She was sitting on the edge of a chair, with her feet not quite touching the floor, and she had the look she gets when she is concentrating on a hard sum.
“Okay,” said Wynne.
So he told us.
It was the second week of November, seven years ago, and it had been raining for two days. He was thirty-one and taught fifth grade in town, and on Tuesday and Thursday nights he was a volunteer with the county fire department, because his father had been, and his grandfather.
At about ten at night, the pager went off.
A car had gone off County Road 12 at the bend by the old quarry. A truck had been coming the other way, on the wrong side, with its lights out, and the car had gone down the bank and into a drainage ditch full of water.
“It was my first real call,” said Mr. Amory. “I’d done two chimney fires and a cat.”
He told us what he saw.
A small blue car on its roof in a foot of water. A woman in the front seat, who he could see at once was beyond anyone’s help, and who he thought, in the first awful minute, was alone. And then a man, in the driver’s seat, pinned under the dashboard, conscious, saying very clearly, over and over, one word.
