CHAPTER 29
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What I've done is stack.
Conduit sorted by length. Fittings boxed and squared to the shelf edge. Good screwdrivers in the drawer, ruined ones in the paint tin, and then the drawer open again because the ruined ones looked wrong in there.
Bramwell watches me from the blanket by the compressor. One ear up. The folded one doing what it always does, which is nothing.
“You think this is tidy,” I tell him. “This isn't tidy. This is a man with hands and nowhere to put them, and you've seen it before, so don't act impressed.”
His tail goes twice against the floor and he shuts his eyes again.
Three days. The gate code's dead, the house phone runs through that system of theirs, and a phone that runs through her house isn't a phone, it's a room he can stand in.
I've driven the mouth of Fernhollow Road twice a day for three days and I haven't turned in once, because turning in is exactly the thing somebody wants written down.
It's a Wednesday. I keep noticing that, like the day of the week is going to help.
There's a box by the door with three years of Ardenwood maintenance records in it. My handwriting on every page, my carbon copies, my job numbers. I brought them here because a man who's being lied about should keep his paper close.
I crouch and put my hand flat on the dog's ribs, which is the only warm thing in this building.
“She'll come to that gate,” I say. “She's stubborn and she's punctual, and those two things together make a timetable.”
He leans into my leg, all forty pounds of him, and I stay down there longer than I need to.
The cruiser turns in at twenty past nine.
Two of them, and neither one is Roz, which tells me somebody made a call about who was free this morning. The older one has a folder. The younger one goes wide and stands where he can see both my hands, and he's about twenty-four, and he'd rather be anywhere else.
“Are you Cole Brennan, the owner here?” the older one says. “There's a complaint filed against you out of Vantance, and it's got two heads on it. Trespass on the property, and removal of company documents without authorisation.”
“Removal of what documents, exactly? Say which ones.”
“Site maintenance records, three years of them.” He turns the folder so I can see the top sheet. Raised letterhead, the Vantance name pressed into it hard enough to feel. “That box, going by the description. It's specific about the box.”
“They're my job records.” My voice comes out level, which surprises me. “My paper, my handwriting, my shop, and every one of them says what I did and what I charged for it. That's not theft, that's a filing cabinet.”
“That may all be true, and it's not mine to sort out.”
“Then whose is it to sort out?”
“A judge's, and I'd guess a lawyer's before that.” He isn't enjoying this. That's the part I can't get my hands around — nobody in this room is enjoying this, and it's happening anyway, at the speed of a form. “Set the box down and step over here for me.”
I don't set the box down.
I stand there holding it with both arms like an idiot, thirty-six years old, in a shop I built out of a burned-out feed store, and I feel my heels dig into the floor the way they do when a ladder starts to go.
“Mr. Brennan, don't turn this into something it doesn't have to be.”
“Read me the theft part again. Read me the words out loud.”
He reads it. Property of the client, removed without authorisation, and my name spelled right, and a case number down the side that some clerk typed at a desk with a jacket on the back of her chair.
“That's a lie built out of true parts,” I say.
“You can help yourself here, Mr. Brennan. Just don't say anything clever.”
The younger one has moved a few feet, over to where the dog is.
And that's it, that's the whole fight I've got in me, and then the floor drops out — because there's a white van coming up my drive with a county badge on the door, and Bramwell is standing now, and he's looking at me for instructions.
“Where does he go?”
“Animal control holds him while you're in custody,” the older one says. “Kennelled, fed, warm. He's fine. It goes easier on him if you're the one who hands him over.”
So I hand him over.
That's the sentence I'll be chewing on for the rest of my life.
The officer who takes the lead has pine disinfectant on his sleeve, strong enough to taste, and he's gentle with the collar, and he says good lad twice, and I get one hand on Bramwell's chest and tell him a lie in a bright voice about coming back soon.
He barks from inside that van all the way down the drive. He barks around the bend at the bottom. The van goes out of sight past the tree line and I can still hear him, and I'm still hearing him a mile up the road with the cuffs on and the heater going, which is not possible, and is happening.
Fernhollow Road is the only road.
That's the thing about this county — there's one way out to Route 12 and it goes past her fence. They know it. I know it. Nobody says a word about it for four miles.
At five past ten she's there.
Forty feet inside the wire, on the frozen grass, in the coat with the torn pocket, because she has walked that fence line at ten every morning since he locked it down and she is exactly who I said she was.
I'm up off the seat before I know I've moved. “Stop the car. Stop the car right here.”
“I can't do that and you know I can't.”
“Ten yards, then. Ten yards and you can stand between us the whole time.”
“That isn't going to happen this morning.”
“Then slow down. Slow down and put the window down, that's all, that costs you nothing —”
“Ninety seconds. Evelyn — give me ninety seconds and I'll say the whole thing out loud.”
The older deputy looks at the road for a second longer than he has to. Then he lifts his hand off the wheel, and the car slows, and the window drops four inches.
“Ten seconds, and I'm counting them out loud.”
He counts.
One. Her head comes up and she starts walking, fast, and she's counting too, I can see her mouth going.
