There was no signature.
He read it twice. The second time, the ground did something under him, a small tilt, like the first second of a curve you have taken too fast. He put his hand on the tank.
"Who wrote this?" he said.
The girl in the pink jacket looked at the hospital, then back at him. "I'm not supposed to say."
"Is it from her? From Mrs. Ketterman?"
"No," said the girl, too fast, and then, after a moment, "Not exactly."
"What does not exactly mean?"
"It means," the girl said, and her chin began to tremble, and she set her jaw against it so hard he could see the muscle in her cheek, "it means you have to stay until I can figure out how to explain it."
He looked at her for a long time. Then he took the key out of the ignition, put it in his shirt pocket, and buttoned the pocket.
"All right," he said. "I'll stay."
To understand why a seventy-one-year-old man who had been sober for thirty-two years and two months would sit down on a concrete parking-lot curb beside a ten-year-old stranger and wait for her to explain a note, you would have to know about the money orders, and to understand the money orders you would have to know about the night of March the ninth, 1993.
Bonner Wenzel did not tell that story often. He had told it in court, where it was entered into the record in a form so flat and procedural it sounded like something that had happened to a piece of equipment. He had told it in the program, in church basements and VFW halls from Elko to Lovelock, where it was received with the particular silence that men who have hurt someone give to a man who has killed someone. He had told it once to his sister before she died, and she had held his hand and said nothing, which was the kindest thing anyone ever did about it.
What happened was this. He was thirty-eight years old. He had been a heavy-equipment mechanic at the Robinson mine, and when the mine shut down in the late seventies and opened again and shut down again he had followed the work around, Battle Mountain, Carlin, Round Mountain, and he had drunk, steadily and competently, the way a lot of men in those towns drank, so that nobody including himself would have called him a drunk. He rode with a loose crowd of men who called themselves a club but were mainly an excuse to ride to Wendover twice a summer. He was divorced, no kids. He thought of himself as a decent man, which was true in the ways that do not cost anything.