Daniel came to me about 10 months before he died. He asked me about a name, a man's name. He asked me if I'd ever heard of him in connection with any fire station business, any inspections, any permits. He paused. The name was connected to the LLC structure, to the disposal operation.
He looked at the ground. I told him I didn't know the name, which was true. But I knew Daniel. I knew when Daniel was asking a question that he already knew the answer to. He wasn't asking because he was confused.
He was asking because he was building something. You knew he was investigating something. I suspected. I didn't ask. I He stopped.
If I had asked if I'd pushed him on it and he'd told me and I'd helped him. I've thought about that every day for 6 years. Clare looked at him for a long time. Frank, her voice was quiet. Daniel made his own choices.
He kept his own counsel on purpose. If you'd pushed him, he would have deflected you. That's what he did. That's who he was. Maybe not.
Maybe. She walked toward him. He protected everyone he could for as long as he could. That includes you. She stopped in front of him.
He wouldn't want you carrying this. Frank looked at her. This woman who had just spent 48 hours uncovering the full weight of what her husband had been carrying alone, telling him not to carry the smaller weight of what he hadn't known. He nodded once slowly. His jaw worked for a moment.
Margaret says the case is solid, he said. Whatever happens in court, the evidence is there. Daniel made sure of that. He was the best man I ever worked with. His voice was rough now in a different way.
The absolute best. Clare put her hand on his arm briefly. The kind of touch that doesn't need words around it. Then she stepped back. "Tell Margaret thank you," she said.
"For everything this week," he put his cap back on, nodded at me, walked back to his car. We watched him drive away. At 6:00, standing in Clare's kitchen while she made dinner, actual dinner, the first real meal either of us had thought about in 2 days, she asked me something I hadn't expected. "Do you think he knew he was running out of time?" I thought about the notebook entries, the acceleration, the reasonzoning application, the call to the lawyer who'd mentioned protection, the decision to bury a second copy of everything in the yard 2 weeks before he died. I think he thought something might happen, I said carefully.