"No."
"Why not?"
The girl took a breath, and he saw her decide how much to say. "He has a trach," she said. "And a ventilator. He's fourteen months. He was born at twenty-five weeks. To take him outside she has to switch him to the portable vent and the portable oxygen and pack the go-bag and put it all on the stroller, and it takes two people to get the stroller down our stairs, and the stairs are outside, and they're wet. And she's shaky. Because of the ketones. And the night nurse broke her wrist."
She said all of it without stopping. It was very fluent. It was, Denny thought, almost too fluent, every detail stacked neatly on the last like a kid's block tower, each one making it more impossible for the mother to be there and more necessary for the girl to walk out with the bag. He had heard a lot of stories in thirty-one years. Some of them had been true.
"That's a lot," he said gently. "That's a lot for one night."
"It's true."
"I believe you believe it." He turned to the pharmacist. "Doctor, do you have a phone number on file for Mrs. Dalby?"
"I do." She was already picking up the counter phone. She read the number off the screen and dialed and held the receiver to her ear. Denny watched the girl watch the pharmacist. The girl's lips were pressed together. Four rings. Five. The pharmacist held the receiver away from her ear slightly, and Denny heard, faint and tinny, a woman's recorded voice: Hi, you've reached Lauren, I'm probably elbow-deep in something, leave a message. The pharmacist hung up without leaving one.
"Voicemail," she said.
"She might be doing Teddy," said Ruthie quickly. "If she's suctioning him or doing his ties, she can't pick up. You need both hands. Or the phone's in the kitchen. She'll call back."
"Maybe," Denny said.
But that was the moment, he would think later, that he stopped thinking the girl might be lying and started thinking something worse. Because the thing that came into his mind when the phone went to voicemail was not a thief, and not an uncle waiting in a car. It was a woman on a kitchen floor. He had walked into that kitchen too many times. A mother who had been sick, or high, or both, who had sent her kid out for something with her wallet because she could not stand up, and had then not answered the phone because she could no longer answer anything. Kids covered. Kids covered better than anyone. Kids would stand at a counter with their hands flat and their chins up and tell you every true detail they knew in exactly the right order, because they had been taking care of the person on the floor for a long time and they were very good at it, and because they believed with all their hearts that if they could just get the right thing in the right bag and bring it home, it would come out right.