Greywood, Row Three

We went up the hill the straight way.

It was the first week of December, a gray still morning with a smell of snow in the air, and the cemetery lay under it like something held in a cupped hand. The pines were black. The grass was stiff with frost. I came in at the west gate, past the little brick lodge with its single bulb, where a caretaker in a green jacket sat at his desk with a newspaper and nodded at us through the glass. He was a real one. He wore a name tag. I had checked.

I did not take the old route.

I did not go by the walnuts, or the family vault with its wreath, or the stone with no name. For twenty-four years my mother had walked the long way round, every year, on the same day, and I had followed her as a child follows a shadow without asking why. More shade, she'd said. I knew now what it had meant. I knew what she was avoiding, and who had been watching, and what she'd been carrying in her handbag. But she was gone, and the men she had walked around were in cells, and I had my hands in my pockets and my daughter at my side and no reason in the world to take the long way.

I turned right at the first fork, up the east slope, and walked straight to him.

…

It was a small stone.

I had been to it twice in my life: once at fourteen, in a black dress from a church rummage sale, and once at twenty, alone, when I came to tell him I was pregnant and had nothing to say. It stood in the third row, twelfth from the end, in a line of plain gray markers, each with a name and two dates. The grass around it was neatly cut. Someone had been keeping it. I did not need to ask who.

WALTER J. OSTRANDER.

1952–2002.

He kept the books.

I had forgotten they put that on it. It was my mother's idea, chiseled below the dates in small plain letters, with no verse, no cross, nothing else. I'd thought it strange when I was fourteen. I had thought, what kind of epitaph is that? I stood there with the cold coming up through the soles of my shoes, and read it, and did not feel anything for a long moment, and then felt everything at once.

"Hi, Dad," I said.

My voice cracked. June's hand slid into mine.

She stood beside me in her gray coat with a bunch of white chrysanthemums in the crook of her arm, three dollars, from a gas station on Lorain. She had bought them herself. She laid them on the grass, carefully, and stepped back.

"He'd have liked you," I said.

"I know."

"He would've been terrible with you. He'd have let you stay up late. He'd have let you drink his coffee." I laughed, and it came out wet. "He'd have taught you to read a balance sheet when you were seven."

"I'd have liked that."

"You'd have been better at it than he was."

She smiled a little. It was the first smile I had seen on her in a week.

…

Behind us, the gravel crunched.

I turned. A man was coming up the path, between the stones, in a long wool coat with a satchel in his hand, and for a moment I did not know him. He had grown a beard. He had lost the stoop. He walked with a loose, easy, unhurried stride, like a man who has been a long way and has nowhere left to hurry to, and his face, above the beard, was brown from the road and creased from the sun, and his gray eyes were clear.

"Ansel," said June.

"Hello, kid."

He had been gone twenty-six days. He had driven four thousand miles. I'd had a postcard from Tulsa and another from Spokane, with nothing on the back but a printed picture of a bridge, and I had not known what they meant, and had not asked. Now he stood on the frozen grass in front of my father's grave, holding his satchel in both hands, and I saw that his fingers were not quite steady.

"Thirteen," he said.

"All of them?"

"All thirteen. I sat with every one." He let out a long breath. "It's done. It took all night, the last. A woman in Duluth. She wanted to hear it twice."

"And?"

"Eight said yes to the first. Two said yes to the second, they want to see who's left. Two said no to everything. One was an old man in Columbus, with a dog. The other wrote her name at the bottom of the page, her own name, the one she's always had, and underlined it." He smiled. "I'd have liked to have met her sooner."

"And the last?"

"The last wanted to know if it was too late." His voice thickened. "I said it's never too late. I said I wished somebody had told me."

I put out my hand.

He took it. He stood there in the cold with his eyes shut, and I held it, and nobody said anything for a while. A crow went over. The wind moved in the pines. It was the first moment in a year that I had not felt hunted.

…

"Ms. Ostrander?"

There was a folding table, set up on the path at the foot of the plot, and a folding stool, and a man who sat on it in a white lab coat and cotton gloves, looking apologetic. He was small, bald, mild, with a pair of half-moon spectacles. His name was Lund. He worked in the document laboratory of the U.S. Attorney's office, and had been working there since before I was born, and Whitcomb had said, when I asked, that she'd trust him with her life.

I had asked for this.

It had taken some doing. The tube had been in an evidence locker for nine weeks, in a plastic bag, tagged and numbered, untouched. It had been the one thing in the vault that Voss had asked for. It had been the one thing, in the whole of that night, that had made him lift a knife to my throat. The prosecution had wanted to open it at once, in a laboratory, under a microscope. I had said no. I had said I wanted to open it where he was.

Whitcomb had looked at me for a long time.

"Not at the lab," she'd said.

"No."

"At the grave."

"Yes."

"It's irregular."

"So is everything," I'd said.

She had signed the order.

So here it was. A square of green baize laid over the folding table. A light on a stand, battery-powered. A camera on a tripod. A cardboard tube, brown, the length of my forearm, tied with string, with a label pinned to the lid by a brass tack.

