Chapter 1
The Saturday Puzzle
June ate pancakes like she was racing someone.
She did it every Saturday. She cut each one into eight pieces, no more and no less, and she ate them in a particular order, and she would not say what the order was. Daniel had been watching for years and still could not work it out. Today she had her left foot tucked under her on the chair and her braid over one shoulder, and she was holding the newspaper folded in quarters with one hand while she cut with the other.
"You're dripping," said Daniel.
"It's syrup. It's supposed to."
"On the paper."
She looked down. A brown drop had landed on the top corner of the chess diagram, right over the black king. She wiped it with her thumb, and then she wiped her thumb on her pajama sleeve, and then she looked at him with an expression of great innocence.
"Now it's a different puzzle," she said. "Now the king's got a stain on him."
"That's a very nice way of saying you made a mess."
"That's a very nice way of saying I made it harder."
He took the coffeepot back to the stove. It was ten past eight. The kitchen window looked out on the back yard, where the grass was coming up in patches and the neighbor's cat was sitting on the fence like a small gray judge. The radio on the shelf was on low, a man reading the weather. Rain by evening. Alder Street smelled like wet leaves and somebody's toast.
It was a small house. It had two bedrooms, one bathroom with a door that stuck, and a kitchen that Daniel had painted yellow four years ago because the color was meant to be cheerful. It had come out the shade of a school bus. June said she liked it. She said it was like living inside a banana. He had decided to take that as praise.
"Okay," said June. "Okay. It's white to move. Mate in two."
"You don't have to tell me."
"I'm not telling you. I'm saying it out loud so I can hear it." She put down her fork. She had the puzzle three inches from her nose and her eyebrows pulled together so hard that they almost met. "The queen can't go there. She'd get taken. The bishop's pinned. So it's not the bishop. It's. Oh."
"Oh?"
"Oh, that's mean." She was grinning. It spread slowly across her face, all the way up, the way it did when she found something she was pleased with. "It's the knight. It's always the knight. They always hide it behind the pawns so you don't see it."
"Is that right?"
"The knight goes in an L, Dad. You know that. I've told you, like, a thousand times."
"I don't play."
"You know how they move."
"I just look," said Daniel, and poured himself coffee. "I'm retired."
"You've been retired my entire life."
"That's a long career."
She pulled a napkin across the table, and a pen from behind her ear, and she drew a small square in the middle of the napkin. From the square she drew a line two squares straight, and then one across. An L. She turned it round so that it faced him and pushed it over the pancake plate with one finger.
"Knight," she said. "In case you forget."
"I won't forget."
"You forget every time."
"I've got a good reason," he said. "I'm a busy man."
He folded the napkin once and put it in his shirt pocket. She watched him do it, and he saw her decide not to say anything about it, which was a thing she was starting to do. She was twelve. In the last year she had begun to notice when people were being kind to her on purpose, and to let them.
He had never taught her to play. That was the odd part. Anna would have, if she had lived. Anna had been the one with the board in the bottom drawer of the sideboard, a travel set with magnets in the pieces, and she had been going to teach June when June was old enough to sit still. But Anna had died the spring June was three, and the board had stayed in the drawer. Then one day when June was seven she had found it, and brought it to him on the couch, and asked what the horse was for.
He had said he didn't know.
It was the first lie he could remember telling her. It was not even a good one. She had looked at the horse, and the board, and him, and gone to find a book from the library. By nine she had beaten him once. By ten she'd beaten the whole school. Now she had a coach and a club that met on Tuesdays and a cardboard box under her bed full of paper scoresheets with her moves written out in her small square handwriting.
He did not look at the scoresheets. When she left them on the couch he put them back in the box without reading them. She thought he was respecting her privacy. Maybe he was.
"What time's the thing?" said June.
"Two. In the gym."
"You're coming?"
"I'm coming."
"You have to sit at the back."
"I know."
"And you can't make faces."
"I never make faces."
"You make a face when I take too long. It's like you're trying to hold your breath underwater."
"I'll hold it quietly."
"And no talking to Mr. Pell. He's weird about parents."
"I'll stay out of his way."
She nodded, satisfied, and went back to her pancakes. He watched the top of her head. The part in her hair was crooked, as it always was, because she did it herself in the mirror and wouldn't let him help. There was a freckle on the left side of her nose that had not been there at Christmas. When he looked at her too long, in the mornings, he felt a small tightening under the ribs, a feeling he had never found a good name for. It was something between pride and fear. It had been there since the day she was born. He had given up trying to make it go away.
Anna used to say that a house with its light on is a house that is expecting somebody.
