15. Carrington
CARRINGTON
Carrington closed the folder at six o'clock while her acquisitions counsel was still talking.
Devika was going through the numbers. Three of the lots at the price they had already agreed on.
The fourth at whatever the fourth required, and if the woman would not sell at all, then renting the corner from her instead and building around it.
Eighteen months of paying for the block before anybody could put a shovel in the ground.
It was a good plan. Carrington could have finished it for her by the second sentence.
The lamp over the table cast a hard line of light across the maps. In January, she would have driven down there the same afternoon, sat with an eighty-one-year-old woman for an hour with no lawyer and no paperwork, come out having bought the place, and been pleased with herself the whole way back.
"Ms. Cole," Devika said. "Do you want the last part again?"
"Yes."
Devika repeated it with no impatience in her voice. "She agreed to meet. Tuesday or Wednesday, at the shop, forty minutes. But she won't sit down with counsel. She wants whoever will sign for it."
"Send Agatha," Carrington said.
"For the meeting?" Devika said.
"For all of it."
Devika waited two seconds. "Agatha Whitlock is a lawyer."
"She's a very good one."
"The owner asked for you," Devika said. "I spent two days getting her to agree to sit down at all."
"She can take the meeting or leave it."
"All right," Devika said.
Devika wrote it down. She straightened the maps and put the elastic around them.
"I'll move the Thursday meeting to nine in the morning," she said. "If that's easier."
"Nine is fine."
Devika picked up the stack and held the door. "I'll tell her Wednesday,” she said. "That gives me a day to brief Agatha."
Carrington walked down the hall to her office and lifted her coat off the back of the chair. Then she took her car keys out of the drawer instead of calling down for the car, and she did not tell Nadia where she was going.
The ridge road followed the coast a mile inland, and she was on it before the light began to fade, driving with the radio off and both hands on the wheel.
Past the water tower, the cemetery road came up on the right.
Clara had hated that cemetery. She had said so at their mother's funeral, standing in the wind on a hill with no trees or shade on it. And Carrington had buried Clara up there anyway. She did not slow down. The turn was on the left, between two mailboxes on the same post, and she took it and drove down the gravel to Clara’s house.
Roses had grown and wrapped all over the trellis at the end of the porch and gone leggy without anybody to cut them back.
The herbs along the path had bolted, and they stood dry and waist-high in their beds.
The bird feeder hung on its hook at the corner of the porch, empty, the same as it had been on the day of Clara's funeral.
Carrington let herself in with a key from her keyring.
She had told the maintenance service to keep the house at fifty-five degrees so nothing froze, and they had kept it consistent since January.
She stood in the hall, wearing a thin suit, and within a minute, her feet were cold through the soles of her shoes.
Circulars sat on the hall table where the cleaner left whatever came.
Clara's coats were still on the hooks, three of them, and a scarf over the top of the newel post.
The stairs at the end of the hall climbed into the dark.
The room that had been Grace's was the first door at the top, and Clara's was the one after it.
Carrington had been up there once, in January, filling two suitcases and a laundry basket with her niece's clothes while Nadia held the bags open for her. She hadn’t been up since. She stayed on the ground floor.
She turned into the kitchen first and stopped at the sink.
The window over it looked straight down the length of the porch rail at the feeder.
Clara had stood here with her hands in the water looking at that feeder every day she had lived in this house.
A chair had been pulled out from the table and never pushed back in.
The study was the second door on the left.
Books stood two deep on every shelf, with two more stacks on the floor beside the desk, spines out, no order to any of it.
A field guide to shorebirds lay across the top of one stack with a bus ticket in it for a bookmark.
A mug sat on the corner of the desk mat with a dark ring dried into the bottom.
Grace's school photograph from the year before leaned against the foot of the lamp, the one with the blue background and the crooked collar.
On the wall by the window, a paper calendar hung open, still showing January. Somebody had written a dentist's appointment in the box of the fourteenth, in handwriting Carrington would have recognized anywhere.
The cleaner came every two weeks and did only the counters and the floors, leaving everything else alone. Carrington had told her not to move anything. Dust had settled over the top of the desk in a soft, even layer.
Over the back of the desk chair was a green cardigan with the elbows gone thin. It had been there since January, too, and nobody had moved it since.
Carrington pulled the chair out and sat down in it.
It was set low; Clara was three inches shorter than her. Her knees came up higher than they should have, and the desk was too high in front of her. She had to reach for the edge of it.
Carrington leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. Then she sat back into it, and the cardigan bunched up between her shoulder blades, thick and lumpy, and it did not press flat the way a cushion would.
She wanted to put on the cardigan, to slip her arms in the same Clara would have. She kept both hands flat on her knees until the urge passed.
She had been in this room four times in her life. Twice for a Christmas, once for a weekend she had cut short, and once on the day of the funeral, standing just inside the door with a glass in her hand and her coat still on, for eleven minutes.
Her phone rang in her coat pocket at ten past seven.
"Ms. Cole, it's Madeline Ives," the agent said. "You said tonight."
"Go on."
"Two showings since March. Neither came back. Both of them told me the same thing out in the driveway before they got in the car. It's somebody's house." Madeline stopped there for a second. "It's the best-built house on that road, and it still looks like somebody lives there."
"What are you asking me for?"
"A decision. Let me bring in a company to empty it and furnish it properly, and I'll have an offer on it in six weeks. Or take it off the market and try again in the fall, when I'll be telling you the same thing I'm telling you now."
