The hearse sat forty feet off the bay doors with its parking brake set and its engine off, and Boyce Dandridge had his file open flat on the tailgate, one hand spread to hold the pages down against the wind coming up off the lot. Junie asked him a fourth time. She heard herself do it, and asked anyway.
"Junie Vane," he said, and turned the top sheet toward her with two fingers. "The release for Arthur Vane remains unsigned in my file. I cannot move Arthur Vane until the county examiner signs it or provides a lawful written substitute." He read her the blank line. He read her the facilities man's statement, four degrees warm, with the man's name printed beside it in Boyce's own small hand. "The hearse remains here until the paperwork is complete."
Her keys were still shut in her fist. She had been holding them so long the ring had printed itself into the meat below her thumb, and she pressed harder, because letting go would have been agreeing to something. Her uncle had been in that building twenty-six hours. She knew about the two sets of initials on the log at station four, and she knew that log had been lying face-down when she walked past it, and she had not said either thing out loud to one living person. The moment she said it they would stop answering her at all.
Inside, she took the corner of the ED desk in both hands and did not let go of it. "The examiner's coming after two, and Arthur has been here twenty-six hours. Who is authorized to sign his release? I want the supervisor, and I'm staying right here until somebody answers me."
The charge nurse had two phones going and gave her a hall, a floor, and a time, and no name at all. A doctor came past with a census form under her arm and did not slow down. Junie's mouth had gone dry.
Then the waitress from the diner came in with her thermos and set a paper cup of coffee on the counter for the night nurse, and asked, with her hands flat and empty on the laminate, whether that nurse signed for the envelope or whether somebody else was coming.
The nurse lifted the assignment sheet. Under it lay a stiff envelope with a signature block on the face.
"Ivy Sun signs for that one."
Junie held the desk corner and repeated the name inside her head twice so it would keep.
Ivy separated the two sheets at the clerk's counter without saying a word about them, and her hands were quicker than her reading. The long printed strip folded down small, once, and went into the scrub pocket that had held worse. She signed beside the entry and left the blank line under it blank, and she did it fast, before she could decide not to. Nobody watching ever wrote the true thing down; she knew it, and she did it anyway.
She walked the page back to records herself instead of leaving it in the tray, so nobody could say she had hidden it, and she checked her watch against the seal-check time on the wall card. The watch said 6:55. She was on time, and the page was logged.
The clerk read the blank line aloud to her, all of it, and asked her to initial an explanation or mark it unexplained in writing. Then he asked where the strip had gone, the one that came clipped to the sheet.
Ivy swallowed and got nothing down. Her badge number was on his log twice now, timed twice, and the strip lay folded against her hip while she stood at a counter that had just asked after it. Four months, she thought, uselessly.
She got as far as the family room. Junie was back in the chair with her coat still buttoned.
"Sorry— I don't have a name for you yet." She refilled the water pitcher, which was full. "Sorry— I don't have a name for you yet, but I'm not going anywhere till someone gives you one."
The floor paged her for bay four before she had sat down.
Marguerite kept her hands on the arms of the chair a beat past what sitting required, then turned the rings on her right hand once, slow, all the way around, before she let herself want the phone. The courier's flat envelope stayed on the hall table where she'd told Royal to leave it. Silent member, typed above her own name, her name looking back at her as though it had forgotten whose it was.
Royal stood in the doorway two beats longer than the errand needed.
"Now. Leave that where it is, I've no interest in it today." She did not look at the envelope. "That car down the road with its engine off. Whose would you say that is, before you tell me who I already think it is."
"The Ledger woman."
She had one line carried to the buyer's attorney: the pages would wait for tomorrow evening's session, and she preferred to walk them in herself. The office took it without a word of argument. Sherrod called and got her asking after his mother-in-law by name, and got nothing else, and when he called the second time she let it ring.
"When Wendell's window opens again, you'll remind me. I want to ask after his mother before I ask him one thing about a page nobody stamped."
She sent Royal for the car and said it was for air. She was unwell, and the house was not going to learn it from her. On the seat, with the door shut and the house behind her, she got the cap off and swallowed it. Royal stood at the driver's door and said nothing about it.
The mailbox was stuffed three months deep with his mother's mail, and Cal stood at the mouth of the drive sorting a dead woman's circulars with the truck running behind him and the hose still going in the yard. The windowed envelope got a single short laugh out of him, and then he went quiet, thumb grinding the knuckle of his other hand.
He tore it along the fold instead of the flap. Read the payoff line. Read it again, in case the second pass caught it lying.
Under it, the green card. He held the signature up to a sky with no light in it at all.
"Well, the situation's escalated," he told the mailbox. "Now it's arguing with itself."
Then, low, barely aloud: "That's not her hand." He did not go on and name the hand he had in mind.
He patted the jacket pocket though the keys were already in his hand, folded the letter and the card into the same crease as the certified copy, and got in the truck with the water still running behind him.