Chapter 2
The Noticing Game
On Monday the lake was the color of a nickel, and a man in a pale blue polo shirt came into the boat shed at ten past ten and asked for Dean Whitlock by name.
Damen was under an outboard at the time. He lay on a creeper on the oil-stained concrete with his head and shoulders inside the cowling of a thirty-year-old Evinrude, a socket wrench in one hand and a penlight clenched in his teeth, listening to the metal. A motor talks if you let it. This one had been telling him for twenty minutes that the water pump was fine, the plugs were fine, the fuel line was fine, and that the real trouble was a hairline crack in the lower unit that old Walt Brennan, who owned it, would refuse to believe until it sank him.
"Cody," he said, around the penlight. "Customer."
"Already on it, boss." The voice came from the front of the shed, bright and young and slightly cracked. Cody Bell was seventeen, a sunburned, tousled boy who had come to the shed two summers earlier looking for a job that wouldn't make him wear shoes, and had stayed because Damen had never once raised his voice at him. "Morning, sir. Help you?"
"I'm looking for a Mr. Whitlock." The second voice was pleasant and unhurried, a light tenor, with the clean consonants of a man who had been taught to speak on the phone. "Dean Whitlock. I was told this was the place."
"He's under a motor."
"Would he mind being brought out?"
Yes, thought Damen. He did not move.
He lay with the wrench resting against the rim of the housing and the penlight shining on a gray bolt, and for four seconds he gave every part of himself to listening. Not the words. The man. The shoes on the concrete: leather, a good leather sole, new enough to be a little stiff. A man who had not been near a boat shed for a while. A soft click on every other step, a ring or a watch brushing a belt buckle. And under it, so faint he wouldn't have heard it if he had not been listening for it all his life, the very slight forward lean of a man who has walked in and wants to see every corner of the room before he speaks.
Not a customer, the dry voice said. A customer looks at the boats.
He took the light out of his teeth, laid the wrench in the tray, and slid out from under the engine on the creeper, slowly, wiping his hands on a red rag. He did it badly. He did it as Dean Whitlock would have: a stooped, tired, middle-aged man with grease to the elbows, mildly resentful of the interruption. He sat up with his knees bent and squinted into the light of the open doors.
"Help you?"
The man was perhaps forty. He was slim and neat, with short sandy hair, a pale blue polo shirt tucked into pressed khakis, and a tan clipboard held to his chest. He wore a lanyard with a laminated card the color of a hospital wristband. His smile was open and rueful and utterly forgettable. Two inches taller than the average. Left-handed, from the way the clipboard hung. A fresh shaving nick under the right ear.
"Mr. Whitlock?" The hand came out. "Aaron Pell. Great Lakes Casualty. I'm so sorry to interrupt, I know you're busy."
"What's this about?"
"A claim, sir. Nothing to worry about. We're doing routine follow-ups on the river-road incident, in March. The pickup that went into the ditch outside the marina. Your name came up as a witness."
Damen looked at his hand. He did not take it. He wiped his own on the rag and then took it, briefly, in a damp firm grip, and let go, and watched the man's eyes flicker to his forearm and away.
"I didn't see it," said Damen. "I heard about it."
"Of course. But you gave the sheriff's office a statement."
"I told them I heard a bang."
"That's exactly what I need." The smile did not change. "A very short statement. Five minutes. Perhaps I could take your details? Full name, date of birth. I understand you've lived locally nine years?"
"About that."
"And before that?"
There was a short, peaceful silence. A gull walked along the roof of the shed. On the dock outside, a child was shrieking with laughter, somewhere beyond the wall of sunlight, and the water slapped the pilings, and Cody Bell, who had been about to say something helpful, closed his mouth.
"I'll tell you what," said Damen. He stood. He was a head taller than the man. He did it slowly, without hurry, without any change in his voice, and the other man's chin lifted a fraction as it came. "Leave me your card. If the sheriff's office gives me a call, I'll ring you."
"It's really no trouble to—"
"Leave me your card, Mr. Pell."
"Of course." The clipboard shifted. A card came out of the breast pocket, white and glossy, and was laid in Damen's palm. Aaron Pell. Claims Adjuster. Great Lakes Casualty & Surety. An 800 number. No address. "I'll tell you what's funny," Pell added, affably, turning toward the door. "You know I asked at the diner. And the hardware store. And the lady at the post office. And nobody, nobody at all, could tell me where you were from."
