"Am I under arrest?" Ancil said.
It was the first thing he had asked. Everybody in the store heard how calm it was.
"No," Nolan said. "Not at this time. I'm asking you to come voluntarily."
"Then I'm not coming. I'm going home." Ancil's hands were still at his sides. "Ivah wakes up around one. She's got nobody but Wilma, and Wilma can't turn her. I'm going to stand right here until Mattie gives me what's mine to carry, and then I'm going to drive home, and you can come out to the house any time you want and sit at the kitchen table and ask me anything you want to. You know the way."
Nolan knew the way.
That was the thing. He knew the way. He had driven it at six-twenty in the evening on the twenty-ninth of December, 2020, in the dark, in a cold rain that was just thinking about being sleet, up the lane between the hayfield and the woods to the white farmhouse at the top, with the porch light on and the Christmas lights still up along the gutters, red and green and blue, and a wreath on the door. He had stood on the porch in the rain with his hat in his hand. He had told them in the kitchen. Ivah had been at the stove; there had been something on the stove, potatoes, he remembered the smell of the potatoes, and she had turned it off without looking at it, reached behind her and turned the knob and stood there with her hand on it. Ancil had been at the table with the newspaper, in his reading glasses. He had taken the glasses off and folded them very carefully and put them in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap.
And Ivah had said — Nolan could hear it now, in the drugstore, as plain as Mattie's voice — Ivah had said, "Where did he get it? Nolan, where did he get it? He was doing so good."
And Nolan Caudill had said, standing in her kitchen in his wet coat, "Ivah, I give you my word I'll find out."
He stood in the drugstore aisle by the compression stockings with the notebook in his hand, and he felt the floor tilt again, and he said the next thing because it was the only thing in him to say, because it was the thing he always said, the thing on the coffee mug and the thing he said at the Kiwanis and at the schools and over the bodies, and it had been true every time.