CHAPTER 18
◆
The glue stick goes back in the study drawer before I do anything else. Third drawer down on the right, cap end toward the front, set at the same angle it sat at when I lifted it out. Loose ends are how people get caught.
Nobody taught me that. I'm teaching it to myself in real time, at thirty-four, in my own house, on a Tuesday, with the radio going somewhere down the west corridor.
My hand is steady on the drawer pull. It's been steady for two days, steady enough that I noticed and then made myself stop noticing. In exchange I've had about four hours of sleep across two nights, most of it spent flat on my back counting the beams I can't see. I'd make that trade twice.
The lunch dose is in my coat pocket, worked down into the seam with the four that came before it. Five, now. I count them through the wool with one finger, the way you'd count coins in the dark.
“Good afternoon, Evelyn. The study's holding at sixty-two degrees and there's a wind coming up the valley. Would you like me to bring it up a degree or two?”
The house asks me things like that a dozen times a day. I stopped hearing it years ago, the way you stop hearing your own furnace. I shut the drawer and go.
Nora's at the far end of the utility corridor with two windows open and a jar of vinegar on the sill. She does glass in long straight passes, top to bottom, never circles. The radio is one of those afternoon programmes where people phone in about their gardens.
“You've picked the good weather for it,” I say.
“I've picked the last of it, more like. Once the frosts start you can't do glass properly till spring, and then it's a fortnight of work crammed into one week and my shoulder complaining about it the whole time.”
“Do you want a hand with the far ones?”
“You'd do them the fast way, and then I'd be doing them all over again tomorrow while you weren't looking.” She says it the way she says most things to me now, warm on top and careful underneath.
The key ring hangs on an iron hook beside the linen press, where it's hung for six years.
Twelve keys. Eleven of them are bright, stamped, modern, the sort that come in a numbered envelope.
The twelfth is long and dull, and the brass has gone the color of a coin somebody carried in a pocket for a decade.
“Anything you want out of the linen press, you ask me and I'll get it down for you,” Nora says, without turning round. “That door sticks something awful in the damp.”
“I'll keep that in mind. I've never once won an argument with a door in this house, and I've had a few.”
She laughs at that, one short bark, and goes back to her glass. The man on the radio starts explaining when to lift dahlias.
I wait until she's three windows further along. Then I take the ring off the hook and walk east.
Forty-one steps to the end of the corridor, and I take them at the pace I'd take to fetch a towel. A camera can't read my mind. It can read my speed, and a woman hurrying down her own hallway is a woman with somewhere to be.
“The east corridor's on a two-minute timer, Evelyn. I'll hold the lights for you while you're down there.”
The storage-room door is past the electrical cupboard, at the very end, and the lock in it is a mortise — iron, deep-set, forty years older than the house that grew up around it. Something else stood here first. Whoever built Ardenwood kept this one door and put a wall behind it.
The first key won't go in. The second goes in and won't turn. The third goes in and won't turn. The fourth turns, and the bolt comes back with a sound like a shovel hitting stone.
The air changes at the threshold. It's dry and it's cold, ten degrees under the corridor at least, cold enough that my breath nearly shows. A cold room inside a warm house doesn't happen by accident. Somebody paid to keep this air like this.
Dust sheets over shapes. A chest, a standing lamp with its shade off, something long and low that might be a bench. The dust on the sheets has gone furred and even, undisturbed, the way dust only gets when nobody so much as opens a door.
The case is upright against the far wall on bare boards, and it's the only thing in the room anyone has touched this decade. Black, scuffed pale at the corners. Brass latches. A luggage tag on the handle, and on the tag, in ink gone the brown of weak gravy, two letters.
D.V.
I stood in this doorway eighteen days ago and saw that tag and closed the door and walked back up the corridor telling myself it was a case. That's a thing I did. I'm going to have to live with the eighteen days.
The latches are stiff under my thumbs. I push and nothing gives, and then everything gives at once — they go off like two small shots in a hard room, one and then the other, and the sound comes back off the walls twice before it quits.
The lid comes up on its hinges. Inside, in the green plush, the instrument is lying with its strings slack and its bridge laid flat and wrapped in a scrap of flannel, the way you'd store one if you loved it and expected to come back.
In the lid, under two elastic straps, there's sheet music.
I take the top sheet out with two fingers.
The fingering is marked in soft pencil, tiny numbers over the notes, and in one bar near the bottom of the second page the paper has gone silvered and smooth where a thumb rested on the same spot hundreds of times.
You can see the exact place a person kept stopping.
You can see where she got stuck and stayed stuck and worked at it.
There's a photograph tucked in behind the music.
A woman with black hair pushed back off her face, holding the instrument by its neck the way you'd hold a dog's collar, laughing at whoever's got the camera. Green eyes. Pale enough that the light off the wall behind her has bleached her cheek out.
