The Confession

Elspeth

Four minutes.

It is the time it takes a car to travel from the gate lodge to the front steps, up the long drive between the beeches, at the speed a careful man drives on snow. I have timed it from my window on three evenings. Three minutes forty, three-fifty, four-ten.

The kettle whistles its two long notes.

I do not run.

That is the first and most important thing. A person who runs leaves a room in a certain state, and the state is detectable by the next person through the door. I stand in the cedar-smelling dark with the penlight in my fist and the blue boxes under my left hand, and I make my breathing slow, and I say to myself, as I'd say to a client in the middle of a deposition: you have already decided.

I had decided in the linen room.

I just hadn't known I would be tempted.

E.C.M. — 3 Feb. E.C.M. — 10 Feb. E.C.M. — 17 Feb.

Three Fridays, two winters ago. A man's neat hand on the spine of a box. My initials. My name, in a safe, in the wall, behind a game of chess.

My fingers are on the edge of the first blue box. I can feel the cardboard, soft with age. It would take eleven seconds to find a machine. It would take a minute to thread it. It would take four to learn what the woman in the safe said, in a voice that I do not remember, to a man I do not remember, on three nights that I have been told, in the pale, shifting way of a dream, did not matter.

I let go.

Not tonight.

I take a gray box from the top shelf instead. The last of the thirty-one. A.P. — Sat. I read the date by the beam of the penlight, and I carry it across the carpet to the credenza under the window.

…

The machine is there. I had seen it that first morning without knowing it: a squat, handsome thing under a linen cover, with two reels on top and a row of black knobs. A Revox, I think; the brand Dennis used to buy when the firm still dictated its memos on tape. I flip the cover. I thumb the box open. A saucer-sized spool of brown tape lies inside, wound tight, with a paper leader.

I thread it by feel.

It takes me forty seconds. I have done this a thousand times in a dead man's office. The tape goes through the guides, over the head, round the capstan, onto the take-up reel; I press the lever; a faint whirr, and the reels begin to turn. There's a pair of headphones hanging from a hook on the side of the cabinet. They are big and soft and smell of him.

I put them on.

The world closes. The clocks are gone. There is only hiss, the long, bright hiss of old tape, and under it a voice.

…

"...look at the watch. One. Two. Three. Your eyelids are growing heavy."

I know it. I know the pitch, the pace, the precise fall of it. It is the voice I have been hearing for six weeks, but it is not speaking to me, and it is warmer than it has ever been with me. It's the voice of a man talking to a child he is fond of.

"You are in the Glass Orchard. Nothing can hurt you here."

I fast-forward. I don't know where I'm going. I run the tape at four times speed, and the voices become a flickering squeal, and the counter ticks upward. At thirty minutes, I stop. I let it play.

"...the lamp," says a voice.

It is slurred. Young. A little hoarse. It is the voice of a man at the bottom of a pool.

"Tell me about the lamp, Mr. Pryce."

"I turned it out. I couldn't look at him. He looked at me as if... he said I wouldn't sleep. He said, 'Numbers never lie, Conrad.'"

"And then?"

"Warren came in."

I stop breathing.

"No. First I... first I lit the lighter. It was Father's, with the crest. I wanted to see his face. I put my hand to his collar, like this, and I held the flame up, so he'd see I meant it. Just to scare him. I said, 'Give me the binder, and no one gets hurt.' Like in a film. I heard myself say it."

"And Dennis?"

"He looked at me. He wasn't afraid. He said, 'Els. Run.' But she didn't. She was at the sink in the dark, and she didn't move. She just said my name. 'Conrad?' Like a question. As if she couldn't believe it was me."

A long, wet breath. The tape hisses.

"Then Warren came in from the back. He'd said he would wait in the car. He had Father's key to the door. Dennis put his hand flat on the cover of the binder and wouldn't move it. Warren said, 'Take it from him.' And I couldn't. I just stood there. I couldn't move my hands."

"And Warren?"

"The poker. From the fireplace. It wasn't meant to be hard. Dennis went down against the table and the chair went over, and he lay there with his glasses off. Els screamed. She ran at Warren. She was trying to reach him. I got her round the waist, and she bit me, and Warren came with the cloth, with the chloroform..."

The voice breaks.

I sit very still. My hands are flat on the cold surface of the credenza. I find that I'm looking at the little glass window on the front of the machine, where the tape moves from one reel to the other, a thin brown line, like a vein.

