Walter’s expression darkened. The old sharpness returning to his eyes. The look of a man who had once worn a badge and had never fully lost the instinct to protect what was right. “They won’t believe him,” he said firmly. “Not once the truth gets in front of them.” “How do you know that?” “Because I intend to make sure it does,” Walter said. “Whatever it takes.”
He didn’t yet know exactly how that promise would be kept. But he intended to spend the next six days finding out, and he meant to start that very night. After Josie left, Walter sat down heavily at the counter, thinking hard, running through everything he knew, everything he had.
There was the cassette tucked away at home in a shoe box on the closet shelf. The recording of a young trooper’s statement from twenty years back. Proof of the kind of man Daniel Callaway had been, though it wouldn’t speak directly to what was happening now. There was his own word for whatever that was worth against a family with the assistant dean’s office two floors up from the hearing room.
And there was Dorothy, who he suspected knew more than she was letting on, given how quiet she’d gone since the parking lot incident. He found her at the counter the next morning going through her usual routine. Coffee black with one sugar, crossword folded open beside her cup. “You’ve been unusually quiet,” Walter said, pouring her a refill she hadn’t asked for.
Dorothy glanced up at him. Something careful in her expression. “I have something,” she admitted finally. “I’ve been sitting on it, trying to decide the right way to handle it.” “Handle what?” She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out her old phone, setting it gently on the counter between them. “I’ve been recording things,” she said. “Most evenings for a few weeks now, propped against my purse, pointed toward the window. Didn’t think much would come of it. Then Tuesday happened.”
Walter’s eyes widened slightly. “You have the fall. Harold. The whole thing.” “I have it,” Dorothy said. “Clear as anything through the glass. Dalton backing into him. Him going down. Dalton laughing instead of helping.” Walter reached for the phone, but Dorothy pulled it back gently, holding it against her chest. “I want to give this to the committee myself,” she said. “At the hearing, not before.”
“Why wait? This could clear her name today.” Dorothy’s expression grew serious in a way Walter rarely saw from her. “Because if word gets out today that I have this,” she said, “there’s no telling what that boy’s father might do before the hearing even happens. Men like Marcus Reeve don’t lose quietly, Walter. They find ways to make inconvenient things disappear.”
Walter considered this and found uncomfortably that he couldn’t entirely disagree. “So what do you plan to do with it in the meantime?” he asked. “Keep it close,” Dorothy said. “Keep it hidden somewhere nobody would think to look.” “All right,” Walter said. “Your call.” That evening, Dorothy carried the phone home with her, wrapped carefully in a scarf at the bottom of her handbag, and told no one else where it was. It was a decision made out of love and out of eighty-two years of watching this town protect the wrong people when it mattered most.