Chapter 11
She would not learn most of what happened that week until much later, and some of it never.
What she had at the time was five pieces, none of which she asked for, arriving over a week and a half from five different directions, in the order that things arrive in a small town — which is to say, badly, and out of sequence, and always from the wrong person.
She was working the case. That was her whole March.
She had a folder, a printed message thread, a vendor ledger, a permissions log, and a photograph with a bowl in the corner of it that had been in the trash since September.
She spent her evenings building it into something a person could hand across a desk.
She indexed it. She numbered the pages. She wrote a two-page summary at the front, because Dr. Paul Garrett had taught her at twenty-four that nobody reads a chart, they read the first paragraph and then decide whether to read the chart.
On the eleventh of March she drove down the hill and gave the whole thing to Randy Boggs at the county, and sat across a desk from a man she had known since he was a boy while he read it, and watched his face do a thing she had not expected: not surprise. Fury, held down.
"Laura."
"I know."
"A year."
"I know."
He put both hands flat on it. "This goes to the DA's office in Cookeville and it goes today. And then it's going to be slow, and I need you to hear that from me now so you don't think nothing's happening. A warrant on a fella in Davidson County takes what it takes."
"How slow?"
"Weeks," Randy said. "Maybe six. If he does one more thing, one, and you get it on a page — that's what moves it."
He squared the folder against the edge of the desk and did not hand it back yet.
"There's one more thing in there you're going to have to hear me say out loud, and I'd rather do it now."
"Say it."
"Six weeks ago I'd have called this a nuisance case.
" He turned two pages back, to the printed thread, and put his finger on the line about eight days in October.
"This isn't that. A fella who wants something from you sends you things.
A fella who's proving something to himself starts keeping score.
" He tapped it. "That right there is a man telling somebody he's better than he is.
That's the kind that comes to see how you take it. "
Laura looked at the page upside down.
"How long have you known that?" she said.
"Since the third paragraph of your summary."
"You didn't say."
"I'm saying now," Randy said. "You wrote it. You just didn't want to be the one who said it about your own life."
Then he said the thing that stayed with her.
"Don't change anything you're doing. Don't stop going to the clinic, don't stop the seven a.m., don't move out of that house." He tapped the folder. "This kind puts it together when the pattern changes. Long as you're where he expects you, he's got no reason to come see you."
That was March eleventh.
The first piece came on the twelfth, from Tammy, who had it from a woman whose nephew worked at the network.
The show had gone dark. No announcement, no press release — Thursday's segment just was not there, and Friday's was a repeat, and by the following week the graphics package had quietly stopped using Jake's name.
"They fired him," Tammy said, doing a woman's roots at nine in the morning with the phone under her ear.
"For the pictures? Five months later?"
"That's what I said."
The second piece came on the fourteenth, and it came from the internet, secondhand, because Laura still had not taken her passcode back.
Tammy read it out to her at the kitchen table, off her own phone, in the flat voice of a woman reading something she does not like.
Sources say the split between Stern Sports Management and its most prominent client was initiated by the client and was not amicable. Stern, reached Tuesday, called the reports "a private matter between friends of seventeen years."
Laura sat very still.
"Seventeen years," Tammy said.
"He fired Gary."
"That's what it says."
Laura got up and went and stood at the sink. Out the window the field on the back side of the house was doing nothing at all.
She did the arithmetic and did not like the answer.
She had asked Jake one question on a Tuesday morning — who hired Derek Mills — and he had answered it, and then he had put six hours between the answer and the men in the SUV. And now, ten days after she had cut him off entirely without telling him why, the man who had made him was gone.
He knew. Some part of it. He had taken one question from a woman who was not speaking to him and he had gone and worked it out.
"Is that good?" Tammy said.
"I don't know."
The third piece came from Kevin Barnes on the seventeenth, and it was four sentences long, and it was the only one that came from somebody who had been in a room.
He came by the clinic at six with a box of the resistance bands she had asked him about weeks ago, and set it down, and did not sit.
