Chapter 3
Rev
It took eleven days to become a routine, which is nine days faster than anything else in my life.
I'm in the bay at four. That's not discipline, it's arithmetic — I stop sleeping around three thirty and there's no point lying there arguing with the ceiling.
So I get up, I make coffee, I roll the door, and I put my hands on something that has a correct answer.
A carburetor has a correct answer. You can be wrong about a carburetor and then stop being wrong about it, which is more than most things offer.
By day four, the kitchenette light was already on when I got there.
By day seven, there was a cup out for me.
By day eleven, I caught myself checking the clock at three forty-five and adjusting, and I want it on the record that I noticed, and that I did not stop.
We didn't talk much at first. That was the good part.
She'd have music on low, some old thing off Margo's radio, and she'd be doing something violent to a lump of dough, and I'd be under the Shovelhead with a light, and every so often one of us would say something and the other would answer four minutes later and it would still make sense.
"Otto tried to teach the dog to shake again."
Four minutes.
"Did he account for the leg this time?"
"He built a ramp."
"A ramp does not address the leg, Rev."
"I told him that."
"What did he say?"
"He said the ramp is for morale."
The dog's name is Warrant. He came with the building.
Around day nine she started leaving things on the fender.
Not on a plate — on a square of parchment, on the front fender of whatever I was working on, which meant she'd come in while I was in the parts shed and gone out again without saying anything.
Little dark chocolate things one morning.
Something with cardamom the next. Once, a single perfect croissant, which I found out later took her three days and a borrowed rolling pin and a fight with the ambient humidity.
I ate them standing up with grease on my hands and I never once said thank you out loud, because we had a thing going and thank you would have priced it.
Then on day twelve she asked.
She was up on the workbench with her heels knocking the drawers, which she'd started doing, and she said, "Why Rev?"
"Road name."
"I got that far on my own."
"Everybody assumes engines."
"You rebuild engines at four in the morning and your name is Rev. It's not a hard case to make." She tore a corner off something and ate it. "But you said assumes."
I put the wrench down.
Here's the thing about Delaney. She'd been in Copper Ridge under two weeks and she'd already worked out that I answer the question I'm asked and nothing past it, and instead of being annoyed by it, she'd started building questions with a little hook on the end.
Nobody had bothered to do that in eight years.
"It's Reverend," I said.
She stopped chewing.
"You're a priest."
"I'm not a priest."
"Elias."
"I was twenty-eight and I had a bad year and I got as far as a correspondence course and about eleven months of a divinity program in Reno.
" I wiped my hands on a rag that wasn't helping.
"There was a woman. Callie. She used to call me Reverend to be cruel about it, and then it stopped being cruel, and then she died on a Sunday morning about forty minutes from where I was, and I did not get there in time, and the name stuck the way a scar sticks. That's the whole of it."
Delaney didn't say I'm sorry. I've never been more grateful for a thing a person didn't say.
She said, "Forty minutes."
"Yeah."
"That's a specific number to carry."
"It is."
She looked at me for a second, and then she looked away, which was a kindness, and she said, "Was the divinity program before or after the vest?"
"Concurrent."
"Concurrent."
"They're more compatible than you'd think. Both of them are mostly showing up when somebody calls."
"And the crown on the skull?"
"Still 1974. Still blood thinners."
That was a quarter of it. Maybe less. But it was more than I'd handed anybody since I got here, and she took it and put it down carefully somewhere and didn't pick at it, and about ten minutes later she said, "For the record, I told the entire diner you were a mechanic," and I said, "I am a mechanic," and she said, "You are a defrocked romantic with a wrench, Elias, and I have been lied to. "
That was the good week. I want it written down that there was a good week.
The calls started on the ninth day.
Margo told me first, because Margo tells me things before she tells Judge, an arrangement Judge has chosen not to examine.
Somebody calling the diner asking for the manager, then asking whether they'd had any new hires.
Then a call to the substation asking about "welfare checks on a missing woman," which Ruth handled in her way — she asked the man for his badge number, and he hung up, and she wrote the time down and put the note in her drawer, and then she came in and had pie and told me about it without appearing to tell me about it.
Then on the fourteenth day, a man came in wearing a golf shirt in Copper Ridge, Nevada, which is like showing up to a knife fight holding a program.
I was at the counter. He took a stool three down and ordered coffee and made a face at it, and then he did the thing where you slide a phone across a counter face-up.
"Wonder if you've seen her," he said. "Family's worried."
I didn't look at the phone.
Margo did. She wiped the counter around it, all the way around, without touching it, and said, "Eggs are good."
"I'm sorry?"
"The eggs. They're good today. Cook came in on time." She topped off his cup. "Where you in from?"
"Bellhaven."
"Long drive."
"It is."
"Be longer going back," Margo said, pleasantly, "you don't order something."
He ordered the eggs. He ate about a third of them, left twelve dollars on a nine-dollar check like that proved something, and slid a card under the sugar caddy on his way out. INVESTIGATIONS, it said, and a phone number, and a first name I won't dignify.
The bell over the door did its thing. Ruth, at the end of the counter, did not turn around, but she wrote the plate number on her napkin.
Otto came in about four seconds later, breathless. "There was a guy—"
"We know," Margo said.
"He had a photo—"
"We know, sugar."
"I was very cool about it," Otto said. "I want that reported accurately. I said 'no comment' and then I said it again and then I told him I was new."
I picked up the card, and I looked at it, and I thought about a woman upstairs who had been in this town fourteen days and had, that morning, put a tray of six little lemon things on my fender with a note that said tell me if the acid is too much, be honest, I will know if you're lying — and who had, four hours ago, laughed at something Otto said, loud, from the gut, in the middle of the diner, and then looked startled by the sound of it.
Like she was hearing a voice she'd been told was lost.
I put the card in my pocket.
"Don't tell her," Otto said. "Right? We don't tell her?"
Margo and I both looked at him.
"We tell her," Margo said.
"Immediately," I said.
Because that was the whole difference, wasn't it. That was the entire difference between us and Bellhaven, and if I forgot it for even one afternoon in the name of protecting her, I'd have turned into a nicer-smelling version of the man she walked away from.
I found her in the back kitchen at two in the afternoon with her hair tied up in a bandanna, arguing with Margo about the dessert case, and I stood in the doorway and waited until she looked up.
"There was a man here," I said.