Chapter 3 - The Man Behind the Grocery Store
It took me most of the next day to find him. Our town wasn't big, and there weren't many places left for someone with a backpack and nowhere to sleep. I finally spotted him behind the grocery store, tearing bread for a small crowd of pigeons like he had nowhere else to be.
"You left a note with a name on it," I said, stopping a few feet away.
"I did."
"I said that name to my ex-husband, and he told me you're dangerous. So either you're someone I should be afraid of, or my ex-husband lies to me as easily as he used to."
The man didn't look up from the pigeons. "Which do you think it is?"
"I think you already know, and you're deciding right now whether I've earned the answer."
That made him look at me. He talked about Russell strangely — not the way you'd talk about a man who'd wronged a business partner, but the way you'd talk about someone you'd raised and then lost. There was an ache under the anger, like the two feelings had been living in the same house a long time.
"What did Russell tell you, during the divorce, about where that house came from?"
"His family's, before we married. I signed papers agreeing I had no claim to it."
"Did you read them?"
I thought of Russell's fingers tapping the signature line, the way he always did. "No."
A grief crossed the old man's face I hadn't expected from a stranger. "You weren't under that tree by accident, were you?" I said.
He didn't answer. He reached into his backpack, pulled out a worn leather wallet, and from it an old identification card, holding it out without a word.
I read the name. Looked at him. Looked at the card again.
"You're Walter."
"Yes."
"You came looking for me, and decided the best way to introduce yourself was a storm and a note under my doormat."
"It was the only way I could think of that didn't start with you not believing me."
I wanted to shake it out of him. "Then tell me how you know Russell."
May you like
He put the wallet away slowly, like it cost him something to close it. "Not yet. I know I owe you that. But words are cheap in this family, Diane — ask Russell, ask me, you'll get two different versions and no way to tell which one's true. Get me in a room with someone who writes things down and holds people to them. Then I'll say it once, where it counts, and you won't have to take it on faith."
I wanted to shake it out of him right there behind the dumpsters. But it was the first thing anyone in this whole mess had said that sounded less like a performance and more like the truth costing him something to hand over.
