There was one more thing I needed to understand, and I asked it as we were clearing the plates. "If you hand it back every Wednesday morning," I said, "why didn't you hand it back this Wednesday?"
They exchanged a look that had a whole week of panic in it.
What had happened, it turned out, was ordinary. My dryer, which is eleven years old and has its own opinions, had decided on Tuesday night to take ninety minutes instead of fifty. By the time the load was dry it was nearly midnight, and Dashiell heard my car in the driveway, and he did what any seventeen-year-old boy would do with a giant sack of a girl's clean laundry when his mother walks in the front door: he shoved it in the back of his closet behind his marching band uniform bag and dove into bed with his shoes still on. He was going to pass it back at six. But at 5:45 on Wednesday morning, Ottoline Vandersloot, who never sleeps past five anymore, Hesper said, went out into her side yard in her robe with her coffee to look at something on the camera, because she'd gotten a motion alert the night before and hadn't checked it, and she found a pair of underpants with ducks on them lying in her mulch. And after that she was out there. She was out there Wednesday morning and Wednesday afternoon and Wednesday night. She moved a lawn chair to the side yard. She sat in it with a legal pad.
"I wore my gym clothes to school two days in a row," Hesper said. "And my orchestra sweatshirt. I'm wearing it now. It's the last clean thing I have."
"She asked me Wednesday night where my clothes were," Hesper went on. "I said they were in the basement drying. She went and looked. Then she came back up and stood in my doorway and didn't say anything. And then she went into her office and closed the door and I heard her printing something."
The letter. Taped to my door with blue painter's tape.
"I couldn't tell her," Hesper said. "Not without telling her everything. The washer, which meant the money, which meant I'd tell her I know about the job. And Dash. And you." She looked at me. "I thought maybe it would just blow over. I thought maybe she'd think a raccoon got it. I'm smart about most things, Mrs. Gilchrist. I'm really dumb about this."
"You're not dumb," I said. "You're seventeen and you've been carrying an entire household on your back. That's not dumb. That's exhausting."