Chapter 14: Dundalk

"Evaluate me for what?" I said.

The caseworker buttoned her raincoat.

"Your fitness. Your temper. Your judgment." She paused. "Whatever he's paying for, Ms. Mahan. I'd be careful what you say to anyone you don't know."

She walked to her car.

Joan walked past me on the step and touched my arm, light as a moth.

"A canopy bed," she said. "She'll forget the boat in a month."

Then she got into the back of a black car that had been idling at the corner the whole time.

Tilly tugged my sleeve.

"Can I go trick-or-treating now?"

"It's eight-thirty in the morning."

"I want to be first."

On Tuesday I had the day off.

Bram closed the shop at noon and put a sign in the window that said BACK TOMORROW, GO HOME.

We drove out to Dundalk in my truck.

It's twenty minutes east, past the old steel plant, brick rows with chain-link fences.

The address on Bram's legal pad was a small corner house with green awnings.

A garage out back on the alley.

I knocked.

The woman who opened it was in her sixties, with short gray hair and reading glasses on a beaded chain.

"Yes?"

"I'm Frankie Mahan," I said. "I'm sorry to bother you. I wanted to ask about a crash on Pratt Street, two and a half years ago."

Her face shut.

"I don't know anything about it."

"You were the dispatcher. They were going to depose you, and then they didn't."

"I signed something," she said. "When they let me go. I'm not allowed to talk about my old job."

"Ma'am," Bram said behind me.

She looked up at him.

Six foot four of tattooed stranger on her steps.

"Get off my porch," she said, "or I call the police."

She slammed the door.

Bram didn't say anything on the drive home.

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