Page 69 of Havoc

Somebody did it in a hurry and they weren't any good at it, and then they hung it back up.

"Do you have a knife now," she says.

"In the car."

She's already up.

We do it on the hood with the dome light on and the doors open and the mosquitoes comin' in.

I get the point of the knife under the first hand-stitch and it gives easy, twenty-two years of humidity in that thread, and I go along the whole four inches and the panel opens up like a mouth.

She puts two fingers in and brings it out.

One sheet of paper. Folded in four. Ledger paper, the green-and-buff kind with the printed columns, and it's gone the color of tea and it's soft as cloth at the folds and it's about to come apart in her hands.

She opens it on the hood one fold at a time.

"That's his writing," she says.

"You sure?"

"He wrote my name on the back of every school photograph I ever had." Her voice ain't doing anything. "Yes."

Here's what's on it, and I've read it eleven times since.

Top left, in a hand that runs uphill and takes up too much room: G.K. — SEPT '04.

Then the columns.

Three entries above the one that matters and I couldn't tell you what any of 'em are, four figures each, somethin' about a hauler and somethin' about Beaumont.

Then, on the fourth line down:

14 SEPT — ARCENEAUX (R.) — 164,000 — REC'D BY —

And that's where it quits.

The sheet was folded in four and it sat folded in a leather lining in Louisiana for twenty-two years, and the crease has done what a crease does. Went soft, went brown, went through. There's a split in the paper right along that fold and the split runs straight through the receiving line, and where the name was there's a hole about the size of a grain of rice with the paper curled back from it on both sides.

What's left is the tail end.

Two letters after the hole.

g e

That's it. That's all of it. Everything before the g is gone.

Below it, in the same hand, pressed harder:

SETTLED. NOT TO BOOK.

And that's the last line on the page.

Lennox has both hands on the hood on either side of it.

"Fourteenth of September," she says.

"Yeah."