"That's small towns."
"It certainly is." The pleasant smile came back, as clean as a coin. "Nice shed."
When he had gone Damen stood for a time without moving, looking at the card.
It was not a bad one. The paper was heavy. The raised ink had real shine. He turned it over and rubbed his thumb along the back and felt the faint ridge of a different stock, glued behind the face. He put it in his shirt pocket. Then he took out his phone, wrote the number on the inside of his wrist with a grease pencil, and set the phone down on the bench very gently, face down, as one lays down a thing that might go off.
"Boss?" said Cody. "Is that bad?"
"What?"
"You've got a look."
"I've got a look because Brennan's lower unit is cracked and he's going to hear it from me." Damen reached for the wrench. His hand, he was almost interested to see, was perfectly steady. "Go and put the kettle on. And Cody."
"Yeah?"
"If he comes back, you've never seen me."
"You mean like, say you're out?"
"I mean, say you work for a man called Dean and he's very dull." He met the boy's eyes. "It's not an insurance matter. I just don't like salesmen."
Cody grinned, relieved. It was the kind of lie a boy of seventeen would take gladly, and carry about for years, and be glad of. Damen watched him go and felt, somewhere under his ribs, something quietly, mathematically close, like a door being checked.
He took Ivy to the library at two.
It was summer, and the library on Church Street ran a day camp for children under twelve, and Ivy, who would be twelve on Saturday and was therefore very nearly too old for it, had talked her way into the post of junior helper, which meant that for three weeks of the year a stout silver-haired woman named Mrs. Dolan turned the reading room into a sort of pirate ship. There were treasure maps on the walls. There was a parrot made of papier-mâché that had lost one eye in a flood. Ivy loved it with a ferocity that bordered on the political. She marched in through the glass doors ahead of him with her notebook under her arm and her boots slapping and a plastic cutlass stuffed through her belt, and did not turn round.
"Pick up at five," he said to Mrs. Dolan. "Maybe six."
"Don't you worry. We'll feed her." The librarian peered at him over the half-moons of her glasses with a certain sharpness. "You're pale, Dean."
"Gutter weather."
"You want to take more care. You don't look after yourself, you know. Just like my husband. He's ninety-one and he still thinks soup is a personality." She patted his arm. "Go on with you."
He walked back out into the sun. At the top of the steps he stopped, as he always did, and without turning his head ran his eyes over the street.
Church Street was ten stores deep. A hardware shop, a florist, a closed-down bank, a diner called the Blue Moose where the coffee was hot and the pie was somebody's grandmother's. A man with a stroller. A girl on a bike. A black dog asleep in the one patch of shade by the post office. A lot of blue sky and a lot of nothing. There was no gray van, no pale blue polo, no white pickup with a ladder rack. He walked to the end of the block and bought a paper he didn't want from the machine and checked the reflection in the dark window of the closed bank as he folded it.
A woman in a green dress. A teenager with earbuds. A truck.
Nothing.
You're doing it again, he told himself.
You're doing it right, said the other voice.
That evening the Okafors held a cookout on their back lawn, and the entire street came to it.
It was an annual thing, begun years ago by a retired schoolteacher named Emeka Okafor and his wife, Ngozi, who had lived on Birchwood for forty years and treated the block as an extended and not particularly well-behaved family. By six o'clock the lawn was crowded. A great black grill smoked beside the garage, tended by Emeka himself in an apron that read KISS THE COOK, IF YOU DARE. There were folding tables heaped with potato salad, jollof rice, corn bread, a vast silver cooler of lemonade, a plate of fried plantain that disappeared as quickly as it was set down. Children ran in packs through the sprinklers. Someone's radio played highlife. The air was thick with charcoal, and cut grass, and the sweet low murmur of forty people who were not in a hurry.
Damen stood at the edge of the crowd with a paper cup of lemonade and let the noise wash over him.
It was a thing he had not been able to do at first. For almost a year he had made excuses. A job, a headache, a motor. Naomi had never pressed. She had simply gone to everything herself and come home with a plate wrapped in foil, and let him eat it in the kitchen at midnight, and said nothing. The first time he had come, in the second summer, he had stood against the garage wall for two hours with his back to the bricks and a cup he never drank from, and Emeka Okafor, who noticed everything and mentioned nothing, had come over with two plates and put one in his hand.
