6. A Tense Encounter
A TENSE ENCOUNTER
SLOANE
My father is at the end of the bar with the ledger open and his coffee gone cold, the pen held in his fist the way he always holds a pen — gripped but not moving, like he hasn't decided what's worth writing down. He's held pens that way my whole life.
I come out of the office and put both hands flat on the wood across from him.
The bar top is cool under my palms, worn smooth by eight years of forearms and wet glasses and Friday-night spills, and I press down until the tremor in my fingers goes quiet.
I catalog the grain under the finish the way I catalog everything when I need the floor to stop moving.
He looks up. Sets the pen down. Reads my face before I've said a word.
"There was a second one last night."
He doesn't move. Doesn't ask. He waits, the way Walt Mercer has waited thirty years for the hard things to come out of his daughter on their own time.
So I tell him. The man who came in at one minute to last call and took a stool down the bar from the one with the scar on his hand. Ordered a whiskey he never touched. Watched me the few minutes he was there the way a man watches a doe step into a clearing — patient, certain, already deciding.
I tell him about the truck. White Ford. Idaho plates. North out of town just after eleven.
And I tell him Cole walked me to my truck. That Cole was on the sidewalk before Bo and I came around the building, and took the walk the rest of the way, and didn't ask if he could.
My father lets that last piece settle into the air without comment, the way he lets every piece settle before he picks it up.
His face does the thing.
I've seen it twice. Once at a gas station off 287, his hand huge over mine on the bench seat with the heater roaring.
Once right here, the night a man put his hand somewhere it didn't belong and my father crossed the room with the slow inevitability of weather.
It's a quieting. A hardening along the jaw that nobody else would catch.
The face of a man who is not afraid and is not going to pretend to be for my sake.
He doesn't say the name.
I don't say it either.
Neither of us has said it out loud in ten years.
The closest we came was last fall, when a propane driver asked the way to the old Crane place, and my father told him it wasn't a road he wanted to be on and watched the truck until it was gone south. He sat at this bar half the night and never turned a page of his paper.
This morning his face does the thing and stays there.
"Tuesday training's tonight."
"Dad."
"And tomorrow. And every night this week."
"Yeah."
"Sloane."
"Yeah, Dad."
"Where's Cole?"
"Eleanor's."
He nods, slow, picks the pen back up. Doesn't write. Sets it down again.
"He walked you out."
"He did."
"You let him."
"I did."
The pause runs longer than any we've shared at this bar. He turns a page of the ledger that isn't the right page, then turns it back, and I watch my father do something I have not seen him do in eight years — lose his place in his own book.
"Did he ask why?"
"No."
"He just did it."
"Yeah."
The muscle in his jaw moves a quarter inch, and something behind his eyes moves with it. Not approval. Not yet. But closer to it than I have ever seen him come on the subject of a man standing near me.
The phone in my back pocket starts buzzing against my hip.
I don't look at it. I already know. I've known for the last three calls, because each buzz sits in my chest a half-second longer than a buzz should.
I pull it out. Marta Ruiz, US Attorney, District of Wyoming.
My father is watching me.
"Take it, kiddo."
"Yeah."
I take it into the office and close the heavy oak door behind me — the door he hung himself eight years ago, when this room was a storage closet with a bare bulb and a smell I never could place. I sit at the desk. I press the green circle.
"This is Sloane Mercer."
"Ms. Mercer. Marta Ruiz."
"Ms. Ruiz."
"Thank you for picking up."
"I haven't picked up the last three times."
"I know. I'm calling anyway."
Twenty-five years asking people to do hard things over a phone line has worn her voice down to something neither warm nor cold. Steady, in the way a woman gets steady when she has outlasted every kind of resistance there is.
I press the heel of my hand against my eye.
"How can I help you, Ms. Ruiz?"
"I'm going to lay out a timeline. I'm going to ask you to let me get to the end before you say anything."
"Okay."
She lays it out.
The federal trial for Eli Crane is in August. The case is built entirely on the testimony of a handful of women — no paper was ever kept. Two are in protective custody. One was just located by people who should not have been able to find her. One went quiet six days ago.
“Ms. Mercer,” she says, “you are not on our witness list.”
A pause.
“Yet.”
The word lands on the desk between us like a dropped stone.
"Yet."
"You were a Blessed One."
