"If they don't believe me," Ruthie said, "they can ask you. And you'll answer. With the light."
Her mother wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.
"Some pharmacist," she said, "is going to think you are the strangest child in the state of Ohio."
"That's okay."
"Ruthie." Her mother reached out and took both of her hands, the flashlight and the card still in them. Her mother's hands were cold and a little damp. "If anybody makes you feel scared. Anybody. If anybody asks you to go somewhere with them, or get in a car, you say no and you come straight back here. You don't need to be polite. You come straight home. Insulin is not worth you. Nothing is worth you. Do you understand?"
"I understand."
"Say it."
"Nothing is worth me."
"Good." Her mother held on a moment longer. Then she let go and stood up, carefully, one hand on the edge of the table, and went to find a pen.
Dennis Albrecht had been the chief of police in Kellam Falls, Ohio, for eleven years and a police officer in Tuscarawas and Carroll counties for thirty-one, and in all that time he had never once been sent to the pharmacy for himself. He had been sent for Joyce's thyroid pills and for his mother's eye drops and for his granddaughter's amoxicillin, the pink kind that smelled like bubble gum and had to be refrigerated, and he had picked up evidence at pharmacies and taken statements at pharmacies. But he had never stood at a pharmacy counter and given his own name and his own date of birth and been handed a white paper bag with his own name stapled to it, and at fifty-eight years old he found that he did not like it one bit.
"It's a pill, Denny," Joyce had said that morning, over coffee. "It's metformin. Half the men at church take metformin."
"Half the men at church are fat."