CHAPTER 12
Avery
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The elevator button lit under my thumb and gave nothing back.
No hum in the shaft, no counterweight sliding, none of the small cough the car made between floors.
I pressed it twice more, because being right about a dead elevator is a cheap thing to be right about.
Then I went down to the corridor head to find out who had switched it off.
Rook had carried a kitchen chair out and set it across the stair door, and he sat in it backward with his arms folded over the top rail.
The stairwell put cold against his back.
Over him buzzed the corridor fixture nobody has ever found a switch for, and the cedar out of the opened closets had followed me down.
“Audit,” he said, before I could ask him. “They seal a wing, they count what is inside it, then they unseal it. The elevator is dead because an elevator is a way out.”
“The stair is a way out too, which makes you the door.”
“It makes me a man in a chair.” He knocked the rail twice with a knuckle. “Nobody leaves until the counting is finished, and that includes me, so I am the worst-paid part of this.”
“How long does the counting take?” I put a hand on the cold stair door and took it off again.
“Sundown, if the paperwork behaves itself,” he said. “You have not eaten today. I watched you not eat yesterday, so tonight I am going to cook, and you are going to sit where I can see you doing it.”
The kitchen in the Sable Wing is a long room with two burners that work and one that pretends.
Rook put the warped skillet down on the good burner and it would not sit level.
It spun a quarter turn every time he let go of the handle, and it made a noise like a coin dropped on a table and left to finish.
“That pan is bent,” I said.
“That pan is seasoned. There is a difference, and you are going to learn it tonight.” He waved the spatula at the chair nearest the burner, which passes for an order from him. “Sit there. Talk to me about your dead language.”
He cooked the way he does everything, which is four things at once and none of them in an order I could follow. Oil went in cold. The onion went in after the meat. He talked the whole time, mostly to the food, and then he started on me.
The smoke came up in a gray sheet and sent the cedar smell running for cover.
“That’s burned. That’s on me. You’re eating the second one.”
“I would have eaten the first one,” I said, and meant it.
“You would have been polite about the first one.” He scraped the skillet into the trash. “There is a difference there too.”
Alistair came in while the next batch was going, with a chess set under one arm and his waistcoat buttoned for a formal occasion that was not happening. He set the board up away from the burner and turned it so the white pieces were mine.
“You have played before,” he said. “I can tell by how fast you refused to look pleased about it.”
“My mother taught me. I lose slowly, which she said was the only skill worth having.”
“It is the only skill in the game. Everything else is memory.” He opened with a pawn and made the move look like my idea.
I won the first game in about twenty moves and the second faster. In the third I stopped playing chess and started watching him play it, and his own bishop gave him away.
The set was old and one piece did not belong to it.
The black bishop on the king’s side was a replacement, cut from a yellower ivory, half a shade off everything else on the board.
It was the only piece I could have picked out with my eyes shut, and it was the piece he handed me in all three games, on three different squares.
I took it, set it back where it came from, and folded my hands.
“You are losing on purpose.”
“I am,” he said.
“Why go to the trouble?” I turned my cup around on the table and waited him out.
“Because a person who is winning stays at the table, and I wanted you at the table.” He spun the board and studied his own trap from inside it. “I concede the bishop, the queen behind it, and the charge of being transparent, which is the only one that costs me anything.”
“You could have asked me to sit down.”
“I could have. He did.” Alistair tipped his head toward the burner, where Rook was defending the second batch with his whole body. “It worked, I resent it, and I am going to keep playing badly until it stops working.”
The second batch was good. Rook watched me decide that and said nothing about it, which cost him visible effort.
Alistair set the pieces up again while he ate, king by king, so he could say a thing without looking at anybody.
“Twenty-five in. Sixty-five to go.”
“I did not ask.” I aligned the edges of my napkin, which is what my hands do.
“You never do,” he said. “You count it under your breath at the sink and you get it wrong on purpose, because a wrong number is not a real one. I would rather you had the true one from somebody who likes you.”
