Where Marrows Never Look

Elspeth

The evaluator's office is on Warren Street in Hudson, over a shop that sells antique maps.

I know because I have been told, three times, by three different people, each in the same bland voice. Dr. Kestrel told me on Saturday. Mr. Teague told me this morning on the stair. And at half past nine on the twenty-ninth, as the long gray Mercedes slides off the Taconic and into the sleeping streets of a river town dressed for the end of the year, Marcus the driver tells me again, over his shoulder, with the gentle persistence of a man who has been instructed to.

"Second floor, miss. Dr. Whitcombe. It'll only be an hour."

"Yes, thank you."

"Dr. Kestrel will be with you."

"Yes."

I sit in the back seat in the navy wool coat and the gray mittens with my hands in my lap and the vacant sweetness of Dahlia settled on my face like a veil. Kestrel sits at the other end of the leather bench with a leather folder on his knee, and does not look at me. Between us, on the seat, lies the space of a person. We have both been careful to leave it.

I count.

Four hundred and eleven telephone poles from the gate. Eleven red lights. A gray sedan, three cars back, that has been there since the bridge.

Hollis, I think. He has been told to let us go, and to see where.

The mittens are warm. I have not taken them off since Christmas.

…

Dr. Whitcombe is a small plump woman with a gray bob and a cardigan the color of oatmeal.

She has a pleasant, tired, intelligent face and a habit of tilting her head when she listens, like a bird at a feeder. Her office smells of tea and old paper. There is a tin of Danish butter cookies on the desk. On the windowsill, among the African violets, a framed photograph of a girl in a Vassar sweatshirt.

"Miss Reeve," she says. "Thank you for coming. I know the roads are dreadful."

"Thank you for seeing me."

I say it in Dahlia's voice, soft and slightly flat, with a faint catch on the s. I let my eyes go to the cookies and away, and to the photograph, and to the cookies again.

"Do help yourself."

"May I?"

"Please."

I take one. I hold it in both mittens and nibble at the edge. I do it as a child does, with absorbed attention, and I feel Whitcombe's eyes rest on my hands.

"Those are pretty."

"Bridget made them."

The name leaves my mouth before I decide. I feel Kestrel, in the chair at my left, go perfectly still.

"Bridget?"

"A nurse," I say. "She died. On Christmas."

"Oh, my dear."

"She was happy. She'd had a telephone call."

I look up at Whitcombe. I let my lip tremble. It is not entirely acting.

She puts her pen down. She does not write. For a long moment she sits with her hands folded on the blotter, and I watch her take in the odd, soft, bruised creature on the other side of the desk, and I watch something uncomfortable go across her face.

"Dr. Kestrel tells me you've made remarkable progress," she says.

"I've been very well looked after."

"Have you?"

"Yes."

"Do you feel safe at Aldenmoor?"

I consider.

I have spent eleven days preparing the answer to this question. I have a version for the court and a version for Cordelia and a version for the man at my left, who is looking, with great concentration, at the African violets. I have a hundred phrasings, each balanced to a hair between sweet and damaged.

I give her none of them.

"I feel safe with Dr. Kestrel," I say.

It is perfectly true.

I did not know it was true until I said it, and it lands in the little room like a stone dropped into a well. I hear Kestrel breathe in. I do not turn my head.

Whitcombe looks at me for a long moment.

"I see," she says.

She writes something down.

…

It takes fifty minutes.

She asks the questions that are asked. The date. The season. The name of the Prime Minister, which is a question from another country and another decade, and which I answer with a puzzled smile. She holds up four fingers and asks how many. She asks about my mother. She asks what I remember of the night of the fourteenth of October, and I tell her about a rain, and a dark road, and a white nightgown, and a man in a hat who was kind to me; every word of it in the soft clipped voice of a child reciting a lesson she has not quite learned.

Kestrel does not speak.

At the end, she closes the folder and sits back. She is not smiling.

"Miss Reeve," she says. "I'd like a moment alone with Dr. Kestrel."

"Of course."

"There's a waiting room along the hall. Mr. Teague will sit with you."

"Thank you."

