The pharmacist, to her credit, opened her mouth and then closed it again, because the girl was right; Neha Kulkarni's agency contract and Warren Stimson's alarm system almost certainly had opinions about a fill-in pharmacist keeping the store open past closing on a police chief's say-so.
"Ruthie," Denny said. "I need to know your mom is all right. You understand that? That's all this is. I need to see her."
The girl looked at him for a long moment, and he could see her thinking. He had seen a lot of people think in his life, and he knew the difference between a person thinking up a lie and a person thinking through a problem. This was the second kind. It was very visible. She was working something out step by step, the way you'd work out the long way around a closed road.
"You don't have to go up," she said finally. "You can see her from here."
Then she reached into the front pocket of her backpack, past the place where the wallet had been, and took out a black aluminum flashlight about the length of her hand, and a small laminated card, and held them both out to him.
Denny took them because she was holding them out, and because he did not know what else to do. The flashlight was heavier than it looked, good machined aluminum, the knurled grip worn smooth in one spot where a thumb had rested on it for years. It was a working man's light. There was a name scratched into the tail cap with the point of a knife, the letters crooked: S. DALBY. The card was a rectangle of white cardstock sealed in thick laminate, the edges cut a little crooked with scissors, and on it, in pencil gone over carefully in black marker, a child had written out the alphabet in two columns, A through M and N through Z, with the numbers zero through nine along the bottom and, at the very end, squeezed in, a question mark. Beside each letter were dots and dashes, the dots drawn as fat round periods and the dashes as short firm lines, every one of them the same length, as though she had used a ruler.
He looked at it for a long second before he understood what it was.
"Is this Morse code?"
"Yes."
"Where'd you learn Morse code?"
"The school library. There's a book." She pointed past him at the front window, at the lit window on the second floor above the laundromat across the street, where through the rain and the glass he could see a lamp, and a curtain pushed aside, and the shape of a person standing very still. "That's our window. That's my mom. She's watching me. She watches me every morning at the bus stop, and we talk with the light. She can't answer the phone if she's doing Teddy. But she can see us. If you don't believe me, you can ask her."
Behind the counter Tyrell Dorsey had come out of the stockroom with a glucose meter in a blue box and was standing perfectly still with it in his hand, listening. Neha Kulkarni had taken off her reading glasses.