Rosa, who had come in from the house with Sarah behind her, put a hand on Margaret's back, and Sarah, who was already reaching for her phone, said, "We photograph every page, right now, before we move it. And then it goes into my safe, Margaret. Not back in the toolbox. Not where he can find it."
Margaret held the journal to her chest with both hands, the way she had held her purse on the first afternoon in the clubhouse, and she thought about Henry, who had written the truth in a little cloth-bound book and taped it inside the lid of his toolbox, as if he had known, somehow, that one day someone would need it. Perhaps he had only been a careful man keeping a private record. Perhaps he had been a man who suspected his own son and wanted the truth kept somewhere safe. Either way, the truth had waited thirty years in the dark, under a locked lid, for a small brass key in a brown purse.
He kept it for me, Margaret said, through her tears. "He didn't know he was keeping it for me, but he kept it."
Yes, Rosa said. "And now you've found it."
Margaret nodded, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and looked once more around the garage — at the workbench, at the pegboard, at the window with its pale shaft of light — and she made herself a promise, there among Henry's tools, that she would see this through to whatever end it had. Not for revenge, but for the truth, which was the only thing left she could give him.
Ruth Alvarez had lived next door to Margaret for forty years, and she answered her own door in a housecoat with her white hair in a braid and a look on her face that said she had been expecting this visit for a very long time and dreading it in equal measure.
Margaret, she said, and then she stopped, and her eyes filled, and she took Margaret's hands in both of hers, and the two old women stood in the doorway holding on to each other while Rosa waited politely on the porch and Duke stood by the gate like a man guarding something precious.
Forty years was a long time to live next door to someone. They had shared a fence line and a thousand small kindnesses: tomatoes from Ruth's garden left on Margaret's porch in August, soup carried the other way in February when Ruth had the flu, the long conversations over the fence. Ruth had been there the day Margaret came home from the hospital after her knee surgery, and Margaret had been there the day Ruth's husband died, sitting with her in the kitchen until the casserole dishes stopped arriving. Their friendship was not dramatic. It was the kind made of ordinary days, which was why the silence between them in recent years had hurt Margaret more than she had ever admitted — she had thought the friendship had simply faded, the way she had thought everything else had faded, when really it had been fenced off like everything else.
Ruth, I need to ask you something, Margaret said, when they were sitting at Ruth's kitchen table with tea that neither of them was drinking. "About 1996. About the night Henry died."
Ruth's hands tightened around her cup. She was eighty years old, and her face was a map of forty years of neighborliness — of casseroles exchanged, of gardens admired over the fence, of the long, quiet friendship of two women who had raised their lives side by side — and there was a shadow on that map now that Margaret had never seen there before, or had never allowed herself to see.
I've been waiting for you to ask, Ruth said, very quietly. "For thirty years, I've been waiting for someone to ask, and hoping no one ever would."
She told it slowly, the way a person tells a thing they have rehearsed in silence for decades and never once said aloud. That night in October 1996, she had been awake late — her husband was snoring, and she had gone to the kitchen for water — and she had heard shouting from Margaret's house. Not the ordinary shouting of a family argument, but something sharper, something frightened, a man's voice raised and then another man's voice answering, and then a sound she had never been able to describe properly, a crash and a cry cut short, as if someone had fallen and someone else had screamed and then stopped. The kitchen window had been open a crack, because the night was mild for October, and the sounds had come across the narrow space between the houses with a terrible clarity. She remembered standing at the sink with the glass of water in her hand, not drinking it, listening, and thinking that she should go next door, and then thinking that it was late, and that families argued, and that she would check in the morning — the small, reasonable thoughts that people think when they are afraid to do the brave thing.