Chapter 5: Petra Szabo Pays Her Debts

The Szabo garage sat at the bend where Mill Road turned to gravel, a corrugated metal building that had started its life as a barn and been persuaded, over twenty years of incremental modification, into something resembling a commercial auto-repair shop. The persuasion showed. One wall was still original barn board, weathered to the grey of old teeth. The hydraulic lift had been bolted to concrete poured directly over what had clearly been a dirt floor, and the concrete around the bolts had cracked in a way that suggested it had never fully forgiven the intrusion. A hand-painted sign above the roll-up door read SZABO & SON — AUTO REPAIR — HONEST WORK and below that, in smaller letters that might have been added later by a different hand: WE SPEAK ENGLISH.

Mara stood in the driveway at eight-fifteen on Wednesday morning and listened.

From inside the garage came the sound of a wrench applied with considerable personal feeling to a rusted bolt, followed by a word in what Mara was fairly sure was Hungarian, followed by the specific clatter of a tool dropped in disgust, retrieved, and applied again. The 1971 Buick Skylark's undercarriage was visible from the drive — a rust-patched horizon of differential housing and exhaust pipe — and beneath it, a pair of legs in oil-stained jeans and a pair of work boots that were too large by half a size and laced with the particular indifference of someone who had stopped caring about aesthetics around the fourth grade.