Chapter 9

She took the duffel and Josie and went to her mother's house on the north side. She didn't tell me she was going, but I knew, because her mother's porch light was on, and because there is nowhere else in Farling she'd take our daughter.

I sat in the kitchen Monday morning and looked at the shelf where the Cheerios bowl had been sitting on the sill since Tuesday with one dried Cheerio stuck to the rim. At nine o'clock I called Deputy Prine and told her I wanted to give a statement, and she said she would come to me if I preferred, and I said I preferred.

She sat at my kitchen table with a pen and a form and a cup of my coffee, and she wrote it down in her tight deputy's handwriting, and I said all of it. The sound of the dock door at five past one. The box in his hands. Where he set it under the tarp in the bed of the 1994 Chevy. The words he said to me. The morning after, and Cori's sentence, and my coffee, and my silence, and the sixteen years after that, in order.

It took forty minutes. She read it back to me. I corrected one thing - I had the time as one-oh-five, not one exactly, because I had looked at the stove clock on my way out.

I signed it. She notarized it on the hood of the cruiser and gave me a copy.

Then I drove to Farling Feed & Seed and stood at the counter and Ollie Strade looked at me for a while without saying a word.

"Well," he said.

"I gave a statement this morning," I said. "It's on paper. Deputy Prine has it."

He studied me. He took the pencil out from behind his ear and put it on the counter and went into the back room, and I heard a drawer slide and keys rattle, and he came out with a gummed manila seed envelope, the kind with the string tie, the kind that used to hold alfalfa seed and now held something else.

He set it on the counter between us. In pencil, in my father's block print: G. HOLLIS 9/13/09.

"He said he'd be back for it," Ollie said. "Sixteen years I've been telling him I told you so." He pushed it across. "It's not engraved. He wanted me to tell you that, if you ever came. He said there was nothing on it to trace."

I opened it in the truck. A plain gold wedding band, no engraving, no date, worn thin on the bottom where a man's hand rubs a steering wheel. I put it in my shirt pocket, over my heart, like an idiot.

Then I called Nevada.

It rang five times and a man's voice said, "This is Dean."

It is my brother's voice. It is my brother's voice and I have not heard it since 2009 and I sat in the truck in the feed store parking lot and could not get a word up out of my chest.

"Dean," I said. "It's Nate."

A pause. A truck going by on his end.

"I know," he said.

"I gave a statement this morning. It's on the record. It was Dad. I saw him do it and I never said so, and Cori's identification-"

"Nate." He cut me off, and he didn't say it mean. He sounded tired, and older than forty-one, and like a man standing in a kitchen in Sparks with the TV on. "I know all of it. Ma called me in April, the day after the funeral. She told me the whole thing over forty minutes from a truck stop." The TV went off on his end. "Here's the part you don't know, so listen. I figured it out myself inside of two weeks. Sitting in a Motel 6 in Nebraska with Wren pregnant and nobody in that town taking my calls. I ran the numbers. There was one balloon note in the world that got paid that week."

"Then why-"

"Because saying it wouldn't have got me my name back in Farling, and it would have put Ma and you and everybody through the wringer, and honestly I didn't have it in me." He exhaled. "So for sixteen years I've been the man who stole from his own family, and the only person that lie ever protected was you, little brother. You and the house and the shop and the Little League. That's it. That's all it ever bought."

I sat there in the parking lot and did not say anything for a while, and he let me.

Then he said, "Call me back Sunday. I want to hear about Bryn's school."