Chapter 8

They put me back in the office. Dru stood in the door with her phone to her ear and said, "Yes, she's very agitated, she started the equipment, she could have hurt someone," and Cole stood by the crusher panel and looked at the floor.

I sat in the chair and watched the clock. 5:58.

Priya said thirty minutes.

The office window looked up the access road. I kept my eyes on it.

At 6:05 Dru said, "The doctor wants her at the clinic now. Cole, get the truck."

Cole went out. Dru followed him to the step and stood there with her phone, and for about ninety seconds nobody was looking at me.

That was the whole plan. Ninety seconds.

I got up and went out the window. This time it was faster, because I knew where the woodpile was. I dropped into the mud and ran up the road, and I was fifty yards along when I heard the truck start behind me.

Headlights in the fog.

I cut off the road into the stone shed and out the back and up the bank, and I was in the tree line when the headlights swept the shed wall and stopped.

Cole got out. He didn't run. He stood by the truck and looked into the trees and said, "Wren, I can hear you breathing."

I put my hand over my mouth.

Then, from the road below, a radio chirped, and a woman's voice said, "Alcott, it's Warden Desai. I need you to step away from the vehicle."

My legs went weak. I came down the bank with my hands up. Priya's truck was behind Cole's, light bar on.

And in the passenger seat was Mamie.

Priya got out. "She was at the end of your drive," she said. "Walking in her robe. With her cane."

Cole said, "She wanders."

"She walked a quarter mile in a February thaw, Alcott." Priya looked at me. "You said thirty minutes. I'm here. Now I need something I can write down."

Dru came up the road then, on foot, with the folder in her hand and her phone up. "Warden, this woman is under a doctor's care. There's an order."

"There's an order for a psych eval," Priya said. "I've seen one before. I'm asking what happened at the fence today."

Dru held out the folder. "Read it. Dr. Feldman signed it. She's a danger to herself and to an infant."

Priya looked at the paper. She looked at me. She looked at Cole, standing by his truck with his hands at his sides.

Then Mamie opened the truck door.

She did it herself. She stood on the running board and looked at her son and her daughter-in-law and her grandson, and then she looked at me.

Then she raised the cane. Not tapping. Holding it up, horizontal, in both hands, like something she wanted somebody to take.

Priya said, "Mrs. Alcott?"

Mamie looked at her. Then she tapped the cane three times against the truck door.

Tap. Tap. Tap.