Chapter 16
Tea With Mr. Strand
He came at four in the afternoon, and he brought the tea himself.
That was the first thing Naomi noticed, and she noticed it with a small cold shock. She had been prepared for a good many things. Over the long day, sitting on the edge of the cot with her daughter's head in her lap and the tower clock tolling its slow wrong hours across the water, she had imagined a dozen versions of the man. A thin cruel figure in a black suit. A fat one, in a silk dressing gown, smoking. A soldier. A saint. She had built him, as one builds a monster from the gaps in a story, out of the pieces she had been given: a voice on a telephone, a name that made her husband's face go still, a pendulum ticking in the dark.
She had not imagined a man who pushed his own trolley.
It came squeaking down the corridor ahead of him, a tall old-fashioned hospital cart of white enameled steel with a rubber-tired wheel that pulled to the left. On its top shelf stood a silver tea service. A pot, a jug, a sugar bowl with a tiny pair of tongs. Three cups with gold rims. A plate of shortbread. A glass dome over a Victoria sponge. And on the lower shelf, half hidden by a linen cloth, a clear plastic bag of fluid, and a coil of tubing, and a small steel kidney dish.
She understood that last at once. It was her profession. She had hung a thousand bags like that. She looked past the shortbread to the dish and the tubing and knew, with the part of her that read charts, that the man who pushed the trolley needed it.
He was old. That was the second thing.
She had known it, of course; he was sixty-eight; she had read it in the way her husband said the name. But she was not prepared for the manner of his age. It was the age of very thin paper. He was tall, and had been taller. He walked with a slight forward stoop, one hand on the cart, in a camel cardigan buttoned to the chin over a gray shirt and a knitted tie, and he had the long fine head of a scholar, white-haired, high-browed, with the skin pulled tight over the bones of the cheeks. There was a faint yellow tint to it, in the whites of the eyes and the corners of the mouth. His hands were large, spotted, trembling very slightly. He had the look she knew better than any other: of a body that is being quietly eaten from within by something patient.
Behind him, a pace to the left, walked a woman in a gray uniform.
She was perhaps sixty. She had iron-gray hair scraped back under a cap, a long straight face, and the flat watchful gaze of a person who had spent forty years in rooms where people were dying and had never allowed herself a single tear. She carried a black leather bag. She did not look at Naomi. She looked at the old man's back, with a steady, professional, critical attention, and Naomi felt the faint pull of recognition that passes between members of a guild.
Hospice, she thought. Or private duty. She's his nurse.
She's counting his breaths.
"Mrs. Whitlock," said Everett Strand.
He halted at the end of the room. He stood with a courteous half bow, his hand resting on the rail of the trolley, and looked about him with a faint air of apology. "Do forgive the surroundings. It's not what I'd choose. It was the best I could do at short notice. I'm told the beds are clean." He smiled. It was a sweet, vague, unexpectedly boyish smile, and it transformed his face. "I've brought tea. It seemed the least one could do. May I come in?"
Naomi stood.
She had risen without meaning to. She stood in the middle of the gray floor with her feet planted, in the torn yellow dress, with her arms at her sides and Ivy pressed against her hip, and looked at him. She was shaking. It had begun in her knees and she could not control it. But her voice, when it came, was as level and as soft as she had ever heard it.
"You're the one who took my daughter."
"I am."
"Then I think you know the answer."
"I do." He inclined his head. "And I should like to say, before anything else, that I regret it. I regret it very much. I want you to know that I did not enjoy it, and that I shall do everything in my power to make it short." The mild eyes met hers. "May I come in?"
"Is there any way I can stop you?"
"No," said Strand. "But I find it's more pleasant to ask."
He took the chair at the table.
He lowered himself into it, with a hand on the back, slowly, and the gray-uniformed woman stood behind him, not touching, her hands folded. He let his breath settle. A small muscle jumped in his jaw. Then he looked up and gestured at the other chair, a stiff gracious wave, and said, "Please. I'd be more comfortable if you sat. I find it hard to look up at people. It's a small vanity."
Naomi did not move.
"Mama," said a small voice.
"It's all right."