My wife says a man who stands against a wall has either been in the army or in prison, the old man had said. I say, neither of those is a reason not to eat.
He'd been coming ever since.
"There he is!" Naomi's voice rose over the crowd. She had taken off her hospice badge and put on a loose yellow dress, and she was crossing the lawn toward him with a tray of cornbread, laughing, her braid swinging, with the low evening light in her hair. She had never looked less like a woman who worried. "Come here. Come and say hello to Mrs. Okafor, she's been asking."
"Mrs. Okafor's been asking about the cake," said Damen.
"Mrs. Okafor," said Naomi, "has been threatening me about the cake."
They were swept up. That was the only word. He found himself standing in a circle of neighbors with a plate in his hand, listening to Emeka explain, with enormous patience, the ways in which the town council was a lazy man's religion. He found himself laughing at a joke about a goat. He found Ivy at his knee, drenched to the skin, with a wet braid and her cutlass held aloft and a dozen younger children behind her in a war party, demanding in a voice like a trumpet that he judge whether the pirates or the mermaids had won. And he found, with a slight shock, as the sun went down behind the Okafors' hedge and the string lights came on over the lawn, that for almost an hour he had not counted anything at all.
This, he thought. This is what it is. He turned the word over carefully, like a stone. This is what they mean.
"You're smiling," said Naomi, beside him.
"Am I?"
"Like someone's taken a splinter out." She put her shoulder against his arm. "I've been watching. You've been watching the whole lawn all night, and about twenty minutes ago you stopped."
"I got distracted."
"Good," said Naomi. "I'd like you distracted. I'd like it as a lifestyle."
He put his arm around her. It was a thing he did without thinking now. Her head came to his shoulder, and they stood together on the edge of the lawn in the warm dusk, among the voices and the smoke, and watched their daughter lead a charge across the sprinklers against a small boy in a dinosaur hat.
At the far side of the lawn, at the gate of the Okafors' side yard, Deputy Sheriff Ray Tobin stood talking to Emeka with his hat in his hand.
He had come in an official cruiser, which was unusual on a Monday, and parked it on the street. He was a tall, sandy, easygoing man of about thirty-five with a boyish face and a heavy gun belt, who had coached the town's Little League for six years and was loved for it. He nodded at one of the neighbors. He accepted a paper plate. And as Damen watched, he lifted his head, in the middle of a sentence, and looked straight across the lawn into Damen's eyes.
It was a very ordinary look. It lasted perhaps a second. The deputy lifted two fingers in a little salute, and smiled, and returned to his conversation.
He's off duty, said Naomi's voice, from a distance. He always comes. He's a dear.
Damen did not answer. He looked at the two fingers, at the plate, at the cruiser in the street. And he noticed, with the cold clarity of a man pressing on an old bruise, that it was the first time in nine years that a deputy sheriff had looked at him first.
At bedtime, Ivy would not sleep.
She had been warned. She had been bathed. She had been read three chapters of a book about a girl and a horse and a very small dragon, and she lay on top of the blanket in her narwhal nightgown with her yellow boots still on and her notebook open against her knees, scowling at the page.
"It doesn't work," she said.
"What doesn't?"
"The game. I did my five things at the party and they were all happy. I need a scary one."
He sat on the edge of the bed. The moon nightlight threw its small blue circle on the ceiling. Outside the window the crickets sawed in the dark. "Why do you need a scary one?"
"Because you said," said Ivy patiently, "that the game's for when you're frightened. And I'm not frightened. So it hasn't been tested."
"I see."
"I'd like it tested."
"Ivy."
"Please."
He could not help it. He laughed, softly, and she looked pleased, and he held out his hand, and she put the notebook in it. He turned the pages. They were covered in her small neat painful printing, in pencil, in dates. Aug 1. A crow. A broken chair. Mom's red sock. A smell of toast. Cloud like a hand. A drawing of the kitchen from above, with the doors marked in little x's, and a stick figure at the table with a speech balloon that read FIVE. Page after page of it. A record of a child learning to look.
On the last written page, in pencil, in her best hand, was a line that had been underlined twice.
