CHAPTER 32
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Nine hours ago I came off the mezzanine stair and landed wrong, and swelling does its real work while you sleep.
The lace is out of the walking shoe because the foot won't go in any other way. I get the heel seated, and I don't tie anything, and I stand up on the right leg first.
Downstairs, AURA says good morning to the kitchen. There's nobody in the kitchen. She says it anyway, warm and unhurried, the way she says everything.
Aldred sleeps in the reading nook now with his door propped open. That's what you do when the person you're watching is upstairs and the stairs creak.
So I take the service corridor instead of the hall. It's three minutes on a good ankle.
It takes eleven, and I count every one of them, limping with a hand along the wall, and by the sixth the whole left side of my foot has gone hot and tight inside the shoe.
The disk is flat against my ribs in the inside pocket of my coat. The server-room door is still leaning where I left it, against the wall, its three hinge pins in my pocket with the pencil halves. Nobody has been down that corridor.
Bay three smells like four-month-old rain.
Four months of dust have gone down onto slate-blue paint, and the dust has taken the shape of the car under it, so the car looks softer than it is.
The right front wing is still creased. They put in a new windshield and they went over the mechanicals and they gave it back to me looking almost repaired, and they left that crease exactly where the guardrail put it.
I stand with a hand on the roof and take my weight off the left foot.
“I'm sorry,” I tell it. “I did that to you, and I've walked past you for four months, and I'm sorry.”
I mean it. I always mean it with objects. It's people I've stopped apologizing to.
There's a scuff on the sill where my boot went in and out of this car twice a day for six years, and it's worn down to bright metal, and nothing about that is repairable either.
The battery is disconnected on the bench in a plastic tray, terminals up, because Julian had them take it out so I wouldn't be tempted. He said it like a kindness and it was a kindness, in the way that everything here is a kindness.
The wrench I need is the ten-millimetre, and it's in the second drawer where it has always been.
I get the battery in the tray and the tray in the car with my back and my right knee, and I say the order out loud, because I'm a person who says the order out loud.
“Positive first, then negative,” I tell the empty bay. “The other way round, the wrench finds the body of the car and you get a spark.”
Positive. Then negative. The nuts go down snug and the terminals go gray-bright where the wire brush has been.
The key is in the ignition. It has been in the ignition since the day they brought the car back, which I have thought about more than once, and I have never once decided what it means.
I get in. The seat is where I left it, because nobody has driven this car since me.
I turn the key.
One click. Then nothing at all, not a crank, not a stutter, only the small dead sound of a solenoid trying and a dash that stays black.
I turn it again and get the same click, and again, and the click gets smaller each time.
I sit there with both hands on a wheel that will not do a single thing for me, and I let it be exactly as bad as it is, for as long as it takes to be that bad.
My hands are shaking on the rim. The left ankle has started throbbing in time with something, and I put my forehead down on my knuckles and stay there.
Then I lift my head, because there's a thing I know that I hadn't finished thinking.
I don't need it to run.
A car doesn't open a gate by running. A car opens a gate by weighing what it weighs.
Cole told me this in a booth at the diner in the spring, over a plate he never touched, with his hands doing the shape of it in the air. There's a wire loop buried in the drive, six feet short of the gate. Big metal leaving wakes it up and the gate opens.
He said it as a complaint about lazy installers. He said a gate that won't let a delivery truck out gets sued, so every one of them is built to open for mass.
I say it out loud in the dark, to nobody, the way I say everything that matters.
“It doesn't have to start. It has to weigh two tons and it has to get to the gate.”
The garage apron falls toward the drive, because water has to go somewhere. I noticed that fall in my first month here and I've never once needed it until now.
Parking brake off. Into neutral. Driver's door open and the wheel in my right hand through the gap.
I put my shoulder into the pillar behind the door and shove off the right leg. Nothing. I shove again and get a groan out of the tires and half an inch.
The third shove is the one, and the car takes the fall in the concrete and starts going without me, and I get in fast and ugly, dragging the left foot in after me like luggage.
Four-tenths of a mile of gravel at walking pace in the dark, with no engine over it.
The wheel takes both arms for every correction, because there's no engine to help it, and the brake pedal is a wall. So I brake in pulls on the parking brake, which is a cable to the back wheels and doesn't care what the engine is doing.
Two tons of steel on loose stone is the loudest thing that has ever happened at Ardenwood. It sounds like a slow, enormous animal eating.
I keep my left foot flat on the floor and off everything, because there's nothing down there it can help with. Every job in this car belongs to my arms and my right leg now, and I keep saying that to myself like a shift briefing.
Twice the front wheel wanders toward the verge and I have to haul it back, both hands, whole shoulders, and each haul costs me a second I can hear passing.
The house lets me go. There's nobody awake in it to hear the one sound it never learned to listen for.
Marguerite's lights are off, a mile and two-tenths down and out of sight. The walk-through gate beside the main one has had a brass padlock on it since the night he cut my code, and I have looked at that padlock every day for two weeks.
