The Audit

Conrad

My father used to say that a Marrow never loses anything. A Marrow only misplaces it, briefly, in the keeping of an inferior.

At three in the morning on the second of January, I am on my knees on the floor of my bedroom with my head under the bed, looking for a lighter.

It is a stupid thing to do. I know it is stupid. I am a man of forty-two, a dead man, in a silk dressing gown, kneeling on a Persian carpet in the east wing of my mother's house with a flashlight in my teeth. But the lighter is not in my coat. It is not in my trousers, or the pocket of the dinner jacket, or the drawer of the nightstand where I keep my cufflinks and my pills. I have turned out the waste bin. I have lifted the mattress. And now I am staring at a rolling dust-ball and a lost button and a single gray sock, and I think: I had it in the library.

I think: I put it on the table.

I think: She was standing there.

I sit back on my heels.

The flashlight shakes. The beam slides across the ceiling, over the plaster moldings and the old gilt cornice, and stops on the window. Outside, the lawn is blue under the moon. The beeches are black. A single light burns in the gatehouse, where Pruett's wife sits up with a book.

She hums, I think.

I put the flashlight down.

…

I will tell you what I felt at dinner, because no one else will.

I did not feel guilt. I want to be exact. Guilt is a thing for people with other options. I felt what a man feels who has been walking for weeks along the edge of a very high wall, in the fog, and who suddenly has the fog lift and sees how far down it goes.

She sat across from me in the candlelight. She had my mother's dress on, charcoal wool, with the high collar; her hair was cut like a boy's and dyed the color of a crow; her face was thin and pale and empty and sweet, like a face in a Victorian photograph. She ate her fish. She made her small, blurred, polite answers. She said ma'am.

And I looked at her and thought: that is my wife.

I thought it as plainly as I would think that is a table.

I have been told, over the last seven weeks, by a great many people, that she is not. That she is a patient. That Elspeth Marrow is dead and buried, that the thing in the gray dress is a clinical object, that I must not confuse the two. Ambrose says it in his flat quiet voice. Warren says it with contempt. Mother says it as she says everything, as though stating a fact about the weather.

I believed them.

I believed them until she said I just do it. I don't know why.

It was so exactly the voice of a woman in a kitchen in Manhattan, standing at a stove at one in the morning in a pair of my socks, humming a tune and not noticing, that the room went away.

So does my wife.

I said it. I heard myself. I heard Warren stop breathing at the other end of the table.

And she looked at me, with her wide empty eyes, and said nothing at all.

…

At nine, Mother sends for us.

Not Pruett; the footman. A boy of nineteen with a pale scrubbed face, who knocks twice and says in a voice cracking with terror that Mrs. Marrow would be obliged if Mr. Pryce would attend her in the library at his earliest convenience. I dress. I choose a gray suit, a sober tie. I look at myself in the glass and see, as I always do, a stranger: the high cheekbones, the thin nose, the expensive new face that cost two hundred thousand dollars and has never once looked back at me with any recognition.

Mr. Pryce.

I go downstairs.

The library at Marrow Hall is the coldest room in the house. It is long and high and book-lined, with a fireplace big enough to stand in, in which a single log is smoldering without conviction. The windows give on the garden and the churchyard wall beyond it. A table runs the length of the room, mahogany, bare. At the far end of it sits my mother in a black cardigan, with a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses on her nose and a stack of paper in front of her.

Warren is standing by the window.

He is in yesterday's suit. His tie is loosened. There is a stubble on his jaw, and there are bruise-colored crescents under his eyes, and he is turning his Princeton ring round and round on his finger with the thumb of the same hand. He does not look at me.

"Sit down, Conrad," says my mother.

I sit.

She does not look up. She is reading. She turns a page, and runs her finger down a column, and makes a small neat mark in the margin with a gold pencil. The log shifts in the grate. The clock in the hall, through the open doors, ticks.

"Mr. Fenn came on Monday," she says.

Warren says nothing.

"You'll remember Mr. Fenn. He kept the Foundation's books for thirty years, before you had him retired. He is eighty-one. He is deaf in one ear. He has, I find, a most remarkable head for figures." She turns another page. "I asked him if he would be so good as to look at the Larkspur schedule."

