Chapter 8: Headquarters

"She didn't say no," I told Jens the next morning.

He was packing Tova's lunch with the concentration of a bomb squad.

"I heard."

"You were listening."

"You left the door open. I'm a union steward. I listen through doors professionally." He zipped the lunchbox. "Now what?"

"Now I need more than a napkin."

The drivers' break room is in the back of the city garage, past the salt dome.

It has a microwave older than me and a couch with one cushion missing.

By Friday, it was ours.

Jens called it a union meeting, and I was his guest.

The guest who brought a laptop, three highlighters and a map of the entire city.

I spread the certification copy out on the card table next to Marit's napkin.

The drivers crowded around.

"That's a swan," said the woman with the frost-burned cheeks.

"That's my sister's swan."

"And yours?"

I signed my name on the back of a donut box, left-handed.

Signe Sandvik.

It leaned back, stiff.

Nobody needed an expert.

"Okay," one of the older drivers said. "But a lawyer's going to say you can fake your own handwriting."

"Then I need her at the counter," I said. "I need a picture."

The room went quiet.

City hall is a public building, but you can't just ask it for its tapes.

Then a driver in the back put his hand up.

He drove Route 6.

"My brother-in-law runs the city hall parking garage," he said. "He owes me for a transmission."

Two days later, he walked into the break room with a thumb drive in a sandwich bag.

We put it up on my laptop, and twenty heads leaned in.

The city hall garage, Monday, January 12.

9:31 a.m.

A white sedan pulled into a visitor space on the second level.

I knew the car. I'd ridden in it to our mother's birthday dinner.

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