"I'd like to sit," said Ivy. "I'd like a piece of the cake."
"Ivy—"
"It's polite." The child looked up at her mother with her chin lifted, and in her face was an expression that Naomi had seen only once before, on the porch at midnight, when her husband had said I'm paying attention. It's not the same. "You told me to be nice to people who are nice to us. He brought a cake."
Strand laughed.
It was a quiet, delighted laugh, rich and surprising, and it set off a cough, and the cough shook him. The nurse stepped forward. A white hand went to his back. He waved her away with one finger, gasping, and when he recovered he wiped his lips with a handkerchief and looked at the child with shining eyes.
"Oh, she's perfect," he said. "She's absolutely perfect. Don't you see it, Mrs. Whitlock? She's exactly what he said."
"Who said?"
"Never mind." He set down the handkerchief. "Young lady. Would you like to cut it?"
It was the strangest tea of her life.
They sat at a gray steel table in a locked room in a ruined cannery with the fog pressing against the whitewashed glass, and Everett Strand poured out. He did it with great care, with a hand that shook only a little: tea into the cups, cream into the jug, a tiny scoop of sugar with the tongs. He handed Ivy her plate. He asked her whether she preferred the jam or the cream, and listened gravely to her explanation. He told her that the sponge was his late wife's recipe, that she had baked it every Sunday for thirty-one years, and that he had never found anyone who could make it as she had. He told her, in a low, absorbed voice, about a clock he had bought in Vienna in 1974 that played a different tune on each of the seven days of the week. He was courteous. He was funny. He listened to every answer.
Naomi sat with the tea going cold in her hands.
She said nothing for a long time. She watched. It was what she did. She had sat at a thousand bedsides and learned that the truest things a person says are said in the pauses, in the glance toward a drawer, in the half second before a lie; and she studied the old man across the table with her whole attention, as she would have studied a patient on the night shift, the pulse in the neck, the way the fingers moved on the cloth. The cup rattled very slightly each time it was lifted. His left foot tapped, under the table, with a restless rhythm that did not match his speech. A faint shining line of sweat beaded the upper lip. He ate nothing. He took one bite of shortbread and put it down, and the gray nurse, behind him, made a note in her head.
Pain, thought Naomi. Bad. He's on a patch. Probably fentanyl. It isn't enough.
He's decided to be charming through it.
"You're dying," she said.
The room was still.
Ivy stopped with her fork in the air. The nurse's head came up. Strand sat motionless, his hand on the handle of the cup, and for a moment his face was entirely blank; and then, slowly, with an expression of immense and boyish delight, as if she had produced a rabbit from a hat, he began to smile.
"Yes," he said. "I am."
"How long?"
"The doctors say four months." He glanced at the nurse. "Mrs. Aldous says three."
"I say two," said the gray woman, without expression.
"You see how I'm treated." He turned back, amused. "Mrs. Whitlock, I confess I had hoped to be tactful. I'd planned an oblique approach. But I find I'm relieved. It's so tiresome, being delicate." He put his elbows on the table. "How did you know?"
"The color of your sclera. The weight under the cardigan. The way you hold your left side." She did not look away. "And the bag on the lower shelf is a TPN line. You can't eat. They're feeding you through a vein."
"Pancreatic," said Strand. "Quite advanced."
"I'm sorry."
"Are you?" The pale eyes were curious. "I should think you'd be delighted."
"I'm a nurse," said Naomi. "I'm never delighted."
"No. I suppose not." He sat back. "That's what I'd hoped."
"I'm going to tell you something about myself," he said.
It was a quarter to five. The light in the high white window had gone the color of tin. Ivy had finished her cake and was licking a fingertip with great concentration. Mrs. Aldous stood against the wall, upright as a post. And the old man leaned forward with his cup in both hands, speaking in a low confiding voice, as to a friend at a fire.
"I'm not what you think. I've been described, I'm sure, in unflattering terms. A criminal. A gangster. A man who has done a great many bad things." He sighed. "All true. I don't dispute it. But I want you to understand that I have always believed in something. I have believed in order."
"Order."
