just lived one, and she did not turn the radio on to drown it out.