WALTER O.

"Whenever you're ready," said Mr. Lund.

…

I do not know how to describe the next minute.

He cut the string. He did it with a pair of tiny scissors, snip, snip, and set the loops aside. He drew off the lid. It came away with a faint dry rasp, like a cork. A smell came out, the smell of old paper and pencil lead, and I thought I was going to be sick.

Pipe smoke, I thought. Pencil shavings.

He slid his gloved fingers into the tube and drew out a roll.

It was a ledger. Not a book, but the pages of one, taken from the binding and rolled tight, a green-ruled accountant's ledger with a red cloth spine. They were covered in a tiny, upright, impeccable hand. Columns. Dates. Sums. Each line was ticked in the margin with a small neat check, and at the end of each column was a total, and at the bottom of each page, in the same hand, in a different ink, a note.

Doesn't reconcile.

Doesn't reconcile.

Again, doesn't reconcile.

I recognized the handwriting. I had seen it a hundred times on the back of a grocery list, a permission slip, a birthday card with a ten-dollar bill inside. I looked at it now and the world shrank to the width of a page.

"This is the audit," said Mr. Lund, in a hush. "The county's. The Department of Records and Vital Statistics, the last three quarters of the year 2001. He was the senior auditor." He turned a leaf with the tip of one gloved finger. "Mr. Ostrander found that money was leaving the department. Small sums, over a long period. They went into a fund called Placement and Transitional Services. He traced it. He traced it back."

"To what?"

"To an annex. To a clerk. To a name." Lund looked up. "To twelve names, ma'am. He had found twelve. He was only a few pages from the thirteenth."

I could not breathe.

"He had the whole thing," said Lund softly. "He knew the amounts. He knew the dates. He had, if I read this right, the signature of the man who authorized every payment." He pointed. "That one. At the bottom of each sheet. It's been initialed, you see, in the same ink."

I leaned over the table.

G.A.

G.A.

G.A.

And on the final page, written so small I had to bend to read it, in the margin by a total that had been underlined twice, a different set of letters, in a different hand, in a pale gray pencil that had faded almost to nothing.

D.V.

…

"He was killed," I said.

Nobody spoke.

"It wasn't the road." My voice was very quiet and quite steady. "It wasn't the rain. It wasn't the brake line, or the curve, or the bad light. I was fourteen, and they came to the door, and a man in a hat said it was an accident. And my mother said thank you. And she shut the door."

"Maren—" said Ansel.

"Twenty-four years. She went to his grave every October, with a thermos. She walked around the hill because she was being followed. And she never said." I looked at the ledger. "She never said."

I saw it all. I saw it as one sees a lit room through a window. A woman at a kitchen table with her hands wrapped around a cup. A knock at the door. A man in a hat. A girl of fourteen on the stairs, in her pajamas, listening. It was a car, Mrs. Ostrander. I'm so sorry for your loss.

And she let me believe it.

I should have been angry. I think I was, a little, somewhere. But what I felt, mostly, was an enormous slow tenderness, and under it a grief so large that I could not see the edges. She had hidden it for me. She had hidden her husband's murder for twenty-four years because the alternative was to tell a fourteen-year-old girl that the men who killed him were still out there, with her name in a notebook.

She was keeping me safe.

Between the pages of the ledger, something fluttered.

…

It was a slip of paper.

Mr. Lund caught it. He drew it out between two gloved fingers, a narrow strip, torn from the corner of an envelope, the color of weak tea. He laid it on the green baize under the lamp. Three words in blue-black ink, in a hand that I would have known at the bottom of the sea.

Maren, this is why.

I put my hand on the edge of the table.

I read it again. I read it a third time. The letters swam and steadied and swam. It was not a letter. It was not an explanation. It was a note on a ledger from one woman to another, from a mother, who had carried a thing for twenty-four years and did not know how to put it down.

This is why.

Why she had hidden. Why she had drawn her maps. Why she'd laid trail after trail, all of them false. Why she had gone to the annex, and taken the job, and signed nine names with her own hand and never said a word. This is why.

"Is there more?" I said.

Mr. Lund hesitated.

He bent over the tube. He tilted it to the light, as one tilts a bottle to see how much is left, and peered down it, and frowned. He reached in again with two fingers, and felt along the bottom, and I saw his face change.

"There's something," he said.

He drew it out.

It was very small. It was a cassette tape, the micro kind, no bigger than a matchbox, in a cracked plastic shell the color of smoke. It had a paper label stuck to one face. The label had been written on by hand, in the same blue-black ink, in a script that had grown shaky.

He held it out on his palm to me, and I did not take it.

I couldn't. I looked at it as at a living thing.

It was June who moved. She stepped forward and bent over his open hand, and I saw her lips move silently as she read. The wind was cold. The light on its stand hissed and flickered. I saw her go quite still.

"What does it say?" I whispered.

She straightened up. She looked at me with her father's eyes, and there was something in her face I had not seen before: a terrible, gentle, wondering stillness, as of a child at the edge of a lake.

"Side B," said June. "For Maren and June."