“But you know their families,” Eleanor said. It wasn’t a question, and he heard that in her tone. “When they died,” she went on, “the police would have gathered their belongings and turned them over to next of kin.
“Most likely the jewelry is with wives or children now.” Daniel was quiet. He did know the families—not well, but enough.
Pittsburgh is a big city, but men like that tend to live in the same few neighborhoods and move in the same circles. He knew names. Knew addresses roughly. “You think they’ll just hand it over?” he asked at last.
“I don’t know,” Eleanor said honestly. “But we have to try.” She set down her mug and looked at him directly.
“Without you, I wouldn’t know where to start,” she said. “You’re needed in this. Not as the guilty party. As the one who knows the road.”
Daniel looked at her for a long second. Then he picked up his spoon and finished the oatmeal. They left the next morning. The bus to Pittsburgh departed at eight.
Eleanor took a small bag. Daniel took nothing but his jacket. At the stop he bought both tickets and shoved the change into his pocket. They sat side by side, and the bus pulled away, rocking over the back roads.
Daniel looked out the window the whole way. Trees gave way to fields, fields to suburban fences. White birches flashed past like pages in a book being flipped too fast.
Beside him sat a small older woman with a straight back who had found him tied up in the woods three weeks earlier. And now she was riding with him into the city to help fix what he had done. The thought was so strange he pushed it away several times, and it kept coming back.
Eleanor was quiet. She looked ahead, whispering something now and then—not to him, to herself, so softly he couldn’t make out the words. Praying, maybe. Or thinking. He didn’t ask.
Something in him began to shift during that ride, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the way furniture gets moved around in a room a few inches at a time. Nothing dramatic. Just enough that by the time the bus rolled into Pittsburgh, he was sitting differently than when he had boarded.
The first address he remembered clearly: a street in an older neighborhood, a brick apartment building with a green-painted entry door. A woman around forty-five opened it in a house robe with a dish towel over her shoulder. Clearly they had come at a bad time. She looked at Daniel with cool recognition, then at Eleanor with surprise.
“Good afternoon,” Eleanor said before the woman could speak. “My name is Eleanor Hayes. I’m from Mill Creek. May we come in for a minute?”
The woman looked at her. Something in Eleanor’s voice—not forceful, not pleading, just steady all the way down—did the work, and the woman stepped aside. The apartment smelled of fried onions and laundry detergent…
