The Yellow Note

The man with the soap smell did not touch me for a long time.

He knelt at the lip of the hole with the bundle in his arms, bent over it, turning it, thumbing the twine. I stood three feet away in the cold with my hands at my sides and watched the back of his neck. A strip of pale skin showed between his collar and his cap. There was a small mole there, I noticed, and a rim of fine gray stubble, and the pulse beating in it, steady as a metronome. It was the most ordinary neck in the world. I thought, quite clearly and for the first time, I could kill him. Then I thought, with what? and the thought went out like a match.

"You have a telephone," he said, without turning.

"No."

"Left coat pocket. The lining's pulled." He sounded faintly amused. "Frank gave you two, I think. One for you, one for the child. A string between two tin cans." A little breath of a laugh. "I did admire that. It's very touching. It's so seldom that a man will bring his own listening device and hand it to you in a bag."

He rose. He did it easily, now, like a man getting up from dinner, and in one movement he set the bundle on the lid of the iron bowl and stepped in close.

I smelled the soap. It was almost a taste.

His hand went into my pocket.

…

I had expected something rougher. A grab, a jerk. Instead he drew it out with two fingers, delicately, like a dentist taking a thread from a tooth, and held it up between us in the moonlight. A cheap gray flip phone with a cracked screen. A strip of white tape on the back.

"Hm," said Voss.

He flipped it open. The little screen lit his chin. I saw the line of the jaw under the mask, and the shine of the glasses I had not known he was wearing, and, reflected in each lens, a tiny blue rectangle of light, glowing like a pair of coins.

"An hour," he said softly. "An hour. She never hung up. Good girl."

He pressed a button. The speaker clicked.

He held it to my ear.

I did not move. I could feel the cold plastic against my cheek and, behind it, the warm patient pressure of his hand, and on the other side of the glass, through all that dark, I could hear my daughter breathing.

"Say something," said Voss, in my other ear, very gently. "Go on. I'm sure she'd like to hear."

…

"Mom."

It was a whisper. It was the smallest and loneliest sound I had ever heard. It came out of the phone and into my skull and I felt something in my chest, which had been clamped down for four hours, open all at once like a hand.

"June." My voice cracked. "June, where are you?"

"I'm out."

"Where—"

"I'm okay." Her breath hitched. "Mom, don't say where. He's listening. Just—are you okay? Did he hurt you?"

"No. No, I'm fine, honey. I'm all right." I shut my eyes. "Are you—what happened? Is Devon—"

"We got out."

Beside me, in the dark, I heard the whisper of a breath drawn through a mask.

"Mom, listen." She spoke very low and very fast, in a small cold voice that was nothing like the child's I'd put to bed. It was a voice with a spine in it. "Don't dig. Whatever he tells you. Whatever's in that hole." A pause. "It isn't what Grandma hid. It's what they just buried."

I opened my eyes.

Voss had not moved. His hand was perfectly steady against my ear. But his eyes above the mask had narrowed, and the light in the little screen made two white points in them, small and cold and still.

"Someone," he said quietly, "has been teaching you to speak in riddles."

"It's not a riddle," said June. "I'm looking at the dirt. I looked at it on the screen. The edge was sharp, Mom, and the leaves on top were swept. Grandma hasn't been here in years. Nobody leaves a cut that clean and then walks away from it."

I thought of the straight dark edge in the turf. Not an hour ago.

"Somebody wanted you to find that," said my daughter. "That's all."

…

He took the phone from my ear.

He held it at the level of his chin and looked at it, a gray plastic shape in a big pale hand, and I watched his face. The mask hid most of it. But the eyes above the cloth had changed. They had grown very still.

"How did you get out?" he said.

He said it in the same easy conversational voice. But he said it into the phone, and the phone said nothing.

"The windows were armored. The locks were down. I was rather proud of the locks." He tilted his head. "It was a very pretty little device, and it was not intended to be survived. Not by two children and a boy with a flashlight. So I would be genuinely interested, my dear. I would like very much to know. How did you get out?"

Silence.

I could hear it on the line. The hush of the wind. A distant sough of pines. And under it, almost inaudible, the stifled sound of a girl who had decided she was not going to give him one thing more.

"Ah," said Voss. "Yes."

He smiled. I saw it in the crinkle of his eyes. It was a terrible smile, pleasant and weary and a little admiring, like a teacher's at a pupil's good answer.

"Your grandmother used to do that," he said. "That exact thing. She'd sit on the sofa with her knitting and look at me, and not say a word, and I'd go on talking and talking, and at the end of an hour I'd know that I had told her everything and she had told me nothing at all." He closed the phone with a snap. "It's a most irritating gift."

He put the phone in his coat.

And then, from a long way off, across the hill and the sleeping stones and the bare black trees, a car horn sounded.

…

It was one long note.