I rise, and fold my hands. At the door I turn and give her a last uncertain smile, the smile of a girl who has done well and does not know it, and I see her mouth move, very slightly, in answer.

She's not sure, I think. She doesn't know what she's looking at.

The door closes.

Through the wood I hear her voice, low and level: "Ambrose, I'd like you to tell me exactly how long you've been treating her."

And his, dry as paper: "Sit down, Margaret. It's a long story."

…

Teague takes me to the waiting room and sits me in a vinyl chair under a poster of the digestive system.

He doesn't speak. He folds himself into the opposite chair with a copy of Reader's Digest and rattles the pages, and the smell of peppermint comes off him like heat. I look at him. At the damp mouth, the small pale eyes. At the left hand, which is turning the pages, and which has a long red scratch across the back of it, from knuckle to wrist.

I look at it for a long time.

Bridget scratched him.

She fought.

I hold the thought carefully, as I would a hot dish, and I do not let my face change.

"Mr. Teague?"

"Miss?"

"I need the ladies'."

"Not on your own."

"I'm going to be sick."

I give him the face. It's an easy face. A child's, green about the lips, with her hand pressed to her stomach. He looks at it for a moment with an expression of disgust and alarm, and then he levers himself up with a grunt.

"Down the hall," he says. "I'll wait outside."

"Thank you."

I walk. I do not hurry. I go along the corridor, past a door marked ACCOUNTS and a door marked BILLING, to the end, where a frosted window gives onto a fire stair.

I do not go into the ladies' room.

I go to the window.

…

I had two minutes. That was the calculation.

Whitcombe's office is at the front of the building, over the map shop. The back stair runs down the side wall to a service lane that gives, thirty feet on, onto Warren Street. A person in a navy coat and gray mittens, walking briskly, with her head down, could be at the corner in forty seconds. And across the street from the corner, between a bakery and a shop selling expensive soap, there is a small narrow window with a gold-leaf sign.

PELL & DAUGHTER. HOROLOGISTS. EST. 1931.

I saw it from the car.

I have been seeing it in my head since Saturday night.

…

You must understand how it was.

On the last afternoon of an ordinary week in March of last year, a woman in a green wool coat walked into a clock shop in Hudson with a heavy parcel wrapped in a pillowcase. She asked for the proprietor. She said the clock had been her mother's and it had stopped. She said it chimed a particular tune that she could not hear without crying, and that she wanted it mended, but there was no hurry. She wrote her name in the ledger. She paid a deposit in cash. She said she would come back.

The proprietor was a gray-haired woman called Wren Pell. She took the parcel, unwrapped it, and exclaimed.

It was a walnut mantel clock, about the size of a loaf of bread, with a pierced brass face and a little glass window in the base through which one could see the comb of a Swiss music-box movement. It had belonged to my mother. It had belonged to her mother, in Dublin. It had chimed the quarters, in a thin sweet voice like a bird's, in the hallway of a third-floor flat above a dry cleaner's in Yonkers, and every night of my childhood it had struck eleven, and played, once, the first two lines of a song.

Little lantern, little light.

I was thirty-three.

I told Wren Pell to take her time.

I never went back.

I did not mean to. I had meant to, every week. I had meant to the week of the Foundation audit, and the week of the wedding anniversary, and the week that Dennis rang to say, in his rough kind voice, Els, I've found something. Come to the City. But the days had filled up, as they do, and the clock had gone out of my head, and when I woke in a hospital bed with my hair cut off and my name taken, I had forgotten it entirely.

Somewhere I wouldn't look.

Anything she loved that I didn't.

I had heard Conrad say it, in the dark, on a sleeping man's tongue. And I had not understood.

I understood on Saturday night, in the observation closet, with my forehead against the horsehair wall.

He never loved the clock.

He used to wind it. He had it on the mantel in the duplex, for a month, before we moved it to storage. He would hold it in his lap and wind it with his bitten fingers and say, in that wry, lovely voice, Els. Make it sing. And when I did, and it played its two lines, he would shut his eyes.

He loved the song.

He never loved the clock.

And on the thirteenth of September, with a cardboard binder under my arm and a heavy foreboding in my chest, I had taken a taxi from the Foundation to Hudson, and gone into a shop I had left eighteen months before, and asked a gray-haired woman if my mother's clock was mended.

