The Face He Wears

Elspeth

Faces are ledgers, too.

A good surgeon can rewrite the entries. He can raise a cheekbone, lift a lid, fill a cleft, and from that day forward the book looks different to anyone who thumbs through it. But the audit trail is still there. The stitches under the hairline. The tightness at the corner of the eye. The small lag in the expression, a tenth of a second, as the muscles negotiate with the implants. You can always tell a falsified record by the way it moves.

I lie awake all night on the quilt in the Lantern Wing, replaying the moment he rose from his knee and pulled on his gloves.

A song my wife used to sing.

I have spent six weeks hardening myself against a monster. I had a monster ready. He had a lighter in his fist and a signet ring on his finger and a smile like a knife, and I could have recited the charges. I had not prepared for a tired man on one knee, humming flat, saying so am I.

It is no defense. That is what I make myself say, at three in the morning, to the ceiling.

It is no defense.

He lit the match. He burned Dennis Oakhurst alive, or watched while it was done, and he has slept badly since. Those are two separate facts, and no amount of weeping will put them in one column.

I turn on my side and draw my knees up and decide, with the cold clarity that comes in the last hour of a sleepless night, that I will not be sorry for him until he is in a cell.

Then I fall asleep for forty minutes and dream I am singing.

…

Bridget finds me in the linen room at seven.

It is a narrow, windowless cupboard at the end of the south corridor, shelved to the ceiling with sheets and blankets, lit by a bare bulb. She has chosen it with care. The camera in the corridor doesn't cover the door; the sound of the laundry chute is a perfect blanket for whispers. She comes in with an armful of towels and shuts the door behind her with her heel.

"You look dreadful," she says.

"I feel it."

"Good. You'd have made me nervous otherwise." She sets down the towels. She rubs her eyes under her half-glasses. She looks as if she has not slept either. "I watched him on the monitor. Anders. In your room."

"You can see that?"

"I can see the hall. I can see the door. I can see your face when he came out." Her mouth tightens. "I can see the sort of thing that doesn't show up on a tape."

I wait.

"It's him," says Bridget. "It's your husband."

"Yes."

"I knew it. I've known since the second time he came. The way he walks. That hand." She lifts her left and taps three times on a stack of sheets. It is a startlingly good imitation. "And the way the doctor treats him. Like a man handling a cracked bomb."

"How many times has he come?"

"Anders?" She counts without moving her lips. "Thirty, thirty-two. He started the week after you came in. At first it was every night. They put him in the east guest suite, the one with the fireplace, and he'd sit up with a bottle of brandy and shout at the walls. After the second week the doctor took him down to the study, and then to the glass room. He's been seeing him ever since."

"What days?"

"Tuesdays, mainly. Fridays. Saturdays, when it's bad." She shrugs. "Never Thursdays. Thursdays the doctor's away."

I look at her sharply.

"The board," I say. "You told me. The first night."

"Every second Thursday, in Manhattan. He leaves at four. Back after midnight. Sometimes one." She is watching my face. "Tonight's a board night."

The bulb hums. Somewhere in the walls the laundry chute thumps with a bundle of sheets.

"You've thought about this," I say.

"I've thought about nothing else since you wrote on that mattress."

…

It takes us eleven minutes to make a plan.

It is a bad plan. I say so, and she agrees. It is a plan with three moving parts, none of which we control, and it requires each of us to be in the wrong place at the right time with a story that nobody will check. But it is the only plan there is, and I have built worse ones in less time for clients who were being sued.

"What's in the study?" I ask.

"I don't know."

"You know something."

She says nothing for some time. She picks at a loose thread on the hem of a towel.

"Two winters ago," she says finally, "the doctor had flu. The real thing. A hundred and three. I took him tea at three in the morning, because the night man was off, and I knocked and no one answered. The door was unlocked. He was on the floor of the study with his back against the desk. He'd been sick on the carpet." A dry breath. "He was holding a gray cardboard box, like you'd keep a record in. He said, Sorrell. Go away. But he'd just come in from the hidden stair, and the bookcase was open, and the chessboard had swung out from the wall."

"The chessboard."

