She looked at me over the top of her glasses.
“Is there anyone who might talk?”
“Maybe,” I said. “She’s running.”
PART 4
Bruce Treadwell came at noon with sawdust still on his sleeves.
He stood in my doorway holding a brown grocery bag against his chest with both hands, and he looked, for a moment, like a man at the wrong fun*ral.
He was sixty-six, broad through the shoulders, with a gray mustache and the kind of hands that had spent forty years teaching teenagers not to lose fingers.
“Dad,” Anders said, standing. “You didn’t have to drive in.”
“Yes, I did,” Bruce said.
He turned to me.
“Ma’am. I’m Bruce.”
“I know who you are,” I said. “I’ve been trying to thank you for thirty-one years.”
His chin trembled.
“I have been scared of you for thirty-one years,” he said. “I thought one day you’d knock on the door and take him back.”
