His father looked at him.
"The green coat. I threw it off the bridge. I lied. I said the bus." He was looking at the floor, at one of the binder clips lying open by the leg of the coffee table. "She knew. She didn't tell you. She didn't make me wear the hoodie. She just didn't get me another one."
"Why?" his father said. His voice had gone very quiet. "Bud. Why would you throw it in the river?"
Dell could not say it. He opened his mouth and it would not come.
"Because I told him where the money came from," Pekka said from the window.
His father turned his head slowly and looked at Pekka.
Pekka did not look away. Dell would remember that. Pekka stood by the black window with his arms crossed over his chest and his white-blond hair in his eyes, and he was fifteen and scared, you could see it, his hands were gripping his own elbows so hard the knuckles stood up, but he did not look away from Rasmus once.
"In October," Pekka said. "He wrecked my reel. The one my dad sent. I was mad. He said something about my dad, and I said — " He swallowed. "I said at least I don't wear a coat bought with my dead mom's money. I said you took it out of the church fund. I saw the statement on your desk in September. I wasn't snooping, it was right there, I was looking for a stamp. I saw the number."
"Pekka," Gudrun said quietly.
"No. He should know." Pekka's voice cracked and he pushed through it. "It was me. It wasn't Mom. Mom told me not to tell you, because she said — she said you did it so nobody would have to know you did it. But I'm the one who told Dell. So if somebody's supposed to get yelled at, it's me."
His father did not say anything for a long time.
Dell watched him. He watched his father's face in the orange light from the stove, the stubble gone gray at the chin, the red line across his forehead where the hard hat had sat for thirty-one hours, the eyes that had gone somewhere far off, and he saw something happen in it that he had never seen before. It was like watching a wall that you had always thought was solid turn out to be a door.
"It's true," his father said at last. "I took it out."
Nobody spoke.
"Twenty-two hundred." He was still holding Dell's feet. He looked down at them, not at anyone. "The furnace went in August. You remember, bud, it made that noise and then it didn't make any noise. That was fourteen hundred, the heat exchanger. And the taxes