Chapter 8: Fifty Thousand

By Monday noon we had a system.

Peg sat at the kitchen table with the telephone and a pot of tea.

I sat across from her with a legal pad.

Donal's driver stood against the fridge, because he had decided without a word to guard the phone.

Every call got three questions.

What time, what place, and what color were his socks.

"Blue," I said to Peg. "Say blue."

"Why blue?"

"Because only I'd know. Nobody else saw his feet."

Peg gave me a look over her glasses, and I felt my face heat up.

"That's lovely," she said. "That's the loveliest thing I've heard all week."

The first call came from a psychic in Revere who said he was in a green room with a door.

The second was a man in Dorchester who said he was Cormac.

"What color were my socks?" he asked.

"You tell me."

"Argyle."

"Goodbye," I said.

Peg wrote it down anyway, in her round hand, under Dorchester, and put a line through it.

A woman in Southie wanted to know if the reward came with a date.

A man in Fall River said he'd seen Cormac at a Dunkin' Donuts, on the Cape, in Wyoming, and at a Patriots game.

"All of them," Peg said calmly. "Same man. Very busy."

The driver let out a sound that I realized, after a second, was a laugh.

It was the first sound he had made in front of me in ten months.

By Monday night we had a hundred and twelve calls, and not one true word.

I fell into bed at ten and was asleep before Donal finished locking up.

On Tuesday afternoon, Ambrose came in with a box of doughnuts.

"I thought you could use the sugar," he said. "You've been at this a day and a half, kid."

He set the box on the counter, kissed Peg on the head, and sat down at the phone.

"Let me spell you. I'll screen them."

"I've got it," I said.

"You're tired."

"I'm not."

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