"He just called, Mr. Mullins. They got ahold of him on his cell phone at work. He's on his way home."

Nick looked down again, as though he understood.

"He's still at the Motorola plant, then?" he said, recalling the reporting he'd done on the earlier Ferris stories.

"We're both still working, Mr. Mullins, trying to pay off the lawyer's bills," she said, only now letting an edge into her voice.

Nick shifted his weight. He was still standing below her, looking up now into her face. He thought he'd remembered her being in her mid-twenties on the documents he'd dug up on the Ferris family. But the crow's-feet at the corners of her eyes and the pull of skin from her cheekbones did not fit that age. He felt somehow responsible, but could not leave it alone.

"Was the phone call about Steven?" he finally asked and she simply nodded in the positive and looked off into the distance behind him. Again Nick let silence surround them, second-guessing whether she was relieved or saddened. He finally took a step back.

"May I wait for David to get here?" he said.

She fixed her dry blue eyes on his. "He doesn't want to talk with you, Mr. Mullins. Enough has been said," she said. "I know that people can't understand it, why he stood up for his brother after what he did to those children. I don't know that I even understand it."

She looked down for the first time, a crack in her show of defiance.

"But David still loved his brother, sir. And now we have a funeral to plan." Nick nodded his head again, this time in deference, and continued stepping backward.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Ferris," he said and then closed his lips around the air that had started behind his teeth before he could say, Thank you.

By the time he opened his car door, she was gone. He climbed in and the spiral wire of his notebook caught the fabric of the seat. He had not taken it from his back pocket.