Chapter 21 of 23That Dark Road

Someone had been in her kitchen.

Dorothy Mercier knew that before she found the switch. The stack of index cards on the oilcloth sat square as ever, but one card lay crosswise to the rest, its blue rules turned the wrong way, and the iron hook on the County K door hung loose in its eye. Nothing was missing. She stood in the doorway with her barn coat on and her keys still in her fist.

She hooked that door every night from the first hard frost on, and she had hooked it every night since the winter a north wind came up the road and shoved it wide and she woke to a house as cold as the barn. Now she walked to the table and turned the card upright with a fingertip.

Her own block print. The name. Under the name, the line she had put there herself because it had to live somewhere. She knew those words without looking. Somebody else had read them, and then set the card down crosswise in her kitchen, and walked out her door.

She made herself walk the house, which was habit and not courage, and the fraud unit's first lesson had taught her that a room tells you what a room held. The bedroom windows were latched. The cellar door was shut, the furnace running its loud October run, the pantry holding the same cans in the same order, the rosary card she used for a bookmark in the same page of the same book. The house had been in the family since her grandmother, and now it had a room in it that belonged to somebody else.

Exhibit F, then: one card, crosswise, and nothing else on the docket.

She was reaching for the kettle when Peg's truck came up the drive. Peg did not get out.

"Booyah," Peg said through the window, and set the Cool Whip container on the top step with a dish towel over it. "You didn't come by last night, so. The sausage is in it."

"I'm eating."

"You're heating." Peg put the truck in gear and then didn't go. "Bonnie looks tired."

Dot said, "Well."

"Tired like you look," Peg said. "Not tired like a woman off a double shift."

"Tired how?"

"Like a woman carrying something up a hill." Peg reached for the window crank, changed her mind, and left it. "You've got your coat on and your keys in your fist and it's barely light. Whatever has you standing in your own doorway, you call the sheriff about it. Take the booyah in before the dogs get it."

She rolled out of the drive. Dot stood on the step a minute with the towel lifting in the north wind. Then she left the container where it was, got in her car, and drove north into New Ghent.

Lu & Peg's had the fishermen at the end of the counter and the pie case open.

"You've got that face," Lu said.

"Which face."

"The file face." Lu slid a plate across — Belgian pie, prune, a wedge of it — and Dot ate standing up, because the stools were taken and the argument was.

"Bonnie was in here before the boats."

"And?"

"And she was kind about you. That's the part I want you to hear." Lu wiped at a spot on the counter that was already clean. "Poor Dot, she says. Poor thing. A divorcée, and now this. After a spell like that, a person starts seeing fraud in a grocery list."

Dot set the fork down. "Those were her words."

"More or less."

"Which were the words, Lu."

"Poor thing." Lu put the rag back on the sink edge. "She said it like it was your name, and the counter agreed with her before the coffee got cold."

From the kitchen Peg said, "You read people their own words back like the bank reads you a balance. It's a gift in a room with a court reporter in it and a wound at a coffee shop."

"What would you have me do, nod?"

"A nod's cheaper," Lu said. "You used to buy the pie and not the fight."

The fishermen were listening and not turning their heads.

"I still buy the pie."

"Then eat it." Peg came out with the pot and filled Dot's cup past where she wanted it. "You've been out at that house by yourself since Labor Day, and you'll be out there at Christmas, and I'll be sending booyah up County K to a woman who won't come to the door."

Dot walked up to the Four Corners. At Deneys' Market the cart with the squeaky wheel belonged to Bonnie Tetzlaff.

"Dorothy." Bonnie stopped the cart and put a hand on Dot's sleeve. Her reading glasses swung on the beaded chain over a sweater with pumpkins along the bottom. "Marv's got your order in the back. I told him to set it aside for you. You look wonderful."

"Bonnie."

"You've had a time of it, haven't you. Gary, and then Orv, and now this business with the estate." Bonnie said it in the soft voice she kept for the bereaved and the burned, the one she used at funerals. "A body starts seeing things sideways after a spell like that, and then the town starts asking, and nobody means a thing by it."

"A body starts seeing things," Dot said.

"Don't." Bonnie's hand stayed on her sleeve. "I'm not the enemy, Dorothy. I'm the one who brought you the pie when nobody else would."

At the register, Arlene Vandermause had stopped pretending not to listen and stood with a can of coffee in one hand and her mouth a little open.

"We all loved Orv, Dot," Arlene said.

"Yes."

"Then let him rest some."

Marv Deneys came up the aisle carrying a case of summer sausage. "Pie's on the counter if you want a slice, Dot. The prune's back in."

Dot thanked Marv, because Marv had earned it, and bought nothing.

She drove out Highway 57 to the Kwik Trip she did not need, because the farmhouse was south and the farmhouse had a card on the table that somebody else had touched. She bought a glazer for a dollar and nine cents and a coffee and sat in the lot with the engine running, watching the trucks come off the highway with their lights already on.

The maples on County K had lost their color to the north wind, and the barn showed red through the bare branches, and the kitchen window had a light in it that she told herself she had left on.

She took the drive slow. She parked, and walked the steps, and found the dish towel standing up off the container. She caught the towel and lifted the Cool Whip bowl by the rim, and the paper was under it, folded once.

Block capitals. Black ballpoint, pressed hard enough that she could feel the letters through the back of the sheet with her thumb.

> YOU TAKE CARE OUT ON THAT DARK ROAD, DOROTHY.

Unsigned. Her name set down last on the line, and whoever had turned the card on her table had known she would come up this drive and lift this bowl and stand here with cold booyah on her own step.

She went through the house room by room with the note in her fist and found nobody in it and nothing else out of place, only her own kitchen lamp burning on the table where she had told herself she must have left it, and she stood a long minute in front of it with her coat still on, working out that she had not.

She had the note now. That was the one thing this house held that it had not held this morning, and it was worth more than the pie she hadn't bought and the counter that had agreed with Bonnie before the coffee got cold.

She laid the sheet on the oilcloth beside the cards, left the lamp burning, and left the County K door unhooked behind her, and sat down at the table where the window would show her, so that whoever had printed those letters could see her sitting there with the note in front of her and know she had gotten it.