"How many times?"
Ruby considered it. Ruby considered everything. "Three," she said. "This is four. The first time was in October when you were doing the lights by the Canal Street doors, and she sat on my bench, and she asked me if I'd seen a soldier. And I said I didn't think so. And she told me about the owl lady." She pointed with her pencil, up and across the hall, high on the east wall, where one of the two big pale statues stood in her niche above the doorway, a robed woman in stone holding a stone owl against her side. On the opposite wall, her sister held a rooster. Day and Night, James knew from a plaque somewhere and from ten years of walking under them without once looking up. "That's where he's going to be," Ruby said. "Under the owl. That's the place."
"Under the owl," Iris agreed, nodding. "That's the place."
"And then the lady in red comes," Ruby went on, glancing at Petra with something like respect, "and she sits with her for a while and then they go home on the Metra. Every time. She always comes." She looked back at James, and her chin came up a little, as if she expected to be in trouble and had decided to be brave about it. "I didn't tell you because you said not to talk to strangers. But she wasn't a stranger after the first time. She was just Mrs. Bird."
James looked at his daughter. He thought of the four Saturdays he had brought her here, four Saturdays he had spent with his back to her, nineteen feet up, worrying about Ron and the file and whether he was a bad father for doing it, glancing down every two minutes at the bench to make sure the purple hat was still there. Every time he had looked, she had been there. And every time, it turned out, she had been somewhere else entirely, in the middle of a whole story he had not even known was happening, and he had seen nothing at all.
"Okay," he said. His voice came out strange. "Okay, Rube. You're not in trouble."
"Am I in trouble for getting off the bench?"
"We'll talk about it."
"That means yes."
"It means we'll talk about it."
Petra was staring at Ruby. "You've seen us," she said. "All those times."