Chapter 9

Priya took the cane.

That's the part I still can't believe, when I think about it at night. Not the shove. Not the camera. Not my mother-in-law's flat voice coming out of a speaker in an oak tree. The warden taking an old woman's cane and feeling the weight of it in her hands.

Mamie let go.

Priya turned the slate knob. It moved. She unscrewed it, and the card slid out into her palm, black and small, and she held it up.

Cole said, "What is that."

"That's what I'm going to ask you," Priya said.

Dru stepped forward. "That's mine. That's from my camera-"

Priya looked at her. "Mrs. Alcott, I'm going to ask you to stand back."

"There's an order!" Dru's voice cracked for the first time all day. "There's a commitment order, signed, this woman is a danger to her child and to my mother-in-law!"

Priya walked to her truck and took a small gray reader out of the cab. She put the card in and she sat on the tailgate with it in her lap.

I stood in the mud in my ruined boots and watched her face.

The sound came out tinny and small, but it was enough. The fence. The wire. Cole's voice, close to the microphone: "The baby will be born without a mother."

Then the click. Then Dru.

"Let them think she tripped."

Priya played it twice.

The second time, Cole heard his mother's voice say Let them think she tripped.

He turned his head slow. "Ma."

Dru said, "That's out of context-"

"He was gonna blame me," Cole said. "You said-" He stopped.

"Cole." Dru's voice was flat. "Cole, listen to me."

"You said you'd handle it." He was breathing hard. "You said the trust, you said the sale, you said I'd get my cut, and you-" He looked at the card. "You told them it was my idea."

Priya had her radio up. "Dispatch, this is Desai, I need a unit at Alcott Slate and Stone, Route 4 spur. I've got a possible criminal case, multiple parties."

Dru said, "Cole, don't say anything else."

"I put the pills in her coffee," Cole said. "She told me they were vitamins."

"She's lying," Dru said.

"He forged the commitment," Cole said. "I signed it. I signed her name."

I sat down in the mud. I didn't decide to. My knees just went.

Priya was beside me in a second. "Wren. Wren, look at me. Are you contracting?"

I didn't know. The pain had started somewhere around the shed and I had been calling it fear.

"Sirens," I said.

"You hear them?"

"I hear them."

Cole and Dru were still going at it, both of them talking at once, and Priya put her hand on my shoulder and kept her radio up, and Mamie got out of the truck and stood beside me in the fog with her empty hands, and when the first state police car came up the access road, she tapped her empty hand on the truck door, three times.