Monday. 1. A man in a blue shirt at Dad's shed (Cody told me). 2. He had clean shoes. 3. He asked Dad where he used to live. 4. Dad was nice. 5. Dad wasn't smiling inside.
He read it twice.
"Cody told you," said Damen. His voice, he noted from a distance, was entirely level.
"He said you looked cross. He said you looked like a policeman." Ivy was watching his face. "I wrote it as Dad wasn't smiling inside. Is that wrong? I didn't say it was bad. I only said what I noticed."
"No," said Damen. "It's not wrong."
"Is the man bad?"
"I don't know."
"Are you scared?"
He set the notebook down on the blanket and looked at his daughter. Gray eyes, wide and level, in a small serious face. A scab on her chin. Her mother's mouth. A line he had taught her at three, in a road, with a barking dog. He thought of the thing he'd said to her on her fourth birthday, when she had cried at a thunderstorm: the dark isn't the dangerous thing. It's the people who tell you not to look. He'd said it to himself. She had been four. She had simply nodded.
"No," he said. "I'm not scared. I'm paying attention. It's not the same."
"What's the difference?"
"Scared people look at the dog," said Damen. "Paying-attention people look at everything else."
Ivy thought about this for a long time. Then she said, "That's a good rule," and pulled the notebook to her chest, and slid down under the blanket in her boots, and shut her eyes, and was, within the space of three breaths, asleep.
He sat with her until the breathing slowed.
When he came out into the hall, Naomi was standing there in the dark with her arms folded, in her sleep shirt, with the landing light behind her. She had heard. She had not meant to. She looked at him for what felt like a long time.
"What did Cody say?" she said, softly.
"A man came by. An insurance adjuster. He asked a few questions about the ditch."
"The ditch."
"In March."
"Dean." She took a step toward him. "You didn't hear anything in March. You were home. You were in bed with me, with a flu. I washed your sheets."
He said nothing.
"I'm not asking," she said. "I told you I'd never ask. I'm only saying that I'm not stupid." Her voice was very quiet. "You can tell me something small. You can tell me, Naomi, there's a man, and I don't like him. You can tell me that. I could stand that."
"There's a man," said Damen. "And I don't like him."
"Thank you," said Naomi, and put her forehead against his chest, and he held her, standing in the narrow hall in the dark, with the crickets going outside and the moon-colored light coming in under the child's door.
The telephone rang at eleven forty-eight.
It was the landline. It stood on the table in the front hall, an old cream-colored thing with a cord, that Naomi kept for her mother's sake and nobody else ever used. He was in the kitchen, standing at the sink in the dark with a glass of water. He had not turned on the light. He heard the first ring and set the glass down without a sound.
Four rings. Five.
Upstairs, the floor creaked once and was still. Naomi had a heavy sleep. Ivy slept like a stone. He crossed the hall in his bare feet, and the boards didn't speak, and on the sixth ring he picked up the receiver and held it against his ear and said nothing at all.
There was a hiss on the line, the long open hiss of a distance.
Then a ticking.
It was slow and regular and perfectly distinct. It was not a digital sound. It was the soft precise tick of a pendulum in a wooden case, a clock somebody had wound by hand, in a room somewhere that was very quiet. He listened. It went on for nine seconds. He counted. Ten. Eleven. Under it, so faintly that he thought at first he had imagined it, he heard something else: the dry faint rustle of a man breathing, easily, patiently, in no hurry at all, on the far end of a line.
Damen stood in the dark hall with the receiver to his ear, and the blood in his body went very slow and very cold.
He knew that clock.
He knew the long slow tock of the brass movement, the little catch before the beat, the soft stammer in the third second that nobody but a man who had stood for years in its presence could have recognized. He had heard it in a paneled office on the top floor of a harbor tower with the window open and the gulls screaming. He had heard it every morning for eleven years, while a mild voice said, Come in, Damen. Sit. You're early.
Then there was a click, and the line went dead.
He did not move. He put the receiver back on its cradle with great care, and stood with one hand resting on the telephone, and the other flat on the cool wall. It took a long time for his heartbeat to come back. When it did, he found that he was standing facing the front door, with his back to the stairs, at exactly the angle he had been taught, and the part of him that had been asleep for nine years was fully, calmly, terribly awake.
The house ticked around him. Upstairs, in the dark, a child slept with her boots on.
Seven doors, said the voice.
He went and checked every one.