I don't answer.
"You were inside four years. You were elevated young. You walked the dormitory at night. You saw what the Marthas saw. And you got out."
I don't answer.
"Ms. Mercer. We have other women. We do not have a Blessed One who got out before the ceremony. We do not have anyone who can tell a jury what the dress was. We do not have anyone who can say what they were told would happen on that table."
My throat closes around something hot and sharp, and I swallow it down, because I am not crying in this office on a Friday morning at eleven-fourteen with my father on the other side of an oak door.
"Ms. Ruiz."
"Yes."
"How did you find me?"
"A woman in Boise gave your name in a deposition six weeks ago. We've been verifying since."
Hannah. The name arrives before I can stop it, and my hand goes flat on the desk to keep it from shaking.
I don't know that it's Hannah. I have no way to know.
But it could be, and the thought of Hannah somewhere alive, saying my name to a federal prosecutor, is a thing I cannot hold in my chest right now without something tearing.
I close my eyes.
"How much time?"
"Ten days ago I'd have given you a month. Five days ago, two weeks. After what happened Tuesday in Billings, I'm giving you three days."
"Three days."
"Three days, Ms. Mercer. And then I call again whether you want me to or not."
"What happened in Billings?"
"I'll give it to you Monday."
"I want a week."
"I can't give you a week."
"Five days."
"Three."
"What does it look like if I say yes?"
She tells me. Protective custody the day I say it. Relocation on the table. They move me and whoever I need moved. The business reimbursed at fair market or held in trust. My father moved with me if he wants to be.
“We do this for a living, Ms. Mercer. We do it well.”
I almost laugh. I bite the inside of my cheek to stop it, because it would come out like the laugh of a woman holding herself together with surgical thread.
"My father is seventy-one. His store has been in that building for forty-one years. He is not leaving Coldwater, and I am not leaving my father."
"Then we plan for that. We've done that too."
I press the heel of my hand to my eye again. There's a wet pressure behind it I am refusing to acknowledge.
"Three days."
"Monday, end of business. I'll call at five."
She hangs up.
I sit at the desk a long time. I listen through the door.
He hasn't knocked. He won't. He'll wait until I open it myself — same as he waited the night in two thousand six when I found him at the kitchen table folding my mother's tea towels into squares that didn't need folding.
I don't open the door for ten minutes.
When I do, he's at the books again. Not turning pages now. Just sitting with the pen in his right hand and his left hand flat on the open page, the way a man rests his hand on a Bible.
"Three days."
He nods.
"She's not putting me on the list. She wants me to ask to be on it."
A smaller nod.
"Dad. I don't know what I'm going to say."
"You will."
"How do you know?"
"Because I've known you since you were one minute old, Sloane Mercer, and I have never once seen you not know what you were going to say by the end of a deadline. Even when the deadline was bad." He sets the pen down. "You'll know."
He comes around the bar slower than he used to — his right knee hasn't been the same since the winter he slipped on the ice behind the store carrying a load of pipe — and puts his hand on the back of my neck, light and brief, the way he has since I was a girl.
"Tuesday training's tonight. And tomorrow. And every night."
"Every night."
The day moves the way a day moves when there's a clock running you can't see.
I run lunch. I run prep. I take a three-o'clock delivery from the produce house in Lander — two cases of limes, one of lemons, three flats of strawberries for Saturday's special. I do not look at my phone.
I think about the man with the scar instead.
On and off all afternoon. Mostly on.
By six I've caught myself at it a dozen separate times.
The last one's at the walk-in, reaching for a case of tonic, my hands still smelling of the limes I cut at five, the cold of the cooler standing the fine hair up along my forearms. What I imagine — in a detail that ought to embarrass me and doesn't — is his hand reaching past mine for the same case.
The width of his wrist. The scar catching the cold light.
The way his forearm would graze mine if he leaned in the half inch it would take.
It's vivid enough that my breath catches, and I have to put both palms flat on the cold steel and run four in, six out, three full times before I can move.
Oh, for God's sake.
I don't get it together. He doesn't come in. Not at seven-thirty, not at eight-fifteen, not at nine, when Megan watches me from the well with her whole face and says nothing, because she's been told to drop it and she drops things the way Megan drops things, which is loudly and without a word.
I tell myself I don't care that he doesn't come in.