"You work with the dying. You know what I mean. You know what happens to a house when the person at the center of it goes. It falls apart. The children quarrel. The money disappears. Old resentments come out. The structure that held it together turns out to have been held by one man's will." He gestured, a small tremulous movement, at the window and the dark yard and the distant tower. "A city is the same. Port Merrin has a hundred thousand people and forty miles of coast and a harbor that moves nine billion dollars of goods a year. Someone must keep it wound. I have done that for forty-one years."
"By killing people."
"By making sure that the right ones are afraid." He said it without heat. "Do you know what Port Merrin was like when I came? Gangs on every corner. Children shot over a pair of shoes. A police chief who took bribes from three sides at once. I did not make it that way. I found it that way. And I put a clock in it, Mrs. Whitlock. A very large clock. And for forty years the people of this city have walked home at night."
"And the ones you killed?"
"Were the ones who stopped it from ticking." He smiled faintly. "I'm told that's a distinction without a difference. I've had it explained to me by a number of priests."
Naomi said nothing.
"Your husband was my best instrument," he said gently. "He understood. He never needed it explained. I would give him a name and a date, and I knew, I always knew, that it would be done cleanly, and that he would not ask me why. He was the finest I ever had. I loved him. I say that without embarrassment." The old eyes rested on hers. "Do you know how many?"
"No."
"Thirty-one."
She did not move.
"Thirty-one men," said Strand. "Over eleven years. Not one woman. Not one child. He had a rule about that. It was the only rule he ever made, and he never told me, and I never asked." He lifted the cup, drank, and set it down. "He told me once, when he was very young, that he could do anything I asked of him as long as it was done to someone who knew what they were. A man who had chosen. He said he could not do it to someone who had not."
"And Wren Calder."
It was out before she could stop it. She had picked it up from the tail of the telephone call, from the half sentences of the men in the van. She saw the old man's face change.
It did not move much. A kind of settling. The pale eyes narrowed, and a line appeared between the brows, and the nurse behind him drew a very small, sharp breath. Then he smiled again, wearily, as if at a child who had asked an awkward question at a funeral.
"Ah. So you have been listening."
"I listen for a living."
"Yes. I should have remembered." He turned his cup a quarter-turn on its saucer. "Wren Calder was a child. And your husband, in a house on a lake, made a decision that I did not understand. He did a thing I had not thought him capable of. He broke the one rule I had never imagined he'd break. He let a witness live." His voice softened. "I've wondered for nine years whether it was strength or weakness. I find that I still don't know."
"You can't hurt her."
"I have no intention of hurting her."
"You'll ask her questions."
"I shall ask her to give me something that belongs to me."
"And then?"
He did not answer. He sat very still. The clock in the tower began to strike, far off across the water, the same slow, flat, wrong note, and he listened to it, with his head slightly bowed, as one listens to a hymn. Five strokes. Four minutes slow.
"It's wrong, you know," said Ivy.
Strand looked at her.
"Your clock. The big one. It's four minutes late." She said it with great politeness. "I checked it with the ferry. I thought you'd like to know."
The old man stared at her for a long moment.
Then he laughed again, very softly, and put his hand over his eyes.
"My wife died at four minutes past five," he said. "On a Tuesday in March, in 1998. In a bed in the Port Merrin Infirmary. I was standing at the window. The clock on the tower struck five while she was still breathing." His voice was quiet. "The ambulance had been late. I stood there and listened to it strike, and I thought: she will live until the clock stops. A child's thought. And then she died, and I looked up, and the clock said five and four minutes. I went back to the tower that night, and I said to the keeper: stop it. He said: Mr. Strand, it's a public clock. I said: Then leave it. But don't ever set it right." He lowered his hand. "It has been four minutes slow for twenty-seven years."
"That's sad," said Ivy.
"Yes."
"You could set it right now."
"I could."
"Why don't you?"
"Because," said Everett Strand, "then she would really be gone."
Nobody spoke. The fog pressed on the glass. And Naomi, who had sat with six hundred dying people and listened to what they said at the end, felt something cold and strange and utterly unwelcome move in her chest, a thin pang of pity so sharp that she nearly could not breathe.
