Chapter 4
Records took two days to tell her no.
The reply came Wednesday afternoon and it had been written by a lawyer wearing a clerk's clothes. Certain historical materials are subject to review prior to release. We are unable to confirm a timeline at present.
Nicole read it, and then she read the room, which was easier. The fourth floor had gone quiet at about eleven and stayed that way. Somebody upstairs had made a decision, and the floor could feel it the way old houses feel weather.
At four o'clock the elevator opened and Ross Danforth came out carrying a banker's box.
He carried it the length of the floor, past thirty desks, in front of everybody, and set it down on her desk with a grunt he didn't need to make.
"Records says these are under review," he said.
"I read that."
"They're not." He straightened up and pushed his glasses into his hair. "They're under my desk. They've been under my desk since we moved buildings, because nobody else wanted them and I don't throw things away."
The box had been labeled in marker a long time ago. DORCHESTER AVE — DO NOT DISCARD.
"Ross."
"Don't."
"Ross—"
"Nicole." He said it quietly, and he wasn't smiling. "I've been waiting nine years for somebody to ask me for this box. Just take the lid off."
She took the lid off.
Paper smells like the year it was filed. That was the first thing, before she'd read a word of it — the room over the print shop came up out of that box and hit her in the chest, dust and cold and the mildew off the stairwell wall.
The lease was on top, four pages, stapled crooked. LESSEE: NICOLE M. DORAN. Her signature at twenty-six, bigger than it was now, with the ambitious loop she'd dropped somewhere in her thirties.
Under it the payroll ledger. Green cardboard covers, her own handwriting in columns, every line in pencil so it could be fixed. She turned to the back, and there it was: the list. Every name, in order, with the date they started. Forty-one names before the sixth year.
Under the ledger were the hiring letters, carbon copies gone the color of weak tea.
She found his without meaning to. Third from the top.
Dear Mr. Danforth,
We are pleased to offer you the position of Field Supervisor at a starting salary of...
And at the bottom, above the typed line:
N. Doran, Partner
Nicole put her hand flat on it.
Around her the floor was pretending very hard to be working. Somewhere a phone rang twice and got picked up.
"I've had that letter in a drawer for twenty years," Ross said. "My wife framed a copy. It's in our hall."
"Why."
"Because I'd been out of work for seven months," he said, "and a woman I'd never met read my references properly and gave me a job over the phone in twenty minutes."
She looked up at him.
"Fifteen minutes," Ross said. "I've told it wrong for two decades. Sue me."
She laughed, and then didn't, because something had occurred to her.
"Ross. How many people still here were here before the name changed?"
He thought about it properly, which took him a while, and which she appreciated.
"Working here now? Nine," he said. "Dolores in accounts is one of them, but she's part-time and she's going in June. Then it's eight."
"Nine."
"Nine out of four hundred and sixty." He shrugged, and it was not a comfortable shrug. "That's not a conspiracy, Nicole. That's just twenty years. People retire. People die. Somebody has to keep the story after that and it turns out nobody's job is keeping the story."
"Somebody's job was writing it."
"Yeah," Ross said. "That's the sixth floor."
She took the box home and went through it on the floor of the Charlestown apartment with a glass of wine she forgot to drink.
There was more in it than she'd asked for. Ross had never sorted anything; he had only kept it. A phone bill. A receipt for a used van. Two years of job files in an order that made sense to nobody, with her handwriting on the covers and the corners soft from being carried.
At the bottom, in a manila folder gone the color of a paper bag, were the corporate filings.
She found the name change halfway down.
MINUTES — SPECIAL MEETING — RESOLUTION TO ADOPT TRADING NAME
It was one page. It said that a resolution had been proposed, that it had been discussed, that it had been carried, and it listed the vote.
That was all. Discussed. Whatever had happened in that room had gone into that one word and there was no other record of it anywhere on earth.
She remembered the spring it happened. She remembered a consultant, a nice man with a portfolio, explaining that Sutton & Doran tested as a law firm and the Sutton Group tested as a builder.
She remembered agreeing with him, out loud, in front of people, because he was right — it did test as a law firm — and because she had wanted very badly to be the kind of person who didn't take that sort of thing personally.
She remembered nothing unusual about that meeting at all.