It came from the west, from the direction of the gate. It rolled up the slope like a great brass animal waking, hoarse and hollow, a note of such sudden enormous volume that the nearest pines seemed to flinch. It went on for two full seconds. A blackbird burst out of a cedar. Somewhere below us, a dog began to bark.

Then, short, short, two sharp blasts, like a pair of blows.

One long. Two short.

I knew it as I heard it. I had stood in a loading bay with a hearse idling in the lamp and listened to a man hold up three fingers. I knew it in my knees. It was the signal for a thing that I could not at first make myself understand, and in the very instant that I understood it, I saw Voss's head go up.

He had gone quite still.

I had not seen him still before. He had been still the way a cat is still, a thing at rest. This was different. It was the stillness of a man who has put down a glass and heard, in the next room, something fall.

The horn blew again. One long. Two short. And from the phone in his coat, thin and tiny and perfectly synchronized, came the echo of the same three notes, a second behind, like a ghost of the first. I understood that someone was holding a telephone to a car horn, a girl, a boy, somewhere near the west gate, and that the little gray string between two tin cans was carrying the sound back to the very place it had begun.

"Hm," said Voss.

He had the air of a man checking his watch.

…

The pines lit.

It happened all at once. A white blade of light slashed across the clearing from the left, and a second from the right, and a third, higher, from the slope behind the stone. They were hand lamps, the big square kind that policemen carry, and they swung and crossed and settled, and every one of them found us. The light was blinding. It struck the nameless granite and turned it a staring white. It struck the iron bowl, and the spade-cut earth, and the two of us standing in it, and our shadows leaped out behind us forty feet long across the grass.

"VOSS."

It was not a radio. It was a human voice, enormous, hoarse, bellowing from somewhere up the hill in the dark. A man's voice, a big man's voice, with a break in it like a cracked bell.

"Voss! It's Dunleavy! You're done!"

I thought my knees would give.

"You're surrounded! There are eleven men on this hill, and every one of them knows your face! Put your hands where I can see them and step away from that woman!"

There were not eleven men. I knew it in a flash, with the clear cold relief of a drowning person who has seen a rope. There were not eleven men and he was a liar; he had promised me two women, a van, and the rest a mile out, and he had given me his word; and he was a policeman who had looked at me in an annex and said, I'll bring the hill down. He had put them in the pines all afternoon. He had hidden them from me. He had put them there with no radio, without wire, without a word, the way you hide a coin in a glove.

Frank, I thought. You old fool. You old, beautiful fool.

Voss did not turn.

He stood in the blaze of three lamps with his hands hanging empty and his shadow thrown back toward the trees, and he did not so much as glance at the hill. He looked at the bundle on the bowl.

"Eleven," he said, almost to himself. "Well. He's had a busy day."

…

He picked it up.

He picked it up in one hand, the whole black oilcloth thing, as a man picks up a loaf. He held it out at arm's length and looked at it for a second with an expression that I could not read, and then, with a quick short jerk of his boot, he stamped it against the iron.

The twine parted. The oilcloth split open like a seed pod.

Nothing spilled out. There was no burst of paper, no cascade of ledgers, no sheaf of photographs. There was a dry rattle, as of a handful of grit. Out of the tear fell a couple of lumps of packed clay, the shape of two fists, and a long heap of wet newspaper. And between the clay and the paper, face up in the grass in the white glare of the lamps, there lay a single square of yellow paper, folded once.

It was old. It was the color of weak tea and the texture of a dead leaf. It had been folded and unfolded so many times that the crease had worn through to a pale line.

Voss bent and picked it up.

He opened it.

I was close enough to see. I should not have been, but the lamps were bright and the paper was small, and a lifetime of reading upside-down over my mother's shoulder at the kitchen table had made me quick. It was written in a small round upright hand in blue-black ink, the hand of a woman who had been taught penmanship by nuns, and I would have known it anywhere. Five lines had been crossed out. At the bottom, in a firm clean script, were written only these words:

Little Maren, don't trust the first nameless headstone.

Below, in the corner, in the neat tiny pen, she had drawn a little mark.

Three short strokes. One long.

I read it twice. The first time I did not understand it. The second time I felt the blood go out of my face, and then rush back, a hot hard flood of it, until I could hardly see.

Little Maren.

She had called me that when I was six. When I was very small and cold and couldn't sleep. She had stood in my doorway in her nightdress and said, Little Maren, hush. Little Maren, it's only the wind. Nobody else had ever called me that in my life.

Nobody else had known.

I looked up.

Over the top of the yellow paper, in the white wash of three police lamps, I saw the eyes of Desmond Voss. They had been calm. They had been calm for twenty-four years. And I watched, with a sick, wild, glad horror, as something began to move beneath the calm, the way a fish moves under ice.

His face changed.