Chapter Twenty-One · Evelyn
Chapter Twenty-One
EVELYN
By nine fifteen there were thirty-one people in the Copperhead clubhouse and Evelyn Chase had a laptop open on the pool table.
Nobody had called them. She understood the mechanism by now: somebody called somebody.
Charlene came from the diner with two urns and a case of styrofoam cups.
Dorene Voyles came, who had buried her grandson twelve days ago, and did not sit down once all night.
Men Evelyn had never seen stood along the wall in work clothes with their hats off.
And at the end of the long table, in a folding chair with her coat still buttoned, sat a small round woman of about fifty with a grey streak in her hair and a phone face up on the table in front of her.
Del Danner taught kindergarten in Salem. She had a laminated name tag on a lanyard still around her neck.
“Where are they now,” Del said.
“On the Salem route.” Grace had the sheriff’s dispatch on speaker with the volume down. “Diesel and Rook took it northbound, Cutter and Scout are coming back southbound, and Cinder’s got four men working the shoulders between the plant and 460.”
“That’s an hour of road.”
“It’s an hour of road.”
“He’d have called,” Del said. “That’s all I keep coming back to. If he’d broke down he’d have called me before he called anybody, because I’d have skinned him if he didn’t.”
Nobody answered her.
Evelyn kept her eyes on the screen and typed and kept them there, because looking up was the one thing she could not do yet.
For the first hour she had been useless and had known it.
She had never prepared for the absence of a thing to find.
She had spent six weeks being the one who found the thing, and at eight forty on a Friday night with a man four hours overdue there was no thing to find, because the only relevant question was where a truck was and the truck was not in any document.
She had made coffee. She had carried chairs.
She had stood at a counter next to a woman named Charlene and cut a pound cake into thirty-one pieces that nobody was going to eat, and had understood, somewhere around the twelfth slice, that this was what the pound cake was for. Nobody eats it. Somebody has to cut it.
And then at ten past nine, with a knife in her hand, she had thought: he was driving a commercial vehicle.
She had put the knife down in the middle of a slice and gone for the laptop.
She had gotten in.
It had taken her twenty minutes and a phone call to Renata at home to get the password, and it was, of course, the year on the gate sign, and it was of course written on a card under the stapler.
“Grace,” Evelyn said. “Come here.”
Grace came, and Charlene came with her without being invited, and then Dutch Voyles came, and by the time the portal finished loading there were nine people standing behind Evelyn Chase looking at a laptop, and she could feel every one of them.
“Whatever this is,” Grace said quietly, “if it’s nothing, say it’s nothing out loud right now. This room cannot take a maybe.”
“It’s not nothing.”
The portal was ugly, blue and grey, built in about 2014, and it said HARROW SALVAGE AND HAULING LLC across the top and listed four power units by number.
“These four trucks are on a combined ELD and fleet-telematics system,” Evelyn said.
“Most interstate drivers who have to keep hours-of-service records use an ELD, but the federal rule is not what gives me this breadcrumb trail. Your units are tied into the engine and GPS, and this vendor’s fleet service pushes location to the carrier portal when it has cellular service.
The ELD records engine hours, miles, duty status, and required location events. The fleet side reports more often.”
Grace said, under her breath, “Oh my God.”
“Nobody in that yard has looked at this portal in two years because nobody has needed to. They pull the compliance logs when DOT asks and otherwise ignore the fleet map.” Evelyn clicked. “Unit 2. That’s the day cab he took.”
The map came up.
It was a bad map, a flat blue-grey thing with the roads too thin, and the breadcrumb trail on it was a line of small dots that went out of Blackthorn Gap at 4:06 in the afternoon and up 220 and onto 419 toward Salem the way it should have.
And then, at 4:51, it turned right.
Evelyn’s finger stopped on the trackpad.
“That’s not the route,” she said.
“That’s Bent Mountain.”
“Grace, that is a twenty-two mile detour on a road with nothing on it.”
The dots went out 221 and then off onto something the map labeled only as a state secondary route with four digits, and they got sparse, the way they do when the cellular signal goes, and they went another two and a half miles.
And then they stopped.
The last one had a time on it.
Evelyn heard her own voice come out of her from somewhere a long way off.
“Five fourteen,” she said.
The whole room had gone silent behind her and she had not noticed it happen.
“Say it out loud,” Grace said. “All of it, exactly, because I’m writing it down and we are going to hand this to a state trooper in about ten minutes and it needs to be right the first time.”
“The last transmission from unit 2 is at five fourteen p.m. on state route 6-1-2, two point four miles east of 221, at a point the map is calling Wolf Creek Road.” Evelyn’s hands were shaking and her voice was not.
“Duty status at the last ping is on-duty driving. The engine did not shut down before transmission stopped.”
“What does that mean.”
“It means he didn’t park,” Evelyn said. “It means the truck was running when it stopped talking.”
“There’s one more thing and I want it in your note.” Evelyn scrolled and turned the screen. “There’s a hard-braking event logged at five thirteen and forty-one seconds. The device records them automatically. Nobody enters it and nobody can delete it.”
“How hard.”
“Hard enough that a piece of 2014 software decided it was worth writing down.”
Grace was already dialing.
Evelyn made herself turn around.
Del Danner was standing up. She had her hand flat on the table, and the laminated name tag was hanging crooked, and she was looking straight at Evelyn with an expression that was not hope and was not fear and was in fact the most terrible thing Evelyn had ever seen on a human face, which was patience.
“Say it to me,” Del said. “Not to her. To me.”
Grace said, “Del, let me...”
