Chapter One

Friday, October 16

The radio said a man had been hit on County Road 12.

Nora heard it the way she heard most of the local news at ten past seven, under the gargle of the coffee maker and the zip of her work bag. A cyclist. Critical condition. Near the reservoir turnoff, a little before ten on Thursday night. The sheriff's office asked anyone who had been on County 12 between nine and ten to call the number the announcer then read out twice, slowly, as if people kept pens beside their radios.

She put the paint gauge in the side pocket of the bag, then the flashlight, then the spare battery for the camera, in the order she would need them. Her first job was a pickup in Dunmore with a hail claim that she suspected was not hail. Her second was a woman who had backed into her own mailbox for the third time since spring and would want to talk about it.

Evie came down at 7:14. She was wearing the gray hoodie that had been her father's, sleeves pulled over her hands, and she went straight to the radio and turned it off.

"I was listening to that," Nora said.

"It's depressing."

"It's the news."

"Same thing." Evie reached a mug down from the cabinet, going up on her toes to do it—she had stopped growing at five foot three and two years later still reached for things as if she expected to be taller—and poured coffee she would not drink.

The old phone was on the counter, plugged into the charger by the toaster. Nora looked at it because it was out of place. It was the one with the cracked corner and the purple case, the phone Evie had used until Nora upgraded her in the spring. Nora had taken the SIM card out of it herself, at this counter, with the little pin from the new phone's box. "It'll still call 911, you know," she had said, handing it back, because handing a child a phone seemed to call for a sentence like that. "Any phone will." Since then it had lived in Evie's gym bag or in the cup holder of whichever car she was driving—a small screen of music and nothing else. It showed up on the Bluetooth menu of Nora's Camry as EV-music.

As far as Nora knew, it had never once been charged in the kitchen.

"You're up early," she said.

"Couldn't sleep." Evie unplugged the phone and put it in the pocket of the hoodie.

At 9:31 the night before, Nora had checked the app. She did it the way she checked the stove before bed: not because she thought anything was wrong but because the checking was part of how an evening ended. The blue dot that was Evie had been at Dana's, where it was supposed to be, studying for a chemistry test with Kit Rourke. At 10:52 the front door had opened and shut, and Evie's voice had said "It's me" from the hall, and Nora had called "Did you walk?" from the couch, and Evie had said "It stopped raining," which was not true. It had been raining since half past ten on the skylight over the stairs. Her sneakers were still on the mat this morning, dark at the toes.

"Can you drive me?" Evie said.

"You've got the car today."

"I don't want to drive." She said it to the coffee. "My eyes are weird. I think I'm getting a migraine."

Nora looked at her—the gray skin under the eyes, the thumbnail bitten to the quick—and decided on a migraine, because it was a quarter past seven and there was a pickup in Dunmore. "Get your stuff."

Her phone rang while Evie was upstairs. DANA, and the photo Evie had taken three summers ago on the Fourth, flour on Dana's cheekbone, laughing at something outside the frame.

"You're up," Dana said. She never said hello before nine; she'd been awake since four and considered the day half gone.

"I'm always up. Aren't you at the bakery?"

"Marisol's opening." A breath through the nose. Behind her Nora could hear a tap running—not the bakery, which had an extractor fan like a jet engine, but Dana's own kitchen on Linden Street. "I need a favor."

"Okay."

"It's a stupid one. If anyone asks, I was with you last night."

Nora put the flashlight down. "Anyone who?"

"Anyone. Nobody. Nobody's going to ask. It's just in case."

"In case what?"

The tap went off. "I was with Greg."

Nora knew Greg Sayer the way everyone who bought bread on Front Street knew him: a big, pleasant man in a canvas work jacket, a contractor, a regular, married to a woman named Laurie who ran the gift shop at the hospital. She had not known him the way Dana apparently did.

"Dana."

"I know."

"Since when?"

"Since it doesn't matter. Since August." Dana's voice went low and quick, the voice she used for working out a delivery order in her head. "Brian's lawyer sent a letter yesterday. A list. They want to know everything—where I've been, what I've spent, whether I've been cohabiting, that's the word. If they find out about Greg, Brian gets to stand up in front of a judge and say the bakery's money went to a motel on Route 9, and Laurie finds out from a court filing, and I lose the house. So. I was at yours. We had a glass of wine and watched something terrible. From about eight until after eleven."

