Chapter 92: Vance Jackson
He telephoned Dolores Reyes on the twenty-fifth of January and she hung up inside nine seconds.
He telephoned again on the twenty-sixth. She said no. He wrote on the twenty-seventh and got nothing.
So I wrote, on the twenty-eighth, four sentences on a sheet of lined paper, because I did not have anything with a letterhead.
I said who I was. I said I had looked after Ethan on nights, from three weeks old.
I said I had a recording of her daughter’s voice from the eighth of December 2025.
I said I would bring it if she wanted it, and that if she did not, I would never contact her again.
She called my phone at twenty to seven in the morning on the thirtieth and said two words.
“Bring it.”
Victor bought the tickets. I kept both receipts and gave copies to my lawyer that same week.
She asked why. I said because one day somebody will ask me who paid for that flight, and I would rather hand over a photocopy than a memory.
She said that was the first thing I had ever done that she approved of without qualification.
We flew separately and stayed in different places. I want that in the record, flatly, because of what people later suggested.
The house on Vance Jackson is low brick with a carport and a lemon tree in a plastic pot that has no business being alive in January.
Chain-link fence. A hoop over the garage with no net on it.
Dolores Reyes is fifty-nine. She works in payroll for a school district. She has her daughter’s face, thirty years further on.
She did not offer me coffee for the first twenty minutes and I did not expect her to.
There was a photograph of Ethan at four months on the refrigerator, printed at a pharmacy.
I had one rule and had written it on my hand in the rental car.
Play it first. Talk after.
I put the laptop on her kitchen table on a folded tea towel because the table had a wobble.
I said the file identifier and the date out loud, and recorded myself saying it, in a stranger’s kitchen, with her watching.
She did not ask why. She said, “Go on.”
At 21:40 a door opens and a woman says Hola, gordito.
I am not going to describe that woman’s mother’s face. I looked at her hands, flat on the table, and kept looking at them.
Four minutes.
When it ended she said, “Again.”
We played it three times. The third time she said the words a half-second before her daughter did, the way you do with a song.
Then she got up and turned the tap on and filled a glass she did not drink.
“She called me on the thirtieth of November,” Dolores said.
I did not say anything. That is the single most useful skill I have.
“She asked me if she was going crazy.”
“She said she couldn’t breathe in that house. Only in that house. She said it out loud like it was a stupid thing to say.”
“And I said —”
She stopped and drank some of the water after all.
“I told her she was tired. I told her she had a baby and no help and a husband who was never home, and that of course she couldn’t breathe.”
“I told her to go back to the doctor and stop frightening herself.”
I have written down a great many sentences in two years. That is the one I would take back if I could take back one.
“She told me she had bought a ticket,” Dolores said. “The fourteenth. She asked me not to tell him.”
“Why not?”
Dolores put the glass down.
“Because he would have said it was nothing,” she said. “Not to be cruel. He would just have said it, in that voice, and she would have believed him.”
“She always believed him. That was the whole trouble with her.”
I wrote none of that down in front of her. I wrote all of it in the rental car with the engine running.
The kitchen clock ticked. Somewhere down the street a truck reversed.
“What do you want,” she said.
I told her. I did not soften it, because softening it takes four sentences instead of one and she would have heard me doing it.
I said we wanted to ask a court for permission to open her daughter’s grave.
She did not answer. She stood at the sink with her back to me and looked out at the carport for a long time.
Then she said, “Where is he.”
“Who?”
“Him.” She did not turn round. “You did not come here alone. He does not let people do things alone. He only lets them do them late.”
“He’s in a rental car at the end of the street,” I said. “You told him no. He’s been there since eleven.”
Dolores Reyes turned the tap off.
“Fourteen months,” she said.
Then she picked up the tea towel from under my laptop, folded it, put it on the rail and straightened it.
“Bring him in.”