Two. “Evelyn. The partition —”
Three. She's at the wire with both hands on it and her chin up, and she doesn't waste a syllable asking me what's happening, because she already knows what's happening, she's known for a month.
Four. “The partition keeps a boring copy. The plain one. Nobody ever deletes the boring copy, Evelyn, nobody bothers —”
Five. She says my name once, and it isn't a shout, it's the way you'd say it across a kitchen.
Six.
The glass goes up under my hand. The car takes the curve. She doesn't run after us and she doesn't yell — she puts one hand flat on the wire and holds it there, and I watch her in the mirror going small, hand still flat, until the road bends her out of it.
“That was six seconds,” I say. “You know it was six.”
“It was six, near enough, and I'm sorry about that.”
“You said ten and you counted me down to six.”
“I did say ten.” He puts his eyes back on the road. “And I'd say it again tomorrow, and I'd cut it at six again, because the pair of us are on a camera in this car.”
Intake is a counter, a scale, a scuffed strip of tape on the floor where they want your feet, and a clerk who doesn't look up.
Belt. Laces out of both boots, which takes a while, and my fingers are stupid with the cold.
Keys — shop, truck, the little brass one for the gun cabinet that's had no gun in it since my father died.
And a carpenter's pencil worn down to four inches, flat and red, brENNAN SYSTEMS still readable along one side.
She had her boots up on my dash back in the summer with her feet crossed at the ankle, and she laughed at something I said, and I remember thinking that I'd take a job I hated for a year to hear it —
The clerk zips the bag.
That's the sound. One short pull, plastic teeth, and the whole summer's in a bag with a number on it, and she still doesn't look up, and why would she, it's a Wednesday and she's done forty of these.
“Property receipt, sign at the X.”
I sign at the X.
“Here's the shape of it, so you're not sitting back there guessing,” the booking deputy says.
He's got a pen behind his ear and a wedding ring worn thin.
“A complaint like this, you'll be out before the seventy-second hour.
Last three we held on paper this thin walked out at seventy-one hours, near enough.
But the judge won't turn you loose clean.
There'll be a condition on it — you don't set foot on Ardenwood, and you have no contact with Mrs. Vance, until the complaint's disposed of. Break that and it stops being thin.”
“And if she needs somebody?”
“Then she calls us,” he says, “same as anybody,” and he believes it, and that's the worst answer I've ever been given.
The cell has a bench and a wall and a light that stays on.
Three years ago I stood in a room in that house with a sheet of paper in my hands that said exactly what those doors do when the power fails, and I read it twice, and I put it back in the folder and drove home and billed them for the visit. I've never told her that. I'm going to have to.
At half four they walk me down a corridor and Aldred is standing in it.
He's got his coat over his arm and he's waiting on a signature from somebody at the courthouse desk, and he sees me and doesn't look away, which I'll give him.
“Mr. Brennan.”
“Four minutes of your time, Doctor.”
“You can have four.” He takes his glasses off and cleans them on a cloth he keeps for it. “I'd rather you understood me than hated me, though I expect I'll get the second one.”
“I expect you will.”
“I've signed two of these in thirty years. Both families hated me. Both women are alive.” He says it quietly. He isn't performing, that's the trouble. “I'm not paid a penny extra. I'd do it for nothing, and I'd like you to work out which of those should frighten you more.”
“Say the rest of it.”
“She engaged a lawyer nine days before she put a car off the only curve on that road with water under it.” He puts the glasses back on.
“He showed me the letter. He never told me what it meant — he let me get there myself.
Now you tell me what a reasonable man does with that letter, Mr. Brennan, because I've had it in my head for four months and I haven't found the other thing it could be.”
And there it is — he's almost right. That's what nobody's said out loud yet. A woman leaves a man, a woman goes off a road, and any decent person in the world puts those two facts side by side in exactly that order.
“He showed you a true thing and let you build the lie yourself. That isn't persuasion, Doctor. That's carpentry.”
He goes still.
It isn't the stillness of a man building an answer. It's the other kind, where the face stops doing anything at all. He looks at the floor between us for three seconds. Then he picks his coat off his arm, says nothing whatsoever, and walks to the desk, and his shoes are very quiet on that floor.
They put me in a chair by the wired glass at seven, and on the other side of it, at a counter, is Julian.
Gray overcoat folded on the seat beside him. Fountain pen, unhurried, the little shake to start the ink. He signs the complaint the way you'd sign for a delivery.
He looks up at me, and he smiles, and the smile is real, which is the thing about him that I've never once been able to explain to anybody.
“This isn't personal, Mr. Brennan. It's a complaint. It has a number, a form and a clerk.”
“Ten years and you've never once said her name to me. Say it.”
He caps the pen. He takes his time, and he looks at me through that wire like he's genuinely considering it, like it's a fair request from a man he almost respects.
“Goodnight.”
They walk me back the way I came, past the counter, past the bag with my laces in it.
“How long can you hold me on this?” I ask him.
He checks his watch like the answer's printed on it. “Seventy-two hours,” he says. “Give or take.”
Give or take. Out on Fernhollow Road there's a woman with her hand flat on a fence wire, and a man in that house counting the same hours I am, and only one of us thinks they're long enough.