"She went limp. Just like that. In my arms. I carried her out to the car. I laid her on the back seat. I put my coat over her. And when I came back in..."

"Take your time."

"The can was on the floor. Warren had brought it. I swear to God, Doctor, I didn't know. I didn't know until I saw it. He was pouring it round the table, and the stuff was dripping off the edge, and Dennis was lying on the floor with his hand moving. His fingers. They were moving. Like he was trying to find his glasses."

My throat has closed.

I hear it as I would hear an audit finding, in the flat part of my mind that does not feel. Alive. He was alive when they lit it. His hand was moving.

"I said, 'He's alive.' I said it to Warren. And Warren said, 'Then do it quickly.'"

Silence. Four seconds of it. Brown tape, turning.

"And I still had the lighter. I'd had it in my hand the whole time, I flick it when I'm nervous. And I thought, I'll just show him, so he'll know it's real. So he'll tell us where the other copy is, and we can all go home."

"Mr. Pryce..."

"I flicked it. And it was in my hand, and then it wasn't. It fell. It just fell out of my fingers onto the floor, and the flame went along the edge of the carpet like a... like a... and it went up. It went up so fast. And Warren grabbed my arm and pulled me out, and I looked back, and..."

The voice stops.

The tape turns. The hiss. The slow, patient whisper of oxide on a head.

"He was looking at me," says Conrad Marrow, in the voice of a child. "He was looking right at me. He wasn't screaming. He had that look. The one he had at the wedding. Like he was sorry for me."

…

I take off the headphones.

I set them down on the credenza very carefully, as one sets down a thing that might break, and I put both hands over my mouth.

I'm not crying. I'm not anything. I'm a woman sitting in a dark room in a gray wool dress with my fingers pressed to my lips, and my whole body has gone to stone. If anyone were to touch me, I think I would shatter.

He was looking at me as if he was sorry for me.

That was Dennis. Not the man who died, not the one in the cardigan with the pen. Dennis, who sat in his office with his shoes off and said you're about to be insulted by a spreadsheet. Dennis, who said you can leave him. Who came up to a lake house in October with a binder under his arm because he would not let me face it alone, and put his hand flat on the cover when they asked for it.

He was not afraid. That is what I cannot bear. He was looking at the man who set the fire, and he was sorry for him.

I think of the kettle.

How long?

I lift my head. I put the headphones on.

There are minutes left on the tape. I run it forward, a little, and the voices blur and settle.

"...the dentist," says Conrad. "Ames. He's been Mother's man for twenty years. It cost forty thousand. He swapped the X-rays and he wrote up the charts and he put my name on the file. By Wednesday I was dead. I went to the funeral. I stood at the back in a hat."

"And the footage?"

"The trooper. Harmon. Warren paid him. They shot it at the quarry the following Tuesday, because the house was... there was nothing left to shoot. They found a woman. An actress. She was thin, like Els. She wore the nightgown. It rained that week. They said it looked better in the rain."

"Did the actress know?"

"She thought it was for a training film."

"And your mother?"

There's a long pause.

"Mother didn't want it done at the house. She said it was untidy. She said the girl was to be taken quietly, and treated, and kept. She said no harm was to come to Els. That was in the first conversation. She was very clear. And then Warren said Dennis was a problem, and Mother said, 'Then manage him,' and she left the room."

"Manage him."

"That was the word she used."

My head is quite clear. It's the clarity of a machine. I hear the names fall one after another into the channels where I keep such things: Ames. Dentist. Danbury. Forty thousand. Harmon. Trooper. Quarry. Tuesday. The words manage him. The word untidy. The date, the sum, the trade.

I have no paper. I have no pencil. I have a head that was trained over twelve years to hold a trial balance of four hundred accounts and recite it at dawn.

I begin to write it in my mind, in the only language I trust.

Dr. G. Ames, DDS, Danbury. $40,000 (cash?). X-rays, charts. Subject: C. Marrow/Oakhurst.

Tpr. D. Harmon, NY State Police. Quarry. Tues. after. Rain.

Actress, thin, female, unnamed. "Training film."

C. Marrow, Sr. (Cordelia): "Manage him." Present. Not hands-on.

W. Marrow: poker, chloroform, can. Hands-on.

C. Marrow, Jr. (Conrad): lighter. Dropped. Dennis alive.

Each is a line in a ledger. I have stopped hearing the voice. I hear only the list.

That is how I do it. That's how I get through.

