Chapter 6

Getting out the window took eleven minutes and I don't want to describe it. There was a moment when my foot found nothing but fog and I thought about the drop, and then there was slate under my boot and I was on the shed roof, and then the woodpile, and then the mud.

I went through the stone shed because the shed had two doors and the back one opened onto the bank above the access road.

I grabbed the pill organizer off the desk on the way out. I'd taken it off the kitchen counter at lunch-seven days, Thursday and Saturday empty, Dru's breakfast days. I wrapped it in a feed sack and pushed it into a bucket of roofing nails under the bench by the back door. If I got out, I could tell somebody where it was. If I didn't, it would still be there.

Then I went up the road.

Priya Desai's truck was parked where it always was on Thursdays, on the wide spot by the state land gate, because she walked the boundary line in February to count the deer yards and check the quarry fence for trespass. Green truck, light bar off. I saw it through the fog like a square of green paint in a gray room.

I was fifty feet away when Cole came around the office corner.

He didn't shout. That was worse. He just started walking, and he was faster than me, and I stopped and turned and put my back against the fence, which was the same thing I'd done at 4:12, and I hated that.

"Priya!" I yelled. "Priya!"

Her door opened.

She came down the road at a jog. She was looking at Cole. Her hand was on her radio but not on her gun. She'd been a warden six years. She knew the difference between a domestic and a deer.

"What's going on," she said.

"She's confused," Cole said. "She's been confused for weeks. Her doctor's seeing her at six."

"He shoved me," I said. "At the fence, at four. There's a camera. There was a camera."

Priya looked at the oak. Then at Cole. Then at me.

"The camera's gone," I said. "He smashed it."

"Wren," Priya said, and her voice was careful, "is there anything I can look at? Anything I can put in a report?"

I had a card in a cane in a house I couldn't enter without going past my husband and his mother. I had a pill organizer in a nail bucket. I had nothing in my hands.

"The medications," I said. "Mamie's medications-"

"Department of Health," Cole said. "That's what this is about, Priya. She thinks my mother's poisoning my grandmother. She's been saying it for a week."

Priya's face didn't move. But she looked at me for a second longer than she had to.

"I can't take her anywhere on a hunch," she said. "I need something I can write down. You understand."

"Thirty minutes," I said.

"What?"

"Give me thirty minutes."

Priya looked at the sky. It was 5:35 and the light was going.

"All right," she said. "I've got the north end to check. Thirty minutes."

She got back in her truck.

Cole stood between me and the road until the taillights were gone.

Then he said, "Go to the house."

I went to the house. My boots were full of water. My back hurt where the wire had caught me. In the kitchen, Dru had Mamie's coat over the back of a chair, and she was buttering a piece of bread like nothing had happened.