Chapter 5

I called Wren Delacroix at seven the next morning, Reno time, which meant four in the morning there, which was the point. I wanted her awake.

She answered on the ninth ring. She sounded like a woman who has been asleep for two hours and has to be at work in three.

"Who is this."

"Nate Hollis. Bryn's uncle."

Silence. A lighter, maybe. Something clinking.

"She can't come back here," Wren said. "I don't have the room. I've got a one-bedroom and a boyfriend who's already used up his patience, and I'm on doubles at the warehouse through the holidays." She coughed. "Ruth said she'd handle it. Ruth said she had a plan. So you tell Ruth to handle it."

"Ruth is dying."

A long pause. "Yeah," Wren said. "She told me in July. She also told me if I came and got Bryn before spring, she'd make sure I never saw her again, and I don't know if she can do that or not, but I believed her." She sniffed. "Look. She's better off there than here. You want me to say it out loud? She's better off there."

I asked her if she would sign something. She said she'd sign something if a lawyer sent it and it didn't cost her anything. Then she hung up.

I went to the county annex at nine and stood at the counter and asked about the demolition hearing on the Hollis & Sons property, and a woman named Ms. Priebe pulled the file and told me what I already knew: three weeks out, listed as vacant and unsafe, no active utility account, no occupancy permit. If anybody files a complaint about a person living in it, she said, the file moves from the board to code enforcement and the timeline compresses. She said it pleasant, the way county people say things.

I got my filters and my salt at Farling Feed & Seed because I have been buying my filters and my salt there since I was nineteen. Ollie Strade was at the counter with a pencil behind his ear, seventy-one years old, in the same canvas apron he had on the day I met him.

"Nate." He put the box on the counter. "How's Cori."

"Good."

"Wet week."

"Wet week."

He rang it up. I stood there with my wallet out, and I heard myself say, casual, like it was nothing, like it was a question about the weather: "Ollie, my dad ever square up with you on that note? The one he had on the building?"

Ollie Strade stopped with his hand on the register key.

He didn't look at me for a second. He looked at the front window, at the wet street, at the two pickups parked at the curb. Then he took his hand off the register and put it flat on the counter, and he looked at me like a man who has been waiting sixteen years to be asked a question and is finally, quietly, furious that it took this long.

"Your dad paid me that Sunday," he said. "You already know that."

The store was cold. The fish tanks bubbled.

"Ollie."

"I've got something in my drawer with your father's name on it, and I've had it since September of oh-nine, and I'm not handing it to a man who is going to put it in his pocket and go home and keep on saying what he's been saying." He picked up the pencil and put it behind his other ear. "So don't ask me for it yet."

Outside, the rain was changing over to sleet.