Chapter 16: Your Turn

The care home in Evanston was a low brick building with a night nurse who would not open the door.

She opened it when the detective held up the paper my lawyer had gotten signed at three in the morning.

Annie went in ahead of all of us.

Her mother was in a bed by the window in a room with the television on, a small woman with grey hair and Annie's brown eyes.

She sat up, and her mouth shook.

"Annie? They told me you'd gone away to work."

"I'm here, Mom."

Annie climbed onto the bed in her ruined green dress and put her face into her mother's neck, and neither of them said anything for a long time.

I stood in the doorway beside Patrick.

The detective put the recording from Jocelyn's kitchen into an evidence bag, and then asked me to say my name for the form.

"You'll want to stay away from Ms. Sayer today," he said. "And Mr. Bancroft."

"I plan to."

"I'd like a statement from Ms. Presnell, when her mother's settled."

"She'll give it," I said, and Annie, over her mother's shoulder, nodded.

Patrick drove them to a hotel near the hospital and paid for a week.

I did not argue, and he did not make a thing of it.

By evening I was at the lake house with the windows open and the smell of the water in the rooms.

The sitter had gone home. Junie was asleep upstairs under my old quilt.

Patrick came in from the porch where he had been on the phone with the hospital.

He stopped in the door of my father's study, where I was standing with my shoes off.

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