CHAPTER 30
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Thursday comes up gray over the orchard and I'm still awake to watch it, which makes twenty-six hours since the cruiser swung around at the bottom of the drive with Cole in the back of it.
I don't lie down. I put yesterday's boots back on and go out the utility door before the house has finished deciding it's morning.
Then I run.
Down the gravel to the second cattle grid, past the bend where the hedge thins, all the way to the stone gatepost and back. My lungs are raw by the halfway mark and my feet slap wrong on the frozen ruts and I keep going anyway.
Frost has stiffened the grass in the verges. It breaks under me with a sound like someone stepping on dry cereal.
Six minutes out. Seven and a half back, because the drive rises.
I stop at the utility door with my hands on my knees and my hair stuck to my neck, and I stay there until the burning in my chest goes quiet, because that burning is mine and nobody has signed a paper about it.
Julian left before five. He's in the city all day, which the house told me without being asked.
Aldred is here. His door is shut and there's a strip of light under it and a cot in there now, made up with hospital corners, and a brass padlock on the outside of the storage room that wasn't there two days ago.
At half past eleven I go down through the orchard with my coat pockets empty and my hands loose, the way a woman walks when she's only looking at trees.
The apple crate is where it's been since the middle of September, third row, tipped on its side under the netting. The ledger comes out of the hollow under the slats. The pencil's been in my coat since the day he gave it to me.
Marguerite is already at the wire when I straighten up.
She's got her good coat on and a canvas bag hanging off her wrist, and the spaniel isn't with her, and I make myself look at her face instead of at the empty end of the lead loop on her belt.
“I brought you these off the tree by my own gate,” she says, “and then I got as far as the wire and realised I don't actually know whether I'm allowed to hand them across to you.”
“You're allowed to hand me a bag of quinces, Marguerite. There's no law in this county about fruit.”
She sets the bag down on the grass. On her side.
“I'll leave them here where they are, and you can come and collect them after I've walked home, and then nobody has to have watched me give you anything.” She smooths the handles flat. “That's cowardice with a bow on it, and I know it is.”
“That's the most honest thing anyone has done for me in a month, and I want you to hear that from me before you go.”
The deer wire between us is chest high and sagging in the middle, and neither of us touches it.
“You've been up all night, dear.” She says it plainly, the way you'd tell someone their coat was buttoned wrong. “I'm not going to stand here and pretend I can't see it.”
“Twenty-six hours, as of about now. I've been counting them, so I'm certain.”
Cold comes off the frozen ground and up through my boots. I say it before I can arrange it better.
“I need to ask you for one thing, and I'd like you to let me get all the way to the end of it before you answer.”
“Go on, then. I'd rather be asked straight out than managed.”
“Make one phone call to the Sheriff's Office. Ask for Deputy Pike by her name. Tell her the housekeeper here was let go without notice four weeks ago, and that you're the nearest neighbour, and that you haven't laid eyes on me past that gate since the summer.”
Marguerite looks at the netting over the crates for a while.
“No, love.”
Then she looks back at me, and her chin has gone soft and stubborn at the same time.
“They took my dog off that drive in a van with a company name on the side, and I've not slept right since. I'm seventy-one, dear. I'm not brave and I'm not going to start.”
“You wouldn't have to speak to a single person. Write it on a page with the date at the top and put the page in your own kitchen drawer, and in a month it would still count for something.”
“No. I'm sorry, and I'll be sorry about it again tonight when I'm doing my dishes, and I'll still be saying no to you now.”
She picks a bit of dead bindweed off the wire and rolls it between her fingers.
“Ask me for apples. Ask me for a lift into town the day that gate opens for you, and I'll have the engine running before you've finished the sentence. Don't ask me for this one.”
“All right.”
“And the young man with the gray dog.” She hesitates. “Is he all right?”
“He's managing.”
Which is a lie shaped like manners, and I hear myself do it.
“Well.” She picks up nothing, because she's already put down the only thing she brought. “Take those in before the birds find them, and mind yourself, and I mean that.”
She walks back along her side of the wire. I collect the quinces after she's out of sight, because she asked me to, and it's the last kind thing anybody does for me today.
The afternoon goes the way an afternoon goes when there's no one to say anything to.
Nora's been gone four weeks. Her rented room is over the diner in town and I have no way to reach it that doesn't run through a phone this house owns.
Cole is in a cell in Calder Ridge on a complaint somebody dictated over lunch.
Rachel is seven miles away with a letter on heavy paper from two men whose names are printed in raised type, and she read it and she stopped calling, and she was right to.
If she comes here, they put her in front of the court as the hysterical sister, and then they've got a second thing to hold up at the hearing.
She's obeying it for me. I keep having to remind myself of the direction that runs in.
At ten past four I sit down on the utility corridor floor with my back against the linen shelving, because it's the one stretch of this house with no camera and no window.
The tile takes the warmth out of the backs of my thighs in under four minutes, straight through wool.
The shelves smell of Nora's starch, four weeks stale and going sweet at the edges.