Carrington looked at the mug on the desk mat.
"Take it off the market," she said.
Madeline didn't answer for a second. "All right. Can I ask what changed?"
"Nothing changed."
"Then I'll say the rest of it anyway, because that's what you pay me for. You're paying the taxes and the insurance and a cleaner every two weeks on a house nobody even lives in. Another year of that is real money out of the trust, and the trust belongs to that little girl."
"I'm aware."
"I know you are," Madeline said. "That's what makes it a strange decision."
"It is."
"If it's the idea of emptying out your sister's belongings that's stopping you, I can have two women do it who will be meticulous and throw nothing out. You can stand there and watch them do it. It takes a day."
"It isn't the emptying."
"Then I'll ask once more and stop. Do you want to give me a reason for the file?"
"No," Carrington said. "Take it off tonight."
"Fine. Tonight," Madeline said, and let her go.
Carrington laid the phone face down on the desk and stayed where she was. Outside the window, the light had left the grass and was still on the top of the trellis. She sat there until it left the trellis too.
She left the drawers shut and the mug where it was, and she did not touch the cardigan. When she got up, she pushed the chair back in exactly as far as it had been.
On the way out, she stopped at the bin by the porch steps where Clara had kept the bird seed.
The sack inside had gone damp over the winter and clumped hard in the bottom, and she broke it up until it ran loose again.
The feeder hung high, and she had to work the cap off one-handed with the other hand full.
She poured two double handfuls in through the top. Some of it missed and ran down the outside of the tube into the grass. She pressed the cap back on until it was secured, brushed her palms clean against each other, and locked the front door behind her.
In the car, she put the key into the ignition but did not turn it. One light was burning in the hall where she had left it, and the porch was dark. She sat there for about two minutes. Then she started the engine and drove home.
She got back to the estate at twenty past nine and let herself in through the courtyard door.
Everything in the kitchen was where it was every night, the blue binder squared on the end of the counter and the chef's list for the morning underneath it.
The bottle from Sunday was by the sink with the cork pushed back in.
Carrington took a glass down and poured it half full. She stood at the island and looked at it. Then she drank all of it, left the glass in the sink, and took the stairs.
Grace's door stood open a few inches, and the nightlight was on in the socket beside the shut closet. Carrington stopped there long enough to hear her breathing, then walked on to the end of the landing.
Her own lamp was on. Lucy was up against the headboard with both sleeves shoved past her elbows, reading a paperback gone soft at the corner from being carried around. She looked up and hooked a finger into the page. The mark on her shoulder above the neck of her shirt had been there since Monday.
"She finished it," Lucy said.
"The fox book?"
"Yes, tonight. Six pages in one go, no help on any of the words." Lucy closed the book on her finger. "She did the voice at the end. It's still terrible and she knows it, but she does it anyway."
"Good," Carrington said.
"She asked if you'd be back before she went to sleep."
"What did you tell her?"
"That I didn't know."
"Does she want to read the ocean book next?"
"She's been keeping it on top of the fox one for two weeks so it doesn't get forgotten," Lucy said. "We start it tomorrow."
Carrington stayed by the door with the coat still folded over her forearm.
She wanted to be in that bed with Lucy's arm over her, which was what she had driven home for.
She hung the coat on the back of the door instead and sat down on the end of the mattress with her feet flat on the floor and her hands on either side of her on the bed.
There was seed dust in the cuff of her sleeve, and one husk caught in the weave. She worked the husk out between her thumb and her forefinger. It was gritty and smelled like the seed bin.
"I went to my sister's house tonight," Carrington said.
"How was that?" Lucy asked.
"There's a cardigan over the chair in her study. Green. It's been there since before the funeral." Carrington kept her eyes on her own cuff. "I sat down and leaned back against it, but I didn't move it."
Lucy didn't answer.
"The agent called me while I was sitting there. I told her to take the house off the market." Carrington rolled the husk once more and let it drop. "She asked me for a reason. But I don't have one. Not one that makes sense anyway."
The back of her neck had gone hot under her collar. She stayed where she was and did not touch it.
"That's okay," Lucy said, and moved her foot under the blanket until it was against Carrington's hip and left it there.
"The chair is still set low," Carrington said. "She was three inches shorter than me, so it makes sense. I just have never sat in her desk chair before."
Lucy laid the book down on the covers, face up, and lost her page.
"Have you eaten anything since lunch?" Lucy asked.
"No."
"I'll make you eggs in a minute." Lucy pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. "You didn't bring it home with you."
"No."
"I'm glad."
"Why?"
"Because it's still her chair," Lucy said. Then: "What happens to Clara's house now?"
"Nothing. It sits there and I keep paying for it."
"That's allowed," Lucy said.
"Is it?"
"People do it for years," Lucy said. "Nobody makes you explain it."
Neither of them said anything. Out in the courtyard, the path lights were on and the sky above the hedge had not gone fully dark. Every window in the kitchen wing was black.
Carrington turned her cuff over and looked at the rest of the seed dust caught in it, then folded the cuff under so it did not show.
"You stood up when I came into the kitchen on Tuesday," Carrington said. "You did it again yesterday morning, with a dish towel in your hand."
Lucy looked at her. "Did I?"
"Both times."
"It's a house I work in," Lucy said. "I'll stop."
"You could stop calling me Ms. Cole in the daytime, too."
"No, I couldn't," Lucy said.