Chapter 10 #3
It was worse read all at once than it would have been one at a time, which is true of everything.
Forty-one calls in nineteen days. And underneath them a column of messages that started ordinary and businesslike in the fall and turned, somewhere around the new year, into something with no bottom to it.
you did the hard part. i finish it.
she doesnt have anyone out there. did you know that. nobody checks on her
i've been doing this a year and youve never once asked what its like
dont text me about invoices
And the last one, four days old, at 3:14 in the morning:
she left the back door unlocked for eight days in october. i never went in. thats the difference between me and everybody
Laura read that one three times.
She had turned the deadbolt on the eighteenth of October, at her mother's kitchen table, with a photograph in her hand.
Eight days. He had counted them.
"Do you have a computer?" she said.
"What?"
"Do you have a laptop and a printer in this apartment."
"I — yeah. In the—"
"Get them."
They printed the whole thread. It took a while, and Laura stood at the counter squaring the pages while the girl watched her from the sofa arm, and neither of them said anything, and at the end Laura folded the stack in half and put it in the brown folder with the ledger.
"Don't delete them," she said. "Not one. If he calls again, don't answer, and don't block him either. Let it ring and let it log."
"Why not block him?"
"Because every call he makes is a line on a page," Laura said, "and a page is what they need."
Laura got her keys out of her coat pocket. Her hands were completely steady, which she noted the way she would note a pulse.
"Are you going to the police?" Ashley said.
"Yes."
"They'll — " She stopped. "It'll all come out. The company. The money."
"Yes," Laura said.
"I have two million people." Ashley said it quietly, and not as a threat, and Laura understood a half second later that it had not been a boast either.
"Two point one. I built that. I talked about him for a year without saying his name and they worked it out and they've been — " She stopped, and started again, and this was the last true thing she said in the book of Laura's life.
"They know your face. I did that. I never told anybody to do anything and I gave two million people your face and a reason, and when this comes out they'll turn around and do it to me, and I can't stop that either. I don't get a lock for that one."
Laura thought about the letters in the fall, and the account with no name, and the woman outside the clinic in January who had wanted a photograph.
"No," she said. "You don't."
Ashley nodded. She sat back down on the arm of her sofa, and she looked about nineteen.
"Okay," she said.
At the door Laura stopped, with her hand on the newer of the two locks.
She had one thing left in her and it was not kindness.
She wanted to be honest about that, later, when she thought about it: it was not kindness, and it was not mercy, and it was certainly not forgiveness.
It was that she was thirty-four years old and she had just watched what happens to a woman who decides she can manage a thing quietly by herself.
"Ashley."
The girl looked up.
"Get the lock changed and tell your sister the whole truth," Laura said, "and when the county calls you — and they will call you — answer the phone."
Then she went down and out through a lobby with a fireplace nobody sits at, and got in her truck, and drove east.
She stopped once, at the Shell outside Lebanon, and stood at the pump with her hand on the cold steel and let herself understand what she now knew.
Nobody was running him.
For five months she had been frightened of a man with a purpose behind him, and there had been one, and the purpose had been a twenty-six-year-old in love with her husband.
That was all. Somebody had wanted something badly enough to buy a boy in a fleece vest, and the wanting had been about Jake from the first minute to the last, and Laura Hayes had never been the point of any of it — she had been the way to find out whether the house was empty.
And then the woman who wanted it had gotten it, and stopped needing the calendar, and let go.
And the boy had not let go. He had been told for fourteen months that he mattered, by the only person who had ever said it, and he had decided the assignment was a calling.
The person who made him could not stop him.
The person who made him was sleeping at her sister's in Antioch, four nights a week, behind a bright brass lock.
Laura put the nozzle back and got in the truck and sat there for a second with both hands on the wheel.
Then she drove home, and she did not turn on the radio, and she did the whole drive doing arithmetic — what she had, what a deputy would need, what a district attorney would need, in what order, from whom.
She got to Quarry Road at four. The field on the back side was gold and empty.
She went inside and sat down at her mother's kitchen table with the green folder and a fresh legal pad, and at the top of the first page she wrote, in block capitals, the way you write a heading on a chart:
DEREK MILLS.