Garrett Vance called in two minutes. Wade could hear him through the closed door, or rather, he could hear the shape of him: the chief's long silences, the occasional "Mm-hm, Garrett," the moment when her voice went flat and level and she said, "No. We're not going to do that." When she opened the door again, Vance was apparently still talking, because she held the receiver a few inches from her ear and made a face at Wade that he understood perfectly. Then she said, "I've got another call, Garrett," and hung up on a city councilman.
"He wants to know," she said, "why we didn't bring Mr. Tran in for questioning anyway, since in his experience—his words—'those people always know who's doing what down on the water.'"
Wade said nothing.
"I want you to notice," the chief said, "how ugly that sounded coming out of somebody else's mouth."
* * *
By noon the story had been told at the bait shop four times, at the hardware store twice, and once at the Methodist church, where the women's auxiliary was folding programs for the Blessing of the Fleet. Wade knew this because his mother told him, at six o'clock, standing in the kitchen of the house on Pecan Street where he had grown up and where, eleven weeks ago, he had come back to sleep in his old room with its trophies and its water-stained ceiling until he could find a place of his own.
"Bud Theriot," Carol Pruitt said, stirring a pot of red beans with the wooden spoon she had been stirring red beans with since 1990, "says you about wet yourself on the boat ramp."
"I did not wet myself."
"He said 'about.'" She tasted the beans and added salt. "Lillian Fontenot says you were very polite."
"That's something."
"She said it like it was the worst part." His mother put the lid on the pot and turned to look at him. She was sixty-four, and since his father died she had cut her hair short and taken up kayaking, which nobody had seen coming, least of all Wade. "Mr. Tran's," she said. "Of all the boats."
"You know him?"
There was a pause that went on a beat too long. His mother wiped her hands on a dish towel, carefully, one finger at a time.
"Everybody knows him," she said. "Set the table. Patsy's bringing Kyle."