THE CALL THAT CAME AT TWENTY TO TEN

The phone rang at twenty to ten on a Tuesday night in September.

I was in the garage with the roller door half down and a ball game on the radio that I was not really listening to. There was a carburettor in pieces on a tray in front of me and my hands were black to the wrist. I remember that because of what I did next, which was wipe them on a rag that made them worse, and then pick up the phone anyway.

The number was one I did not know. Area code from three states over.

At my age you learn that a call from a number you do not know at that hour is one of four things. It is a wrong number. It is somebody selling something. It is somebody in trouble. Or it is somebody ringing to tell you that a person you used to know has died.

I have had all four. Three of them you can hear in the first two words.

This one I could not.

"Is this Graves?"

A man's voice. Middle-aged. Not drunk. Not crying. Careful in a way that told me he had thought about this call for some time before he made it, and had probably put it off twice.

"It is."

Then he did not say anything for about three seconds, and I let him not say anything, because in my experience the gap before a man tells you a thing is where the truth about the thing actually lives.

"There's a girl," he said.

I set the rag down.

"She's in a hospital in Colorado. They're saying she fell down the stairs."

I want to be exact about what happened in my head, because people have asked me about it since and I have not always answered them honestly.

Nothing happened in my head.

That is the truth. There was no flash of rage. No decision. I have been told that what I have is a temper, and that it is the reason for a number of things in my life that I would take back if the world worked that way, but that night there was no temper in it at all. What there was, was a kind of stillness, the way a room goes still when the compressor in the corner shuts off and you only notice the noise after it stops.

"They're saying," I repeated.

"Yeah."

"You said they're saying. Not she said. Not the doctors found. They're saying."

Another pause. Longer.

"Yeah."

"And you don't believe it."

"No," he said. "I don't."

I did not ask him for proof.

I know how that sounds. I know exactly how that sounds, and I have had it put to me by a lawyer, by a journalist, and once by a judge, and I gave all three of them the same answer I am going to give here.

If I had asked for proof, he would have given me something. A photograph, maybe. A name. Something that could be argued about. And then we would have spent four days arguing about it, the way people do, and by the time we had finished arguing the thing would have been over and settled and filed, because that is what those four days are for.

A story only needs a few days of nobody looking at it too hard. After that it sets, like concrete.

So I did not ask about the stairs and I did not ask who he thought had done it and I did not ask him how he knew. I asked the only question that changes what a man is supposed to do about a thing like that.

"Is she alone?"

That was when he took the longest pause of the whole call.

I could hear him breathing. Somewhere behind him a television was on in another room, and a door closed, and a car went past outside his window.

"Yes," he said.

I stood there in my own garage with a carburettor in pieces on a tray and a radio talking to nobody, and I looked at the wall.

There is a photograph on that wall. It has been there so long that the paper has gone the colour of weak tea and the tape at the corners has been replaced twice. It is a picture of a girl in a yellow dress standing on a kerb with her arms out for balance. She is eight in it. She would be thirty-four now.

I do not talk about that photograph and I am not going to start here.

I said, "Where in Colorado?"

He told me the name of the town. It meant nothing to me. I wrote it on the edge of a cardboard box with a carpenter's pencil, along with the name of the hospital, and then I asked him for one more thing.

"Her name."

"Lily."

"Lily what?"

"I'd rather not," he said. "Not yet. Not on a phone."

Most people would have pushed. I did not, because a man who will not say a surname on a phone is a man who has already worked out that the surname is the problem, and that told me more than the surname would have.

"All right," I said.

"Are you—" he started, and then he stopped, because he did not know how to finish it.

I finished it for him.

"Go to bed," I said. "You did the right thing. You won't hear from me again."

He never did.

I do not know who he was. I have a guess, and my guess has changed twice in the years since, and I have deliberately never tried to confirm any version of it, because the man was frightened enough to ring a stranger at ten at night rather than walk into a police station, and if he had wanted me to know who he was he would have told me.

I put the phone face down on the bench.

Then I stood there for a while longer.

I want to be honest about the next part, because it is the part that gets told wrong. People like the version where I got on the bike that night and rode out into the dark on my own. It makes a better picture.

What I actually did was sweep up. I put the carburettor parts in a coffee can and labelled the lid with masking tape so I would know which engine they came out of when I got back. I pulled the roller door down and locked it. I went inside and made a pot of coffee and sat at the kitchen table with a legal pad and worked out how far it was and how many fuel stops it would take and what the weather was doing over the pass, and I wrote all of that down in columns.

Because the thing I had just decided to do was going to involve other people's time, other people's fuel, other people's jobs and marriages and sleep. And a man who asks for that had better have done the arithmetic first.

I did not sleep.

At four in the morning I picked up the phone again and I sent one message to a list of one hundred and eleven numbers.

It said:

*Ride.*

Nothing else. No town. No hospital. No reason.

By seven that morning I had ninety-four replies.

Not one of them was a question.