There was a letter, handwritten on lined paper torn from a spiral notebook, with the fringe still on the edge. It was dated March 1980, and it was addressed to Mrs. Tolan, and it was short. I read it twice. I still have it, and I've read it more times since than I can count, and I know it by heart, so I'll put it down, because I think the woman who wrote it would want it put down.
Mrs. Tolan, it said. My daughter's jaw was wired shut for six weeks. She is eighteen now and she can eat again. She can't drive at night. She can't sleep with the light off. She didn't go to her graduation because he said he would come to it. You told the sheriff he was with you in Oregon that night. You and I both know where he was. I'm not writing this to threaten you. There isn't anything left I can do. I'm only writing so that you'll know somebody knows. I hope you can sleep. I can't. Marva Shaw.
Under that letter was a passbook, a little blue savings passbook from the First National Bank of Astoria, the kind they used to stamp at the teller window. It was in the name of Edna M. Tolan, Route 1, Brownsmead. I opened it. There were twenty years of entries in there in purple ink, deposits of eleven dollars and twenty dollars and thirty-two fifty, and the balance went up and up in that slow way that savings go up for people who have never had any money, until in January of 1982 it said four thousand one hundred and six dollars and twelve cents. Then, from February on, it went down. Two hundred. Three hundred. Five hundred. Three hundred again. In September it said three dollars and twelve cents.
The last thing was a scrap of paper. Lined, torn off the top of a notepad, the kind that says something like FROM THE DESK OF and has a picture of a duck. On it, in pencil, in a slanting, forward-leaning hand, somebody had written a list:
Tires — 140
Mike in Reno — call Sun
Fri the 15th — J — 7am
$ — G's
Don't tell A.