She'd said, Oh, my dear. It's been ready since the summer before.

And I had taken it out of the pillowcase, and unscrewed the base, and put in what I had come to put in. And I had said: Keep it safe. I'll come when I can.

I had meant to tell Dennis.

I had meant to tell him on the fifteenth.

…

It is forty seconds to the corner.

I take thirty-one.

The bell above the door gives a thin jangle as I step in, and the warm air closes round me, smelling of brass polish and machine oil and, from somewhere, a sweetness like old apples. The shop is long and narrow and crowded to the ceiling. There are clocks on every wall, grandfather clocks in the corners, carriage clocks in glass cases, a row of cuckoos with their little doors shut. The ticking is immense. It is a hundred hearts beating a hundred different tempos in a single room, and under it, thin and bright, a chorus of silver bells.

It is eleven minutes to ten.

At the counter a woman is bending over a watch movement with a jeweler's loupe screwed into her eye. She is perhaps sixty, tall, with a long gray braid over one shoulder and a leather apron. She does not look up.

"Be with you in a moment."

"Mrs. Pell."

The loupe comes out. The braid turns. A pair of pale blue eyes fix themselves on my face, and I watch them travel: the cropped black hair, the thin shoulders, the gray mittens. I watch the faint wrinkle gather between her brows.

"I know you," she says slowly.

"You might."

"I know the... it's the coat. The coat's wrong." She puts down the tweezers. "You came in with a pillowcase. In March. Last year."

"Yes."

"Green, it was. A green coat."

"Yes."

"Your mother's clock."

I cannot speak. I nod.

"Oh, my dear," says Wren Pell. She comes round the counter very quickly, wiping her hands on her apron, and for a moment I think she is going to embrace me. She stops a foot away. Her hands go out, and fall. "It's been ready for a year and a half. I wrote you. I rang. They said there was no one at the number. I thought, well, she's moved. I thought, she'll come."

"I'm sorry."

"I kept it in the safe." She turns, and I see her shoulders shake once. "You see, it wasn't just the clock. There was the other thing, in the base. I'm not a woman who goes poking, but a thing like that, wrapped up in oilcloth..." She wipes her face with her wrist. "I thought: it's somebody's life, that is. And I put it by."

"You did right."

"I read the papers," says Wren Pell. "A man in the Hudson Valley had a house fire in October. A man called Oakhurst. And then your name. And a photograph." She stops. "You looked so different."

"I was."

"They said you'd died."

"I know."

"I didn't believe it." She turns back. Her pale eyes are wet and fierce. "You'd left it with me. People who mean to die don't leave their mother's clock to be mended."

…

She takes me into the back.

It is a small room with a workbench, a gas fire, a cat asleep on a heap of old cardigans, and a safe in the corner: a squat black Victorian monster with a brass handle, taller than I am. She spins the dial with the confidence of a woman who has done it ten thousand times. The door swings. There are shelves inside. On the second shelf, in a wad of tissue paper, sits a walnut clock the size of a loaf of bread.

I stand there.

I stand there for a long time.

It is smaller than I remember. The walnut has darkened. Someone has polished the brass, and one of the little feet has been replaced with a new one, slightly paler than the others. Through the glass window in the base, I can see the comb of the music-box movement, bright and fine as a lace collar.

Wren Pell lifts it out and sets it on the bench with the tenderness of a nurse laying down a newborn.

"I did the movement," she says. "It's a Swiss thing, beautiful. A Paillard, from about 1890. Someone had put a wrong cylinder in. I found the right one in a lot at an auction in Albany." She hesitates. "I set it to the quarters. And to eleven, I think. I took the liberty. It was only the two lines."

"Yes."

"May I?"

"Please."

She turns a tiny key in the base. She does not wind it far. She sets the pendulum with the pad of her thumb.

It begins to tick.

It is a small, quick, intimate sound, a pulse, a brisk and cheerful little heartbeat. I have not heard it for nearly two years. It goes into my chest like a thread being drawn through cloth. I shut my eyes, and the shop falls away; and I am twelve, in a hallway in Yonkers, in my nightgown, with my back against the wall, and my mother is at the piano in the next room, playing the first four bars of something and stopping, and starting again.

