On Easter Sunday my daughter called and asked me to come and get her, and her mother-in-law put a hand on my chest in the doorway in front of thirty guests and told me to go home. My son-in-law told me to call the police, because the Chief was standing in his back yard eating food he’d paid for. He was right about that — and it is the reason he lost everything.
She flinched before she worked out it was me. That was worse than everything else that happened that day and it is the thing I still get in the night.
She said: don’t let him make me stay.
I said: not one more minute.
Sutton took a drink and told me that if I walked out of his house with his wife he would have me arrested before I reached the county line.
I carried her out through the front door while thirty people held their breath, and out on the lawn the children were still dropping painted eggs into baskets, because nobody had told them anything.
Then I reached under the dash of my truck for a case I had not opened in nine years, and took out a laminated card with eleven numbers on it from a life I had put down so I could just be Nell’s father.
I did not call the police.
PART 2
I called Yvonne Prentiss.
Yvonne and I worked eleven years in the same field office. She left three years before I did and she is now in the public integrity unit at the state Attorney General’s office, and she has a voice like somebody reading a gas meter.
It was Easter Sunday. She answered on the fourth ring.
I told her what I was looking at. It took me about ninety seconds and I did it badly.