Don't, she told herself. He killed Cody Bell. He took your child. Don't you dare.
Yes, said another voice, a quieter one. And he's the loneliest man you've ever seen.
He made her an offer at six.
He did it with perfect courtesy. He had finished his tea, and the nurse had adjusted the line at his collar, and he sat for a time in silence, turning the tiny silver spoon over and over in his fingers. Then he said, without raising his eyes: "I would like to propose something, Mrs. Whitlock. And I would like you to think before you answer."
"All right."
"It's a simple thing. I am not a man who enjoys keeping children in cellars." He looked up. "I would like to send your daughter home."
Naomi did not breathe.
"There is a woman in Alder Falls," said Strand, "named Rosa Delgado. Your mother. She is seventy-one, and she lives alone, and she makes excellent tamales. She has been very frightened since yesterday, I'm told. She has rung the sheriff's office eleven times. A car could take Ivy to her door by midnight." He folded his hands. "She would be kept safe. She would be fed, and loved, and my people would stand at the end of the street. Nobody would touch her."
"And me?"
"You would stay."
"As a hostage."
"As a guest." He held up a hand. "I would not hurt you. I would not allow anyone to. But I would need you here, to speak to your husband, on Tuesday, when he comes. To make sure he does what is asked." The mild voice did not waver. "It's a very small price. You would be saving a child. I can think of no mother who would say no."
The room was very quiet.
Naomi turned her head. Ivy was sitting at the table with her knees drawn up, quite still, with the compass in her fist. She was looking at her mother. She was not smiling, and she was not afraid. She was watching, with the clear unblinking attention of a girl who has been taught to notice what people do not say, and in her gray eyes was a question so naked and so enormous that it seemed to fill the room.
Go, said the question. Or stay.
Which one are you?
Naomi turned back to the old man.
She had never been so sure of anything in her life. She sat with her hands in her lap, in the gray light, with the taste of cold tea in her mouth and the smell of tar in her nose, and heard in her head a voice she had not heard since she was a girl. It was her grandmother's. You do not leave the sick to die alone, mija. Not for any reason. Not for any price.
"No," said Naomi.
Strand raised his eyebrows.
"I won't send her without me." She said it clearly, without heat. "And I'm not leaving her here alone. If you want me to speak to my husband, I'll speak to him. But Ivy stays with me, and I stay with her, and if you try to separate us I will scream until every one of your men in this building can't sleep." She drew a breath. "I've been a nurse for twenty years. I know how to make a noise."
The old man looked at her for a long time.
Then he began, very gently, to clap.
It was a slow, soft, pattering sound, the sound of an old man's hands. It went on for perhaps ten seconds. In the doorway, Mrs. Aldous's face did not change.
"I thought you'd say that," said Strand. "I wanted to be sure." He rose, with an effort, on the arm of the nurse. "Your husband is a fortunate man. He has been told so, I am sure, but I should like to say it again." He turned to the child, and bowed. "Young lady. It has been a privilege. I hope we shall have more tea."
"Mr. Strand?" said Ivy.
"Yes, my dear?"
"What's the nine?"
He stopped. "I beg your pardon?"
"There's a nine on the door." The child pointed. "Outside. On the metal. I saw it when Eli came. It says Net Loft, Number Nine. It's in white paint." She looked at him seriously. "Is that where we are?"
There was a silence.
Strand looked at her, the small, pale, composed face turned up to his. Behind him, the gray nurse closed her eyes.
"My dear," he said, almost tenderly, "you really are remarkable."
He went out. The trolley squeaked after him, pulling to the left, down the long iron-floored corridor. They heard the bolts shoot home, the footsteps recede, the faint clang of the stairs. Eleven. Twelve. Naomi sat and counted them. At the thirty-first, there was a silence.
Then Ivy, very quietly, picked up her pencil, and wrote in her notebook, in her small fierce hand: Net Loft No. 9. The old man's wife died at 5:04. He is lonely. He is not lying about the cake.
She underlined the last line twice.
And above them, in the gathering dusk, from the top of the tower across the water, the great slow clock began to strike six, four minutes late, with a note that shook the glass.