Kurt Vandehey stood on her porch at ten minutes to seven with both hands where she could see them, which for a man who made his living behind a carving knife was close to undressed.
"Before you start," he said. "I was there."
Dot had the coffee pot in one hand and the screen door propped with her hip. The farmhouse kitchen had been eighty-one degrees at three in the morning and was sixty-four now, and she'd stood in the doorway at dawn letting the north wind dry her hairline. Awake, damp, and out of patience for a Thursday's worth of apology on a Monday.
"There," she said.
"The Wagon Wheel. That Sunday night." He swallowed. "I was up there."
She held the door. He came through it the way a big man comes through a door he's been dreading, shoulders first, then stopped on the linoleum like he needed directions to the table.
"Sit down, Kurt."
He sat, then emptied his pockets and laid the things in a row on the oilcloth the way claimants used to at her old office — keys, wallet, the Kwik Trip receipt gone soft at the fold, and a manila folder with a Milwaukee number on the corner.
"That's the folder," he said. "The interview one. Terri found it in the truck and set it on the table."
"Eleven minutes," Dot said when he'd finished. "That's how long you talked. The stove clock runs four fast."
"You going to write it down?"
"I'm going to write it down."
He told it straight through and it held. Left the ridge road at 9:35, parked second row on the gravel, cap in his hand — Orv was one of three men alive who'd told him to take a cap off at a table. He'd come to ask Orv to hold the price thirty days. The bank had said no; his uncle in De Pere was three weeks from yes or no on a co-sign.
"You brought the folder in with you," Dot said.
"I brought the folder in. I thought if it was on paper."
"On paper."
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Say it back to me the way you say things back."
She let that sit. Outside, a pickup went by on County K with something loose in the bed.
"He poured me one brandy old-fashioned, sweet," Kurt said. "Then he wouldn't pour a second, on account of the pills. He said, 'I'll buy you one, Kurt, but I'm not selling you the building.'"
"And you said?"
"I said I'd take it at his number. I said I'd have the money in thirty days." He turned his hands over, palms up, which he did whether he was lying or not, so it told her nothing. "The thirty days was a lie."
"Then what."
"Then he said, 'That's settled then.'" Kurt looked at the window. "Like a man closing a cash drawer. I walked out of there believing him, and he never wrote one word of it down in twenty-two years."
"Milwaukee called your references," Dot said. "Didn't they."
"Tuesday. My old boss, of all people."
Dot tapped the receipt. "Ten-twenty-two."
"Eleven gallons, two glazers, dollar-nine apiece." The corners of his mouth moved. "I ate one in the lot with the dome light on like a kid."
"And then home."
"And then home. Terri was up with Amy's fever."
"Nobody on the gravel when you left?"
"His car and my truck. Cold, and nobody walking."
"How'd you leave it with him?"
"He followed me as far as the kitchenette and stopped."
Dot set her cup down. "What was on the counter?"
Kurt sat back. "The pill box. The week one, all the little doors open, and him standing there with his back to me, counting into it."
"Did you touch it?"
"I never touched it. He'd have known if I touched it." He did Orv's voice then, which he could do. "He said, 'Don't get in my week, Kurt.'"
"When you gave me the noise," she said. "At the club, when I asked about that night. You told me you heard something out back."
His ears went red, which in Kurt was a thermostat, not a lie detector. "There wasn't any noise. I made it up at your table." He made himself look at her. "I'm in that building at nine-forty with the price in my mouth, and he's dead by Sunday breakfast, and half the Legion already has me buying a boat with it. Who'd believe me? Terri didn't. She looked at me for a month like I was a bill she couldn't pay."
Dot put the kettle on, sliced the summer sausage Peg had sent home with her, and set it out with bread. He ate standing up.
"You're off my list, Kurt."
"I know what your list is worth."
"Nothing, until the county says so. You're off mine anyway."
He put his cap on at the door and took it off again. "Can I go back to work?"
"You've been working."
"I mean behind the roast." He got the door open. "I haven't carved since."
"Go carve."
He went out to the truck and sat in it a while before he started it, and Dorothy Mercier watched a man take four minutes to find the key. Then she took an index card from the box and wrote across the top: Vandehey, statement, at home, Monday. She wrote the substance on the back and left the front blank.
Lu & Peg's Bait & Breakfast was closed and the stools were up on the counter except the one Peg kept down for family. The county truck sat across from the fish-cleaning shed on the New Ghent harbor.
Lu worked a rag along the counter like a woman who'd decided to be busy. Peg had Monday's chicken dumpling going for the men off the last charters, $3.25 a bowl, and she set one in front of Dot without asking.
"Saw Kurt's truck at your place this morning," Lu said.
"You did not."
"Gus did. Gus sees more than the county does."
"Gus was at the meat raffle."
"Gus is always at the meat raffle." Lu wrung the rag out. "Well?"
So Dot gave it to them the short way. The cap in his hand. The brandy he wasn't allowed a second of. The ten-twenty-two receipt, one glazer eaten in the cab.
"He drove all the way out to County K to confess," Lu said, "and didn't bring a hotdish. That's not a confession, that's a drive-by."
"You fed him," Peg said.
"I fed him."
Rollie Schuette sat at the end of the counter with a cup in front of him. He'd been there before Dot came in and hadn't said a word, which was how he did it. Sit, drink his decaf, act like he'd stopped in for the soup.
"The funeral home called the county again," he said. "I've got a week in this pen. Maybe two. After that my name goes on the paper and Orv goes to Green Bay."
"Then you know how much week I've got," Dot said.
"I've got a fair idea."
She told him the rest of it with the bowl going cold. Four people could have been inside that building that Sunday night after nine. One is in a recliner. One was posting a sign to an online account from Green Bay at 9:58, and the account stamped it there itself. One stood on her porch this morning and puts Orv alive at ten-fifteen with the pill box open on his counter.
"That's three," Rollie said.
"That's three."
Lu stopped wiping. "There's a name you're not saying."
"I noticed."
"Say it."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because she fed me pie while I counted her cash."
The counter went quiet. Peg turned back to the stove, which was her way of leaving a room.
Rollie looked at his cup a while. Then he lifted it, got it as far as his mouth, and stopped. The decaf went back down on the saucer without a sound.
"You're holding a card, Dorothy," he said. "Whose face is on it?"
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