Chapter 3
Winslow
She knew before she knew, which was the part she'd hate herself for later.
It arrived on a Tuesday in the shape of nothing at all. Callum came into the kitchen and poured coffee.
"Kellerman came around," he said.
"Good."
"It was Senna's read. Entirely. I'd have gone at him straight and lost him."
"Good."
He took his cup down the hall.
That was all of it. Nothing had happened. A man told his wife his week had gone well.
But she stood there afterward with her hand around a mug she hadn't drunk from, and her stomach had gone down an elevator shaft, and her back teeth ached from how hard her jaw had locked.
She got very quiet after that. That was her trick and she'd had it since she was nine years old on Wharton Street, where the smart move in a bad hour was to be small and behind a door.
Whatever came at her, she went cold and did not move, one full step back.
From there it was happening to somebody else.
She was very good at it. She'd been doing it eleven days before she caught herself at it.
In those eleven days she hosted a dinner for four donors and their wives and did it beautifully.
The caterers came from Richmond in two vans.
Somebody in the family office had approved the flowers without asking her.
They were lilies. She was faintly allergic to lilies, so she said nothing and took an antihistamine at four in the afternoon.
She got a woman from Lynchburg talking about her son's wedding for thirty-five minutes and never had to say a word herself.
"They wanted it outdoors," the woman said. "In August. In Virginia."
"Did you tell them?"
"I did not tell them. My mother told me about my own wedding and I've never forgiven her for being right." She turned her glass. "You had a barn, didn't you? Somebody said a barn."
"In Pennsylvania. It rained."
"Of course it rained."
"It came in under the doors about two inches. My father had rented the chairs himself and he spent the whole reception moving them back off the wet." Winslow heard herself say it and could not remember the last time she'd told anybody. "He wouldn't let anyone help him."
"Well, that's a father."
"That's my father."
At the far end of the table Callum was telling the Bristol story to Cyrus. It got the laugh it always got. Winslow sat with a fork in her hand and watched her husband be charming from twelve feet away. At no point in that evening did any part of her body do one thing.
Afterward she loaded the dishwasher herself, though there was no reason on earth to, and stood with her hands in the water long past the point where the water was hot.
Callum came in for a glass.
"That went well," he said.
"It did."
"Cyrus put his hand on my arm at the door. That's the whole ballgame with Cyrus."
"I know."
"You were great."
"Thank you."
He kissed the top of her head on his way out, which he had done perhaps four thousand times, and she stood there afterward with wet hands and could not have told anybody what it was supposed to mean.
The rain came Thursday, and it came sideways. Nadine was off. The house did the thing where the icemaker carried through two rooms.
Winslow went upstairs for a sweater and came down with the Pelican case.
She put it on the kitchen island and opened both latches with her thumbs, and the foam inside was still cut to the shapes she'd cut it to in 2016. Body, two lenses, the little recorder with the tape on it, one dead battery, and one she'd have sworn she charged.
Her hands did the assembly without asking her. Body, mount, twist, seat. The sound the lens made going on was one she had not heard in six years and it went straight up her forearm.
The battery was dead. Of course the battery was dead.
She found the charger in a shoebox in the basement, sat on the stairs forty minutes with her elbows on her knees waiting for a green light, and felt stupid the entire time. She did not get up.
Her phone went twice while she sat there. The family office in Richmond, about a car service for the March thing, and then a follow-up from the same woman clarifying that the first car had been booked in error. Winslow answered both, from a basement step, with a camera battery charging in her lap.
"I'll handle the car," she said.
"Mrs. Fairbanks, you don't have to handle the car."
"I know I don't."
"I can have Tessa handle the car."
"Tell Tessa I've got it," Winslow said, and hung up. She sat back down on the step. She understood while she was doing it that she had just fought a woman in an office for the right to make a phone call about a Suburban.
Then she went out on the back porch in the rain and filmed the gutter.
That was it. That was the whole thing. Nine minutes of a bad gutter over the porch rail.
The corner had come loose in the fall and nobody had called anybody about it, though there was a man on a retainer for exactly this, and calling him would have taken forty seconds.
Water sheeting off it in a rope, hitting the boxwood, jumping.
She held the shot until her arms burned.
She moved six inches left and held it again.
Watching it back on the little screen, she was crying, and she wasn't sad, and there was no name for what it was.
Friday she drove to the landing at Buck Island with the camera riding the passenger seat.
There was a man down there scraping paint off an aluminum jon boat with a putty knife. Seventy-some, sleeves pushed up, radio going on the seat behind him. Winslow stood at the top of the ramp ten minutes before she went down.
