Chapter 14
The first call came on a Wednesday in July from a number in Weymouth, and she nearly didn't take it.
"Is that Nicole Doran?"
"It is."
"You won't remember me. Arthur Pell. I ran sheet metal for Kilroy out of Braintree, and I did your ductwork on the Norwood job in — it'd be 'oh-eight."
Nicole sat down on the edge of a stack of pallets in the Haymarket loading bay.
"Mr. Pell. I remember you. You put a jog in a main to miss a beam and didn't charge us for it."
There was a pause on the line.
"Well," Arthur Pell said. "That's a hell of a thing to be remembered for."
"Why are you calling?"
"Because a fella phoned me about a month ago.
" He cleared his throat. "Fella called Sutton.
Said he was writing down what happened at the start of the company and wanted to know what I remembered.
Asked me what you did. Not what he did — what you did.
Sat on the phone with me for about fifty minutes, and I'm seventy-eight and I don't get fifty minutes off anybody anymore. "
She had a hand over her eyes.
"And then he said thank you," Pell said, "and he said something I've thought about since, which is that he was sorry it had taken him twenty years to ask."
"Did he say why he was asking?"
"I asked him that. He said the record was wrong and he was one of the people who'd got it wrong." A wet cough. "Anyway. I gave your number to the woman from the magazine. Hope that's all right. She's already called."
The second one came on the Friday.
A woman named Ceil Hardaway who had done the company's books for seven weeks in the second year, as a favor, while Nicole had pneumonia.
"He wanted to know what shape the books were in when I picked them up," she said, and laughed. "I told him. I said they were the cleanest set I'd ever inherited off anybody and I'd assumed there was an accountant, and there wasn't, there was a girl of twenty-eight doing it in pencil at night."
The third came on the Monday. The fourth and fifth came in the same week.
By the middle of July she had spoken to nine people she had not spoken to in fifteen years, and every one of them had been called first by Gordon Sutton, and not one of them had been asked to keep it quiet.
That was the detail she kept turning over. He had not sworn anybody to secrecy. He had simply not told her — and had then rung around a list of people who would obviously, inevitably, eventually ring her.
She worked out the list on a Saturday morning and had to stop halfway through and stand at the window.
It was the ledger. Of course it was the ledger. He was working through the back of the first payroll ledger — forty-one names, in the order she had written them down in 2006 and 2007 and 2008 — and calling every single one of them who was still alive.
He'd asked Ross for it in March, apparently. Ross had photocopied the page and had not mentioned it to anybody for four months, which was the most Ross Danforth thing that had ever happened.
"He rings in the evenings," Ilene Brackett said, when Nicole finally asked. "Twice a week, roughly. Sometimes three. He's got about nine left and two of those are in Florida."
"How do you know that?"
"Because he calls me afterward and tells me who he's got to, so I can put it in the file properly.
" Ilene's voice was perfectly matter-of-fact.
"He asked me in April whether it would be all right to help.
Asked, mind. He's the owner of the company and he asked a sixty-one-year-old archivist for permission to make phone calls. "
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him he could do the calls and I'd do the filing and he wasn't to write a single word of the file himself." A pause. "He said that was exactly what he'd hoped I'd say."
Nicole stood in her kitchen.
"Ilene. Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because he asked me not to, and I thought about it for a night, and I decided he was right.
" Papers moved somewhere. "And before you get cross with me, Nicole, he didn't ask me to keep it a secret.
He asked me not to be the one who told you.
Those are different. He knew perfectly well you'd find out — you can't ring forty people in this trade and expect it not to reach you.
He just wanted it to reach you sideways, from them, rather than from him. "
Nicole did not say anything for a moment.
"He was quite clear about it," Ilene said. "He said: if she hears it from me it's a present."
The one that finished her came on a Thursday evening in the parking lot of the Ironworks.
She had got there early. She was sitting in the car with the engine off and ten minutes to kill, and the number was a landline in Fall River.
"Mrs. Doran? It's Rosalie Amaral. My husband was Manny — Manuel Amaral, he did concrete for you, the first school and the church hall in—"
"Quincy," Nicole said. "St. Bride's. Manny did the pad for the new plant room."