I start on the ceiling tiles. Left to right, front to back, the way you'd count anything.
I lose it at thirty-one.
I start again and lose it at nineteen.
That's the part that opens the floor. The counting has worked since I was eleven years old, through a hospital and a funeral and a diagnosis, and this afternoon it will not hold weight.
So I count people instead, out loud, on my fingers, because a list is a structure and a structure holds.
“Cole. Nora. Rachel. Marguerite. Roz Pike.”
Then I take them down one at a time, thumb first. A cell. A rented room over a diner. Seven miles away and barely speaking, on legal advice, for my sake. A woman of seventy-one with a lead loop on her belt and no dog on the end of it.
And a deputy I have said perhaps eleven words to, once, across a bar.
I hold up my hand with nothing left on it and I look at it.
Then I take the organizer out of my coat and count the doses. Fifteen. I count them again. Fifteen both times, which is correct, which is the only correct thing in the building.
And for four or five seconds I can't remember what I've been saving them for.
That's the part that gets me — the pills are still in my hand and the reason for them has walked out of the room.
Somewhere in there I think about the truck, the day of the rain, his hand at the back of my neck and his forehead against mine and me counting because I count. Twelve seconds. I know it was twelve because I was counting.
Remembering it now is the worst thing that happens all afternoon.
I take off my left boot. I hold it. I put it back on and lace it, because my hands want a job and there is no job.
Then I cry.
Both hands over my mouth, hard, because Aldred is one wall away and doors here are hollow-core and I will not give this house a recording. It comes up ugly and silent and it shakes the shelving against my shoulder blades.
Four minutes.
It stops. I look at the clock over the linen cupboard and it says four fifty-eight, and I say the time inside my head, and the saying of it puts my feet back under me.
I sit there with my back on the shelf until the minute hand clears the hour.
“One hour. That was the hour. I'm not getting another one.”
And then I say the rest of it out loud, to the tile and the starch and nobody.
“Five days. A hundred and twenty hours. I've done more with less and worse light.”
Standing up takes three tries. Both legs have gone dead below the knee and I have to haul myself hand over hand up the shelving like a ladder, and I hang there while the blood comes back and stings.
There's a flashlight in the corridor cabinet, rubber-gripped, four D cells. It's heavier than I remember and the beam has a yellow ring at the edge.
I start at the east end and I count hinges.
Twenty-two interior doors on the corridor side of this house. Nineteen hung the way they ought to be, pin side to the room, the way you hang a door you mean to keep shut.
Three hung wrong. Exterior-mount butt hinges facing the corridor, pins sitting there in the open where anybody with a nail set could walk them up out of the barrel.
The storage room. The garage pedestrian door.
And the server room, with its steel plate on the wall beside it and its palm reader glowing, which I have known about since the first week of September and have never once written down.
Then the mezzanine.
Nine posts in the gallery rail. Four fasteners each. I go up the stairs two at a time and then I get down on the boards with my cheek almost on the floor and put the beam along the underside of the edge beam, and there it is.
They aren't through-bolts. They're three-inch lag screws, driven into the end grain of the beam.
End grain holds a screw about as well as a bar of soap holds a nail.
I sit back on my heels with the flashlight going tacky and warm in my palm and I laugh once, and it isn't a nice sound, and it's the first one in twenty-eight hours.
Both counts go into the ledger in pencil. Doors, then posts.
Then I stage the kit. Canvas tool roll off the shop bench, behind the linen shelving, third shelf, under the sheets nobody has touched since Nora left. Claw hammer. Nail set. Flat screwdriver. Ten-millimetre wrench. Flashlight.
All of it already in this house. I buy nothing, I order nothing, I ask for nothing.
At half past eleven the corridor speaks to me, warm as a friend at a party.
“You've been walking about a long time, Evelyn. Shall I put the hall lights on for you?”
“No, thank you. Leave them off.”
They come on anyway, one bank at a time, all the way to the west end. I stand still in the middle of it with the flashlight down against my leg and I don't move a muscle until they decide on their own to go out.
Then I say the last piece to the dark.
“Six hundred pounds of hold on every door in my half of this house, and all of it plugged into one panel.”
Here's what I decide, sitting on the corridor floor at ten past midnight with a pencil in my fist and a page I'll never be able to send.
I won't make the opportunity. Making it would tell him, and the second he knows I'm working he'll put another lock between me and the panel and I'll have taught him for free.
I'll be ready instead. And the first time this house goes dark, for any reason at all — a storm, a squirrel, a bill, his own hand — I'm taking a door off its hinges.
There are five days between tonight and a courtroom, and nobody is coming, and I've stopped listening for the drive.
I write the counts at the top of a clean page and underline the last one twice, because it's the only one that's actually mine.
TWENTY-TWO DOORS. THREE HUNG WRONG. NINE POSTS. FIVE DAYS.
Then I put the flashlight in my coat pocket with the pills, and I go and eat something standing up at the counter, because a woman who intends to take a steel door off its hinges needs to have eaten.