Chapter 12: Two Tubes

She wouldn't come to the boardinghouse.

She said she hadn't been in the dining room of a restaurant in a decade.

She said the back door would do, at half past ten, once the last of the long-table crowd had gone out to their cars.

I was scraping bean pots in the dish room when the bell over the alley door rang.

I dried my hands and pushed the door open with my hip.

The nurse stood on the step in a wool coat, with her purse over her arm and a brown envelope held flat against her chest.

Ansel waited behind her, bare-headed, a few steps down the alley.

He hadn't been invited in, and he knew it.

"Ms. Etcheverry," the nurse said.

"Please come in."

"I will not," she said.

"I'm too old to be seen in a kitchen.

"Is there a place that's quiet?"

"The dish room.

"Nobody comes back till morning."

She stepped over the threshold.

She looked at the pots hung over the sink, the steam on the window, the sixty-quart kettle with its lid ajar.

She took the single stool by the sink and sat on it with her back very straight.

I stood against the steel counter.

She did not hand me the envelope.

She held it in her lap with both hands.

"I'm going to tell you how it happened," she said, "and then you can read it.

"I've been over it enough in my head that I know it by heart."

"All right."

"I worked in the lab room at the Great Basin clinic," she said.

"I drew blood, and I labeled tubes, and I boxed them for the courier.

"I did it twenty-two years and never made a mistake that mattered.

"The week they took your cheek swab, there were two other families in the same rack.

"One was a sheepman's wife from Winnemucca.

"The tubes were a number apart."

"A number," I said.

"Two numbers on a rack, and a tired girl at the end of a shift.

"The lab in Reno ran what they were sent.