Chapter 9
The Girl Who Wasn't There
"Hello, Damen," said the voice. "Are you hurt?"
He lay on his back on the dock with the phone against his ear, looking up at the sky. The mist had thinned. There were stars. They hung over the lake in the gap between two clouds, small and cold and absolutely indifferent, and he found that he was counting them. It was something to do with his mind. He'd reached eleven. His left hand lay across his chest at an angle that hand should not make, and the pain in it was a kind of singing, high and clear, very far away.
"I've got a wrist," he said. His own voice sounded like gravel. "A shoulder."
"Then you must go to the hospital."
"I can't."
"No," said Everett Strand, thoughtfully. "I suppose you can't. That's a pity. They'd have made such a fuss." A small pause. In it he heard the clock. It was exactly as he remembered, the slow brass stammer in the third beat, a sound as familiar as a heartbeat that had belonged to someone else. "I want you to know first that they're safe. Your wife and the child. They are warm, and fed, and in a room with a window. Nobody will touch them. I've given my word to the woman. I've given it to the girl."
"You've spoken to her."
"For a few minutes. She's an extraordinary child." A dry rustle, like paper. "She asked me what time it was. I told her. She told me the clock was wrong by four minutes. I looked, and she was right. I've owned that clock since 1971. Nobody has ever noticed."
Damen shut his eyes.
It was perfectly like him. It was the thing that had always frightened people most, not the violence, but the charm: the small, courteous, delighted interest, as in a collector turning over a rare stamp. The old man had spent forty years learning how to make a person feel they were being listened to. It was a gift, like a gift for music. And in forty years, he had never once been known to stop listening, even while he was giving the order.
"What do you want?" said Damen.
"Ah. We'll get there." The voice settled. "I'd like us to be civil. You and I have had a very long association, and I'd like it to end properly. I'm told I'm not well. You may have heard." A pause. "I find that when one is not well, the things one has left undone begin to sit in the room."
"You killed Cody Bell."
"I did not."
"He was seventeen."
"I know how old he was. I read the file." A silence. "That was not my order. I gave strict instructions that there was to be nothing of the kind. Mr. Mercer has been, shall we say, zealous. He has a great deal to prove. I'll address it in my own time."
"You'll address it."
"I always do." The mild voice did not change. "Damen, I'm going to tell you something, and I'd like you not to interrupt. I was fond of you. You may not believe that, but it's true. You were the best I ever had. You were quiet, and exact, and honest in the only way that matters in our trade: you never lied about what you were. When you came to me nine years ago and asked to go, I let you. I could have refused. I thought: let him have it. He's earned a life. I even found it rather moving."
"Get to it."
"I thought you had told me the truth."
The phone was warm against his ear. A thread of cold air stirred across the dock.
"I thought," said Strand, gently, "that you had told me the house was empty."
Damen did not breathe.
He remembered it then, entirely, as if a door had opened in a wall.
He remembered a long gray hall, the rain, a clock ticking. He remembered the dead man's hands on a blotter and a glass of milk spilling over a page. He remembered the voice behind the closet door, small and counting, and the long moment with his hand lifted and the whole of his profession standing at his shoulder like a judge. And what he had done next.
He'd opened the door. That was the thing he had never told. He had put his hand on the little brass knob and turned it, and the thread of light had widened into a yellow blade, and inside, among the winter coats and the boots and the smell of wet wool, a child was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chin and her hands clamped over her mouth. A thin small girl in blue pajamas. Ten years old. Her eyes had been huge and dark, and fixed on his face. She hadn't screamed. She had gone on counting, without sound, with her lips moving.
Four hundred and twenty-six, the lips had said. Four hundred and twenty-seven.
He had knelt in front of her. He didn't know why. He'd taken off his glove.
What's your name?
Wren.
Wren, he'd said. Do you know who I am?
No.
That's good. His voice had come out strange. That's the best thing you could say. I want you to keep not knowing. I want you to forget my face, and the night, and the sound you heard. Do you understand?
She'd shaken her head.
It doesn't matter. He had lifted her out. She weighed no more than a bag of flour, and she had clung to his neck with both arms as if he were a thing she had been waiting for all her life. He'd carried her through the hall, past the study, out into the rain, to the car he'd left at the end of the lane, and placed her on the back seat in his coat. Then he'd driven north, with the lights off, for three hours, to a place he'd never meant to see again.
A funeral home, in the old part of Port Merrin, on a street of brick.
Marta, he'd said, to the thin gray woman who opened the door in a robe. I need a favor.
She'd looked at the girl. She'd looked at his face. And in the whole of that long night, in the porch light, with the child asleep on his shoulder and the rain running down the gutters, she had said only four words, in a voice like a closing safe.
You damned fool, Damen.
And she'd taken her.
"Who told you?" he said.
"Does it matter?"
"Who?"
"An old friend," said Strand, gently. "A friend who has been very unhappy for some time, and who, when a certain young man was found to owe an unusual amount of money, found that he had something to trade. I won't name him. I'm not a cruel man. But you will understand that I've been hearing, for the last few weeks, from a person who drove a car on a rainy night nine years ago, and who sat at the end of a lane with the engine idling, and who saw you walk out of that house with a small girl in your arms."
Teddy.
He lay still. He felt the name go through him and out the other side and keep going, as a bullet goes through a wall.
"He didn't tell me then," said Strand. "I'll say that for him. For nine years he said nothing. He carried it round with him like a stone, and drank, and I think he thought that if he never spoke of it, it wouldn't have happened. But a man's son is a very particular kind of key." The pendulum ticked. "He wept. I confess I was sorry. But it meant I had to ask myself some questions."
"Like what?"
"Like what Martin Calder left behind. And with whom."