"Mother."

"I did not tell him what I was looking for."

"Mother, I—"

"I did not tell him anything. I simply put the schedule in front of him, with the wire confirmations, and the registers from George Town, and a cup of tea. And I sat in that chair." She nods toward the one beside her. "He took four hours."

She takes off her glasses.

She folds them and sets them on the table. And for the first time she lifts her eyes, and looks at her elder son, with an expression I have never in my life seen on her: not anger, not even disappointment, but a vast cold fatigue, like the weariness of a woman who has been carrying a heavy basket for a very long way and has just been told it is empty.

"Westbrook Advisory," says my mother.

…

I should say that I did not know.

I want that noted, for whatever it is worth. I am a thief, and a liar, and a man who held a lighter to his friend's collar; but I did not know that Warren was robbing us. I had thought, in so far as I thought at all, that Larkspur was a pie, and that it was cut in the ways my mother described, and that the bit that went to my brother was the bit that went to my brother. I signed what was put in front of me. I did not read the footnotes.

I sit quite still while my mother says it, in her small dry voice, line by line.

Fourteen transfers. Two million, three million, two and a half. Wilmington. A trust with a beneficiary named Margaret Dunne, who is eighty-three, and lives in Tucson, and has never in her life been to Delaware. A retainer, paid monthly, to a firm on Park Avenue with Warren's name on the door.

Thirty-eight million, six hundred and fourteen thousand, two hundred dollars.

"It's a fee," says Warren.

"It is nine point four percent."

"Of the net. For services. Legal services. For managing the whole..." He makes a sharp gesture. "For taking the risk. For cleaning up. Do you imagine that I did that for free? For twenty years? Do you imagine that when the thing at Verrin was done, and the house was burning, and Conrad was sitting in the car in tears with his coat over that woman's head..."

"Warren."

"...it was Father who held the can? Was it Father who rang the dentist?"

"Warren."

"It was me!" His voice cracks across the room. "It has always been me! Who rang the dentist in Danbury? Who paid Harmon? Who sat in the cold in a quarry at five in the morning with a girl in a nightgown, and told her where to stand? Who has kept this family out of prison for twenty years, while he got to have a face and a grave and a wife?"

He is pointing at me.

His hand is shaking.

I look at it. I look at the long white finger, with the Princeton ring, and the neat nail, and I think: he has never in his life raised his voice in this house.

"You took it from the family," says my mother, "in the dark."

"I took what I was owed."

"Yes. And did not say so."

"Would you have paid it?"

"I might."

"Would you?"

"I should have asked a good many questions, Warren. And then, yes. I think I might." She looks at him. "I am your mother. I should have wished to know my son's price."

There is a silence.

It is a terrible silence. It fills the library like water in a well. Warren stands at the window with his hand still half raised, and the light behind him leaves his face in shadow, and I see his chest heave, once, as a man heaves who has run a long way and been told that the finish line has moved.

"I won't apologize," he says.

"I haven't asked you to."

"I'm not sorry."

"No. I rather think you are not." She puts her glasses on. She picks up the gold pencil. "You will restore thirty-eight million, six hundred and fourteen thousand, two hundred dollars to the Foundation reserve. The sum will be in the account by the end of the fifth. If it is not, I shall inform the board, and the board will inform the Attorney General, and the Attorney General will ask a great many questions about a quarry."

"You wouldn't."

"I wouldn't like to."

"You'd be hanging yourself."

"I am seventy-four," says my mother. "I have been hanged by better men."

…

I walk him out to the terrace.

It is not a kindness. I do not feel kind. But he looks like a man who has been struck in the stomach, and I find that I cannot, in decency, leave him alone with the stone and the cold. We stand together at the balustrade with our breath smoking and the whole white valley laid out beneath us, and neither of us speaks.

"Who sent it?" says Warren at last.

"I don't know."

"It was a page. A single page. Block capitals. No postmark but Poughkeepsie." His voice is flat. "She read it on the twenty-sixth. She had Fenn on the twenty-ninth. She sat on it for three days and told no one, because she wanted to see what I'd do."

