Chapter 9
The call came at twenty past four on a Friday afternoon in February, in the third day of a cold snap that had taken the harbor down to fourteen degrees and stayed there.
"Mrs. Sutton? It's Father Dunne at St. Bride's. I'm sorry to — I've been given your number by a Miss Beckett—"
"What's happened?"
"The heat's gone."
"Gone how? Gone cold, or gone loud?"
A pause. "It made a noise," Father Dunne said, "and then it stopped."
She was in the truck in four minutes.
St. Bride's parish hall in Quincy was a low brick building attached to a church by a covered walk, with a day-care in the basement and a food pantry that ran on Saturdays and two hundred people expected at nine the next morning for a funeral breakfast.
It was thirty-one degrees inside when she got there, and dropping, and the pipes in the walk-through were already sweating in the way that means you have about six hours before you have a very different problem.
Gordon's truck pulled in behind hers at 5:10.
She did not need to ask why he was there. She had known he'd come from the moment she heard the address, the way you know weather.
He got out with a coat over a suit and a flashlight in his hand.
"Beckett called you too," she said.
"Beckett called Lattimore. Lattimore called me." He shut the door with his hip. "I can go."
Nicole looked at the building.
Somewhere under it was a two-pipe system converted twice, once by a contractor in 1974 and once by two people in their twenties over a weekend in the company's first year, with a header between the hall and the rectory that existed on no drawing anywhere in the world.
There were exactly two people alive who had put it there.
"No," she said. "You can't."
Father Dunne met them at the side door with a flashlight and an apology.
"I want to be clear that I have no money," he said. "I have a heating fund with four hundred dollars in it and a boiler that predates me."
"You've got a contract," Nicole said.
"Have I?"
"Since 2006. Nobody's ever changed the rate." She wiped her boots. "Where's the day-care?"
"Under the hall. They're closed till Monday, thank God."
"And the pantry?"
"Saturday morning. Eight o'clock." He hesitated. "There'll be sixty people."
Gordon said, "Then we've got till eight."
The basement mechanical room was six feet of headroom and eighty years of paint.
Gordon got the light up. Nicole got the panel off. Neither of them said a word about the fact that they did it without discussing who would do which, or that they had last done it together in a different century.
"It's not the boiler," she said.
"No."
"Boiler's fine. Listen to it."
"I am listening to it." He put a hand flat on the casing. "It's firing and it's got nowhere to go."
"So it's the header."
"It's the header," he agreed, and then, because he was Gordon: "Or it's the pump."
"It's not the pump."
"It could be the—"
"Gordon, it's not the pump." She wiped her hand down her face and left a stripe of forty years of dust there, which he did not tell her about for another two hours.
"The pump was replaced in the spring. I signed the invoice in the spring because it came to the house by accident and I opened it.
Twelve hundred dollars and a note from Corbett's boy. "
Gordon looked at her in the dark.
"You opened our mail," he said.
"I opened your mail. Once. In April."
"And you read the whole invoice."
"I read the whole invoice."
And he laughed. It came out of him before he could get hold of it — the bark, the actual one, the one she had known since she was twenty-two — and it bounced off eighty years of paint in a basement in Quincy.
She did not laugh with him. But something moved.
At half past seven they found it.
The header was buried behind a false wall a previous contractor had built to hide it, which was exactly the kind of thing that happens to a pipe nobody has drawn: it becomes invisible, and then somebody builds a wall in front of it, and then thirty years later it becomes a mystery.
Gordon put the sledge through the plasterboard because his shoulder was better than hers and he did not say that, he just picked it up.
Behind it was a valve.
"Oh," Nicole said.
It was closed.
Not broken. Not seized. Not frozen. Somebody, sometime in the last few months, had reached in behind a false wall with a wrench and closed a gate valve by hand, three-quarters of the way, and the system had been limping on the last quarter through November and December and January until the cold got serious enough to finish it.
"Somebody did that," Gordon said.
"Somebody did that."
"Why would—"
"Because it knocks," Nicole said. She was already laughing, a bit hysterically, in the cold.
"It's always knocked. It knocked in the first winter.
Somebody in this parish has spent twenty years being annoyed by a noise, and this year they found the valve and turned it down, and the noise stopped, and they thought they'd fixed it. "
Gordon sat down on an upturned bucket and put his head in his hands.