It was a rule, and a joke, and by now it was also a habit that nobody argued with. When Anna first got sick, they were still living in the apartment on Burke Street, and she had started leaving the hall light on every night so that Daniel could find his way home when he worked late. She called it the lighthouse. Come in by the light, she'd say. It's the only one that isn't a trick. After she died, he had gone on leaving the porch light on in the new house, every night, without once forgetting, though he could not have told you why. June had picked it up. She said lighthouse when she meant home. It was their private word. It was also, since a bad winter when she was eight and a woman at the grocery store had been a little too friendly, the password.
"If anyone ever picks you up from school and it isn't me," he had told her then, "they have to say it. If they don't say it, you don't go. Even if they're a teacher. Even if they say I told them."
"What if they say it wrong?"
"There isn't a wrong way. It's one word."
"What if they're someone I know?"
"Then they'll know it."
She had taken that very seriously. She had written it on the inside of her pencil case, in tiny letters, and then crossed it out, and then written it again somewhere only she could find.
He worked at Harbor Mutual, on the fourth floor of a building that used to be a department store, and what he did all day was find out when people were lying.
That was not what the job was called. The job was called claims investigator. People had a fire, or a flood, or a car stolen out of a locked garage, and they filed a claim, and Daniel went and looked at it. He was good at the work. He had a quiet manner and a plain face and he did not seem to want anything, and people told him things. Over twelve years he had learned that nobody lies about the big thing. They tell you the truth about the big thing, even cry about it. They lie about the small thing next to it. The time the stove was last cleaned. Whether the back door was locked. A person who has lost everything will tell you every detail of the loss, and then, when you ask what time they went to bed, they'll look at the window.
He sometimes thought it was the only real skill he had. He could tell when somebody was holding one sentence back. He just could not ever tell what to do about it.
There was a stack of mail on the counter. He had been going through it with one eye, between sips of coffee, junk and bills, and the gas company, and a postcard from his sister in Tucson with a picture of a cactus wearing a hat. At the bottom was a long white envelope with a county seal in the corner and a window in the front. He knew what it was before he read the line through the window. He had always known by the envelope. It looked exactly like a utility bill from a very serious utility.
MARLOW COUNTY JURY COMMISSION. JUROR SUMMONS.
He turned it face down. He did it quickly, with the flat of his hand, as you cover a card at the poker table. Then he slid it under the gas bill, and the gas bill under the postcard, and went to put the milk away.
"What's that?" said June.
"What's what?"
"The one you hid."
"I didn't hide anything. I put it on the pile."
"You put it under the pile." She had turned in her chair and was watching him over the back of it, like a small detective. "It had the county thing on it. Is it the tax?"
"It's nothing. It's a letter."
"Are you in trouble?"
"No."
"You went kind of gray."
"I did not go gray."
"A bit. Like Mr. Pell when someone asks about the budget."
"It's a jury thing," said Daniel. He said it lightly, to the refrigerator. "They send them out every year. I get out of them."
"How?"
"I write back and say I can't."
"Can't or won't?"
"Both."
"Why?"
He closed the door of the refrigerator. There was a magnet on it in the shape of a lemon, holding up a school photograph of June at ten, gap-toothed and glaring, and he looked at it for a second before he answered.
"I'd be a bad juror," he said. "I get too tired. I'm the kind of person who just wants to go home."
"Everyone wants to go home."
"Then I'd be an average one."
She seemed to think about that. Then she turned back to the newspaper, which was how he knew that she had not believed him and had decided it was not the time. She was good at that too.
The gym smelled like floor wax and orange peel.
They had set up twenty tables in rows across the basketball court, each one with a board and two chairs and a little digital clock with a button on each side. Parents stood along the wall, not talking. Children sat at the tables with their heads down and their legs swinging. The only sound was a soft constant clicking, like a very large and very cautious insect, as hands pressed buttons and pieces went down on wood.
Daniel stood at the back, by the door, where he had been told to stand.
He didn't look at the boards. He looked at the floor, and at the exit sign, and at a banner on the far wall that said MARLOW MIDDLE SCHOOL KNIGHTS. He counted the tiles by the door. It was something he did without noticing. In any hallway, any corridor, any long room, he counted steps until he got to forty, and then he stopped, and then he started looking at something else. He had done it for as long as June had been alive. He had never once told anyone.
"Mr. Wells?"
It was Mr. Pell, who was the chess coach, a pale man in a gray cardigan who looked as if he had been ironed. He had a clipboard and a lanyard and the expression of a man who dealt with a great many parents.
"June's up next," said Mr. Pell. "Round four. She's playing a boy from Lincoln. He's good."
"She'll be all right."
"I just wanted to say. She's, well. She's a remarkable player. She sees things." He stopped. He seemed to be searching for a polite way of finishing. "She doesn't like to lose."
"No."
"Some children cry. She goes very quiet. It's rather more worrying."
