It did not sink right away. It floated, puffed up with air, a dark shape turning slowly on the brown water, and the current took it under the bridge, and he ran to the other side and watched it come out and go on down toward the lake, turning, turning, until he could not see it anymore.
He walked home in his T-shirt. It took twenty minutes. By the time he got back his teeth were going so hard he bit his tongue. He went in through the mudroom and up the stairs and into bed, and in the morning he told them he had left it on the bus.
Gudrun had known. He was almost sure of it, even then. She had made the calls, the bus garage and the lost and found and Mr. Norquist, and she had done it all in front of him, and then she had stood in the kitchen with the phone in her hand and looked at him, and he had understood that she was giving him a chance. One chance, very quietly, the way you hold a door. And he had not taken it. And she had said "Okay," and let the door close.
What he did not know until much later was that Pekka had told her. He had told her the next afternoon, when she woke up, sitting on the edge of her bed with his hands between his knees. He had told her he had said something to Dell about the money and that Dell's coat was gone and Dell's face had been wrong at breakfast, and Gudrun had asked him what he said, exactly, and he had told her exactly, and she had put her face in her hands for a minute and then lifted it and said, "Okay. Okay. I'll take care of it. Don't you tell Rasmus. You hear me? Not one word to Rasmus."
Pekka had asked why.
Gudrun had said, "Because he did it so nobody would have to know he did it."
That was what Dell did not know, through all of November, standing at the bus stop with his three binder clips. He thought he was being punished. He thought Gudrun had decided, the way people decide things about stepchildren, that he was a liar and a waster and not hers to fix. He thought Pekka was smug. He thought his father did not notice anything because his father did not notice anything anymore, because his father was always at the yard or asleep on the couch with his boots on. He thought the house had a cold place in it and that the cold place was him.
All of which was partly true. That was the hard part. It was all partly true.