"You mind?" she said, and lifted the camera an inch.
He looked at it, then at her, then went back to the boat.
"Free country," he said. "It ain't much of a boat."
"It's a fine boat."
"It's a terrible boat. My brother sold it to me."
She got forty minutes. The putty knife. The flake curl coming off the aluminum in a strip. The light off the water landing on the underside of his chin.
"What's your brother's name," she said, from behind the camera.
"Dell."
"And he sold you a terrible boat."
"He sold me a terrible boat in 1991 for four hundred dollars, and he told me it was tight, and it was not tight." The knife kept going. "I've had it thirty-four years. Longest thing I've kept besides my wife."
"Why'd you keep it?"
He stopped. He looked at the hull rather than at her and rubbed the edge of the scrape with his thumb.
"He's dead," he said. "That's the whole reason. It's a bad boat, he's dead, and I take the paint off it every March."
The radio behind him went to an ad. Winslow held the shot and did not breathe.
"You want me to say that again?" he said. "I can say it better."
"No, sir. You said it right."
"You want it back?" she said. "The footage. I can send you a file."
"I don't have anything to put a file in."
"I'll bring a disc."
"Bring a disc," the man said, "and don't make me famous, I've got a sister who'd take it hard."
She drove home with her hands loose on the wheel and the radio off. One shot she knew was good. One thing that was better than the shot.
She stopped at the market in town for milk she didn't need, so the drive would last longer. Afterward she stood in the lot with the door open and the camera on the seat and did not want to get in.
Gideon called on Sunday.
The name came up on the screen and she sat down on the arm of the couch before she answered it, which told her plenty.
"Winslow Vance," he said.
"Nobody's called me that in a while."
"That's a shame, because that's who I'm calling.
" A door shut on his end and a street noise went away.
"I'm putting a series together for Kestrel.
Six half-hours, water rights in the eastern watersheds.
I've had a list on my desk a month, and your name is on it in my handwriting from before I made the list, which is embarrassing for me. "
"Gideon."
"Slackwater is on three syllabi that I know about."
"Slackwater is nine years old."
"It's the reason the series got greenlit and I said so in the room." He let a beat go. "I'm not asking you for anything on a Sunday. I'm asking whether you still know where your camera is."
She looked across the kitchen at the island, where it sat out of its case with the strap hanging off the edge.
"I might," she said.
"Huh," Gideon said, pleased, and let it go. He asked about the drive from Roanoke instead. He told her a long ridiculous story about a producer who'd gone into a settling pond up to the hip, and she laughed with her whole chest, out loud, alone in a kitchen.
***
She kept the phone in her hand for a while after Gideon hung up.
Slackwater had gone to four festivals and one small prize and had made, in nine years, about what the caterers had cost on Tuesday.
She'd known that at the time and it hadn't mattered at the time.
She'd been thirty-one, eating gas station food in a Corolla in West Virginia for eleven weeks, and she'd have done another eleven.
There was a woman in it at the end who puts her hand on a fence.
Winslow had cut that ending forty times to get it down to nine minutes.
She got up and washed the mug she had never drunk from.
She was still warm from it when Callum got home.
That was the thing. She came at him warm. She'd been cold eleven days, a thing in her had thawed on a boat ramp, and the door went, and her body turned toward it before her head got a vote.
He was in the hall shaking rain off his coat.
"Hey," she said. "Come here a second, I want to show you something."
"Two minutes."
"It's not even a minute. I filmed a guy at Buck Island, he's got a boat his brother sold him, and I swear to God, Callum, he does this thing with the knife where he—"
"Hang on." He had the phone at his ear. He held up one finger to her. The finger. The one he used on staffers and cameramen and a state trooper once. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm here."
She stopped in the middle of the hall with the camera in her hands.
"No, he can't have both," Callum said into the phone.
He was smiling. He pulled his tie loose with his free hand and walked past her toward the study.
"Tell him that. No, tell him exactly that.
Senna. Senna. He's going to say the same thing he said in October, and you know what you're going to say back. "
The study door swung half shut.
Winslow stood in the hall. Rain in the gutter out there, the loose one, hitting the boxwood and jumping.
She stood there long enough to hear him laugh once through the half-shut door, and then she went up.
She put the camera in the case. She got the lens seated in its foam and the recorder into the cutout with the tape on it. Her hands did all of it correctly. At the end she sat back on her heels on the guest room floor and did not shut the latches.
Downstairs the study door opened. She listened to him go to the kitchen, get a glass, and go back, still talking, and she stayed where she was on the floor with the case open in front of her until the ice in the glass had stopped moving in the room below her.