Chapter Fifteen · Evelyn
Chapter Fifteen
EVELYN
In nine days they got to six of the nineteen.
Two took the binder. Three would not open a gate. The sixth, a man outside Bristol with seven trucks and a wife who did the books, listened to all of it in his own kitchen, thanked them, walked them out, and had Renner Freight on the phone before Grace’s Subaru reached the end of his road.
Grace kept the tally on a whiteboard in her office in three columns and would not let anybody call the third column anything but undecided, which Evelyn eventually understood was a discipline and not an optimism.
She rode along on four of the six.
That had been its own negotiation, conducted over two days and settled by Grace, who pointed out that a lawyer, a club president, and a forensic accountant standing at a gate together was a materially different object than two men in vests, and that in three of the six cases the person who actually got them past the chain had been Evelyn, because Evelyn could say I audited the company that did this to you and mean it.
She learned things at those gates that were not in the binder.
She learned that a man who has been used for two years does not get angry first. He gets embarrassed.
Every one of them, without exception, went red before they went anything else, and two of the three who refused them had refused out of pure shame, and she had not understood that until the fourth stop and had been unable to stop seeing it after.
She learned that Diesel Harrow, at a stranger’s gate, did not talk about the club, the war, or Renner.
He talked about equipment. He asked what year the tractor was.
He asked whether they were running their own reefer work or farming it out.
He got four minutes of ordinary shop talk out of men who had come out to run him off, and then he said the thing he had come to say, and it landed because by then he was a carrier and not a biker.
She spent those nine days doing the other thing.
She did not ask permission for it. She thought about that afterward at some length, and what she landed on was that she had not decided to keep it from anybody.
She had simply gotten up on a Tuesday and driven Grace’s spare car to the post office in Buchanan with six padded envelopes on the passenger seat, and had not raised it at the table first, and those were not the same thing but they were close enough to look identical from the outside.
The list took her a week to build and twenty minutes to execute.
A woman named Priya Raghunathan in Bethesda who had taught her graduate forensic accounting seminar and had once told a room of twenty-six students that the only real professional obligation is to write it down.
A safe deposit box in Waynesboro, opened in person with cash, under her own name, because Grace had said flatly that anything under a false name turns a witness into a defendant.
The regional desk of a newspaper in Roanoke, addressed to nobody, with a cover letter that said only that the enclosed was a complete and accurate compilation of public records and that no response was expected.
Marcus Teal, at a home address that had taken her forty minutes to find and that she chose not to explain to anybody.
Dorene Voyles.
And Charlene at Rowe’s, in an envelope with a note that said, If anything happens to me, this belongs to the town. Do whatever you think is right with it. Thank you for the coffee.
She told Diesel on the ninth night, in the kitchen, standing up, with all of it already done.
He took a long ten seconds with it.
“Six copies,” he said.
“Six.”
“Dorene Voyles has ninety pages about the road that killed her grandson sitting in her house.”
“Yes.” Evelyn kept her chin level. “And she can burn it, or she can put it in a drawer, or she can walk it into a newspaper office in twenty years when she’s ready. It’s hers. It happened to her more than it happened to me.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“No.”
“Why not.”
“Because you’d have said no.” She saw it land.
“And because you would have been wrong, and I would not have been able to prove it to you in a conversation, and Teal said the thing out loud in Grace’s office and everyone in that room heard him.
Three cases died because there was only ever one of something. ”
Diesel put both hands on the back of a kitchen chair and looked at the floor.
“You went to Buchanan,” he said. “By yourself. With six envelopes on the seat.”
Evelyn opened her mouth to say something about the post office and stopped, because that was not what he had said.
It was the only part of it he had said.
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Diesel.”
“I ain’t arguing about the copies. The copies are right.
” He still had not looked up. “I got the whole way to your professor in Bethesda before I got to the part where you drove twenty-two miles down 43 by yourself, and then I couldn’t hear anything else you were saying, and I’ve been standing here since trying to get it back. ”
She crossed the kitchen and put her hand on his wrist.
“Say the rest of it,” she said.
“There ain’t a rest of it. That’s the whole injury.
” Diesel finally looked at her, and whatever was in his face had been in there a good while.
“I’m not going to tell you where you can drive.
I want you to know I’m not going to, and I want you to know it costs me something, and I want that on the table between us instead of in my chest, because Grace told you what I am and Grace was right. ”
Evelyn did not move.
“She told you she told me.”
“Grace has told me the same thing to my face four times since I was thirty.” He turned his hand over under hers. “She just don’t usually get to me first.”
“She said you’d decide for me and think it was the same as loving me.”
“That’s about the shape of it.”
“She was right about the first part.” Evelyn kept hold of his wrist. “She was wrong about the second one, and I want to say why, because I have been sitting on it since a Subaru on a switchback. You did not decide for me tonight. You wanted to. I watched you want to. And what you did instead was tell me it cost you.” She tightened her fingers.
“A man who does that is not doing the thing she warned me about. He is doing the hard version of the opposite.”
“Don’t give me credit for one night.”
“I’m not,” she said. “I’m putting it on the board so we both know what the score was on this one. There’ll be others.”
The call came at seven forty that evening while the pan was still on the stove.
Grace’s voice was doing the thing it did when she was being very precise because the alternative was not being precise at all.