"After eleven," Nora said.

"And my car was in your drive."

"Why would anyone ask about your car?"

"Because Brian's cousin lives on Hollis and drives past your house every night on the way home from the Legion, and Brian is exactly the kind of man who'd ask him." Dana let that sit. "It's nothing, Nora. It's for a lawyer who bills by the minute. It's never going to come up."

Evie had come back into the kitchen. She stood in the doorway with her bag on one shoulder and a hand on the frame, and she did not move.

Nora turned toward the window. "I'm not going to lie in a courtroom."

"Nobody is asking you to lie in a courtroom."

"I'm saying it so you know."

"I know you, Nora." There was no edge in it at all, which made it worse. Dana had known her for twenty-two years. Dana had driven two hours each way, eleven days running, to sit in the back of a courtroom in the county seat the last time Nora told the truth under oath, and had been the only person in the room on Nora's side of the aisle. She had never brought it up since. She had not brought it up six years ago, when Nora's marriage came apart and Evie slept in Dana's spare room for a month while Nora found an apartment. She had not brought it up about the six thousand dollars that paid Nora's divorce lawyer, which Dana had refused to hear a word about for four years and which Nora had been paying back ever since, two hundred dollars on the first of the month.

"If anyone asks," Nora said.

"That's all it is."

"That's all I'm doing."

"You're a good friend," Dana said. "You're a pain in the ass, but you're a good friend." The tap came on again, and she was gone.

"What did she want?" Evie said.

"A favor."

"What kind of favor?"

Nora looked at her. Evie did not ask about Dana's favors. Dana asked Nora for things all the time—her opinion on a used van, a ride to the airport, a Saturday morning on the register when somebody called in sick—and Evie noticed adult arrangements only when they involved her.

"A boring one," Nora said. "Grown-up stuff. Get in the car."

In the Camry, Evie pulled her belt across and then held the shoulder strap away from her breastbone with two fingers, the way you'd hold a wet strap off your skin. She held it like that down Orchard Street and all the way onto Main.

"What did you do to yourself?"

"Nothing. Maddie's elbow." Evie looked out the window. "Practice."

At the school she got out before the car had fully stopped. Kit Rourke was standing by the flagpole with his hands in his pockets, all six foot two of him folded into a black jacket, the gray ARMY T-shirt the recruiter had given him in September showing at the neck. He had lost his license in August for doing eighty on the bypass, and Dana had made a point of telling the whole bakery that her son would be walking until December and she hoped his legs fell off. He was a boy who could not normally stand still for the length of a sentence. He was standing still now. Evie walked up to him and they didn't touch, and they didn't look at each other. They stood side by side and watched the parking lot as if they were waiting for a bus that wasn't coming.

Nora pulled away. At the light on Main she caught herself checking the app, and the blue dot that was Evie was exactly where she had left it.

*

She took County 12 to Dunmore because it saved eleven minutes and because she always had. North of the Route 9 junction it ran flat and straight between fields, the beans long since cut and the corn on the west side still standing, pale and dry and rattling whenever the wind went through it, until the road reached the trees around Beck Reservoir and began, very slightly, to bend.

She saw the flares first: four burned-out stubs on the shoulder a little short of the reservoir turnoff, black cardboard in the gravel. Beyond them a sheriff's SUV sat on the grass with its lights off. A deputy in a yellow vest was walking the far shoulder behind a measuring wheel, and another stood down in the ditch with his hands on his hips, looking at the ground.

Everyone slowed. Nora slowed. The deputy with the wheel lifted one hand without looking up: keep going.

She went by at twenty and saw it anyway, because for most of her working life she had been paid to look at places where something had happened to a car. Orange paint on the asphalt, short dashes along the fog line on the far side. A circle sprayed on the gravel of the shoulder, with a number beside it. A strip of orange tape tied to a fence post beyond the ditch. Past the circle the shoulder glittered the way a shoulder glitters after a lamp has broken on it, with pieces too small for anyone to sweep.

Then it was behind her, and the road straightened again, and there was nothing on either side but fields.

