CHAPTER 3
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The truck sits at the bottom of the drive with both windows down and half a dog hanging out of the passenger side.
“Four years I've been coming out here, mate,” I tell him. “Four years, and they still can't work a phone.”
Bramwell doesn't answer. He never does when I'm right.
It's warm for September. Dust hanging over Fernhollow Road where I turned in, apples going red on the slope, ten past one on the dash. Good afternoon. Wrong house.
I've had the work order nine days. Quarterly service, Ardenwood, one hour, no fault reported. I rang ahead like a grown man and got a woman in an office somewhere who said Mrs. Vance was resting, and could I possibly come Wednesday.
So. Wednesday.
I roll up with my hand already out the window for the keypad, and the gate opens.
It hasn't opened for me. I'm still ten feet short of it, nobody's buzzed me, nobody's spoken, and the little courtesy light hasn't so much as flickered.
“Well, that's a new one,” I say. “That's not supposed to happen.”
Bramwell pulls his head in.
There's a loop buried under that apron. Somebody trenched it, backfilled it, and never put it on a drawing I've ever seen. It doesn't read a code. It reads weight. Anything heavy rolls up and the gate swings wide, delighted to be of use.
I sit with my foot on the brake and my ears going hot. It's what I feel finding a shelf hung on drywall screws. Somebody's been inside my work with their sleeves rolled up.
I count cameras on the way up the drive, because I put them there and I can't not.
Two on the gateposts. Three across the south glass. One under each eave, one on the garage soffit, the four I fought for along the orchard fence because a fence line is where people actually come from.
Thirty-four. Same as the day I signed it off.
For about four seconds I'm pleased. Nobody's bolted a cheap dome onto my design, nobody's spliced anything, the man's left it alone.
Then I do the sum properly and stop being pleased. You quit adding cameras when the ones you've got already show you everything you want. I aimed thirty-four of them at a road. Somebody's been perfectly content with that for four years.
Content is the word that gets me. I park in the shade and sit for a second with my hands on the wheel.
“It's a service call, that's all it is,” I tell Bramwell. “One hour. In, tighten everything, out.”
He puts his chin on my knee, which is his opinion of that.
“Your window stays down and you stay behind it,” I tell him. “And no singing. I'm serious about the singing. Last time was embarrassing for both of us.”
The house is glass and pale stone and it still looks like an architect won an argument. AURA gets the door before I reach it, and her voice comes out of the stone in that unhurried way, like she's been looking forward to this.
“Four years and two months, Mr. Brennan. Welcome back.”
Behind me, Bramwell's folded ear swings toward the speaker. It's the only ear he's got that moves and he spends it entirely on her.
“She's not talking to you, mate. She's never once talked to you,” I say. He disagrees.
Inside it's cool and quiet and smells of nothing at all, which is a thing money can buy. I stand in the hall with my case and ask for the head-end, west wing.
“Of course. The server room requires an enrolled palm, Mr. Brennan. Yours isn't enrolled. Shall I ask Mr. Vance?”
Friendly as anything. There isn't one grain of edge in it.
“There's no need to bother the man on my account,” I say. “I'll do it off the corridor panel.”
“Certainly.”
I commissioned that room. I racked it. I labelled every port in it with my own hand and my own bad printing, and I can't get in it without a phone call to a man in another country.
Fine. Fine, fine, fine.
“Would you like me to log the visit?” she asks.
“You've already logged the visit.”
“I have,” says AURA, warmly. “I like to check.”
The utility corridor runs the spine of the west wing, narrow, lit by one strip and whatever gets in through the glass at the far end. It smells like hot dust coming off a transformer, and underneath that, laundry soap. Somebody irons in this house.
I get the panel cover off, put the flashlight in my teeth, and start walking the profiles.
Cameras fine. Perimeter fine. Two contacts moaning about themselves the way contacts do.
Then the interior maglocks.
Fail-secure. Every bedroom door in the wing, on a profile called NIGHT 3 — INTERIOR HOLD.
Fail-secure means the lock holds shut when the power dies. You put that on a strongroom. You do not put it on a room somebody sleeps in.
My hands stop.
I've been doing this since I was nineteen and my hands keep going through most things. Bad news, bad weather, a wasp in the panel. They stop now, one on the cover, one on the flashlight handle, and they stay stopped long enough that I hear the transformer.
There's a version of this where somebody clicked the wrong line in a menu at eleven at night. I've made that mistake myself and I've fixed it for people twice this year.
That version needs one door on it, not the whole wing, and it doesn't arrive as a profile that somebody has named, saved, and scheduled.
I don't photograph it. I don't touch a setting. I take the pencil out of my shirt pocket and write NIGHT 3 on the inside of my left wrist, and pull my sleeve down over it, and put the pencil back.
Then I go on with the service like a man doing a service, and my ears are listening to the whole house.
Which is how I don't hear her until she's already in the doorway at the kitchen end.
“You're the alarm man.”
I get the flashlight out of my teeth. “That's me. Twelve years in the trade and that's the title I've earned.”
She's got her sleeves pushed up past the elbow and an envelope in one hand, and she's looking at me the way you look at a thing that has appeared in your house without being announced, which, in fairness.
Dark auburn hair to her collarbone. Gray eyes. Freckles across her nose like somebody flicked a brush at her. Pale, and pale in the specific way of somebody who's been indoors a long stretch without choosing it.
Behind her the housekeeper crosses the kitchen with a stack of folded linen and doesn't stop or look, and something about how carefully she doesn't look puts a small cold coin in my chest.
