Chapter 1 #2
At number six I noticed her again, because she was there before the ambulance.
At number nine I started counting.
At number ten I called the air ambulance service in Bismarck and asked what shift Solveig Aune worked, and a very nice dispatcher named Barb told me they'd had a Sol Aune on the roster for as long as she'd been there, which was thirty-one years, and that Barb hadn't ever actually seen her at a Christmas party, and that I should probably come by sometime, because Barb sounded like she'd had a long night and I have a phone voice.
Thirty-one years.
She's maybe thirty-two.
Now, look. There are answers to that. Same name.
Mother and daughter. A clerical thing. I've been in this club long enough to know that the boring explanation is usually right and I've been in it long enough to know the exact size of the exception, and I've seen my president's eye change color in a photograph taken before I met him, and there's a raccoon at the clubhouse with a patch and voting rights.
So I did what I do, which is not ask.
I investigated it like a threat.
That's the part I'd apologize for if I were a different man.
I ran her plate. I sat outside the hangar.
I pulled the incident reports for all eleven and laid them out on the pool table like a man in a movie about a man losing his mind, and Deke came in and looked at them and said, "Are you doing a conspiracy?
" and I said, "No," and he said, "Because you've got a real conspiracy shape happening on my pool table. "
Every single one had her signature. Every single one. Including two that happened forty minutes apart in counties ninety minutes from each other.
And here's the thing that got me. Here's the thing that put me in the parking lot of the Bismarck hangar at four in the morning with two coffees and a hand that shouldn't have been holding anything.
It wasn't the impossible schedule.
It was that in six years and eleven wrecks she has never once treated me.
She's treated everybody else. Petey. The Nordlund kid. A tourist who ran a stop sign in 2021. She has bandaged, splinted, intubated, and — I watched this — swore at a man in what I'd bet was not English, and he lived.
Me, she looks at.
Every time. Standing in whatever hole I've made, hands empty, looking at me the way you look at a clock.
Deke found me at the pool table at midnight.
"Talk me through it."
"No."
"Ivar."
"You'll say a thing."
"I'll say several things," Deke agreed, and pulled up a stool, which for him is a two-part maneuver with a rest in the middle. "Start with the pretty one and go from there."
So I told him. All of it. The name on eleven reports. The thirty-one years. The counties ninety minutes apart, forty minutes apart in time.
Deke listened the whole way through without interrupting once, which took him visible effort, and at the end he was quiet for a bit.
"Okay," he said. "Two things."
"Here we go."
"One. Around here that's not even the strangest thing that happened this year, so we're not going to do the part where you apologize for saying it out loud."
"And two?"
"Two." He tapped the laminated sheet, which he had brought with him, because of course he had brought it with him. "Eleven wrecks, Ivar. And I've been standing at eleven wrecks worth of hospital doors, and I've watched a woman in a flight suit walk past you every single time like you were a chair."
"You noticed her."
"I notice everything, I'm just polite about it, which is the difference between us."
"So what's your read?"
Deke looked at the sheet for a long moment.
"My read," he said, "is that if a woman shows up eleven times and never touches you, she's not there for you." He got up, slow, both hands on the cane. "She's there for something about you. And I'd want to know what it was before I got fond."
"I'm not fond."
"You've asked me four times tonight if I thought she was tall," Deke said, and went to bed.
So at four in the morning I leaned on the fender of her rig with two coffees going cold and waited, and at 4:20 she came out of the hangar in a flight suit with her hair pulled back and stopped dead about fifteen feet away.
"You shouldn't be here," she said.
"Probably not."
"That isn't a figure of speech."
"Yeah, I'm starting to get that about you." I held out one of the coffees. She didn't take it. I kept holding it, because I've got nothing but time and a very high tolerance for standing still, and it's the only skill I've got that isn't ugly. "Can I ask you a question?"
"You may ask."
"That's a lawyer answer."
"It's an older answer than that."
"Sure." I nodded. The coffee was heavy. My hand was starting to sing. "Eleven wrecks. You've been at all eleven. You've never touched me once."
She didn't move. There's a stillness some people have that's calm and there's a stillness that's structural, like a building, and hers was the second one.
"Ask the question, Mr. Boone."
"Are you waiting for me to die?"
Out on the apron, a truck backed up somewhere, beeping, absurd, the most ordinary sound in the world.
And Solveig Aune looked at me for a long moment with an expression I have thought about every day since, which was not guilt and was not pity and was, if I had to name it, the face of somebody doing math they already know the answer to and hoping the paper's wrong.
"Yes," she said.
Then she took the coffee.