Chapter 4

The water came up over the tow yard Thursday afternoon and stayed.

Four feet of brown soup sitting on my life. The flatbed was gone - I'd moved it to the church lot when the river started talking - but my 1998 wrecker was in the shop bay with the boom chained down and the water halfway up the driver's window, and my office, and the parts room, and the room over the garage where I sleep with a fan in the summer because the window sticks.

I stood on the berm by the road with my hands in my pockets for about twenty minutes. There's a kind of calm that comes over you when the thing you were going to lose has already gone. I've felt it two times in my life. That was the first that wasn't a fire.

Then a jon boat came in from the north end of Front Street with a chain in the bow and a winch housing on the bench seat.

Ren cut the motor fifty feet out and drifted in. He didn't say hello. He threw me a coil of chain and I caught it one-handed out of thirty years of catching things, and then we worked for an hour and forty minutes and neither of us said one personal word.

That's the thing about hiring the wrong brother for the job, or in our case the right one. He knew boats. He knew water. He knew how to take a truck's weight without snapping an axle, and he did it without once telling me he knew, which is rarer than knowing. We hooked the wrecker to the flatbed's old bed frame and walked it up out of the bay the last three feet by hand, both of us in hip waders cussing the same cuss.

Two Ottaway trucks had already been through. Fuel bowser and a lift truck with a company driver who offered, real polite, to pull the whole shop out for me free of charge. He said Mr. Ottaway had put out the word. He said it like it was a park pass.

I said no thank you. He said it again, slower. I said no thank you again and he looked at my shop sitting in water and drove off, and I stood there afterward and shook for a minute like a dog.

When we were done, Ren sat on the tailgate of the flatbed with his dry suit around his waist and drank half a bottle of water and poured the other half over his head.

"Eleven years," he said.

"What?"

"I started looking when I was twenty-two. Napkin, birth date, county records, the paper morgue at the library, that ancestry website until they wanted forty dollars a month. I sat on a picnic table in a library parking lot in Fairmont and read a microfiche of an old Kessler Bend Register and it said one child, female, survived." He picked at the label on the bottle. "Nine years I thought I was looking for a dead girl. That's a different kind of search. You do it slower."

"I'm not dead," I said.

"No." He looked at the flooded street. Seagulls - seagulls, in the mountains, off the storm - were fighting over something on a rooftop. "Somebody told me you were dead."

"I know who."

"I want to know who."

I should have told him right then. Faye's name, the whole thing, took twenty seconds. But I stood on the roof of my drowned life with a stranger who ate eleven years for me, and I did the math on how much he'd hate her, and I chickened out, and I have had to live with those twenty seconds.

"I'm getting the fire file," I said instead. "First thing tomorrow. I put in the request with the state fire marshal's office an hour ago, before the boat. There's an electronics route over the ridge and the dispatcher says they'll pull the microfilm."

"You didn't waste any time."

"No."

Ren crushed the bottle in his hand, easy, like it was nothing, which told me everything about how much he was feeling.

"He's got a sticker," I said.

"What?"

"Your boat. On the stern, port side, there's a peeling sticker. Ottaway Fuel and Grain, with the little flame in the O."

Ren looked at his boat like it was somebody else's.

"It came with the boat," he said. "I bought it off Sam Kizer. I never looked at it once in three years." He was on his feet now, walking down the ramp, and I followed him, both of us on wet concrete.

He got down on the gunwale with his hip in the water and looked at the sticker for a long time.

Then he said, "I want the file."

"You'll get the file."

"I want the name of the man who sat in a car in a parking lot and decided my sister's arm wasn't worth a court."

"Tomorrow," I said.

He stood up out of the water and looked at me and for the first time I could see my own face in his, across the eyes, and it wasn't a comfort. It was like looking in a mirror in a house you don't live in.