A small sound on the line.
"He's been gone six years," Rosalie said.
"I'm so sorry. I didn't know."
"No, no. Why would you." A steadying breath. "I'm calling because your husband telephoned me in May and I've been trying to work out since whether to call you, and my daughter said just call her, so I'm calling."
"Please."
"He didn't know Manny had died," Rosalie said.
"He asked for him by name. And when I told him, he was quiet a long time, and then he said he was sorry, and then he said — Mrs. Doran, he said, Can I ask you what he said about the job?
Because I'd like to write it down while there's still someone to ask. "
Nicole put her free hand flat on the steering wheel.
"And I told him what Manny used to say." Rosalie's voice went warm and a bit unsteady.
"Which was that there was a girl at that outfit who paid on the Friday.
That's it, that's the whole story, he told it for twenty years — there's a girl at that outfit who pays on the Friday.
We had four children and there were months where that was the difference, and he never forgot it, and he went to your — he came to the twentieth anniversary do, the big one at the hotel, no — no, that's not right, that's not what I meant to say. "
"It's all right."
"He didn't. He'd have been dead six years." A wet laugh. "Listen to me. I'm eighty-one."
"Mrs. Amaral, it's all right."
"Your husband stayed on the phone with me for an hour," Rosalie said. "An hour, with an old woman he'd never met, about a man who's been dead six years. And at the end he said thank you for your time, and then he said one more thing and I wrote it down because I wanted to get it right."
Nicole sat very still in a parking lot in Quincy.
"He said: I'm not putting my name on any of this. It's not mine to put."
She said something. She had no idea afterward what she said. She got off the phone and sat in the car with her hands in her lap and the light going long and orange across the lot and the sign over the Ironworks door buzzing the way it had buzzed since 1998.
And then Nicole Sutton cried in a parked car for about twenty minutes.
Not because of Gordon. That was what she tried to explain to herself afterward and couldn't, quite.
It was for a man named Manny Amaral, who had spent twenty years telling people about a girl who paid on the Friday, and had died six years ago, and had never once been asked; and for a woman of eighty-one who had written a sentence down on a pad by the phone because she wanted to get it right; and for the fact that there had been forty-one names in the back of a ledger and nobody, in twenty years, had thought to ring any of them.
And underneath all of it, in a place she did not want to look at directly, for the fact that the person who finally did was her husband, alone, in the evenings, twice a week, with no one watching and nothing to gain and no intention of ever mentioning it to her.
Bridget came out to the lot at ten past seven and found her.
She didn't ask. She got into the passenger seat and shut the door and sat there.
"Is he dead?" she said eventually.
"No."
"Has he done something?"
"Yes."
"Bad?"
"No," Nicole said.
Bridget looked out the windshield for a while.
"Well," she said. "Shit."
She did not call him.
That was the hard part, and she was aware, doing it, that she was doing a version of the thing he had done — receiving something enormous and saying nothing about it — and she could not tell whether that was symmetry or cowardice.
But she thought about it constantly. It sat in her chest all through July, in the way that a fact sits in you before it has become a feeling.
Because here was the shape of it, and she turned it over every night for three weeks:
He could have told her. It would have taken one sentence.
I've been calling the old crew. It would have been the single most effective thing he could possibly have said to her in eight months, and he knew it, and he had known it in March when he asked Ross for the page, and he had chosen — deliberately, over four months, twice a week, in the evenings, alone — to do the work and to not have the credit.
And it wasn't even really for the record. That was the thing. Joanna already had the record. She had nine witnesses and a hundred and forty pages and the minute books, and a scattering of retired subcontractors was not going to change one word of an eight-thousand-word piece.
He was doing it for the people. He was ringing seventy-eight-year-olds in Weymouth to ask them what his wife had done, and giving them fifty minutes, and saying he was sorry it had taken him twenty years to ask.
The Haymarket job finished on the eighteenth of July, on schedule and under the contingency, and Yolanda Beckett came to the handover because she said she wanted to see the shaft.
Kara took her through it. Nicole stood at the back and did not say a word.