Chapter 5

At dawn, Seth went out to plow.

I heard the truck start and the blade scrape the dooryard, and I got up off the floor where I'd been sleeping sitting up, with Micah against my side. He was still asleep, mouth open, one fist curled near his chin the way he'd slept as a baby.

I put my hand on his shoulder and shook him, soft.

"Micah. Where's the other radio?"

He opened his eyes and thought about it, and I could see him deciding whether he was in trouble.

"I put it under the wreath table," he said.

"Why?"

"Because Nana was looking."

I kissed his forehead and told him to stay in bed and went down.

The barn at dawn was gray and cold. The kerosene heater was out. A skin of ice had formed in the low spots of the concrete, and the whole place smelled like the inside of a freezer.

The wreath bench was where it had been. Under it, pushed back against the wall, behind a coil of wire and a canvas sack of pinecones, was a second blue walkie-talkie.

It was cold as a stone.

I turned it over. There was a sticker on the back-Micah's name in my handwriting, because the pair had come with two and he lost things. The little red light was dark. There was a scuff on the casing and a wet smear on the side that I told myself was water.

I sat down on the bench and held it in both hands and pressed the button.

Static.

I pressed it again.

Static, and then, faint and muffled, the sound of sleet on a metal roof.

I pressed it again.

"...she's stealing his meds... I caught her..."

My own mother-in-law's voice, coming out of a five-year-old's toy, in the empty barn.

I pressed it again.

"...let her fall."

I sat there for a long time.

The sound on the recording was bad. The toy was cheap and Micah had been far from the bench and the heater had been running, and half of it was a hiss like a distant river. But the words were there. Corinne's words. In Corinne's voice. On a device that didn't belong to her and couldn't have been faked by a pregnant woman in a flannel shirt.

I pressed it again, and the light on the side flickered, once, weak, and the static got louder and the voices got further away, and then the playback cut out mid-word and the light died.

The battery was going.

I turned it over and over in my hands, looking for a place to plug something in, and there wasn't one, because it was a toy and it ran on two AA batteries and there was no jack and no card and no way in the world to get that sound off of it.

Which meant the toy itself was the evidence.

Which meant it had to stay alive long enough to be heard by somebody who mattered.

In my head, Corinne's voice said nine o'clock. In my chest, my baby moved, small and insistent, the way it did when I got scared.

I slid the walkie-talkie into my apron pocket, against my stomach, and I buttoned the pocket, and I went up to the house to find the folder and the man and the pen.