CHAPTER 31
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Aldred has the chair nearest the fire and a glass of something amber he isn't drinking. Julian stands at the long window with his back to the room, watching the drive the way other men watch a television.
I put both hands on the back of the sofa so they'll stay where I want them.
“I'd like a copy of the exhibit packet,” I say. “All of it, bound the way it goes to the court, so a lawyer of my own choosing can read the whole thing before the hearing instead of afterward.”
Julian turns around, and his face does the warm thing it does.
“Of course. I'll have a copy sent over this week.”
It comes out before I've finished the last word of the question. He doesn't ask which lawyer. He doesn't ask for an address, or a name, or whether I have anybody's number written down anywhere in this house. A man who means to send a thing asks where to send it.
“It's a dull read, and you'll be furious with me for most of it,” he says, coming away from the window. “I'd rather you were furious with a document than with me over dinner. I'll ask them to put tabs on the medical section so you can go straight to the part you'll want to fight.”
I turn to the chair by the fire instead of to him.
“Doctor, you heard me ask, and you heard him agree, and I'd like you to keep hold of both of those, because I've stopped being able to keep hold of things in this house on my own.”
Aldred turns his glass a quarter-turn on the arm of the chair and looks at the fire.
“Everyone in this room wants the same outcome for you,” Julian says, comfortable as a man reading a weather report. “It only looks like an argument because you've been unwell and nobody's explained the timetable properly.”
“Then send it tomorrow instead of this week.”
He smiles at me with a great deal of patience and goes back to the window.
He comes to my door at half past, with his coat already over his arm.
“He said that very quickly,” Aldred says. “I've noticed he says things quickly when he doesn't intend them.”
“You could write that somewhere it would count for something,” I say. “I'm never going to ask you to invent anything.”
“I could. Whether I will is a different question, and I'd rather not answer it standing in a doorway with my car keys in my hand.” He puts his glasses back on and goes.
At 9:12 p.m. the east wing goes dark.
It isn't a flicker or a stumble. It's a clean drop, all at once, the lamp and the clock and the little green light on the wall panel going out together like a hand closing over them. The blowers under the floor wind down and stop. The house gets very large and very quiet.
I stand still and count. At thirty the cold is already in the room, because heat and locks live on the same board, and by the time I get to sixty my own breath is a pale smudge in the flashlight beam.
Four feet from my bedroom door there's a soft click at the head of the frame.
The door swings a quarter-inch on its own.
I say it out loud, because saying it makes it true. “Fail secure means it holds while the power's on. He's just turned the power off.”
Six hundred pounds of holding force, and every ounce of it borrowed from a wire.
Boots. Coat over the sweater. The flashlight from the drawer, and my hand steady enough on the switch to be worth noticing.
The utility corridor runs the length of the house under the good floors, bare block and conduit and a drain in the middle.
The linen shelving is twenty feet in. The tool roll is where I left it, third shelf, behind the folded sheets nobody in this house counts.
Hammer. Nail set. I put both in my coat pocket and the weight of them changes how I walk.
The sub-panel is at the corridor turn, and someone has written EAST WING on masking tape across the door of it in black marker.
Every door along this corridor is standing a quarter-inch off its frame.
The label says EAST WING. The installer tapped the nearest board. One panel, one breaker, and every interior lock in this house is on it.
He thinks he's shut a door on me. He's opened all of them.
Six years I've walked past that piece of tape and read it the way you're meant to read a label, which is the one thing an engineer is trained never to do. You trace the run. You don't trust the marker.
I walk west with my light low. The linen room, the dry store, the storage at the far end where a black case with brass latches sits against the wall — all of them loose in their frames, all of them breathing on their hinges when I pass.
The server room is at the end, on the west side, and the server room is different, because the server room has its own feed.
Julian would never hang his own house on the same wire as my bedside lamp.
The palm plate beside it glows a steady red.
The strike inside the frame is locked and pleased with itself.
I don't touch the plate. I've never once touched the plate.
I put the light on the corridor side of the door and there they are, the way they've been there since the week I first walked this corridor with a contractor's eye and said nothing about it to anybody.
Three butt hinges. Mounted on my side. Pins up.
Steel door, hung the fast way by a crew who were paid by the opening.
“Bottom pin. Top pin. Middle one last.”
I go down on one knee at the bottom hinge and set the nail set under the head of the pin, angled up, and tap. Five taps and the pin walks out of the barrel half an inch. Two more and it's proud enough to pull with my fingers. I catch it in my palm so it can't ring on the floor.
I count it out loud to the door between the blows, because counting is the only steady thing I own. “Two minutes ten. Two minutes twenty. It's a hinge, Evelyn. It's only ever been a hinge.”
The top pin squeals coming out, one long note that goes up the corridor and into the dark part of the house, and then it stops. The silence after it is worse than the sound was.
I count nine seconds. Nothing comes.