"Twenty years," he said.
"Twenty years."
"We could have written it on the wall."
"We meant to." She leaned against the brick. "Do you remember? We said we'd do a drawing on Monday."
"I remember saying it."
"We did the drawing," Nicole said. "In September. It's wrong."
She stood looking at the open valve for a while.
"It was you, you know."
"What?"
"The wall. Not this one — the reason nobody drew the header.
" She was looking at the plasterboard dust on her boots.
"We were going to do the drawing on the Monday and on the Monday you got the Wollaston job, and you came home at nine at night with it and we opened a bottle of wine that cost four dollars, and the drawing didn't happen.
And then it was Tuesday, and then it was never. "
Gordon was quiet for a moment.
"I remember the wine," he said.
"You would."
"No, I remember it because you cried." He was still sitting on the bucket. "You sat on the floor in that room and you cried about a contract for twenty thousand dollars, and I didn't know what to do, and I sat down next to you and you said — "
"I said now we have to actually do it."
"Now we have to actually do it," Gordon said.
Nicole leaned against the brick with her arms folded and looked at a valve behind a false wall.
"We were so frightened," she said. "The whole time. I don't think I've said that out loud, ever. Not to Bridget, not to anyone. Everybody thinks the beginning was the good part and it was the good part, and I was frightened every single day for six years."
"So was I."
"I know you were. I could hear you not sleeping." She rubbed her thumb along the scar. "That's the bit that's gone, isn't it. Not the money. We were terrified together and it was the last thing we ever did as one person."
Gordon didn't answer for a long moment.
"The last thing," he said, "was the sixth year."
"What happened in the sixth year?"
And Gordon Sutton looked at the floor of a mechanical room in Quincy and said, "Nothing. It's late. Pass me the smaller wrench."
They got the valve open at ten past eight and it knocked so loudly that Father Dunne came down the stairs to see whether the building was falling over.
Then they had to bleed the whole system, which is a job for two people and about four hours, and there was nobody else, and neither of them suggested calling anybody.
Somewhere in there Father Dunne brought down two mugs of tea and a plate of sandwiches from the funeral breakfast and left without asking a single question, which Nicole thought was probably the entire skill of the priesthood.
They sat on the floor of the mechanical room at half past ten with sandwiches.
"You've got dust on your face," Gordon said.
"I know."
"It's been there since seven."
"I know, Gordon."
He almost said something and didn't.
"Go on."
"No."
"Say it."
"You used to have it there all the time," he said.
"That's all. That's the whole thought. You used to come home with that on your face about four days a week and I used to—" He stopped.
He turned his wedding ring with his thumb, and then noticed he was doing it, and put both hands flat on his knees like a man putting down a weapon.
"You used to what."
"I used to think I was the luckiest man in Massachusetts," Gordon said.
Nicole looked at the pipes.
"Don't do that," she said.
"You asked."
"I did." She pulled her knees up. "That's fair."
They worked. It got easier and then it got dangerous, because the easiness was the problem: the shorthand came back inside an hour, the hold that, the two more turns, the way he knew to hand her the smaller wrench without being asked, the way she knew from the sound whether a radiator upstairs had taken.
Twenty-four years is a machine, and the machine still ran.
They did the ground floor first and then went up.
Bleeding a system is not difficult and it is not interesting; it is a key, a jar, a rag, and forty-one radiators, and you do them in order and you do not skip one, because the one you skip is the one that airlocks at four in the morning and undoes the whole night.
Forty-one. She noticed the number on the eighth one and had to stop for a second with her hand on a valve.
"What?" Gordon said.
"Nothing."
"Nic."
"There were forty-one people," she said. "Before the name changed. I counted them in the ledger last month."
He didn't say anything. He handed her the rag.
At the twentieth radiator she said, "Ask me something about the company."
"What?"
"Anything. Something you'd actually want to know." She kept her eyes on the valve. "You haven't asked me a single question about the work since December. Neither have I, and I've been trying to work out which of us stopped first, and I don't think either of us did. I think we just — agreed."
Gordon crouched down beside her with the jar.
"All right," he said. "The Haymarket contingency. Nine and a half."
"How do you know that?"
"It's my company, Nicole, I read the submissions." A beat. "Nine and a half is high. Lattimore would have gone six. Why?"