* * *
Tom came in at one-forty with his hair dark from the rain and his good jacket on over a pilot association polo shirt, because he'd been at the station on the waterfront all morning watching the bar forecast and had changed in his truck. He was fifty-one. He was a big, slow-spoken man with a sunburned neck in all seasons and a way of standing very still in rooms, as if they might pitch under him. He kissed his mother on the cheek. He kissed Renee on the temple, the way he always did, and sat down in the first chair, the one with his name on it, and then he looked along the row and counted.
"Where's the other one?" he said. "Pete said there were six."
Pete, Tom's younger brother, a fishing guide out of Hammond, said from Ingrid's far side, "Don't look at me, I just got here."
Renee had been rehearsing for twenty minutes. Everything she had rehearsed left her at once. She took the pieces of the card out of her blazer pocket and laid them in his palm, and he fitted them together on his knee the way you'd fit a broken plate, and she watched him read it.
She had expected anger. Embarrassment. Maybe a flash of the old grief, which she had seen on him a handful of times in eight years: at Nora's eighth-grade promotion, at the first debate tournament she won, once for no reason she could ever identify in the cereal aisle of the Fred Meyer. She had been prepared for any of that.
What she saw instead was fear. It came up from somewhere under his collar and took his face over all at once, the color going out of it as if somebody had pulled a plug.
"She put Dana's name on it," he said.
"Under mother. Tom, she knows. She has to know. She must have found out somehow where Dana was."
"Did Dana contact her?" His voice had gone low and quick. "Has Dana been in touch with her? Has she been to the house?"
"I don't know. I don't know anything. I found the card when I got here and I—" Renee stopped. "I tore it. I'm sorry. I didn't want Nora to look down from up there at an empty chair. And Nora saw me do it."