Some of it he already knew from Birch. Some of it was new, the specific meeting where Aldrick had been given his instructions regarding Coda's death record, the name of the surveyor who'd provided the false basis for the land dispute, the date, the people present. She told him all of it, flat and clear and without embellishment because Dora Pell had been sitting with the truth for a long time, and the truth didn't need decoration. When she finished, Cole said, "Would you say that in front of people?" She looked at him.
"That's why I made you come back Thursday," she said. The second was Walt Gruber, 54, worked the livery stable, had been Coda's closest neighbor, had found the body, had written and signed the initial report that Aldrick had used as the basis for the death record. Cole found him on a Friday morning mucking stalls. He'd known Cole was coming, word traveled fast in Red Rock, and he was still there, which meant something. Cole leaned on the stall door, didn't say anything right away.
Walt kept working, the shovel against the floor, the sound of it rhythmic and steady. A man who used physical work to fill the space where harder things lived. Finally, Walt said, "I wrote what Pharaoh told me to write." Cole waited. "He came the morning after, before I told anyone, before I'd done anything official, told me what the report needed to say, and stood there while I wrote it."
"Were you threatened?" Walt stopped, looked at Cole. "Not in words," he said. "Pharaoh doesn't use words for that. He just stands there in a particular way, and you understand."
He set the shovel against the wall. "I've been understanding that particular way of standing for 8 months," Walt said, "and I haven't slept right in 8 months. And I think those two things are connected." "What happens to me if I say it?" Walt said.
"I don't know," Cole said. "Greer will come at you. Pharaoh will make things difficult. People will take sides, and some of them will take the wrong one." "That's honest," Walt said.
"I'm not going to tell you it'll be easy," Cole said. "I don't know that it will be. But But you just told me you haven't slept right in 8 months," Cole said. "And I think you know what that means better than I do." Walt was quiet for a long time.
The horses moved in their stalls. The morning light came through the stable doors in long pale bars. "Tell me when," Walt said. "I'll be there." The third was Aldrick Main, and Aldrick came to Cole on the Tuesday before the hearing, evening.
Cole was on the porch, and the lamp was lit, and he saw the figure coming up the road on foot, not on horseback, not in a cart, on foot, like a man who had needed to walk the distance to confirm his own decision with every step. Aldrick Main, in his pressed vest, his good hat, moving with the careful, deliberate pace of a man in his 60s who had been carrying something heavy for a very long time, and had made the decision tonight to set it down. Cole stood up. Aldrick came to the foot of the porch steps and stopped. He looked up at Cole, and his eyes, which had spent 15 years carefully not landing on anything directly, were steady, present, the eyes of someone who had finally stopped performing the absence of themselves.
He said, "My daughter came to visit last week." Cole said nothing. "She's 26, lives in the city, teaches school. She came for 3 days, and on the last evening we were sitting at dinner, and she looked at me and said, 'Pa, what are you most proud of in your whole life? What's the thing you'd want me to know about you?'" His voice was very even, the evenness of something that had been worked at.
"I couldn't answer her," he said. "I sat at my own dinner table, and I could not think of a single thing I'd done in 30 years of practicing law that I would want my daughter to know about me. And she saw it. She didn't push. She just went back to eating."
A pause. "That was 4 days ago," Aldrick said. "I haven't thought about much else since." Cole looked at the man at the foot of his porch steps, at the 15 years in his face, at the thing that had been crushed down, and the thing that was trying to come back up through it. "Come inside," Cole said.
They sat at the kitchen table. Cole poured coffee. Senna came to the kitchen doorway, looked at Aldrick, looked at Cole. Cole gave her a small nod. She came in, sat at the end of the table, said nothing, but her presence in that room was its own kind of witness.
Aldrick looked at his coffee cup. "I know what happened the night Coda died," he said. "I know who was there and what was said and what the cause of death actually was. I signed a document that said otherwise, and I've been a judge in this town for 15 years while knowing that." He looked up.
"I'll say all of it at the hearing, in front of whoever needs to hear it, on record." "Greer will use what he has on you," Cole said. "I know. The case from 15 years ago will come out. I know," Aldrick said, the voice of a man who had finally run out of the energy required to keep a secret.
"I've been afraid of that for 15 years. I've done things I'm ashamed of to keep it from coming out. And last Tuesday, my daughter asked me what I was proud of, and I had no answer." He turned and looked at Senna. "Your husband was a good man," he said.
"I knew that when I signed the document. I knew it the whole time." Senna looked at him for a long moment. This man in his pressed vest with 15 years of weight visible in his face, no longer hidden under the performance of neutrality. She said, "I know."