He walked. His knee hurt. The pad of warnings was in the right cargo pocket of his pants, a thick book of triplicate forms on carbonless paper, white for the department, pink for the court file, goldenrod for the subject. CRIMINAL TRESPASS WARNING — CITY OF FALLON across the top in black capitals. Name, date of birth, address if any, description. Location. Duration of exclusion, with a box to check: thirty days, ninety days, one year. Officer's signature and badge number. On the back of the goldenrod copy, in small print, the appeal procedure, which almost nobody read and which, in Lloyd's experience, had worked exactly once, for a lawyer who had gotten drunk at a wedding and fallen asleep in the bandstand.
He had written four this week. He knew all four by name. That was the thing nobody at the DID understood when they talked about numbers: in a park this size, you knew everyone, and the numbers were people you had said good morning to.
At a quarter to ten he got coffee from the cart on Front Street, black, and stood drinking it at the edge of the square with his back to a lamppost, watching the paths. Office workers cutting through toward the courthouse annex. A man with a stroller. Arnold arrived at five past ten with his loaf of bread under his arm and his tremendous dignity, sat down near the war memorial, and began feeding the pigeons in direct violation of a posted rule, and Lloyd watched him do it and did nothing at all.
It was at ten-forty that he noticed the girl.
She was on the bench by the west path, the one under the second oak from the Holloway Street corner, alone. She had not been there on his first loop. She must have come in from the courthouse side while he was at the coffee cart. She was sitting the way kids sit when they have been sitting a long time, with her legs folded up under her and a backpack on the bench beside her, and she was reading a book so thick she had to hold it with both hands.
He looked at his watch. He looked at the girl.
It was Wednesday. It was ten-forty in the morning on a Wednesday in October, and every public school in Fallon had been in session since eight-oh-five.
He did not go over right away. He finished his coffee. He watched her turn a page, and then another, and he noticed that she did not look up when a bus went by on Holloway with its brakes shrieking, and did not look up when Arnold's pigeons rose all at once in a gray clatter at something only pigeons could see. She was eleven, maybe twelve. Brown skin, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail so tight it looked like it hurt. A navy hooded sweatshirt too big for her, the cuffs pushed up. Jeans, sneakers with the laces double-knotted. The backpack was black and plain and had a carabiner clipped to one strap with a library card dangling from it on a coiled plastic cord, the kind of thing a parent buys so a kid won't lose something.
There were a lot of reasons a twelve-year-old could be in a park at ten-forty on a school day, and Lloyd had encountered most of them. Suspended. Sick and bored and the parent at work. Skipping, which was the most common and the least interesting. Running away, which was rarer than people thought and usually ended at a grandmother's. Sometimes it was worse than that. Sometimes a kid was out because home was a place you did not want to be at any hour, and you could tell, if you had been doing this long enough, by the way they sat — curled, watchful, with their stuff close to them. This girl had her stuff close to her. But she was not watchful. She was the least watchful person in the square. She was somewhere else entirely, and the somewhere else was in the book.
That was what got under his skin, if he was honest, and later he would try very hard to be honest about it. Not the truancy. The reading. The way she held the book, two-handed, like something that might get away. The way her lips moved very slightly on some words and not on others. He had seen that before. He had seen it in a mirror in a bathroom over a shoe repair shop on Calhoun Street in 1985, a thirteen-year-old boy reading The Count of Monte Cristo in the bathtub because it was the only room in the apartment with a lock, and his father pounding on the door, and his father's voice, Armenian and then English and then Armenian again, saying, The professor! The professor is in the bath with his books, the professor is too good to sweep the shop! The professor's going to read his way out of here, is he? Read his way to where?
His father had died in 2001 with his hands still black from shoe dye. Lloyd had gone one year to Fallon State and then the academy. He did not read much now. He told people he didn't have time.
He dropped the coffee cup in the trash can and walked over.