Chapter 9
Nobody in that kitchen said a word for eleven seconds.
Joe stood holding a photograph in one hand and a rifle cartridge in the other, and he could hear the stove ticking and Delores breathing and, out on the porch, Mack's nails moving on the boards.
Then Imogen said, "Turn it back over."
He did.
She took it out of his hand and laid it flat on the table and smoothed the curled corner down with two fingers.
"That's my grandmother's fence," she said. "That's Redlands. That's the backyard on Cypress Avenue where my dad kept the parts washer."
"Is that you?"
"That's me."
She touched the face of the girl with dark hair squinting into the sun.
"I remember that shirt," she said. "It was green with a horse on it and it wasn't mine, it was Marguerite's, and I wore it for a year until she made my aunt take it back."
Joe crouched beside the chair.
"Imogen. Who's the man?"
"I don't know."
"You don't."
"Joe, I have looked at this picture for four hours." Her voice was flat and steady in a way that frightened him more than shaking would have. "I don't know him. I don't know that beard, I don't know that jacket, I don't know that baby."
"But the writing says."
"The writing says my father's friend." Imogen looked up. "My father had about nine hundred friends. He ran a salvage yard for thirty one years. There were men in that yard every single day of my childhood and I knew maybe eleven of them by name."
"Hennefrick Tarly," said Hazel, from the doorway.
Everyone turned.
Hazel had not moved from the door frame in four hours and she said it like she had been holding it in her mouth the whole time.
"That's the sorcerer," she said. "That's what the writing means. It has to be."
Imogen shook her head.
"That is not Hennefrick Tarly," she said.
"How do you know?"
"Because Hennefrick Tarly was sixty years old when I was seven, honey. He had a beard down to here and a coat to the ground and he was an old man in 1991 and he would be a hundred and something now."
"Then it's his son," said Colby.
"It's not his son."
"You don't know that."
"I don't know anything," Imogen said. "That's the entire point. I've got a photograph of myself at eleven years old that I have never seen before, handed to me on my own porch by a man with a rifle, six weeks after the end of the world, in the mountains of Utah,
nine hundred miles from Cypress Avenue."
She put both hands flat on either side of it.
"So no. I don't know."
Joe stood up and set the cartridge on the table beside the photograph and looked at the two objects together.
A picture and a bullet.
"Hazel," he said. "Tell me about the man. Everything. Take your time and don't leave anything out because it seems stupid."
Hazel came in and sat down.
"He was tall."
"How tall?"
"Taller than you. Not as tall as Stance was." She thought. "He had a beard but it was short. Like a normal beard. It was gray."
"Age?"
"Old. Older than you." She frowned. "Not old like Bill. Old like, fifty. Sixty."
"How was he dressed?"
"Green. All green, like a jacket and pants that matched, but not like camo, just plain. And boots."
Joe's jaw tightened. "Did you see his boots?"
"Not really. I was at the window."
"Anything on his face?"
"No. That's what was weird." Hazel looked at her mother. "He took his hat off. Like right when Mom opened the door. He took it off and held it in front of him like."
She stopped.
"Like Crowe does?" Joe said.
"No. Different." She struggled with it. "Crowe does it like he's at church. This guy did it like he was sorry."
Imogen said, "That's exactly right."
"You saw it up close," Joe said.
"I was four feet from him."
"Then tell me."
Imogen closed her eyes.
"He was calm," she said. "Completely calm. Not the fake calm Crowe does. He was breathing normally and his hands were loose and he was standing about six feet back from the door instead of on the step, which is a thing people do on purpose."
"What kind of rifle?"
"Slung. Muzzle down. Bolt action with a scope, and the scope had a cover on it." She opened her eyes. "The stock was wood. Not black plastic. Dark wood, and worn light on the grip."
Joe looked at Pruitt.
Pruitt nodded slowly. "That's what I saw on the hill. Wood stock."
"Voice?" Joe said.
"Ordinary," said Imogen. "No accent. Not from here and not from California. Just an American man's voice. He said, good afternoon, ma'am. Is Joe Henfry home?"
"By name."
"By your full name."
"And you said no."
"I said he's not here. And he said, that's fine, I'll come back."
"That's all?"
Imogen hesitated.
"No," she said.
Joe waited.
"He said one more thing," Imogen said. "He handed me the canvas and he said, don't open this until he's back. And I said why, and he said."
She stopped.
"Imogen."
"He said, because you'll want somebody with you."
The house did not sleep well.
