Sully started the sportster. The ragged idol filled the morning. He pulled out of the lot, turned onto Larkin Street, and was gone. Boon stood in the cold a moment. 22 years.
Some things didn’t resolve. They got smaller. Not gone, just reduced to a size that could be carried without it being the weight that defined everything else. He went inside and made coffee. Ruth had his cup ready when he came in Monday, timing it to his arrival, which she’d started doing sometime in the second week without either of them remarking on it.
“You’ve been expecting somebody,” she said. Boon looked at her. “How do you know? ” “I don’t know who. I know you’ve been checking your phone differently. A person waiting for something checks their phone differently than a person just checking their phone. ” He looked at her a moment.
“You’d have done well in a different line of work. I did fine in this one, she said. What did he say? Boon considered what to share and in what order. He’d learned over many years of situations where information worked like currency that you gave people what they needed to know in the sequence they needed to know it.
Not out of dishonesty, out of care. Too much at once overwhelmed, too little insulted. He’s gone now, Boon said. But he confirmed some things. Ruth sat down the coffee pot, leaned slightly against the counter.
There’s something I didn’t tell you last week, she said. I figured there might be Walt, she said. The year before he died, he was working on something. Walt was a careful man, patient. He kept records the way some men keep tools, everything labeled, everything in its right place.
She paused. After he died, I found a box in the back of the garage. Files, notes, dates, names, Pierce Boon said. Pierce, she confirmed. Walt had been documenting land transactions, council votes, a pattern of financial connections between Pierce and three development companies that kept appearing in decisions that were supposed to be made independently.
She straightened up, looked out the window at Main Street. The box is still in my garage. Why haven’t you done anything with it? Boon said she didn’t answer immediately. When she did, her voice had the steadiness of something that had been hard and had arrived at peace with itself over a long time.