"It's not a chessboard. It's a door." She makes a flat gesture. "Behind it there's a safe. Steel. Small. Round dial. Inside there were boxes, rows of them, all alike. Each with a label." She hesitates. "I only saw one. Written in his hand."

"What did it say?"

"A set of letters. And a date."

"What letters?"

Bridget looks at me.

"A.P.," she says.

The bulb hums. I find that I'm holding the edge of a shelf.

"He records them," I say.

"I think so."

"Every session."

"I think so. I think that's what the boxes are." She wets her lips. "Elspeth, I'm not stupid. A man who makes a safe in his wall, for something that small, is a man who keeps score. It's no use to him as therapy. He's keeping them for another reason."

"Leverage."

"Whoever's in those boxes can't hurt him as long as he has them. And if he lost them..."

"He'd be a man with nothing to bargain with."

"Yes."

I think about this. I think about it with the part of my mind that is wholly cold and has never learned to hope. A man who has recorded thirty-two nights of a murderer's confessions has, in a gray cardboard box, the means to destroy the Marrow family. And he has not used it. He has kept it, as one keeps a loaded pistol in a drawer, because the moment it is fired he must also face what it costs.

"The combination," I say.

"I don't have it."

"Do you know what he would choose?"

"Why would I?"

"Because I think it's a date." I'm talking slowly. I'm looking not at her but at the wall. "A man like that doesn't pick a number from his phone. He picks a number that means something. Something that he's had in his head for thirty years."

"A birthday?"

"Not a birthday." I look at her. "A death."

Bridget doesn't answer.

"Nov. 4," I say. "Eleven-oh-four. Or oh-four-one-one."

"You can't know that."

"No." I take a breath. "But if I'm wrong, we'll find out in about ninety seconds, and if I'm right, he'll never forgive me for being able to guess."

…

Eleven o'clock that night.

I lie in bed in the Lantern Wing with my eyes closed and my breathing slow, and I listen to the building.

It is a thing I've learned to do. In the first weeks I counted ceiling tiles; now I count sounds. The click of the radiators cooling. The tick of the pipes. The creak of the stair at the end of the corridor as Mr. Teague settles on his folding chair with the crossword and his thermos of tea. A siren a long way off on the county road, thin as a thread.

At eleven-forty, there is a soft double knock at my door.

I get up.

I am dressed. I have been dressed since ten, under the quilt, in the gray wool dress and a pair of Bridget's rubber-soled shoes. I go to the door and I open it.

She stands in the dark of the corridor with a tin cup of tea in one hand and a small steel object in the other. The object is a key. It's a long one, plain, with a red plastic head, the kind you see in a box on the wall of any public building, behind glass, under a sign that reads BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.

"The seal's a strip of wax over a fuse," she whispers. "A hair dryer and a razor. I've put it back as I found it." A pause. "If anyone's counting, they'll count eighteen seconds."

"Teague?"

"Asleep. I gave him a tablet at ten. He'll sleep through a brass band."

"The cameras?"

"The east corridor and the library are on a separate loop since the tour. I've told the tech it's maintenance." She presses the key into my palm. It's warm. "Your window is nine minutes. After that, the sweep catches the stairs. I'll be at the nurses' station. If the doctor's car comes up the drive, I'll turn on the kettle."

"The kettle."

"It sets off the whistle in the pantry. Two long notes. You'll hear it through the floor." Her eyes are very bright. "Then you run."

I look at her.

"Thank you," I say.

"Don't," says Bridget. "Don't thank me. Thank me when we're out."

I close my fist on the key.

…

I have never been so silent.

I go down the south stair in my stocking feet, with the shoes in my hand. The treads are oak, and they were laid by someone who respected a staircase; they do not creak. At the landing there is a window, and the moon through it throws a cold square of light on the floor. I step round it.

First floor. The corridor. Dark paneling and a runner. The library doors are to my left, shut. The oak door of the study is to my right, forty feet away, at the end of a passage between two portraits of long-dead governors.

Brass plaque. Dr. Ambrose Kestrel — Clinical Director.

I put the red-headed key into the lock. It turns with the soft, oiled click of a good mechanism. I stop. I wait for an alarm.

