Chapter 7

Dru was in the kitchen with Mamie's coat when I came in. Mamie was sitting in her chair with her fists in her lap. She was looking at the door.

"She's not going," I said.

Dru didn't look up. "She has an appointment."

"She has an appointment with the same doctor who just signed the order to commit me. That's not a doctor. That's a signature."

"Wren." Dru held up the coat. "Come on, Mamie. Let's get you warm."

Mamie didn't move.

Cole was behind me in the doorway. I could feel him.

I did the thing I'd been thinking about since the office. I walked past Dru, out the back door, across the yard, and into the quarry office.

The crusher control panel was on the west wall. I'd done the maintenance logs for fourteen months. I knew the sequence: breaker, hydraulic pump, start.

I hit the breaker. The panel hummed. I hit the pump.

Then I knelt in front of Mamie, who had followed me out onto the porch, and I took her hands. "If they try to take you," I said, "tap three times. Hold onto the cane. Don't let anybody take it from you. Three taps."

She looked at me. Then she tapped the porch rail. Three times.

I went back in the office and put my thumb on the green button and looked through the window. Cole was running across the yard.

I started the crusher.

The noise came up through the floor like an animal. In the office, the windows rang. Out in the yard, Dru stopped with the coat in her hands and put her fingers in her ears. Cole got to the office door and yanked it and found the deadbolt, which was still thrown from the inside, and he stood there and screamed at me through the glass and I couldn't hear a word.

I held the button. The machine chewed nothing. It didn't matter. I just needed the noise, four minutes of noise, so that Cole and Dru couldn't hear each other, couldn't talk, couldn't plan, couldn't move Mamie out the door with a phone to the doctor saying come now, she's worse.

Over the crusher I saw Mamie come out onto the porch.

She had her cane. She stood at the top of the steps in her cardigan with the cold coming off the fog, and she lifted the cane and tapped the porch rail.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I let go of the button. The crusher wound down.

Cole was inside before I could move. He got me by the arm and he pulled me off the chair and he said, right against my ear, "You think that helps you?"

Behind him, Dru came up the steps with her coat over her arm, and she looked at me the way you look at a dog that's ruined a rug.

"Take her to the office," she said. "I'll call Feldman."

And Mamie, on the porch, tapped the rail again.

Three times.