The person who came to see me on Wednesday introduced themself as Ellis Dunlow, a liaison with the Federal Security Inquiry Bureau, and asked if we could talk in the shop after I'd locked the front door. I appreciated that more than I expected to, not having it happen in front of customers.
"I'm not here to tell you anything about the case," Ellis said, setting a small notebook on the counter between the bread racks. "I'm here to ask what you saw. Firsthand. Nothing you were told, nothing you've put together since."
"That's a short list," I said.
"Good. Short is useful."
I told them about deliveries, about the hours Martin kept, about the tomatoes, feeling foolish saying tomatoes to a federal liaison but saying it anyway because it was true.
Then Ellis asked about visitors, and I started to describe a man who'd come by Martin's house three or four times that spring, always on a Thursday, always parking a block down instead of in the driveway, and I heard myself say, "He was probably a customer of Martin's, Martin did some bookkeeping on the side," before I'd checked whether that was something I knew or something I'd decided.
Ellis didn't write anything down yet. They just looked at me, patient, the way you'd wait out a kettle.
"Did you see him make a purchase. Hand over cash, a check, anything."
I thought back, honestly this time, the way I hadn't let myself a moment before. "No," I said slowly. "I never saw that. I saw him go in the side door. I never saw him come out with anything, or leave anything. I just assumed, because why else would a stranger keep coming back."
"That's a reasonable assumption," Ellis said. "It's also not what you saw."
"No," I agreed. "It isn't."
It unsettled me more than I let on, how easily I'd dressed a guess in the clothes of a fact, how I'd have repeated it to someone else inside the hour and believed myself a careful witness the whole time.
"Is Tess in trouble," I asked, because I had to ask it even knowing what the answer would likely be.
"I can't discuss that with you." Ellis's voice wasn't unkind, just precise. "I can tell you that I'm asking the same kind of questions of a lot of people on that street, and that what I collect gets weighed by people who aren't me."
"That's not a no."
"It's not a yes either. It's what I'm able to say."
I wanted, badly, for Ellis to tell me something that would let me stop turning this over at night, some sentence that would clear Tess the way a receipt clears a purchase, and I understood, sitting there in my own closed shop with flour still under my nails, that no such sentence was coming, not that day and maybe not ever.
"Can I ask you something," I said, as Ellis was closing the notebook. "If I'd told you the man was a customer, flat out, no hedging, would you have written it down as fact?"
"I might have. People do it all the time. It's why I ask the follow-up."
"Then I'm glad you asked the follow-up."
"So am I," Ellis said, and for the first time something like warmth moved across their face, brief, there and gone. "Most people don't like correcting themselves in front of a stranger with a notebook."
"I didn't like it either," I admitted. "But I liked it better than being wrong on the record."
Ellis left a card and no promises, and I sat a long while after, thinking about how much of my certainty about Martin Vey, and about my own daughter-shaped feelings for Tess, had been built the exact same way, a guess wearing the coat of a fact, worn so long I'd stopped checking what was underneath it.