The clock strikes the quarter.

It is not a loud sound. It is a bell, as thin as a drop of water, and then a small silver rippling, like fingers drawn across a harp. It plays four notes. It plays them slowly. I know them as I know my own name.

Lit-tle lan-tern.

I put the back of my mittened hand against my mouth.

Lit-tle light.

The ticking resumes.

And in the quiet after, in the warm back room, with a cat asleep on the cardigans and a gas fire hissing in its grate and the great sea of ticking washing on the wall beyond the door, I stand with my eyes shut and weep without making a sound.

I weep for a very short time.

Then I open my eyes.

"Mrs. Pell," I say. "I need you to open the base."

…

She does it with a screwdriver the length of a pencil.

Four screws. A brass plate. Beneath it a hollow, perhaps three inches deep and eight across, which I had padded with a sheet of felt from a sewing basket on the rainy afternoon of the thirteenth. In the hollow lie two things.

The first is a long flat package, wrapped in yellow oilcloth and tied with kitchen string. I know the weight of it without lifting it: three hundred and forty pages of photocopied bank records, and a covering memorandum, and a typed index in a hand I could read in the dark. I have not seen it since the day I made it. My hand shakes as I untie the string, and the oilcloth falls open on the bench, and there it is, in black and white: the thing that burned a man alive.

FOUR HUNDRED AND TWELVE MILLION.

The second is a very small, very ordinary object. A flash drive, black plastic, the sort one gets free at a conference. It has a strip of white tape across it. On the tape, in a rough square hand that I last saw on a Post-it note stuck to my kitchen refrigerator, a single word is written.

ELS.

I pick it up.

I turn it over.

On the reverse, in the same rough capitals, is a second line.

IN CASE I'M AN OLD FOOL. — D.O.

I put my hand over my eyes.

…

"I'm sorry," says a voice behind me. "I couldn't wait any longer."

I turn.

There is a woman standing in the doorway to the shop.

She is not tall. She is wrapped in a gray cashmere scarf and an ankle-length camel coat, with a leather satchel slung over her shoulder, and her hair is short and iron-gray and cut like a man's. She is perhaps sixty-five. She has a face like a knife: all bone, and a long fierce nose, and black eyes that do not waver. In one hand she holds a pair of kid gloves. In the other, an envelope, opened, with a letterhead I recognize.

ALDENMOOR. OFFICE OF THE MEDICAL DIRECTOR.

"Elspeth Calder," says the woman. "My name is Miriam Castellane. I was Dennis Oakhurst's friend for thirty-six years."

I cannot speak.

"I had a letter on Friday," she says. "It was eleven lines. It was signed A. Kestrel, M.D. It was the most extraordinary letter I have ever received." Her voice is dry and low and utterly steady. "It said that you were alive. It said where you would be on the twenty-ninth, and when. It said, Please be at the clock shop at ten, and bring someone who can print."

"Someone who can print."

"I've brought two."

She steps aside.

Behind her, in the shadows of the shop, between a longcase clock and a tall oak wardrobe, a second woman is standing. She is much younger. Thirty, perhaps. She wears a green parka and a woolen cap pulled low, and her cheeks are red from the cold. She has a notebook in one hand and a phone in the other. And her brown eyes, wide and fixed and wet, are staring at me as though I were a ghost.

"Hi," says Tamar Quinn. "It's, um." She swallows. "I gave you my card. At the conference. You said you'd call."

"I did."

"I waited nineteen months."

"I know," I say. "I'm sorry."

Tamar Quinn takes a step forward. She stops. She draws a breath that shakes all the way down.

"You're so thin," she says.

And I laugh.

It is a terrible, cracked, helpless sound, half a sob, and it shocks all four of us into stillness. The cat opens one eye. The clock on the bench ticks on. In the shop beyond the door, the great chorus of clocks begins, one after another, to strike ten.

I count them.

I count to ten.

Then I look at the two women in the doorway, and I say, in my own voice, for the first time to anyone outside of Aldenmoor:

"I've got eleven minutes. Sit down. I'll tell you everything."