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.
I said something about how my daughter was in the front of my truck and she was talking to me about a chief of police.
And Yvonne said: yes.
She said: I have been doing this for twenty-six years and I am going to tell you the thing nobody says out loud. The man who hurt her is not the reason it kept happening. He is one man and one man is manageable. What is not manageable is the arrangement that made him safe, and if you take him and leave the arrangement, it grows another one inside eighteen months.
She said: I am not choosing the arrangement over your daughter. I am telling you that your daughter is in an emergency department problem right now and the arrangement is a two-year problem, and you can do both, in that order, and you cannot do them in the other order.
Then she said: go. Drive. Call me tomorrow.
I drove my daughter forty-one miles to Merrow Valley General.
They kept her overnight. A nurse called Bettina Ould did the documentation and did it properly and I have thought about her a lot, because she is somebody’s forty minutes on an Easter Sunday and she will never know that a hundred and ninety pages came out of her forms.
And on the way, at about four in the afternoon, with Nell half asleep against the door with my coat over her, I understood the second thing.
The phone under the sofa.
Nell had called me at 2:13. Nell had never hung up.
PART 3
The phone was in evidence by Tuesday. Not because anybody seized it — because Nell’s cousin Roland went back for her things on the Monday with a deputy escort, and Camille Ostrand handed over a bag with the phone in it, in a plastic sleeve, cracked, because it did not occur to her that it mattered.
That is the entire Ostrand family in one gesture. They did not hide it. They handed it over. It genuinely did not occur to any of them that a thing could be evidence against them, because nothing ever had been.