She thought that nobody should ride a bicycle on County 12 after dark, with no lights for six miles and deer coming out of the reservoir woods to cross it, and then she was ashamed of the thought, because it was the kind people had so that what happened to somebody else could be his own fault.

Dale Brekke's pickup was waiting in front of his machine shed with its nose to the road, as if he'd parked it to be admired. He came out of the shed wiping his hands on a rag, a long, stooped man in a seed cap, and stood a polite distance off while she worked, the way men in Dunmore stood when a woman was doing something they had decided not to have an opinion about.

The storm had come through on the last Tuesday in September: twenty minutes of hail the size of marbles, a hundred and some claims across two counties, half of them still open. She took the photographs first, the four corners and the VIN, and then she held the flashlight flat against the hood so that its light skated across the paint, and the dents came up out of the finish like a rash.

They were hail. That was the trouble with them. They were round and shallow and scattered across the hood and the roof and the top rail of the bed the way hail scatters, as if somebody had thrown a handful of gravel at the sky and let it come down. But at the bottom of a good many of them, where the paint had cracked in a star the size of a pinhead, there was a brown thread in the crack, the color of weak tea.

Rust didn't keep a calendar. She had seen it bloom in one wet month and sit for years in a dry garage. It was a question, not an answer.

She pulled up the policy on the tablet while Brekke watched her do it. Comprehensive, added August 30. Before that, liability only, for eleven years. When he added it, the agent in Merritt had made him send in four photographs from his phone, and they were in the file: the pickup in this same yard in the long light of a summer evening, and across the hood, where the low sun skated over the paint, the same dimpling she was looking at now.

"Bad?" he said.

She turned the tablet around so he could see the August picture, and then she put the flashlight back on the hood. He looked from one to the other for a while. He didn't argue, which she liked him for. He straightened up and took off his cap and put it back on.

"My brother-in-law said if they sent the Pell woman I might as well save my breath."

"Your brother-in-law's Gene Haugen?"

"He is."

"I did his Buick," she said. "Two years ago. He backed it into his own grain truck."

Brekke laughed once, unwillingly. "So what happens."

"I write what I can see. Most of this was here in August. If the storm added anything, somebody at a desk with better pictures than mine can try to find it. I can't tell you it did." She wrote it that way, and he signed the tablet with his finger and told her she was a hard woman, and she told him she got that a lot.

Her second job was Mrs. Ostrander and the mailbox, which took forty minutes, thirty-five of them about Mrs. Ostrander's son-in-law.

She came back by Route 9. It added eleven minutes. Outside Calder she passed the two motels on the strip by the interchange, and caught herself looking into their parking lots, and was annoyed with herself, and looked at the road.

*

Tri-County Mutual kept its regional office in a low brick building on Route 9, between a tire place and a feed store, and at three o'clock on a Friday it smelled of burned coffee and the carpet shampoo they had used in the summer and never quite rinsed out. Nora wrote up Brekke at her desk, attaching her photographs in order with the August ones beside them, and a note that said damage visible in 8/30 inspection photos; storm damage, if any, not separable in field; refer desk review, because somebody would open the file in a year, when Brekke filed again, and want to know what she had been sure of and what she hadn't.

Across the room Marcy Oduya, who handled the glass claims, was telling someone on the phone that a windshield was not a lifestyle choice.

Gary Tunney put his head out of his office and said, "Got a minute?" and went back in without waiting.

He didn't get up when she came in. He never did. He had his reading glasses on their cord and his feet on the open bottom drawer of the desk, and the jar of peppermints he kept for claimants and ate himself was open beside the phone. On the wall behind him a younger Gary held up a walleye beside a lake, looking at it as if it owed him money.

"Ray Paulsen's retiring at Christmas," he said.

"I heard."

"Janet Lindqvist called me this morning about his desk." He took his feet off the drawer. "I told her it should be you. She agreed with me, which happens about once a year, so I wanted to get it to you before she changes her mind. Special Investigations. Start the fourth of January. You'd be at a desk in Merritt three days and here two."

Nora sat down.

"It's eleven thousand more," Gary said. "It's Monday to Friday. Nobody calls you at six on a Sunday because a deer came through somebody's windshield. You'd be the one the field people send things to when the story doesn't add up."