The woman in the doorway comes two steps down into the corridor. Her hands are what I'm watching. Nails cut down to nothing, a white scar laid across the left index knuckle, and her thumb going back and forth along the edge of that envelope like she's testing a seam for a gap.
Builder's hands. I'd know them in a crowd.
And there are numbers on the back of the envelope. Dozens of them, small and level, in columns, in pencil.
“That's not a list,” I say. “That's got a fraction in it.”
She looks at the envelope. Then at me. Something happens in her face that I would fix my whole week around seeing again.
“It's a rail. The gallery rail, up there.” Her voice comes out dry and a little unused, like a tap on a house nobody's been in. “I'm working out what it would take before it let go.”
“And what did it come out at?”
“More than they think. Less than it looks.”
“Right. Right, that's genuinely — ” and I stop, because I was going to say something clever and what I want instead is to see the rest of the columns. “Somebody's built that rail wrong, then, if you're having to check it.”
“Somebody built it beautifully. That's not the same thing.”
I laugh. It gets away from me before I've decided to allow it.
She doesn't laugh. But her thumb stops on the envelope, which I decide to count.
“Is it going to fall down?”
“No.”
“You did all that to find out no?”
“I did all that,” she says, “because it was there and I wasn't doing anything else.”
There's about nine things under that sentence and I'm not invited to any of them.
“I'm Cole Brennan, by the way,” I say. “Brennan Systems. I put this system in, back before it grew up and stopped recognising me.”
“Evelyn Vance. I'm the one who lives here.”
“I know. I mean — I know whose house. I don't know you.” Good start, Cole. Excellent. “Can I ask you something completely unrelated to any of this.”
“You can ask me whatever you like.”
“My dog's in the truck. He's four, he's gray, he's a coward about bins, and he's currently melting. Can he come in?”
She looks past me down the corridor at nothing, and I watch her do arithmetic on it.
“The house has a policy,” she says.
“The house has a policy.”
I don't do a voice. I just put the words down where she can see them, one after the other, the way you'd lay out a tool that doesn't work.
And she laughs.
It's short and it's rough at the edges and it stops fast, and the look that goes over her afterwards is somebody startled by a noise coming out of her own mouth. I'd like the record to show I didn't do that on purpose. I'd also like the record to show I'd do it again this afternoon.
“He can sit in the shade of the porch,” she says. “That's not the house. That's the outside.”
“That's lawyering, and I respect it enormously.”
“Yes.”
“Does he need a name for the paperwork?”
“What is it? The name, I mean.”
“Bramwell. Bramwell Brennan, if we're filling in forms.”
“Bramwell.” She says it like she's setting it down somewhere safe. “That's a ridiculous name for a dog.”
“He came with it. I've tried shortening it and he won't answer, so now we're both stuck with the long one.”
I go back to the panel, and not because I'm finished being delighted. I go back because there is one hour on the work order and I have four minutes of it left and something in my sleeve I'm not going to say out loud.
I need to write the service reference somewhere. I pat down my shirt, my back pocket, my shirt again — I have the memory of a goldfish for anything that isn't a wire — and then I find the pencil where it's been the whole time.
I write the reference on the back of my hand instead, and then I hold the pencil out flat on my palm, near enough to her, and let her take it off me.
Her fingers don't come near mine. Neither of us makes it a thing.
“You should keep that one, honestly,” I say. “It doesn't roll off things. That's the whole trick of it. Round pencil, you put it down on a windowsill and it's gone forever, and you're a lunatic on your knees under a radiator. That one stays where you leave it.”
She turns it over. brENNAN SYSTEMS is stamped down one flat side and she reads it like a label on a specimen.
Then she does a small thing that I'm going to think about later, on the road, with the windows down and the dog asleep against my arm.
She doesn't put it on the sill. She puts it in her pocket, deep, and flattens her hand over the outside of the pocket once, the way you check a pocket for keys.
That's not a woman accepting a pencil. That's a woman keeping one.
The pencil going in pushes something else out. A card, stiff, cream, sharp at the corners, and it lands face up between us. I pick it up because I'm nearer the floor.
Two men's names I've never heard, raised off the card so you can feel them with a thumb. A firm of some kind. An address in Calder Ridge.
She doesn't say oh, or that's mine, or thank you. She looks at it the way you look at a word in a language you don't have.
“It was in my coat,” she says. “The coat's been in the hall since — ” and she doesn't finish it, and I put the card on the sill instead of in her hand, and I file that away too, and honestly, this house.
“Can I ask why you're here?” she says. “Nobody said. Nobody says.”
And here's where I should be clever, and I'm not.
“It's the insurer's doing, mostly,” I say. “Annual service, quarterly checks in between. It's in the court-ordered contract, so I can't skip it even if the kit's perfect. Which it is. Mostly.”
I've got one thing written on my wrist I've decided not to report to anyone.
Give it four seconds and I'll have two.
Because she goes still. It isn't startled-still. It's slow. Her thumb comes off the envelope. Her chin comes up about an inch, and everything in her face packs itself away somewhere out of sight, and what's left is a woman doing sums with a piece missing.
“Court-ordered. You said court-ordered,” she says. “Say that part again, slowly.”
So I say it again, slowly, and I stand in that corridor with a flashlight in my teeth and watch a woman find out from the alarm man that there's a judge somewhere with her name on a piece of paper.
She doesn't ask me what it means. She doesn't ask who told me. Her hand goes flat over the pocket with the pencil in it, the way you check for keys, and she says it very quietly.
“Whose name is on it besides mine?”