"I know."
"I'll tell her. It's my mess. I'll tell her after I dig the car out. You shouldn't have to—"
"Wes." Delia's voice was steady, but her knuckles had gone white around the velvet. "Go dig out your car. And bring my gloves when you come back, would you? They're in my coat. In the hall closet. The inside pocket."
---
The hall closet smelled of mothballs and wet wool. Delia's long cream coat hung between his mother's good camel coat and his father's old red-and-black hunting jacket, which nobody had moved in two years. Wes found her gloves in the right-hand pocket, brown leather, soft as butter, and he would have stopped there, except that she had said the inside pocket, and he was a man who did what he was told when he was frightened.
There was a small flat wallet in the inside pocket, the kind girls carried bus tokens in. It fell open in his hand. Inside it, behind a library card and a photograph of two large boys in wrestling singlets, was a slip of pink paper, folded in half.
He did not mean to unfold it. His fingers did it on their own.
It was a laundry ticket. Cheap pink stock, gone soft and fuzzy as felt, the kind of paper that had been through a wash and a dryer and come out the other side changed. Across the top, in faded purple print, it said LAVERIE DES MARTYRS, and underneath that there was a number, 47, and a date stamped crookedly in blue: 24 AVR 1974.
He turned it over.