"They do that now."

"Now you'd get paid for it." He held out the peppermint jar, and she took one, because it was easier than not. "You'd be good at it, Nora. You're the only person in this building who'd rather be right than liked, and you're right more than anybody I've got."

"That's not a compliment."

"In Special Investigations it is." He put his glasses on and looked at her over them. "Think about it over the weekend. Tell me Monday. Don't tell me Tuesday, because Halloran wants it, and Halloran would be a disaster, and I'd have to give it to him."

She said she would think about it. She had been thinking about it since August, when Ray Paulsen first said the word Christmas in the break room, the way you think about a house you have driven past for years before it goes on the market. A desk. Home by half past five. Evie's last semester, every night of it at the kitchen table, and then in August Evie would be gone, and Nora would come home at half past five to a house with nobody in it. She had thought about that too. She had decided it was the kind of problem you were lucky to have.

*

She stopped at the Lotus on Main for pad thai and spring rolls, because it was Friday, and because Evie, who would eat almost nothing else when she was tired, had been tired all week.

Jen Alvarez's minivan dropped Evie off at ten past six. She came in with her gym bag over her shoulder and said "Hi" to the hall, and she sat down at the table in the hoodie without taking it off.

At dinner she ate four noodles and moved the rest around the carton with her chopsticks.

"Gary called me in today," Nora said.

Evie looked up, quickly, and then she looked at Nora's face and her own face changed. "About what?"

"Ray Paulsen's job. Special Investigations." Nora could hear herself smiling and couldn't stop. "In January. A desk. Eleven thousand more."

"Mom." Evie put the chopsticks down. "That's good. That's really good."

"Home by five-thirty every night. You'll hate it."

"I'll be gone in August." Evie said it lightly, the way she'd been saying it all summer, as if August were a place on a map. Then she picked up the chopsticks again and looked at them.

"Did you look at the essay again?"

"Some."

"It's two weeks from Sunday."

"I know when it is."

On the refrigerator calendar, in Nora's own capitals, the first of November had a box drawn around it: HALVORSEN, 11:59 P.M. Nora had done the parent section in August, at this table, while Evie read out the questions in the voice of a game-show host. Please list all sources of household income. Please describe any extraordinary financial circumstances. Nora had written single parent and, under debts, personal loan, $200/mo, and Evie had read it upside down and said nothing, which was the closest Evie came to tact.

"Your letters came in?"

"Both of them."

In September Evie had told her at this table which two teachers she was asking, and Nora had been reading a claim file on her phone and had said good, good choices, and had heard the names the way you hear a radio in another room. She could have asked again. She hadn't, because asking again meant admitting she hadn't listened the first time, and by now it was October.

"How was the chem test?"

"It didn't happen." Evie was looking at the carton. "Ms. Kasprzak wasn't there. There was a sub. She said family emergency."

"Poor woman," Nora said, and took the last spring roll.

Evie watched her eat it. Then she said, "Did Dana call again?"

"No. Why?"

"No reason."

After dinner Evie sat on at the table with the laptop open and her knees drawn up inside the hoodie. Nora, rinsing the two forks they hadn't used, could see the screen reflected in the dark window over the sink: the Halvorsen page with its blue banner, the essay box full, the cursor blinking at the end of the last sentence. Evie sat in front of it with her hands pulled up into her sleeves and didn't type. Once she reached out and put one finger on the trackpad, as if she meant to scroll back to the top and start reading, and then she took the finger away.

At ten she closed the laptop and said "Night" and went up, and in a minute Nora heard the shower start.

She took the towels up from the dryer and stood on the landing with the basket against her hip.

Since August, whenever Evie showered, the same song had come through the bathroom door: a woman's voice, high, over slow piano, something about a harbor, about leaving a light on. A band called Pale Stations. Evie had played it over and over, every morning and most nights, until one morning Nora had knocked and asked whether the album had any other tracks on it, and Evie had turned it up.

Tonight the water ran and nothing else did.

Nora stood on the landing until she understood that she was waiting for it. Then she put the towels in the closet and went to bed, and lay listening to the water, which ran for a long time.