Cecily Pryn came up at half past six with a clipboard and a face with nothing on it. Forty years in an archive have left her with the manner of weather. She put a printed sheet down and asked for keys.
“All of them, in front of the person they belong to. I will count them, write down what I counted, and give them back.”
“Every key I own?”
“Every key you carry,” she said. “The audit does not care what you own.”
Rook emptied his pockets onto the wood. Alistair laid his ring down with one finger, finishing the motion he had started before she asked. I put down the two I was given.
In Rook’s pile, near the front, dull and green in its teeth, was the copper key. It has opened nothing since they changed the core on the tunnel door. He carries it anyway, and Cecily wrote it down without a flicker.
I kept my hands where they were. Reaching for it would have told the room I had not finished wanting it.
My phone went off against my hip while she was still writing.
“That is not on the inventory,” Cecily said. “Take it in the corridor if you want the corridor. It makes no difference to me.”
I got three steps from the table, as far as the wing would let me go, and my brother’s voice came up too loud and too fast.
“There she is. There’s my sister. I was starting to think they’d put you in a tower.”
“They put me in a wing. Different architecture.”
“I’m great,” Teddy said. “Healthiest idiot in three counties. There’s a lock on the door.”
“A lock on which door?”
“Mine. The room’s over a hardware store, and there’s a bolt on the inside I put on myself with a screwdriver the landlady lent me.
” He took a breath and kept going. “I unload feed on Saturday for a guy who thinks I’m nineteen and useless, which is accurate, and he pays cash on the day.
The landlady does the crossword out loud and she’s terrible at it. ”
“There’s a man who drives past twice a night,” he said, before I could ask it. “And before you start, he works for your friend with the burned arm, and he waves.”
“He waves.”
“He waves, Avery. It’s a nice street. It’s the nicest street I’ve been on since Mom.” The bravado came off him then, all at once, the way a coat does. “Don’t sign anything else for me. Whatever they put in front of you, don’t put my name on the bottom of it, and don’t put yours.”
“Teddy.”
“I know what I cost.” His voice thinned out on the last word and he hurried past it. “I’m not going to say the figure out loud, because saying it makes it real, and I’ve got a bolt on the door and a good afternoon, and I want to keep both.”
“Then keep them,” I said. “I will do the arguing from here. You do the feed and the crossword, and I will call again, and you will pick up on the first ring.”
He laughed. It was wet at the edge, and he covered it by hanging up on me, which is the most Teddy thing he has ever done.
Julian came up the service stair at seven with his coat still on.
He did not take it off in the doorway. He did not say good evening, or ask what was in the skillet, or do any of the small courteous things he does without thinking, and their absence was the loudest thing in the room. He crossed to the window and put his hand on the sill.
Cecily capped her pen.
“The board sat at nine. Censure, item four on the minutes.”
The pipes had not started yet. The room was very warm, the wind was working at the northwest corner of the building, and nobody moved.
“Say that in a way I can use,” I said.
“I have said it in the only way I have,” she answered. “The rest is not archive. The rest belongs to him.”
I put my back to her and asked him, because he was four steps away, and because I have never been able to take a fact secondhand with the person standing in the room.
“Is it true?”
“It is on the minutes.” He turned around. “That is not a thing I will argue, Miss Vance.”
“I am not asking you to argue it. I am asking what happened in that room. There are two sides here and I have heard the one that got written down.”
“The side that got written down is the finding of the board,” he said. “It stands.”
“That is not an answer. That is a citation.”
“It is what I have.” He put the sill at his back and left his hands where they were.
I gave him the second opening, and I made it as wide as I know how to make one. “Then tell me the price instead of the finding. Give me the name of it, or the cost of it, and I will never raise it again.”
He looked at me for a while, and whatever was behind his face he kept behind it.
“I took you out of active care and said why. Once.”
“That is the whole answer?”
“That is the whole of it,” he said.
Rook set the pan down on the cold burner, and the sound was a man putting a thing down instead of throwing it.
“He won’t tell you what it cost him. I would.”
“Rook.” Julian said the name the way you would put a hand out.