Prologue
Nine Years Ago
It was raining on Lake Orrin, and the man in the doorway had stopped hearing it.
He stood on the porch of the house with his back to the dark water and his hand flat against the wet frame of the screen door, listening. A clock was ticking inside. It was not a loud clock. It was the sort that sits on a mantel and has been wound every Sunday for thirty years by a man who liked to know exactly how late it was. Under the ticking he could hear a refrigerator, a floorboard settling, and a long way off, behind everything, the slow tidal suck of the lake against the pilings of the dock.
Eleven minutes past one.
Damen Knox had been waiting on the porch for four of them. He was forty-one years old, and by any reasonable measure he was very good at what he did. His hands were steady. His breath was slow. The night before, in a motel room in Port Merrin, he had eaten a full meal and slept for six hours, and he had not dreamed. He never did, before. That was the thing the others said about him in the back rooms where such things were said. They said Knox could have done it in his sleep and would have woken up rested. They called him the Metronome, because he never hurried and he was never late.
He opened the screen door without letting it touch the frame.
The house was a summer place that had been turned into a life. There were boots by the door, a child's, yellow, with a cartoon duck on the toe. A calendar from the hardware store hung over a telephone table. On the refrigerator, held by a magnet shaped like a lighthouse, was a drawing in crayon of a house, a lake, a tall man, a small girl, and a sun with a face. Above it somebody had printed, with the careful backwards R's of the very young: MY DAD AND ME.
He looked at it for a count of three. Then he went on.
Martin Calder was in the study at the back of the house, with a lamp on and a glass of milk at his elbow, working. He was fifty-two and soft in the middle, with a gray beard, reading glasses pushed up into his hair, and a cardigan with one elbow worn through. He was sitting at a rolltop desk with his back to the door, copying something from one sheet of paper onto another in a small, neat, patient hand. It took him almost half a minute to feel that he was not alone.
"I wondered who they'd send," he said.
He did not turn. His pen had stopped.
"I hoped it wouldn't be someone I'd like." A pause. "You've got a quiet step, you know. I never heard you at all. It was the draft."
Damen said nothing. The clock ticked.
"May I put the pen down?"
"Yes."
Calder set it on the blotter, very carefully, as if it might break. His shoulders, in the old cardigan, rose and fell. "Is it Everett?" he said. "I'd like to know that. I think I've earned it."
"It doesn't matter who."
"It matters to me." The old man's voice was not afraid. That was what Damen would remember. It was not brave either. It was tired and curious and faintly amused, the voice of a man who has done a long sum and come out where he expected. "I did everything right, you know. I kept every number. I only wanted to leave one honest copy of the books. Isn't that funny? Thirty years of dishonest ones, and I thought, someone should be able to read the true one."
"Turn around."
"Must I?"
"No."
"Then I shan't." Calder took off his glasses and laid them beside the pen. "There's a child upstairs," he said, quite gently. "She's ten. She sleeps like a stone. I'd ask only that you go out the way you came."
"She won't be hurt."
"Thank you," said Martin Calder. And then, to the lamp, in a different voice, almost to himself: "Oh, I'm so tired."
It took four seconds.
There was no sound that carried. There was a small flat cough, and the lamp, and the milk glass tipping over very slowly on the blotter and spilling across a page of careful figures, and the old man folding forward over his work as though he had decided, at last, to sleep. Damen stood in the doorway until the ticking of the clock was the only thing in the room. Then he crossed to the desk and, without looking at the face, put two fingers against the throat, and waited, and counted.
Nothing.
He looked at the papers. He did not read them. That had never been his business. He took the sheet from under the pen, folded it twice, and put it in his coat, because the people who sent him would want to know what had been written, and a man in his profession learned never to leave a page behind. Then he turned out the lamp.
It was in the hall that he heard it.
It was a very small sound, and it came from a place that should have been empty. A cough. Not the cough of a sleeper but the held-in, swallowed, desperate cough of someone who has been trying with everything in her body not to make a noise and has just lost the fight. It came from the wall behind the coats, from a narrow door under the staircase with a thread of yellow light beneath it, where a child had been told once, in a game, that if the bad wolf ever came she was to climb into the closet and count to a thousand and not breathe.
Damen stood in the dark hall with the gun at his side.
He knew exactly what the job required. He had known it for twenty minutes, in the car; he had known it for ten. There were no witnesses on a contract. There was no argument for the exception, and he had never in his life looked for one. He had a rule that he did not say aloud, and the rule was: do not look at the faces. He lifted his hand.
Behind the door, very quietly, a small voice was counting. "Four hundred and twelve," it whispered. "Four hundred and thirteen."
He had not meant to hear the numbers.
Rain ran down the windows. In the study, the clock went on ticking over a dead man's hands. And Damen Knox, who had never once in his working life stood still for longer than the job required, stood for a very long time with his hand lifted in front of a closet door in the dark.
Then he did a thing he had never done on a contract.
He put the gun away.