Chapter 63: Twelve Ardmore Terrace
On the thirty-first of March I went out to Route 9.
Not to the barracks. To the other end.
The 14 to Danforth, the 22 to the county line, and then a mile and a quarter on foot along a shoulder with no sidewalk.
It took two hours and ten minutes each way and I had never done it in six years and eleven months.
I want to say what is there, because I had built something in my head and it was wrong.
There is a guardrail.
There is a mile marker, 47, on a green post.
There is a drainage grate at the edge of the asphalt, eighteen inches by thirty, set flush.
The bars of that grate run parallel to the direction of travel.
That is the kind of grate that takes a bicycle wheel.
Some counties replaced all of them thirty years ago. Some did not.
I noted it. I did not conclude anything from it.
It has nothing to do with my case and everything to do with what kind of road it is.
There is nothing else there.
No marker. No paint. No flowers, plastic or otherwise.
Nobody had tied anything to the fence.
I do not know what I expected. Something.
There was nothing, and there had been nothing for six years, while people drove over that spot at fifty-five miles an hour.
I stood on the gravel for eleven minutes and did not say anything, out loud or otherwise, because anything I said there would have been for me.
Then I walked back a half mile to Ardmore Terrace, which is a road of eight houses that comes off Route 9 at an angle.
Number 12 is the third one. Yellow. A carport with a chest freezer in it.
The mailbox says REYES in stick-on letters.
Two letters have been replaced in a different font, which means it has been there a long time and somebody keeps fixing it.
There was a car in the drive and a light on in the front room at four in the afternoon.
That means somebody old, or somebody who works nights.
I stood at the end of that driveway for a long time.
Here is what I wanted to do.
I wanted to knock on the door and say thank you to a woman of sixty-eight who went out in a bathrobe in March.
I did not do it, and I want to explain why.
It is not delicacy. It is procedure.
Sylvia Reyes is a witness in a case I intend to attack.
If I knock on her door, then in eighteen months a prosecutor will argue that this whole thing is a convicted felon's construction.
And the first question anybody asks her will be: did the petitioner contact you.
And the answer will be yes, and everything she ever says after that will have my fingerprints on it.
A witness you have touched is a witness you have spent.
Ruth Ahearn told me a version of that in a four-minute phone call.
I did not understand it until I stood in that driveway with my hands in my pockets.
So I turned around and walked a mile and a quarter back to the bus stop.
On the way I passed the grate again and I stopped and looked at it a second time.
Then I went home.
That night I did the only thing I am allowed to do with a witness.
I documented that she exists.
I took an index card. I wrote her name, her age as given in the report, her address, and the page and exhibit number where she appears.
Under that I wrote: SOURCE — STATE POLICE SUPPLEMENTAL NARRATIVE, EXH. 10, P. 207. OBTAINED FROM CERTIFIED CLERK COPY.
That line matters. If you ever have to explain how you know a thing, you had better be able to point at a document and not at a memory.
Then at the bottom of the card, in capitals, I wrote three lines.
DO NOT CONTACT.
NOT BY ME.
NOT EVER.
I put the card in a folder, wrote WITNESSES on the tab, and there was one card in it.
Then I got out the pad with the four lines on it, which by then had seven crossings-out, and read the third line again.
The third line said there was a fact in the file that I did not think anyone had told him.
Before that afternoon it was something I believed.
After that afternoon it was something I had checked: an address, a mailbox, a light on at four in the afternoon, a woman who is still alive and still there.
I crossed out “I do not think” and wrote “I do not believe,” which is not better, and then put it back the way it was.
But I knew the sentence was true now, and there is a difference in how you write a sentence you have stood in front of.