CHAPTER 10
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The keeper plate on the shop door has been fine for four years. I've got it off anyway, screws held in my teeth, filing the strike edge on a Saturday in a building nobody's coming into, because my hands wanted a job and my head wouldn't give them one.
Bramwell watches from the dog bed with his chin flat on the foam.
“You could hold the light for me,” I tell him. “That's the whole ask. You're four years old, you've got a mouth like a bear trap, and I have hung every single door in this building on my own.”
He thumps his tail twice and shuts his eyes. That's his position on the labour question and he's never once revised it.
The iron's been on since nine and the place smells of hot flux and the cold-rolled offcuts stacked by the roller door. I file. I blow the dust off the edge. I file again. The plate goes back on square and true, which is exactly how it was before I touched it.
So. Fixed.
Now what.
I sit down on the bench with the screwdriver still in my hand and look at the dog, because he's the only one here and because he's never yet told anybody what I said.
“Here's the thing I can't get past,” I say. “Nobody hangs a bedroom door fail-secure. Nobody does it by accident, nobody does it quietly over six years, and nobody does it on a system I built and signed off myself.”
His ear comes up. The folded one stays folded. It's never once stood up in its life.
“Fail-secure means the power dies and the lock stays shut,” I tell him. “That's for a server room, that's for a drug cabinet. That is not for a room with a bed in it and a person inside.”
Six days ago I was up a ladder in that house in front of half the county, running a profile name I didn't recognise, and I wrote it in a notebook and I've told nobody. The notebook's on the bench under a coil of low-voltage cable. I could reach it without standing up. I don't reach it.
What I do instead is get the box file down off the shelf, which I pulled a week ago and left lying there like a man leaving a letter unopened on the hall table.
ARDENWOOD, in my own marker, going furry at the edges.
Six years of my handwriting in there. First fix, second fix, the punch list from the year the glass went in, a sketch of the west corridor with the door swings marked because the architect drew them backwards and nobody noticed but me.
My twenties are in this file. My hands were better then and my printing was worse.
I go through it slowly, the way you go through a drawer when you already know what you're looking for and you'd rather take the long road there.
And here's what's in it, if you can read a service history: everything up to about year four is mine.
After that the handwriting stops and the change tickets start, and the tickets come from somewhere else, and every one of them is small.
A schedule tweak. A profile rename. A door group edited some quiet afternoon by somebody who never once had to stand in that corridor and watch the thing swing.
Nothing in there is illegal. Nothing in there is even unusual on its own. It's a hundred small tidy edits made to a house I built, by people who never met the house.
“Somebody's been redecorating,” I tell the dog.
Halfway down, in pencil, the note I'm looking for.
Year one. The client wanted thirty days of retention on every door event and I don't trust a ring buffer, because a ring buffer's whole job is eating its own tail. So I built a mirror. Second box, second copy, writes the same events to a partition that nothing ever prunes.
“The mirror's the boring copy,” I tell the dog, “and the boring copy is the one nobody ever deletes, because deleting it isn't a decision anybody actually makes.”
He rolls onto his side to give me more of his attention or possibly less.
The laptop takes a minute to wake. Maintenance account, read-only, the same credentials we've had since the day it went live, because in six years nobody at that end has ever asked me to change them.
The status page comes up. The mount answers.
MOUNTED. Green. Sitting there like a tin of something at the back of a cupboard.
“Six years,” I say, “and nobody's laid a finger on it. Nobody ever does. That's not clever of me. That's just what happens to boring things.”
And here's where it stops being a nice afternoon.
Because I can see it's alive from a bench in Calder Ridge, and I can't read a line of it from here.
To read it I'd have to be standing in the west wing with a laptop, in a room with a palm plate on the door.
Eleven grand of palm reader, that plate.
Hung on two hinge pins you could drift out from the corridor side with a nail set and about four minutes of not panicking.
Which I mention only because it annoys me professionally.
“And no,” I tell Bramwell. “Before you start. I'm a contractor with a service contract, not a fella with a crowbar and a theory.”
He looks at me the way he looks at the bins.
“A man who walks into a client's server room with no work order loses his licence,” I say. “Then three people who work for me lose their jobs, and one of them's got a lad starting big school, and none of that helps a single soul in that house.”
He puts his chin back down. It's the closest thing to an argument I'm going to get out of him, and it's a fair one, and I don't like it.
“And say I did it anyway,” I say. “Say I go up there tonight with a flashlight and I pull those pins and I read the whole boring copy end to end.
Then what? Then I'm a man who broke into a house, holding paper that a court won't look at twice, telling everybody in this county that the fella who paid for their ambulance has been locking his wife's door.”
The iron ticks as it cools. Outside, somebody's reversing a trailer badly and telling the world about it.
“They'd believe him,” I say. “I'd believe him, and I've met the door.”
So I do it the right way. That's the part I want on the record later, when this all gets read back to me by somebody in a uniform: I tried the front door first.
