Chapter 10 — THE PLUG

The compressor at Praeger's did not have a switch.

There was no breaker for it either, because the breaker had been mislabelled in 1994 and everybody knew the panel was wrong.

It had a plug.

A large four-prong twist-lock plug on a heavy cord that ran up the wall to a receptacle at about shoulder height by the corner of the box, and to run that unit you put the plug in and turned it clockwise a quarter, and to stop it you turned it back.

That was it.

That was the entire system.

I found out who turned it on eleven days after the arrest, in the parking lot of the Marathon station on Route 9, at about half past eight at night, because Ren Colquitt came and stood by the driver's door of my truck while I was putting gas in it and did not say anything for a long time.

Then she said, "It was me."

I said, "What was."

She said, "Monday night."

She had come back after close.

She had come back because Gus had told her on the Monday afternoon, in that flat way of his, that if the county wrote them up on refrigeration there would be a placard in the window and if there was a placard in the window in September then there was no November, and she had stood there and understood that sentence completely, because she was the one whose name was on one out of four of those log entries.

So she came back at nine.

She put the plug in and turned it a quarter.

And she stood there in the dark in her own workplace and did the same arithmetic Gus did on the Tuesday morning and got a different answer, and her answer was: it will run overnight, it will read cold on Tuesday, and I will pull the plug on Tuesday night, and the kids are not in there until three in the morning anyway, and it is eleven hours, and it is only a room, and it doesn't get that cold.

She told them.

She told both of them, at three in the morning, when she brought them in.

She said, "Don't shut the door tonight, baby, the cold's on."

She said it to Nora.

Nora was five.

And Nora — and I know this because Nora told the guardian ad litem and the guardian ad litem told the court — Nora said it to Sam.

And Sam was four, and it was three o'clock in the morning, and he went in with his blanket the way he had gone in one hundred and nineteen times, and somewhere between the doorway and the cot his foot caught a yellow plastic wedge.

Ren stood by my truck in that parking lot and she said, "I did it."

And then she said the thing that made me not go to Detective Teale on the Wednesday morning, or on the Thursday, or on any of the three hundred and some mornings after that.

She said, "If I tell them, they don't give him back."