There's a seam in the asphalt six feet short of the gate. I know where it is because I counted it out two nights ago, heel to toe, in the cold, with a coat over my nightgown.
The front wheels cross it.
I haul the parking brake up with both hands and the car settles and stops with all of it sitting on the loop.
There it is. Two tons of Swedish steel, and it didn't have to ask him a thing.
The gate wakes up. It hesitates for a second the way it always does, and then both leaves swing back and stand open on a Sunday morning that is barely light yet, and it has opened for mass, not for permission.
And it can't close.
It runs out toward shut, finds the car still sitting on the loop, hesitates, and runs all the way back open again. Then it does it again. It will do it all day.
I get out on the right leg and I walk through, and I don't look back at it.
Fernhollow Road is a mile and two-tenths from the gate to the junction, and limping it takes me forty-five minutes.
I stop twice. The second time I sit down on the frozen grass at the edge of the asphalt and hold the ankle in both hands and rock, and then I get up, because sitting is worse.
By the last quarter mile I'm walking on the heel only, and swinging the leg from the hip, and the sky over the ridge has gone the blue-white it goes before the sun.
The cruiser is at the mouth of the road with its engine off and a thermos on the dash.
Roz Pike rolls the window down and looks at how I'm standing before she looks at my face.
“I've parked here four mornings running. I was starting to feel extremely stupid about it.”
“You can stop feeling stupid. I have something for you.” My voice comes out wrong and I let it. “I need you to take it now, before I change my mind.”
“Sit down in the car before you fall down in the road,” she says. “That ankle's the wrong color for a woman out for a walk.”
I get in. The heater's off and the seat is cold and she pours coffee into the screw-on lid and hands it over too hot to drink, which is fine, because my hands need something to hold.
“How bad is that ankle, honestly?”
“It's day one. It'll be uglier tomorrow and I'll be walking on it properly by the weekend.”
“You came a mile down this road on it.”
“A mile and two-tenths, and I know that because I measure everything now.”
That gets something out of her that isn't quite a laugh, and she looks out at the road instead of at me, which is a courtesy, and I take it.
I put the disk in her palm and I explain it in three sentences and none of them are technical.
“That's a copy of what the house recorded and what it was told to throw away,” I say. “His doctor wrote a history of me that has me sick on days I was standing in a room full of people who watched me work.”
She doesn't move at all.
“The dates are in the house's own filing, and they don't match the record he signed his name to.”
She turns it over once. She doesn't ask me how.
“Did you take a door off?”
“I took the pins out of three hinges and lifted it off,” I say. “It's leaning on the corridor wall, and it's still leaning there now.”
She gets a notebook out of her jacket and writes that down, unhurried, in a hand I can read upside down. A deputy writing something down is the most reassuring thing I have seen in ninety-one days.
“I'm writing it because if I don't write it now,” she says, “somebody will stand up in a room later and say you never told me.”
She underlines something and looks up.
“And you told me. It's a quarter to eight on a Sunday, and you told me.”
Then I ask about Cole, because I've stopped being able to make it up.
“He came out three nights ago, and there's a condition on him,” she says. “He can't come near that property and he can't come near you.”
She waits until I look at her before she finishes it.
“If he does either one, he goes straight back inside, and he knows exactly that.”
For two seconds the coffee lid is warm and everything in me lets go at once.
Then I set the lid down on the dash very carefully, because I know exactly what a man like that does with a condition like that, and I want to put my fist through the windshield of a car the county didn't pay for.
“He asked me one question when he came out,” Roz says, “and it wasn't about his truck and it wasn't about the dog.”
“Don't tell me what it was.”
“You already know.”
“That's the whole problem with him, and everybody who meets him knows it inside a week,” I say. “You can put a condition on that man and all you've done is told him which door to come through.”
She screws the lid back on the thermos and doesn't argue with me, which is its own kind of answer.
Out through the windshield, the frost is coming off the fields in a low gray layer, and somewhere a mile and two-tenths up that road there's a gate opening and closing and opening.
“I'm going back in,” I say.
“A warrant takes what it takes. I can't walk into that house without one, and I'm not sending you back in there.”
“You're not sending me. There are ninety-one pages of a forged medical record, twenty-two letters and a box of pills in that house, and the moment he finds a door leaning on a wall he burns all of it and you're left holding a disk with no context.”
She looks down the road for a long moment. Her jaw does nothing at all, which is somehow worse.
“Then keep your hands where his cameras can see them,” she says, “and don't be clever with him. He's better at clever than you are today, and you're standing on one leg.”
“I'll be back inside before half past nine,” I say. “I'll stand in the kitchen where his camera is, and I'll be exactly as boring as he needs me to be.”
She puts the disk in the breast pocket of her jacket and buttons it down flat, and then she puts her hand over the pocket for a second like a woman checking she still has her keys.
“If you go back in there,” she says, “I can't reach you.”
“I know how every door in that house is hung,” I tell her. “He's the one who can't reach me.”
The car is still on the loop when I come back up the drive on one and a half ankles, and the gate is still trying to shut, and still failing, and it will go on failing all night.