The lake lapped at the pilings. Out in the dark a fish jumped.
"I've spent nine years," said Strand, "wondering where my Registry went. You will remember it. You never saw it, of course. But you will have heard it spoken of. A book. A very large book, with a very small number of readers. Two hundred and thirteen names and what each one owes. Judges, commissioners, a state senator, three police chiefs. A harbor board. A bishop, I'm sorry to say. It is, in a manner of speaking, the only thing I've ever made that will outlast me." A pause. "And one night, nine years ago, my accountant, who was a brilliant man and a trusted one, sat down at his desk with a pen, and copied it out."
"I didn't know."
"I know you didn't. I've never doubted it." The voice softened. "Martin was going to take that copy to a woman in Washington. A federal woman, with a briefcase. He told no one. He'd have gone on Monday. I was warned on Saturday, by a man I pay, and I sent for you. Do you understand? I sent for you because I trusted you to be quick, and quiet, and to bring me back whatever he'd written. And you did. You brought me a single page."
"It was all there was."
"No," said Strand. "It was all you were given."
A silence.
"He had a daughter," said the old man. "Hadn't he? A quiet little thing. I looked in the file, of course, at the time. And the police report said that the girl had died in the fire that was set to cover the shooting. A tragic business. They found, they thought, her remains. I was a good deal moved. But I've since learned that the fire was set at four in the morning, and that there was a small body found in the cinders that had been dead for six hours, and that no one thought to look at the teeth. They were a boy's." The mild voice dropped. "It was a good piece of work, Damen. It really was. It fooled me for nine years. I would very much like to know how you did it."
"I didn't."
"Then who did?"
He did not answer.
"I'll tell you what I think," said Everett Strand. "I think you opened a door that night. I think there was a child behind it. I think you did a thing you'd never done, and I think you spent a night wondering why. And I think that somewhere in the world, at this moment, there is a young woman of nineteen, with dark eyes and her father's hands, who has in her possession the only other copy of the only book I fear."
"She doesn't know."
"She knows exactly what her father gave her. Children always do."
"She was ten."
"Yes," said Strand. "And she's been quiet for nine years, which tells me something about whoever raised her." The words came gently, like a hand on the back of a neck. "I want her, Damen. I want her, and I want what she carries. I want them both brought to me, alive, unhurt, by someone she might trust. And I think there's only one person in the world she might trust, and that's the man who carried her out of that house."
Damen sat up.
It hurt. The dock tilted. He got his good hand under him, and pushed, and found himself on his knees in the cold water on the boards with the phone clamped to his head and a roar in his ears like a train.
"You want me to give you a child."
"A woman. She'll be nineteen."
"For my family."
"For your family, yes." The voice did not hurry. "Seventy-two hours. By Tuesday night. Bring me Wren Calder, and whatever she holds, and your wife and daughter will walk out of this house untouched. I swear it on every clock in this room. I've never broken my word to you, and I don't mean to start tonight."
"You'll kill her."
"I'll ask her some questions."
"And then?"
There was a long pause. The clock ticked into it, slow and patient.
"You were always so sentimental about the wrong things," said Strand. "I'll give you something to hold on to. I'll say it plainly. She will be a great deal safer in a warm room, with me, than she'll be on the street, with the Table's people looking for her. Mercer wants her very badly. I've told him he can't have her. That is my gift to you." The mild voice grew very quiet. "Seventy-two hours, Damen. You'll hear from me. And, my dear boy..."
"What?"
"Sofia," said Damen.
There was a pause on the line. For the first time that night the clock seemed to hesitate, a long beat, in the third stammer of its tick.
"Ah," said Strand. "Your elder. I had hoped you would not ask." The voice was almost gentle. "There was an irregularity at the boat ramp. A man of Mr. Mercer's, Mr. Rourke, is dead. A knife, I am told, in the throat. The other man was not coherent, and no one has seen the girl since." A cough. "I am sorry. I do not know whether you will find that a comfort or a grief."
Damen did not breathe.
"Do try the police," Strand added, after a moment, quite softly. "You'll find it instructive. Detective Pratt is a great friend of mine."
The line clicked. It went dead.
He knelt on the dock with the phone in his hand. The lake lay black and flat, with the stars lying in it, and a gentle wind had come up out of the north, smelling of pines and rain. In the shed behind him a boy lay dead, and a mile up the hill a house stood open with its doors broken. And a long way off, far out on the dark water, something small and white rose and fell: a gull, he thought, or the wake of a boat.
Then he began to shake.
It came on slowly, as a fever does. It started in his knees, and rose through his thighs, and into the great muscles of his back, and then, all at once, it had him entirely, from his jaw to his heels, a violent, rattling, wordless shudder that he could not stop and did not try to. He bent over his broken wrist. He put his forehead against the wet planks. And for three or four minutes, alone on a dock at midnight in the ruins of his life, Damen Knox wept without making any sound at all, with his mouth open, like a man trying to scream under water.
Ivy.
Naomi.
You said you'd make sure. You said it would never come to the door.
When it was over, he did not sit up at once.
He lay on his side on the wet planks with his knees drawn up and one hand open on the boards, as a man lies who has been struck, and looked at nothing. The wind blew. A loon called out on the black water, long and wild and lonely, and was answered from the far shore. He heard the slow lap of the lake against the pilings, and the creak of the dock, and his own breath, going in and out, in and out, ragged and slow, like a clock that has been dropped and does not know how to stop.
Get up, said the voice.
In a minute.
There are seventy-two hours.
I know.
He was still lying there, with his cheek against the cold boards, when behind him in the dark, from the foot of the dock, very small and cracked and hoarse, a voice said one word.
"Dad."