She hesitated. Not because she did not have it, but because she would have to put the box down or hand it to him to get to her wallet, and she did not want to do either of those things. She looked at the road. The leaves were wet. There was a dark puddle by the stone wall. "I need to put this down," she said.
"Go ahead."
She crouched, her knees complaining, and set the box on top of the stone wall, on a flat capstone, and kept one hand on it while she reached into the tote with the other and found her wallet and found the card in it and held it out. He took it. He shone the flashlight on it, and in the backwash of the light off the plastic, for the first time, she saw the small brass bar pinned over the right pocket of his jacket, above the badge. She saw the letters on it.
C. SHEEHAN.
Something in her went very still. It was not fear. She knew what fear felt like and this was not it. It was more like the feeling of stepping onto a stair in the dark and finding that the stair is not there, that brief weightlessness before your foot comes down on the next one, when your whole body is a question.
She looked at his face again, properly this time, in the glow off the card. She looked at the jaw, which was square and stubborn. She looked at the way he stood, with his weight a little on the left leg and the right shoulder a little lower than the left, the way a man stands who has carried something heavy on one side for many years. She had seen that stance every day for four years, in a man thirty-five years older, leaning on the kitchen counter with his good hand while she buttoned his shirt. She looked at the eyes. It was dark and she could not see their color, but she did not need to. She knew what color they would be.
She thought of the pencil marks on the closet doorframe in the room where she slept. CONOR 6/81. CONOR 6/95.
She thought of the photograph in the second drawer of the old man's dresser, under his undershirts, face down, which she had found the first month when she was putting away laundry and which she had turned over and looked at and then turned face down again exactly as she had found it, and never mentioned: a young man in a dress uniform, white gloves, white hat, a line of other young men behind him in a gymnasium, and on the back, in the same woman's hand as the doorframe, Conor — Academy — June 2003. He never came. Underlined twice. And under that, in a different pen, in shaky block capitals, a man's hand, much later: I KNOW.
She thought of the cruiser.
Every night. Every single night she had been in that house, and on her nights off too, Fabiola said. Sometime after eleven, and again sometime after midnight, and sometimes again near two, a pair of headlights would come up Quarry Lane slowly, too slowly for a car that was going somewhere, and go past the Dowds' and past the Benedettos' and past the white house to the turnaround, and come back. And if Dermot Sheehan was awake, and he was always awake, he would lift his left hand off the arm of the brown leather chair, just slightly, just an inch, the way a man lifts his hand at a funeral when he sees someone he knows across the room. He never said anything. He never told her what it was. The first year she had thought it was nothing, a habit, a tremor. The second year, one night in February in a snowstorm, the headlights had come up Quarry Lane in the snow at one in the morning with the blue lights off and the wipers going, and Dermot had leaned forward in the chair so far she was afraid he would fall, and watched the car go to the turnaround and come back, and said, so quietly she almost missed it, "He's got chains on. Good."