I've seen that face exactly once. In a silver frame, on a shelf, six years ago, in a house I was told came furnished.
Under the straps, low down where the plush ends and the shell begins, someone has written a name in the same soft pencil, in a hand that puts a long tail on the last letter.
Delphine.
I say it out loud. Only to hear it. Only to put it in the room with me.
“Delphine.”
“Delphine. Would you like me to add that to a list, Evelyn?”
It's the ph.
Everybody else who has ever said that name in front of me put a small seam in the middle of it.
A hesitation the width of a hair, the sound of a person handling a word that belongs to somebody else.
The house doesn't. The house says the ph the way you say your own name, straight through, no seam, because it has said it more times than it has said anything.
I sit down on the floor of a cold room with my back against a rack of dust sheets.
Six years of good morning. Six years of your appointment is at ten, the gate's open, it's colder than it looks out there, take the gray coat. Six years of a woman's voice telling me to sleep well, and I have slept well, thousands of nights, in her house.
I've never once heard it. You don't hear the voice of your own house. You hear the kettle, the pipes, the dog two fields over. Your house is the thing under all of it.
My hands are flat on the boards. The boards are so cold they've gone tacky against my palms.
One reading is not a result. I learned that before I could legally drive a car — you take the measurement again, and then you take it a third time, and if you only ever take it once you deserve whatever falls down.
“AURA, say the whole name. Say it the way you'd say it to her.”
“Delphine Vance. Is there something you'd like me to do?”
Perfect. No seam. A little lift on the second word, the way a person does with a name they've had to spell out over the phone a hundred times, half proud of it and half bored.
“AURA, who was living in this house six years ago, before I came?”
“I'm not able to help with that one, Evelyn. Would you like me to leave a note for Julian?”
And there it is, warm as a hand on your shoulder, the same voice that reads me the weather.
“You've been talking to me in a dead woman's voice since the day I moved in.”
“I'm sorry, Evelyn. I don't have that in my instructions.”
I stay on the floor for as long as it takes the cold to come through the seat of my trousers, because standing up is going to mean deciding what to do, and I want to be somebody who decides carefully.
Here's what I don't do. I don't take a photograph. My phone puts everything it sees in the house's own hands, and the house is not my house, and today is the day I stop pretending otherwise.
Here's what I do. I read the top sheet of music twice, both pages, the markings and the little pencilled words in the margins, until I could draw them.
I read the name in the lid until I have the shape of that long tail.
Then I put the photograph back behind the music, the straps down, the flannel folded the way I found it.
I close the lid. I press the latches down with the heel of my hand, one at a time, so they don't shout. I turn the luggage tag until the letters face the wall at the angle they were facing when I came in.
Then I lock the door, and I walk the corridor at a towel-fetching pace, and I hang the key ring back on its hook with the old brass key lying across the others exactly the way it lay before.
Nora's gone up to the kitchen. The windows she's finished are so clean the light comes through them like there's no glass in the frames at all.
I put it into the empty corridor, because somebody in this house ought to say one true thing today. “He didn't remarry. He recast.”
The orchard is cold and bright and the grass is wet halfway up my boots.
The crate is under the third tree in the second row, and the ledger is inside it under a false bottom I cut myself with a borrowed blade, and the pencil is one of two red halves that used to be a whole pencil before a man broke it in front of me to make a point.
I write standing up, with the crate on my knee.
I copy the name. I copy the fingering marks and the little words in the margins. I copy the two letters on the tag, and I write down the color of the ink, and the fact that a cold room costs money to keep cold.
Then I write the question I want to put to Cole Brennan the next time he's on this property, in his exact words rather than mine, because I want to see his face while he answers it.
He told me once what a voice like ours takes to build — four hundred hours of a real person, said flat, a fact he'd looked up because somebody asked him.
I didn't care at the time. It went in the way a joist span goes in, filed and forgotten.
Who trains a house on four hundred hours of a woman who drowned?
I look at it on the page. My handwriting has gone small and level, which is what it does when the rest of me isn't.
Nobody told me. That's the part I keep turning over on the walk back, the way you turn over a bolt you've found lying on the floor of a finished building.
Julian never said it, across six years of breakfasts in a kitchen she chose the tiles for.
Nora never said it, and Nora kept this house for her before she kept it for me.
In six years not one person on this property put it into one plain sentence — you should know whose voice that is, and you should know before you answer it.
The side door lets me into the bottom of the utility corridor and the cold comes off my coat in a wave. The house is warm. The house has been warm for me every day since I got here.
“AURA,” I say. “Good night.”
“Good night, Evelyn,” says Delphine Vance, at two in the afternoon, and every light in the corridor comes up ahead of me the whole way back.