"I gave you three names, Nolan," she said. Quietly; only he could hear it. "I wrote them down for you. Right there. I've thought for six years that you must have checked the third one first."
He did not answer that either.
He walked out through the store. He felt them watching him, the young mother and Ardella Gaither and Elmo Pickens with his pink barbered neck, and he did not touch his hat to any of them. At the door he stopped beside the gray kiosk. He stood beside it a moment and looked at the slot in the top. Then he put his palm flat on the steel, the way he did every morning on the box in his own lobby, and it was cool under his hand, and nothing happened, and he took his hand away.
Outside the wind had come up stronger and was turning the maple leaves over all across the courthouse lawn, so that the whole lawn flashed pale and dark and pale again. The white Silverado was gone from in front of the hardware store. He stood under the green awning a long time. A deputy's voice came across the radio on his shoulder, Ricketts, asking dispatch for a plate, and Carla's voice answering, and he let it go by him like water.
He did not go to the Café. He walked back around the square to the Annex and got in the Tahoe and sat in it. Then he started it and drove south out of town on the county road, past the Methodist church at Possum Trot with GOD ANSWERS KNEE-MAIL on its board, past the Ninevah Creek bridge with its orange barricade and its plywood sign, into the hills where the maples had gone red in patches up the slopes, and he did not let himself think about where he was going until he was there, at the bottom of the lane on Tolbert Hollow Road, between the hayfield and the woods, with the white farmhouse at the top of the hill.
The Silverado was parked by the kitchen door, beside Wilma's green Ford Escape. Through the big window in the front room he could see the shape of a hospital bed with its head raised, and a man in a brown coat standing beside it, bending down. As he watched, the man straightened and took off the coat and laid it over the back of a kitchen chair, and sat down in the chair, and took something small out of his shirt pocket and opened it on his knee.
Nolan sat at the bottom of the lane with the engine running. He thought of the drawer by his own sink, and the white carton in the back of it with its flaps tucked in. He thought of a phone number in Midland, Texas, that he had not called on a birthday in two years, and of the prosecutor, and of a case file in a steel cabinet in the basement of the Annex with SOURCE UNDETERMINED typed on the last page, and of thirty-one white cards. He thought of Ivah Sizemore at her stove, reaching behind her without looking to turn the knob. He did not know what he was going to say. He did not know who he was going to say it to first, or whether, when he got to the top of the hill, he would be able to say anything at all.
He turned off the engine. He took off his hat and set it on the passenger seat, crown down, the way Verlie had always told him to so the brim wouldn't flatten. Up at the house, in the big front window, the man in the chair looked up from his notebook, toward the road.
Nolan Caudill opened the door of the truck and got out and began to walk up the hill.