"Join the club," he said, and she did not get the joke, and he did not explain it.
She told him what he needed to know. That his heart had gone into an arrhythmia and that a water hauler named Hootie Galbraith, who had been a medic in the Guard, had kept him going with CPR until the ambulance got there twenty-two minutes later. That Curt Shuler was in custody at the barracks and had already asked for his father's lawyer. That Dale Rusk had sat on the bumper of the gray truck and waited, the way he said he would, and had put his own hands behind his back when the first trooper got out of the car, and had been talking ever since. That a detective had already been out to the old Bucktail bore on Kettle Creek Road at first light, and had found the cap cut off and a fresh hose coupling welded on, and that somebody from the DEP in Williamsport was on the way. That the boy was all right. That the boy had been asking about him every half hour.
"There's something else," Hollis said, when she was done. "I need to talk to somebody about a man named Lonnie Pruitt. In Erie. In 1994." He looked at the ceiling. "It's going to take a while."
The trooper looked at him for a long moment. Then she picked the clipboard back up, turned to a fresh page, and clicked her pen.
"I've got time," she said.
* * *
Cherry Springs State Park sits on top of the plateau at twenty-three hundred feet, a long mown field with nothing around it for miles but forest, and on a clear night in May with no moon the sky over it is so full of stars that people who have lived their whole lives in cities sometimes sit down in the grass and cry and do not know why.
Hollis did not cry. But he sat down. He sat down carefully, because the scar down the middle of his chest from the surgery in Pittsburgh still pulled when he bent, and he leaned back on his elbows in the cold grass next to an eleven-year-old boy who was pointing.
"There," Toby said. "Cassiopeia. The W. And that's Perseus. And there, that little cloudy bunch, that's them. The Pleiades."
Hollis looked. He saw a smudge of light, and then, as his eyes got used to it, separate points. He counted.
"Six," he said.
"I can see seven," Toby said. "Jesse said almost nobody can see seven."
"Then you're almost nobody," Hollis said, and the boy grinned in the dark.