Dennis Oakhurst. Aged sixty-one. Alive at the time of ignition.

I write that last, in the coldest hand I own, and I double-rule it.

…

The kettle whistles.

It's a second whistle, two short notes now, high and thin and urgent. The sound comes up through the floor like a wire pulled tight.

He's at the steps.

I tear off the headphones. I hit the stop lever with the heel of my hand and watch the reels slow and judder and still. The counter shows 41:17. When I came to the middle of the tape it stood at 30:00. I have been listening for eleven minutes.

It's wrong. It's all wrong. I've overrun my time by seven.

I wind the tape back. I do it by feel, in a panic, with my fingers shaking, and I stop where I think it began and I cannot tell if it's right. Thirty? Thirty-three? I can't read the counter in the dark. I strip the tape from the machine. I thumb it into the box and close the lid, and I run across the room with my stocking feet silent on the carpet and my shoes in my fist, and I put the gray box back on the top shelf in the row where it belongs.

I shut the steel door. I turn the dial to scramble the combination. I swing the chessboard back into the wall.

Black queen pinned. White to move.

I check the credenza. The headphones are on their hook, the cover is on the machine. My hands are trembling so hard I drop the linen. I pick it up, and put it down again, and smooth it over the Revox.

There's a sound in the corridor.

Footsteps, outside. A man's. They are quick and light, a pair of English shoes on a wooden floor, coming from the front of the house. They stop at the foot of the stairs.

I cross the room in four steps. I get to the door. I put my ear to the oak, and in the stillness I hear the unmistakable sound of a man's breath, very slow and very even.

He is standing at the foot of the stair. He is thinking.

I think of the key in my pocket. The red plastic head. I think of the lock, which I turned from the outside when I came in, and which I locked behind me, for the sake of order, from the inside.

I can't go out through that door.

I have one other.

I run to the bookcase.

It is a long wall, floor to ceiling. Leather spines. Gilt titles. A ladder on a rail. Somewhere in it, between the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry and a volume of Jung, is a chestnut-colored book with no author's name.

I have seen the hand that opens it. I know the angle of the wrist.

I find the book. I press the spine.

Snap.

The wall of books slides ten inches to the right, silent on its rails, and a breath of cold sweet air comes out of the dark. Dahlia and night jasmine.

Behind me, in the corridor, a man's foot sets itself on the bottom stair.

I step through. I draw the bookcase shut behind me. I hear it seat itself with the faintest click, and then I am in the dark at the head of ten stone steps, with my back against the wall, and my shoes in my fist.

I hear the study door unlock.

…

He comes in.

I can hear everything through the shelves. The soft thud of the door. The tick of the clocks. Footsteps on the carpet, unhurried, to the desk. A rustle of cloth. Something heavy is set down: a bag, a case.

Then a silence.

It is the silence of a man who has entered a room and found that it is not as he left it.

I hold my breath. I hold it until the dark behind my eyes is full of small colors.

The headphones. The linen. The tape.

A footstep. Another. They go to the credenza.

A pause, very long. A small sound: the soft tick of a lever.

Then, softly, so softly that I almost cannot hear it, the voice of Dr. Ambrose Kestrel, in the dark:

"Who's been here?"

He isn't speaking to anyone. He is speaking to the room.

I stay where I am. I do not move a muscle, and I don't let my eyes close, and I think, with a distant and absolutely lucid despair: he knows the machine has been touched.

Five seconds. Ten.

Then another sound.

The tap of a cufflink against the glass of a clock.

Tink. Tink. Tink.

Three times.

He is standing in front of the seven clocks, I realize, with his hand raised, and he's knocking on the glass of the third from the left, the way a man knocks on a door to be certain someone is home.

"Not now," says Kestrel, quietly. "Not now. Think."

I have never heard him sound so tired.

He moves. I hear the scrape of the chessboard frame on the plaster, the faint whine of a hinge. A long, long silence. The sound of a man leaning his forehead against a steel door.

And then, muffled, almost a whisper, I hear him begin to laugh.

It's the most terrible sound I have ever heard. It's the laughter of a man who has been waiting a very long time for someone to find him, and who has just understood that they have, and who finds that, in the end, he is not afraid.

"Well," says Kestrel, to the safe. "Well, well. Look at that."

I close my eyes.

Then, slowly, with great care, in the dark, I begin to climb down the ten steps of the Glass Orchard in my stocking feet, to wait for morning.