Joe put two on watch instead of one and did the rounds himself at midnight and again at three, and the mountain gave him nothing at all.
At four in the morning he gave up and came down and found Imogen at the table with the photograph in front of her and a candle burning down to nothing.
He sat.
"Talk," he said.
"I don't have anything."
"Then talk anyway. Talk about the yard. Talk about your dad. Talk about anything, because sitting there looking at it isn't working and I've watched you do it for ten hours."
Imogen rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.
"Okay," she said. "The yard."
"The yard."
"Eleven acres off Tennessee Street in San Bernardino, which everybody called Redlands because my dad thought it sounded better." She pulled the candle closer. "He bought it in 1979 from a man who was going to prison. That's not a figure of speech."
"What kind of prison?"
"I never asked. That's a thing about growing up in that business, Joe. You learn at about nine years old which questions get an answer and which ones get you sent to the house."
"What did the business actually do?"
"Everything. On paper it was auto salvage. You bring in a wreck, we pull the good parts, we sell them, we crush the rest."
She turned the photograph a quarter turn without seeming to notice.
"In practice it was whatever came through the gate. Appliances. Copper. Farm equipment in the eighties when the small farms out toward Riverside went under. Aircraft parts once, for about eight months, which I now think about differently than I did at the time."
"Aircraft parts."
"There's a boneyard out in the desert and there was a man who brought us things in a stake bed truck and my father paid him in cash and did not write anything down."
Joe sat very still.
"How much cash moved through that yard?"
"A lot."
"How much is a lot?"
"Joe, I was eleven. I know that there was a safe in the office floor and I know my father went to the bank once a month and not more, and I know that when he died in 2011 there was eighty six thousand dollars in a coffee can in the rafters of the parts shed and nobody in my family was surprised."
She looked up.
"I have not thought about any of this in twenty years," she said.
"I want you to understand that. I made a decision at about nineteen years old that I was going to be a nurse and live in a clean place and never smell that yard again, and it worked, and it worked so well that I forgot there was anything to forget."
Joe picked up the cartridge and turned it in the candlelight.
"And your father's friend," he said.
"Which one."
"The one in the picture."
Imogen looked at it again.
"Joe," she said slowly. "Here's the thing I've been circling for ten hours and I'm going to say it out loud now because it's four in the morning and I'm too tired to be careful."
"Say it."
"Whoever wrote on the back of that photograph wrote her father's friend. Singular. With the definite article." She tapped it. "Not a friend. The friend. Like there's only one and I ought to know which."
"And you don't."
"And I don't. And that means either the man who wrote it is wrong about what I know."
"Or?"
"Or the person who told him about me was wrong about what I know," Imogen said. "Which is a completely different problem."
Joe set the cartridge down.
"Say more."
"Somebody has talked about me," she said.
"Not about the nurse on the bench. About Imogen, age eleven, in Redlands, in a shirt that wasn't mine. Somebody who had that photograph and knew who I was and told a story about it, and the man on my porch heard that story and wrote down what he took from it."
"Who's alive that could do that?"
Imogen started counting on her fingers.
"My mother. Eighty three, in Palm Desert, and she has not been able to work a television remote since 2018."
"Who else?"
"Marguerite. My cousin, fifty one, Bakersfield. She was in that yard as much as I was."
"Who else?"
"My uncle Danny, who is my father's brother, who is seventy seven and who ran the front counter for nineteen years."
She stopped.
"And that's it," she said. "That is the complete list of living human beings who could look at that picture and tell somebody a story about it."
"Three people."
"Three people, all of them in California, all of them a thousand miles away with no phones and no power and no way to get here."
Joe leaned back.
"Unless somebody went there," he said.
Imogen went white.
"No," she said.
"I'm not saying it happened."
"Joe, don't."
"I'm saying it's a possibility and I'd rather say it at four in the morning to you than think it alone for a week."
"It's been six weeks," Imogen said. "Nobody drives nine hundred miles in six weeks."
"Somebody with eleven gallons of stabilized fuel and an old truck does it in two days."
"And then comes back?"
"And then comes back," Joe said. "That's four days of driving. It's absolutely possible. It's the single most possible thing in this entire conversation, and I hate it."
Imogen put her face in her hands.
"Why," she said. "Why would anybody."
"I don't know."
"No, Joe, actually why. What is the purpose. What does a man get out of driving to California and back to hand me a photograph of myself in my grandmother's backyard?"
Joe looked at the two objects on the table.