“No, honey.” Del kept her eyes on Evelyn. “You’re a lawyer and you’ve known me since you were nine and you love me, and all three of them are going to make you round it off. She don’t know me.”
Evelyn crossed the room.
Every instinct she had said to soften it and she remembered a woman crouching in a hallway six weeks ago telling her that people can smell it and it will go badly for you, and she looked Del Danner in the eyes.
“His truck stopped transmitting at fourteen minutes past five this afternoon on a road called Wolf Creek, off 221 on Bent Mountain,” she said.
“That’s twenty-two miles off his route. The engine was still running when the signal ended.
Nobody has been out there because nobody knew to look, and they know now, and Grace is on the phone with the sheriff and they will be there before anybody else can get there. ”
Del Danner stood there.
“Four hours,” she said.
“Four hours and forty minutes.”
“He’d have called.”
“Yes ma’am,” Evelyn said. “I believe he would have.”
Del Danner took her time about answering.
“You’re the one he sat with,” she said. “In the office. With the papers.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“He come home that night and he set down at the table and he said, that woman asked me forty-one questions and not one of ’em was whether I done it.” Del’s chin went, once, and she stopped it. “He’d been carrying it three weeks by then and he hadn’t told me none of it. He told me that.”
And Del Danner sat back down in the folding chair and put both hands flat on the table on either side of her phone and looked at it, and Charlene came and stood behind her chair with a hand on her shoulder, and nobody in that room said one word for what felt like an hour.
Somebody put a coat around Del’s shoulders over the coat she already had on.
Evelyn watched the room do what it did. Nobody offered anybody a platitude.
Charlene refilled cups that were full. Two women whose names Evelyn did not know went into the kitchen and started washing things that were clean.
A man in a Copperhead cut with a grey ponytail sat down on the floor with his back against the wall where he could see the door and stayed there.
Dorene Voyles pulled a folding chair around and sat down knee to knee with Del Danner and took both of her hands and held them for forty minutes without speaking.
Twelve days ago, Evelyn thought. Twelve days ago it was her.
Evelyn called Diesel from the office at nine fifty.
He picked up on the first ring.
“Say it.”
“Wolf Creek Road, off 221 on Bent Mountain, two point four miles east.” She read him the coordinates twice off the screen and made him read them back.
“The ELD’s last ping is five fourteen and the engine was running.
Grace has state police rolling and the sheriff, and I gave them everything, and Grace has already told them we have the data and that we are giving them the login. ”
There was a silence on the line that went on for about four seconds.
“Evelyn.”
“Don’t.”
“You found him.”
“I found a dot on a map,” she said, and heard her own voice break for the first time all night, and got it back.
“Diesel, listen to me, because you have about twenty minutes of driving to hear it and then you won’t.
Del is here. She is sitting at that table and she is not crying and she is not going anywhere, and when you find him you are going to want to be the one to tell her and you are going to want to do it on the phone. ”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t. Come here and do it in this room.” Her hand was shaking on the desk. “She has spent thirty years in a house where a man’s job could kill him. She does not need it fast. She needs it from your face.”
Another silence.
“All right,” Diesel said.
“And Diesel.”
“Yeah.”
“Whatever’s out there.” Evelyn closed her eyes. “You call me before you call anybody, and you do not sit in that truck deciding what to carry by yourself.”
She heard him breathe out.
“Twenty minutes,” he said.
“Diesel.”
“Yeah.”
“I love you,” Evelyn said. “I was going to save it for a better night and there isn’t going to be one for a while, and I’m not asking you for anything back, and I’d like you to have it in the truck with you.”
The line was quiet for two seconds.
“You’ve had it since the church lot,” Diesel said. “I just didn’t have anywhere to put it down.”
Then he was gone.
The hour between ten and eleven was the longest of Evelyn Chase’s life and she spent most of it doing the only thing she knew how to do, which was write it down.
She built the timeline on a legal pad because Grace had asked her to and because Grace had been right that it would be needed and had also, Evelyn understood perfectly well, been giving her a job.
4:02 p.m. Unit 2 departs Blackthorn Gap, scrap load, destination Salem.
4:51 p.m. Unit 2 departs the route at 419 and turns south onto 221.
5:13:41 p.m. Hard-braking event logged. 5:14 p.m. Final transmission, state route 612, engine running.
8:20 p.m. Renata Sowder contacts Diesel Harrow.
8:26 p.m. First sheriff’s report filed by telephone.
She looked at the gap between five fourteen and eight twenty and then wrote, underneath it, in her own hand, three hours and six minutes with nobody looking, and then scratched it out hard enough to go through the page, because it was not a fact and it did not belong on a document.
She wrote it on the back page instead.
They found him at eleven twenty and it was Rook who called the clubhouse, because Rook was the one who could still talk.
Evelyn took it on the office extension standing up.
She listened to twenty seconds of a man she had heard say fewer than two hundred words in six weeks, and then she said, “I understand,” and, “I’ll tell them,” and, “Rook, has somebody got Diesel,” and heard the answer, and said, “Good.”
Then she put the phone down in the cradle.
She stood in that office with her hand still on it and gave herself one breath, because that was all there was, and then she opened the door and went out into a room with thirty-one people in it and a small woman with a laminated name tag sitting at the end of a long table, who had already turned around before the door was all the way open, and who was already standing up.
Evelyn did not have to say it.
She got four steps into the room and Del Danner made a sound that Evelyn Chase would hear at four in the morning for the rest of her life, and thirty people moved at once, and Dorene Voyles got there first.