I ring the Vantance office on the shop phone. A woman picks up on the second ring, and she has the voice of somebody who genuinely likes her job, which makes what comes next worse.
“Morning,” I say. “Cole Brennan, Brennan Systems. We hold the service contract on the Ardenwood house, and I need about ten minutes of Mrs. Vance's time regarding one of the doors.”
“Of course. Let me see who I can find for you,” she says. “Is this something Mr. Vance's office would be able to take care of instead?”
“It'd be faster with her, honestly. It's her floor of the house and it's her door, and she's the one who'll know if it's been doing it a while.”
There's the small clean sound of a keyboard, and she comes back pleasant as ever.
“I can put a note through to Mr. Vance's assistant for you,” she says. “Mrs. Vance doesn't take calls at the moment.”
I've got the pencil in my other hand. Flat red carpenter's pencil out of the box under the counter, same box I pulled one from six days ago and put in a woman's hand instead of my pocket. I'd been shaving the point off it with the utility knife the whole call without noticing.
I stop.
“At the moment meaning today,” I say, “or at the moment meaning generally?”
Nothing on the line for a second. Then, warm as anything, no edge on it at all, a word she has plainly been handed by somebody else and asked to use:
“Generally.”
I look at the green light on the screen. I look at the dog.
“That's grand,” I say. “You've been genuinely helpful, and I mean that the way people usually don't.”
“Have a lovely Saturday, Mr. Brennan.”
She hangs up first, kindly, and I sit there with a pencil sharpened down to nearly nothing and sawdust all over my knee.
Generally.
Six years I've been in and out of that house. I've had cups of coffee off that housekeeper standing up. I have never once rung an office and been told that a grown woman doesn't take calls, in general, as a standing arrangement, like weather.
I put the pencil down. I pick up the keys.
The claws go off on the concrete before the keys have finished moving — that skittering scrabble, all four feet going and none of them gripping, the noise of a dog who has decided the day is happening.
“Right, you're coming with me,” I tell him, holding the door. “And if they throw us out, we say you needed the drive. Nobody argues with a dog who needs a drive.”
Seven miles the wrong way on a Saturday afternoon, and I know exactly what I'm doing, and I'd like that noted too.
Window down past the square. Out onto Route 12 with the ridge on our left and the light going long and gold across it, and Bramwell up on the blanket with his whole head out of the window and his ear flat back.
The turn onto Fernhollow, and the tailgate does its thing over the cattle grid — that two-note rattle, bang-bang, the second one always flatter than the first. Three years I've been going to fix that tailgate. I could do it in an hour with a bar and a new latch and I have never once done it.
I run the job in my head because that's where my head goes when it doesn't want to be where it is.
If it's a bad profile I'd need the laptop, the service key, and twenty minutes at the panel.
If somebody's set that door deliberately I'd need nothing at all, because the fix isn't in the panel then, it's in the house.
And I've no work order for either. I've got a dog and a truck with a bad tailgate.
What I'm actually thinking about is her hands.
Forty minutes in a corridor and ninety seconds in a doorway, and it's her hands.
She ran a thumb down the gap at the door seam, top to bottom, the way you'd read something, and told me it was three-sixteenths at the head and an eighth at the strike.
She was right. I had the gauge in my pocket and I checked after she'd gone, which tells you everything about me.
Ninety seconds in the doorway, and she had an envelope in her hand and she kept turning it over.
I remember the exact number she said. Three-sixteenths. It's been six days and I could not tell you the color of the car in that drive but I've got the fraction.
I'm not proud of that. A married woman, a client's wife, and me driving out there on a Saturday with a dog and no paperwork.
“I'm the alarm man,” I say out loud, at fifty on the straight past the Ferris place, to nobody, to the windshield, to him. “That's the whole job. Doors and panels and invoices. That's it.”
Bramwell doesn't answer, which is the only honest response available.
Then I start rehearsing, because apparently that's who I am now.
Version one: I was in the area. I was seven miles the wrong way up a dead end road with nothing at the top of it but a woodlot.
Version two: I'm following up an anomaly from the service visit. Fine words, that. Those are the words of a man who has printed nothing and brought nobody and would rather not say the anomaly out loud.
Version three is the true one, and the true one is that a pleasant woman in an office said generally to me and I got in a truck.
“They all sound like a fella with an excuse,” I tell the dog. “Every single version. And the worst of it is I'd believe me, which is exactly the problem.”
The gravel starts. The trees close in over the road the way they do on the last mile, so the light comes down in bars across the hood, and I'm going too fast for the surface and I know it.
Then the fence line opens up on the left, post and rail running clean along the top of the field, and above it the flat gray line of that roof with the low sun sitting on the glass.
The gate's shut. The gate's always shut.
I come round the last bend with the window down and the dog's head out of it, and there's a woman standing on the inside of that gate with both hands round the bars like she's been there since lunch.
I get on the brakes so hard Bramwell ends up in the footwell, and he doesn't even complain.