Gordon had come home that week the same as any other week — tired, a little short, nothing she would have flagged at the time. She had a specific memory of being mildly irritated that he hadn't mentioned it was happening, and deciding it wasn't worth a fight, and putting it down.
Nicole sat on the floor with the page in her hand for a long time.
Then she put it back in the folder, because she did not know what to do with a fact that had no shape yet, and she had learned as a young woman not to pick up a load until she knew where she was setting it down.
She met Joanna Pierce at a café on Farnsworth Street at eight the next morning, before the building filled.
Joanna was forty-one and looked like nothing. That was the only way Nicole could describe it afterward — she had the least memorable face in the room and she used it like a tool. She ordered black coffee, put a recorder on the table between them, and did not touch either.
"Before we start," Joanna said, "some ground rules, because I don't want you to be surprised by me later."
"Go on."
"I'm not your friend and I'm not on your side. If I find out you're wrong about something, I'll print that you were wrong." She turned the recorder on. "I'm also not interested in your marriage. Everyone else who calls you this month will be. I want to know who did what in the first six years."
Nicole found, to her surprise, that she liked her.
"I brought some things," she said, and put the box on the table.
Joanna went through it the way a doctor palpates. No exclaiming, no oh my God. She read the lease all the way through, then the ledger, then four of the hiring letters, and she made small marks in a notebook that Nicole couldn't see.
At the ledger she stopped for a while.
"This is in pencil."
"It had to be. We were guessing."
"Whose handwriting?"
"Mine."
"All of it?"
"For six years."
Joanna turned back a page. "There's a column here that's just — is that hours?"
"Hours against the bid. So I could see how badly I'd priced it." Nicole leaned over and turned two more pages. "There. Fourth line. That's a school in Dorchester and I underbid it by nine thousand dollars, and we ate it, and Gordon and I didn't take anything for seven weeks."
"Did he know you'd underbid it?"
"He priced the second one with me at the kitchen table until three in the morning so it wouldn't happen twice."
Joanna wrote for a moment.
"I have to tell you something," she said, "and you're not going to like it. Two days ago my piece was a nice anniversary profile with a quote from a founder's wife in the middle of it. That's what I was commissioned for and that's what I'd have filed."
"And now?"
"Now I have a lease." Joanna closed her notebook. "Mrs. Sutton, this changes the shape of my piece and it's going to take me months and it will be very hard on your husband. I need to know you understand that before I keep going."
Nicole looked out the window at the brick building where her husband was, four floors up, probably standing still.
"I understand it," she said.
The archdiocese meeting was on Thursday and she wasn't invited to it.
She knew it was happening because the fourth floor knew everything, and because Yolanda Beckett's name had been on the visitors' board since Tuesday, and because at nine that morning Chris Lattimore came through in a good suit talking about a portfolio.
Lattimore was maybe forty and ran delivery for the northern half of the region. He had a habit of saying we about work he hadn't done.
"Big one," he said to the floor generally. "Thirty-one buildings."
Nicole listened to him list them from her desk with her pencil in her hand.
She got to the fourth building before she put the pencil down.
The conference room on five had glass on two sides, which was a design decision she had opposed fourteen years ago and lost. She could see Yolanda Beckett from the corridor, a heavyset woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a chain, and Lattimore standing at the screen, and Whitney at the far end with her chin on her hand, and Gordon by the window.
Nicole opened the door.
Every head turned. Lattimore said, "Sorry — this is a client—"
"Which parish are you doing first?" Nicole said.
Yolanda Beckett took her glasses off.
"I'm sorry," Lattimore said. "Mrs. Sutton, this really isn't—"
"You've got them in cost order." Nicole came in and looked at the screen. "So you're starting with St. Bride's in Quincy, because it's the smallest number on the page. Is that right?"
"It's the most efficient sequ—"
"You can't touch St. Bride's first," she said. "You'll take the whole schedule down with it."
The room did nothing for a second.
Yolanda Beckett said, "Go on."
Nicole put two fingers on the table. "St. Bride's has a two-pipe system that's been converted twice, and the second conversion was ours, in the first year we existed, on no money.
It works. It works because the hall and the rectory share a header that isn't on any drawing anywhere, because we put it in over a weekend and we did the drawing after and the drawing is wrong. "
"That's not in the survey," Lattimore said.