There, she thought. He heard it. Now he knows I'm almost home.
The train slowed, and stopped, and the doors opened with their soft chime, and Solange Augustin stood up with the box in her two hands and her tote over her shoulder and stepped down onto the platform at Wickham Falls into a cold that took the breath out of her.
"Night, now," said Mr. Gerrity, leaning out of the door between the cars with his hand on the rail.
"Good night," she said.
The doors closed. The train pulled away north toward Goldens Bridge and Purdy's and Croton Falls and Brewster and the end of the line, its red lights getting smaller and smaller and then going around the bend, and then it was gone, and the sound of it was gone, and there was nothing but the hum of the platform lights and somewhere, very far off, a dog.
She stood for a minute. She looked at the empty lot. She looked up the hill, where the road went into the trees. It was a mile and nine-tenths to Quarry Lane. She knew that because she had asked Mr. Paredes once, and he had said "One point nine," and laughed, and said, "Why, you want to walk?" and she had laughed too.
Her phone said 3 percent. She turned it off again, and put it away, and shifted the box into the crook of her left arm, and buttoned the top button of her coat, and started to walk.
Officer Conor Sheehan had been on the road since ten, and by twelve-thirty he had driven past his father's house four times.
He did not count it as four. He did not count it at all, the way a man who bites his nails does not count each finger. Quarry Lane was on his sector. That was the fact of it, and he had told himself the fact of it so many times over so many midnight shifts that it had worn smooth, like a stone in a pocket. Wickham Falls Police Department had twenty-three sworn officers and on the midnight tour it put two cars on the road, one north of Route 35 and one south, and Conor had the north car more nights than not because he had asked for it nine years ago and nobody had ever asked him why. The north sector was the big one. It was reservoirs and horse farms and long private roads behind stone walls, estates set so far back in the trees you could pass one nightly for a decade and never see the house. It was also, at its southern edge, a short dead-end road off Ridge Road called Quarry Lane, where three houses stood that were older than anything around them and smaller than anything around them, built a hundred years ago for the foremen at the granite quarry that was now a swimming hole the town had fenced off after two kids drowned in it in 1988. One of those three houses was a white clapboard farmhouse with green shutters and a porch that sagged a little at the left corner, and a kitchen light that was on, Conor knew, every night until one in the morning, and sometimes all night.
He did not stop. He never stopped. He came up Ridge Road and turned onto Quarry Lane and drove slowly to the end where the turnaround was, past the Dowds' place with the stone lions and the Benedettos' place where nobody lived anymore except in August, and the white house was the last one, and he went past it at about eight miles an hour, and he looked, the way you look at anything on patrol, a quick sweep, porch, windows, driveway, nothing out of place, and he went around the turnaround and came back out and went on with his night. It took about ninety seconds. If anybody had asked him, which nobody did, he would have said dead-end roads were where people parked to do things they should not do, and that there had been burglaries.