The middle pin last, and my shoulder braced flat against the leaf while I do it, because eighty pounds of steel goes somewhere the moment nothing is holding it, and I'd rather it went into me than onto me.
Four minutes on the corridor clock. The pin drops out and the whole door leans into my shoulder like something tired.
I get the claw of the hammer into the gap and lever it, and the door comes off the strike sideways, not open, just gone, and I walk it two steps and set it against the corridor wall.
The strike stays in the frame with its red light on. Still energised. Still locked. Still holding a door that isn't there.
“You did exactly what they asked of you,” I tell the strike, and I mean it a little.
Inside it's warm, and dry, and humming, and the air tastes of hot dust and something sharp under it like a struck match. The only warm room in the east half of this house, and it was never for me.
One console on a fold-out shelf. The screen is already lit and already open on a list, because there was never going to be a password. Nobody puts a lock on the inside of a room they've already locked.
Thirty days of camera files. Six-minute segments, hundreds of them, every one the same size as the last, stacked in a neat column under the heading that says date.
I don't search for anything. I wouldn't know how, and I don't have to.
I put the cursor on the heading that says size, and I click it once.
The list turns over.
One block stands straight up out of the top of it. Forty-one minutes long, where everything else is six. Seven times the weight of its neighbours, sitting under a date in July with a filename as boring as a laundry receipt.
You can rename a thing. You can move it, and re-stamp it, and file it under a month when I was still in a hospital bed in Calder Ridge.
I say it to the screen, out loud, in a room with nobody in it. “There you are. You can rename a thing all you like, but you can't ever make it weigh less.”
My hands aren't steady now. They were steady on the hammer and they've stopped being steady here, which is the wrong way round and typical.
I open ten seconds of it, and no more.
Rain on gravel. The drive at night, grayed out and grainy. Tail lights going away from the house toward the gate, low and wide, a slate-blue wagon I know the shape of the way you know your own hand.
Then, ninety seconds behind it on the timer, a second set of headlights swinging out of the garage court.
I close it.
The first thing in my head isn't the hearing, and it isn't him.
It's a man's face at the window of a cruiser with a deputy's hand on his elbow, telling me fast, before they shut the door, that they'd have made a mirror of everything for the insurers and nobody ever remembers to delete the boring copy.
“Thank you, Cole Brennan,” I say to an empty room.
The rack is behind me, eight caddies in two rows, each with a paper label in a little steel window. Two of them say the same word with different numbers after it. The last one says mirror.
I press the thumb latch with my thumb, because that's what it's for, and the caddy comes out on its rails with a small sound of surrender.
The disk drops into my hand with the weight of a hardback.
At 9:31 p.m. the east wing comes back. The lights in the corridor snap on all at once, the blowers cough and start, and every door I passed sucks shut against its frame in a run of soft clicks like knuckles cracking.
The ceiling clears its throat.
“Evelyn? Your wing's back on. I'm sorry about that — Julian's been working on the panel.”
I put the disk inside my coat, against my ribs, and I go back the way I came with the light off, because I know the count of my own steps in this corridor better than he knows the drive.
The stair at the east end brings me up beside the great room, and the great room has a lamp on in it and a man standing under the lamp with a glass in his hand.
So I go up instead, and over, along the mezzanine that runs above the hall, in socks, with my boots in my hand.
I'm halfway down the open stair on the far side when I hear him on the landing below me.
Unhurried. Coming up.
The balustrade on this stair stops five treads from the bottom, because the run ends before the rail does and nobody has ever noticed it but me. I go over the outside of it with the disk hard against my ribs and one hand on the stringer, and I let go.
Four feet. A controlled drop, and I've made a hundred of them off scaffold in my life.
My left foot lands on its outside edge on the polished boards, and the ankle rolls under me, and I hear it before I feel it — a wet small sound like a green stick being bent.
No noise. I make no noise at all.
The floor is cold under my hands. I count to ten with my mouth shut and my forehead against the boards, and by six the whole joint is hot and getting fatter inside the sock, and by ten I know exactly what this is going to cost me.
I go along the wall in the dark with my shoulder against the plaster and my weight on the right side, past the pantry, past the laundry, into my own room, and the disk goes flat under the mattress on the hinge side where a hand doesn't go.
The boot won't come off over the left ankle, and pulling at it puts white spots in the dark. I cut the lace with the knife from the drawer, from the top down, one eyelet at a time, and lift my foot out of it.
Elastic bandage from the box. Figure-of-eight around the left ankle — heel, arch, ankle, heel — tight enough that the ends of my toes go cold.
The disk is under the mattress, the bandage is on, and my boot is in the bin with its lace cut open. Above me on the mezzanine there are footsteps, unhurried, the way a man walks in a house he is completely sure of.
Then the ceiling speaks, warm as a hand laid between the shoulders.
“Evelyn, Julian would like to know whether you're comfortable.”