Chapter 4

Ardith Pike had been Nora's teacher since September, and I'd been avoiding her since the fall conference, when she'd told me my daughter was stealing at school, and I'd told her my daughter was grieving, and she'd looked at me like I was the one who needed the conference.

Friday morning I caught her in the lot at 7:45 with her arms full of poster board.

She didn't do the teacher voice. She unlocked her car and took a manila folder off the passenger seat and handed it to me in the cold.

A carbon copy of a form. Dated October 14. My daughter's name, my address, a paragraph in Pike's own handwriting that said a student disclosed being struck with an object at home, that the student would not name the person, that the student had marks on her left shoulder that the student would not explain.

And a photograph. Printed on the office machine, dated. My daughter in the nurse's office with her shirt pulled up and a red band across her back, three months old, and it looked exactly like what I'd seen Thursday night.

"I called the county that morning," Pike said. "I gave them the Route 7 address. They said someone would be in touch with the parent."

The machine.

I drove to the county. It's forty minutes. I did it in thirty.

Boyd Doss was in the lobby in his county shirt with his coffee, and when I said my daughter's name he got that look men in this family get, the one where the face doesn't move but the eyes go to the door.

He pulled the file on the screen. He read it out the way you'd read a feed bill.

"October 14, referral received. October 21, contact attempt, message left with the household. October 28, parent declined interview. November 2, closed. Unfounded." He looked up. "It says the mother declined, Roz."

The mother was never called. The mother was on Route 7 at three in the morning pulling a Civic out of a ditch. The message went to the landline in my scale house, onto the machine Clay empties every single morning before I'm awake, and there was nobody in the world who was going to tell me.

I want to be clear about what I did then, because I've had a year to think about it. I didn't hit anybody. I yelled at a deputy in a public lobby in front of a woman with a stroller, and I said some things about the Doss family that I meant, and two guys in county shirts walked me to the door, and Boyd stood there and let them, and the whole time I could see on his face that he thought he was being fair to me.

In the truck I put my forehead on the wheel and I understood the thing that changed everything.

My temper was the best tool Clay had.

So I used the phone instead.

I called the school and I asked Ardith Pike to be at my yard Saturday morning at 8:15 with that folder.

Then I called the sheriff's non-emergency line and I said, "This is Roz Kelleher at Kelleher Salvage on Route 7." I said, "I want a car at my scale house at 8:15 tomorrow morning. I'm not asking you to believe me. I'm asking you to stand there."

Charlene called me at noon. She wanted to know if she could take Nora "for a while." Just for a while, she said, with the yard the way it is. I told her no, and she said, "Roz, honey, you know how this town talks," and I said, "I do," and hung up on the only person who'd ever kept my kid when I couldn't.

I got home at four. Rufus was going crazy at the north fence, and the skirt board on the west side of the doghouse was standing up in the mud, and the crate was gone.

I found it twenty minutes later in the bed of Clay's pickup under a folded tarp, and I stood there in the cold with my hands on the tailgate and let myself be scared for about ten seconds, and then I took it and wrapped it in a black trash bag and put it behind the bench seat of the rotator, in the crawl space with the chains.

I went out on rotation at ten. At 1:20 the county called me to a jackknifed trailer on Route 7 mile 9.

Clay showed up at 1:50 in the yard truck with the work lights on. He said he couldn't sleep. He sat in the cab with me while I rigged and he talked about the crusher and the price of shred and a fella from Portsmouth bringing in three loads, and then he told me about Monday.

Ten a.m., the courthouse annex. He'd talked to a lawyer in Chillicothe. He'd already put himself on the school's contact list as the primary. He said it the way he says everything, even and patient, and he said it as a man stating facts, and I sat there with my gloves on and nodded like a woman agreeing about a truck.

Then he reached behind the seat for the black bag to take it to the burn barrel.

"That one's mine," I said.

He stopped with his fingers on the knot.

He looked at me a second longer than a man looks at his wife. Then he took his hand back and sat up and looked out the windshield at the trailer in the ditch.

"Monday," he said. "Ten o'clock. You'll want to be there."