There is none.

I open the door, and the smell of cedar closes over my head.

…

It is darker than I expected. The curtains are drawn. A single green light burns on the console beside the desk, steady as a star. I wait for my eyes to settle. Slowly, the room draws itself out of the dark: the desk, the leather chair, the chaise by the wall. The bookcase to the ceiling.

The clocks.

Seven of them. Even in the dark I can see the pale discs of the faces, and their pendulums moving, back and forth, back and forth. Each at a slightly different tempo. They fill the room with a low interference, like the sound of rain on a distant roof.

It is the loudest silence I have ever heard.

I close the door behind me. I stand a moment with my back against the wood and let my pulse catch up. Seventy-six. Eighty. Eighty-four.

Nine minutes. Go.

I cross the carpet. The chessboard hangs on the wall to the left of the desk, in a plain wooden frame. Black and white squares, inlaid ivory pieces mid-game. White to move. I look at the arrangement of the pieces, because I can't help it. A Ruy Lopez, two-thirds through, in a position I've seen in books: a classic, locked, with the black queen pinned.

White to play.

I put my fingers to the frame.

It swings out, on a hinge so well oiled that it makes no sound, and reveals a square of steel set into the plaster. A small gray door. In its center, a round dial the size of a saucer, ringed with numbers.

I breathe in.

Eleven. Oh. Four.

I turn the dial. Right to eleven, once round, left past it. The mechanical tick of each number passes into my fingertips. Oh. I change direction. Four.

Nothing.

I stand there. My heart bangs once, hard, against my ribs.

I try the lever.

It doesn't move.

Wrong.

My mouth has gone dry. I wet my lips. I look at the plate of the dial, the finely cut digits, the black pointer. I think of the portrait in the library, of the brass plate under it. 4 November.

Some men would write it the other way.

I reset the dial. Left to zero. Right past it, once round. The tick of each number is like the beat of a small slow heart.

Zero. Four.

I stop.

One. One.

I turn the lever.

It gives.

It gives with a soft, solid, heavy thunk, a sound like a bolt drawn on a church door. The little steel door swings open, and a breath of cold air comes out of the wall.

I don't move for a long moment.

I have just opened the secret place of a man I have been studying for six weeks, with the one key he did not think to hide from himself, and I am not sure whether what I feel is triumph or shame. It is as if I had unlocked a drawer in his body.

I switch on the penlight Bridget gave me.

…

The safe is deeper than it looks. Three shelves, running back into the wall.

On the top shelf lie rows of gray cardboard boxes, flat and square, each the size of a dinner plate. They have been stacked with the labels outward, in rows of ten. The spines are labeled in black ink in a small upright hand.

A.P. and a date.

I read them with the penlight, one by one. A.P. — 21 Oct. A.P. — 23 Oct. A.P. — 26 Oct. The dates run on, down the row, into November, into December, thirty-one boxes in all. The last, on top, is labeled with the date of the previous Saturday.

Thirty-one hours of a man's soul.

I touch the nearest with a fingertip. It is cold. Heavy. Real.

On the second shelf, there is only one thing. A brown envelope, thick, tied with a ribbon, with a name written on it in blue ink in an unfamiliar hand: Ambrose — from me — never open. A woman's handwriting. Round and schoolgirlish. A thing a girl might have written. I don't touch it.

And on the third shelf, there are three more boxes.

They are not gray. They are blue.

A different stock, an older cardboard, softened at the corners. The spines are dated in the same small upright hand, but in ink that has begun to fade to brown. The labels are short.

E.C.M. — 3 Feb.

E.C.M. — 10 Feb.

E.C.M. — 17 Feb.

My hand has stopped in the air.

I do not breathe. I don't think. I stand in the dark, in the cedar smell, in the sound of seven clocks, and I read the letters on the spine of the box again, and again, as one reads a verdict.

E.C.M.

Elspeth Calder Marrow.

Three Fridays in February. Two winters ago.

There is a roaring in my ears. My knees are suddenly loose.

Somewhere far below me, in the floor of the house, a kettle begins to whistle.

Two long notes.

I have been in this room for seven minutes.