"I know," said Daniel. "I'm the same."
"Really?"
"I don't like it either."
Mr. Pell gave him an odd look and went away to the other side of the gym.
June played the boy from Lincoln for fifty minutes. Daniel stood at the back and held his breath. She did not look at him once. She sat with her chin on her fist and her braid hanging over the board, and every so often she picked up a piece and held it for a long moment, and put it back where it had been. The boy from Lincoln kept looking at the clock. At the forty-first minute, he reached out and pressed his button, and June moved something, and the boy stared at the board, and his face went through three or four expressions in a row. He tipped over his king.
June did not smile. She shook his hand. She wrote her move on the scoresheet. Then, when she was sure nobody was watching her, she looked across the gym, straight at Daniel, and held up one hand with three fingers raised. Three more rounds to go.
He nodded. He gave her a thumbs-up, and then, because it seemed too small, he did a second one with the other hand.
She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.
They did not win the tournament. She came third, and cried in the car, though she said she was not crying, it was just an allergy. They stopped for ice cream and she ate hers in forty seconds and didn't say anything until they got to Alder Street.
"He wasn't better than me," she said, at last.
"No."
"I just had a bad round. Round six. I did a dumb thing with my queen."
"Everybody does."
"You don't. You don't even play."
"That's why I don't do dumb things with my queen."
"That's not how it works."
"No," Daniel admitted. "I know."
She leaned her head against the window. The light was going. There was a thin sliver of orange along the bottom of the sky, over the roofs, and a plane was blinking its way down toward the airport. He turned the car into their street. It was an ordinary street, with ordinary houses, each with a mailbox and a trash can and a light in the window. He felt, as he always felt at the corner, a small relief. Then the car turned the last bend and there was their house, with the porch light already burning.
He had set it on a timer in the autumn. He could not have said why that seemed like cheating.
She was asleep by nine.
He went up twice to check. The first time she was on her back with her mouth open and one arm out of the covers, as if she were hailing a taxi. The second time she had turned toward the wall and pulled the blanket over her head, and all he could see was a lump and a braid. He stood in the doorway with his hand on the frame and listened to her breathe.
Come in by the light, Anna had said.
He went downstairs and washed the two plates and the pan. He wiped the counter. He did not put on the television, because there might have been a court show on, and he had learned to avoid them the way you avoid a stretch of road where you once had an accident. At ten he went to the front door to bring in the paper that he had forgotten that morning.
It lay on the mat in its plastic sleeve, folded in thirds. The porch light made it shine. He picked it up and carried it to the kitchen and slid it out of the plastic, and the front page fell open on the table.
It was Saturday's paper. He had read it already.
No. He had not read it. He had looked at it, over June's shoulder, at breakfast. June had been holding it. She had taken it into the yard afterward, to do something with her pencil, and brought it back, and thrown it on the counter. He had not seen it since.
So this was a second copy.
Somebody had left a second copy, on the mat, in the same sleeve.
He opened it to the games page. The chess puzzle was in the usual place. White to move. Mate in two. A diagram of black and white squares, small pieces in small black outlines, a lone knight half hidden behind a row of pawns. He looked at it for exactly as long as it took to understand it. Then he looked at the margin.
In the margin someone had written, in red ink, in a neat, small, upright hand:
Your move, Foreman.
He did not move.
It had been nine years since anyone had called him that. Nine years, almost to the week. He felt it go through him, slowly, the way cold water goes through a boot. For a moment the yellow kitchen disappeared, and he was standing in a long room that smelled of radiators and old coffee, with a hard chair under him and eleven faces turned toward his, waiting.
He put the paper down.
He went to the front door and opened it. The street was empty. The porch light shone on the mat and the steps and the wet dark lawn. A dog barked, two blocks off. A car passed at the end of the street and was gone. Nobody stood in the road. Nobody was under the lamp post. Nothing moved at all.
He was about to close the door when he saw it, on the top step, to the left of the boot scraper, where the light made a small white circle.
It was a chess piece.
It was a pawn. It was white, and carved from wood, and so worn at the top that it had a small shine on its head, like a coin. It stood upright on the concrete, as though somebody had set it there with care. Beside it, folded once, lay a strip of paper no wider than his finger.
He bent and picked up the paper first. His hand was not shaking. He noticed that, and was distantly surprised.
It had a date on it. Only a date.
March 9.
Behind him, upstairs, in the dark, June turned over in her sleep and said something that wasn't a word.
Daniel stood on the step in the circle of the porch light with a wooden pawn in one hand and a slip of paper in the other. He thought about the napkin in his shirt pocket. He thought about a letter hidden under the gas bill. And very clearly, as if a voice had said it at his shoulder, he thought: The light is on. The light is on, and it doesn't matter.