“Setzer Brothers’ shop building burned at six fifteen,” she said. “Both brothers were at supper. Nobody was in it. Fire marshal’s out there now and Wythe County is already saying accelerant.”
Evelyn sat down on the arm of the recliner.
“Their trucks?”
“Two of the four were inside.” A pause. “Evelyn, the binder was in that building. He had it on the desk in the office. He told the marshal that himself, ten minutes ago, in front of a deputy, which is either the bravest or the stupidest thing anybody’s done this month.”
“It’s the bravest.”
“It’s both,” Grace said. “It usually is.”
Evelyn looked at the pan on the stove and at the window and at nothing.
“Grace. Did we do that to him?”
“Ask me the real question.”
“Did I do that to him. It was my binder on his desk.”
“Then here’s the real answer, and I want you to actually hear it instead of holding it politely.
” Grace’s voice came down the line perfectly steady.
“A man burned that building. A specific man, for a specific reason, on somebody’s instruction.
He is the one who did it. And if the rule is that you don’t tell a person the truth about their own business because of what somebody else might do to them for knowing it, then the arsonist writes the rules for everybody, forever, and every one of those nineteen men gets indicted next spring for something they were never told. ”
“That’s the lawyer answer.”
“That is the only answer there is, and I did not make it up to make you feel better, and it does not make me feel better either.” A pause. “Ask me again in a year when I’ve had to say it to somebody’s widow, and I’ll say it the same way, and I’ll hate it the same amount.”
They ate anyway, because Diesel said a man who stops eating stops thinking, and neither of them tasted one bite of it, and afterward he washed and she dried and the two of them went twenty minutes without a word, and it was not a bad silence.
Then she put the towel down.
“Diesel.”
“Yeah.”
“I have been extremely reasonable for nine days,” Evelyn said, “and I am going to stop.”
He turned around from the sink with his hands still wet.
“Say what you want,” he said. “Out loud. All of it.”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s completely fair and you know exactly why I’m doing it.”
She did know. He had shut the water off and he had not come one step toward her, and he was standing eight feet away in his own kitchen making her say it, and it was the single most effective thing anybody had ever done to her for the second time in a month.
“I want you to take me to bed,” Evelyn said. “Not the front room with the lock on the door. Yours.”
“You sure?”
“I am so far past sure that I have started resenting the question.”
“Then I’m going to ask it twice more before we’re done,” Diesel said, “and you’re going to answer it twice more, because I’ve spent most of my life deciding things for other people and I’m not going to do it in that room.”
And then he came across the kitchen.
He kissed her against the counter with one hand at her jaw and the other flat on the small of her back, and it was nothing like the church lot. The church lot had been grief and cold and a thing that got away from both of them. This was a man who had made up his mind in a kitchen with the light on.
Her hands got under the hem of his shirt and found bare skin and heat, and he made a sound against her mouth that went straight down through her, and she pulled at the shirt and he broke off long enough to reach back and haul it over his head himself.
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah, I got scars, we’re not doing a whole thing about it.”
“I wasn’t going to do a whole thing about it.” She put her palm flat in the middle of his chest. “I was doing arithmetic.”
“About what?”
“About how long I’ve been pretending I wasn’t.”
He got a hand under her thighs and she was up and around his waist before she had entirely agreed to it, and the hallway was dark and the third step in it made noise and neither of them cared.
He set her down in a bedroom she had never been in, at the foot of a bed that faced a window with eighty miles of black mountain in it, and stood there with his hands at her waist.
“Second time,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Say it whole.”
“Yes, Diesel, I want this, and if you ask me the third time before you take this shirt off me I am going to hurt you.”
He laughed, low, and got the shirt off her, and stopped laughing.
After that there was not a great deal of talking, and what there was of it was quiet and specific and not the kind of thing she had expected from him at all.
He said her name once, early, with his mouth at her throat, and it did something to her ribs.
He asked her twice more what she wanted, both times when she had not thought to ask for it herself, and both times he was right, and by the second one she had stopped being embarrassed about the noise she made.
He was slow. That was what came back to her later, for weeks, at inconvenient moments.
A man built like that, with hands like that, and he went slow enough that she came apart the first time with her fingers dug into his shoulder and her mouth against his ear, saying something that afterward she could not remember one word of.
And when he finally moved over her and stopped, braced on his forearms with his forehead against hers, she understood that this was the third time and she got there ahead of him.
“Yes,” Evelyn said. “Yes.”
Afterward, she lay across his chest with the whole valley out the window and his hand moving slow up and down her spine, and she thought about the fact that she had come down a mountain a month ago with four hundred dollars and a hard drive and no plan past tonight, and that she had, at some point since, entirely stopped thinking of it as somebody else’s house.
“You’re doing arithmetic again,” Diesel said.
“I’m always doing arithmetic.”
“What’s the number.”
“A month,” she said.
His hand stopped on her back.
“Feels longer,” he said.
“It feels like the only thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Diesel Harrow took his time about answering, and then he said, into her hair, in a voice she had not heard him use, “I’d like you to stop calling it the front bedroom.”
The phone went off at four in the morning.
Evelyn came up out of sleep with her heart already going, and the room was black, and Diesel was already sitting on the edge of the bed with the phone at his ear and his back to her, and she watched the shape of his shoulders in the dark and knew before he said one word.
“Say it again,” he said.
Then, “How long ago?”
Then, “Don’t touch nothing. I’m twenty minutes.”