"I'm going to break my rule one time," he said. "And then I'm putting it back."
Laura waited.
"He called me Sunday and asked me to come to the house, and I went, and he had the garage open and boxes of stuff out on the floor, and he was going through his own contracts with a legal pad.
" Kevin scratched his jaw. "He asked me how much of my money was Gary's people.
Not how much I make. How much of it existed because Gary knew somebody. "
"What did you say?"
"I said about half. And he said, yeah, and then he sat down on a cooler and didn't say anything for like a minute and a half.
" Kevin looked at the floor. "Then he told me what he said to Gary.
In the office, when he did it. He said he never brought up the girl at all.
He said he asked him one thing — how long did you know. "
The kitchen was very quiet.
"And Gary said what?"
"September. Second week."
Laura sat down on the arm of her mother's chair, which she had not done once in five months.
She had known that since two in the morning on the eleventh of October. Jake had handed it to her himself, standing in that kitchen, and then refused to stand behind it. She had carried it around for five months the way you carry a stone you have decided not to throw.
What she had not known — what nobody had told her, because nobody had been in the room — was that her husband had gone and put it to him out loud.
"He asked him that," she said. "Not about the girl."
"Not one word about the girl." Kevin turned his cap over in his hands. "He said the girl was his and he wasn't going to stand in an office and split her with anybody."
"And Jake said?"
"Jake said, you had a month and you never once thought she should know.
" Kevin shrugged with one shoulder, uncomfortable with the whole of it.
"And Gary said — and this is the part Jake couldn't get past, he told me this twice — Gary said, that's not what you pay me for.
And Jake said no, that's exactly what I paid you for, that's the entire seventeen years in one sentence. And then he fired him."
Kevin put his cap on the box and left it there.
"Then he asked me if I thought a man could tell the difference between being sorry and being caught."
Laura did not move off the arm of the chair.
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him I didn't know," Kevin said, "and that you'd be able to tell, and that it wasn't my business either way." He picked his cap up off the box. "That's it. That's all of it, and I'm not carrying any more."
"Kevin."
"Yeah."
"Thank you."
The fourth piece came on the nineteenth, from Carol Hayes, who called the clinic's line at ten past eight in the morning, which meant she had looked up the clinic's number.
"Laura. It's Carol. Don't hang up, I know what he did with those men and I told him it was the stupidest thing he has ever done in his life, and I include the obvious."
Laura sat down on the rolling stool.
"Hi, Carol."
"I'm not calling for him. He doesn't know I'm calling and he'd be furious." A breath. "He fired that boy."
"Which boy?"
"The little one. The one that does the computers.
Derek." Carol's voice was doing something odd — brittle at the edges.
"He came Sunday and took the keys off him, and every card and every code, and he had a man from a security company change everything on that house in one afternoon.
He called me and made me change my own front door lock, which cost me a fortune, and he wouldn't say why. "
Laura closed her eyes.
"Carol, when."
"Sunday. The fifteenth."
Four days ago.
"Laura, he was strange about it. I've known that boy since he was — you know I have.
And he sat at my kitchen table and he said, Mama, I have had a man in my house for four years and I have never once looked at him.
And then he cried, which he does not do.
" A pause. "And then he asked me if I remembered when his father used to have people call the house. "
Laura opened her eyes.
"What did you say to that?"
"I said I remembered," Carol said, and did not go on, and Laura — sitting on a stool in an empty clinic at ten past eight in the morning — understood that there was an entire other book in that sentence and that she was not going to get it today.
She hung up with Carol and sat on the stool for a while with the phone in her lap.
Then she did the only thing she could think to do with it, which was work.
She had a nine o'clock, a nine-forty-five, and Roy at eleven arguing about lifting again, and a woman from out past the quarry with a frozen shoulder who cried every time she came until she stopped, two weeks ago. Laura put her hands on all of them and counted out loud and wrote her notes at lunch.
That was the shape of her March: a case file at night and nineteen people a week in the daytime, and no husband, and a rock against the door.