That's what Detective Ruiz is finding out. Rosa turned then, and her face was kind but unsparing. "He ran, Margaret. After what he said last night, he knew what it meant."
Margaret nodded. She had known it too, the moment the words left his mouth in the clubhouse and his face changed — the dawning horror, the way he had looked at the door as if it had already closed behind him. "I only pushed him — he was going to ruin me." He had said it in front of Logan and Duke and Rosa, and in front of Detective Ruiz, who had been standing openly by the workbench, her badge visible, her notebook closed but her eyes open. He had fled into the night before anyone could stop him, and no one had tried very hard, because stopping him then would have meant a struggle, and Margaret had already had enough of struggles in that room.
She sat at the kitchen table and thought about her son running. She thought about him at twenty-two, gangly and furious on the stairs, and about him at fifty-two, a man who had learned to smile at church suppers and to sign his mother's name in a steady hand. She thought about the miles of highway east out of Spokane, the motels with their buzzing signs, the border into Idaho, and the way a frightened man drives too fast and then too slow, checking his mirror. Love and justice sat on either side of her at that table like two guests who would not speak to each other, and she let them sit there. She did not choose between them. She did not have to. Loving her son had never meant protecting what he had done.
Logan came in from the rain, shaking water from his jacket. "Ruiz is on her way," he said. "She's drawing up the warrant now. The statement from last night, the journal, Ruth, the pharmacy records — she says it's enough. She says the judge will sign it before noon."
And then? Margaret asked.
And then they find him. Logan sat across from her, his hands flat on the table, his voice even. "Margaret, I need you to hear this plainly. He is not going to come back here and talk his way out of this. What he said last night was an admission, and Ruiz heard it, and so did we. He knows that. That's why he's running."
I know, she said.
Are you all right with what comes next?
It was the question she had been asking herself since sunrise, in different words. Was she all right with her son being hunted by the police? Was she all right with the handcuffs, the courtroom, the newspaper stories that would print her name? She thought about Henry at the bottom of the stairs, about thirty years of pills that made the world swim, about the bruise under her cuff that had faded from purple to yellow, about the night she had asked her son about the night his father fell and he had grabbed her arm hard enough to leave a mark. She thought about the mornings she had woken confused and frightened in her own house, believing herself to be losing her mind, because that was what he had told her she was doing.
I'm all right with the truth, she said at last. "Whatever comes with it, I'm all right with it."
Duke appeared in the doorway with a plate of toast. He set it down in front of her as if it were a small, serious gift. "Eat," he said. "Ruiz will want you sharp."
She ate, though food tasted like paper. The clubhouse filled slowly around her: Jax with his easy grin gone quiet, Benny with his glasses and his ledger, Cole Bennett watching the door the way he always did now. These men had become a strange kind of family in a matter of weeks, and she understood, sitting among them with her toast and coffee, that safety was not a place so much as people who stayed.
Detective Ruiz arrived just before ten, rain on her shoulders, a folder under her arm. She sat beside Margaret and laid the folder on the table, and in it Margaret saw the shape of the case made plain: her statement, Sam's dated photographs, Dr. Prescott's letter, the pharmacy printouts, a copy of Henry's journal entries, and Ruth Alvarez's signed account. It looked both thinner and heavier than she had expected. A life, reduced to paper.
The judge will sign the warrant this morning, Ruiz said. "Manslaughter, elder abuse, financial exploitation. We'll put out the notice to the state patrol and the Idaho line. He won't get far, Margaret. Men who run like this — they don't have a plan. They have panic."
Will you tell me when you find him? Margaret asked.
The moment I know, you'll know.
Ruiz left, and the waiting began. It was the hardest part, Margaret discovered, harder than the meeting, harder than the memory itself. Waiting gave her thoughts room to roam, and they roamed back over fifty-two years: Michael as a baby in her arms, Michael learning to ride a bicycle in the driveway Henry had poured, Michael at the kitchen table doing homework in his father's sawdust-smelling shirt. She wept once, quietly, into her handkerchief, and Rosa sat beside her and said nothing, which was exactly right. Grief did not need advice. It needed company.
By afternoon the rain had stopped, and a thin, pale sun came out over the highway. Logan walked Margaret around the back of the clubhouse, where the ground was wet and the air smelled of pine and diesel, and they talked about ordinary things — the price of roses, the way the clubhouse roof leaked in the corner, whether the spare room needed a new rug. It was a kindness, that ordinariness, and Margaret recognized it as such.