"What did you do?"

"I behaved normally."

"And that's why you look like a ghost."

"I look like a ghost, little brother, because someone in this house has a leak." He turns. His eyes are red. "And I have been looking for it since Christmas."

I wait.

"I thought it was the nurse." He says it quite calmly. "Sorrell. The one in the pantry. She had a son. She had a grievance. She was seen at the post office. It fitted."

I go cold.

"What do you mean, was?"

"Hollis took care of it."

"What?"

"Oh, for God's sake." He laughs, a short ugly sound. "Don't look at me like that. Nothing hurt her. She went to sleep. They found a note." He shrugs. "I told you I would clean it up. That is what I do, Conrad. It is the only thing I have ever been asked to do."

The wind comes up the valley. I feel it on my face like a hand.

Daniel, I think.

I don't know where the name comes from. It is a boy's name, a plain name, from a chart in a file I once signed without reading. Daniel Sorrell, twenty-three, Hollowbrook. Schizophrenia. A bed.

"You killed the nurse," I say.

"Hollis did."

"On Christmas Eve."

"It was a convenient night."

"She had a son."

"And he is, I'm told, in a very nice clinic now." Warren's mouth curls. "Thanks to our friend the doctor. Which is another matter, and I will deal with it in due course."

I put my hands on the cold stone.

I find that they are shaking. I find that I cannot catch my breath. I find that I'm seeing, quite clearly, not the valley at all, but a cedar kitchen at midnight, and a big untidy man in a cardigan with leather patches who looks at me, across a table, with an expression of enormous tired pity.

Numbers never lie, Conrad.

"No more," I say.

"I beg your pardon?"

"No more, Warren." My voice is very low. "No more of them. The nurse. The old man. That girl in the quarry. I can't..."

"You can't?"

"I can't sleep."

"No," says Warren. "You can't." He steps close. He puts his hand on the back of my neck, quite gently, as he did when I was nine and he was thirteen and I'd been crying behind the stable. "You lit the match, Conrad. You dropped the lighter. You held your wife by the hair in the back of my car while I drove her to a hospital. It was all you." His thumb moves, once, on my spine. "I did not ask you to be a good man. I asked you to be quiet."

He lets go.

"Come inside," he says. "You'll catch cold."

…

At six that evening the telephone rings in the east wing.

I am in the sitting room, in the dark, with a decanter on my knee. I have not touched it. I have not turned on a lamp. I sit with my feet on a footstool, watching the last of the light drain out of the window, and when the instrument on the desk begins to trill I let it ring four times before I rise.

"Pryce."

"It's Warren." His voice is clipped and cold. "Don't talk. Listen."

"I'm listening."

"The reporter."

My stomach turns over.

"A woman called Quinn. Tamar Quinn. She writes for a rag in Poughkeepsie, a weekly, I don't know. She's been in the paper twice this year, for the Foundation, which she called 'opaque.'" A pause. "Hollis photographed her on Monday in Hudson. Leaving a clock shop. With a very old lawyer named Castellane."

"Miriam Castellane."

"You know her."

"Dennis's friend."

"Precisely." I hear paper rustle. "The nurse posted the page. The reporter, I think, is what the nurse was for. Someone is building a file."

"Warren."

"It's under control."

"What have you done?"

"I have not done anything. Yet." His voice drops. "Hollis is following her. She leaves the Courier at half past five. She drives a green Subaru. She lives in a flat on Mill Street, up four flights, with a cat. She has no husband and no family nearer than Boston." A cough. "It's a Friday. The roads are icy."

I stand with the receiver against my ear and the room going slowly dark around me.

"Please," I say.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Warren. Please."

It's the first time I have said that word to him in thirty years. It comes out of my mouth like a stone. I listen to the silence on the other end of the line, and I think of my father in his wheelchair with his face the color of raw liver, shouting a dead girl's name.

A Marrow never begs.

"Good night, Conrad," says Warren, gently. "Go to bed."

The line clicks.

…

I do not go to bed.

I go to the garage.

I do it without deciding. My feet take me down the back stair, through the scullery, past the boot-room with its row of green rubber boots, into the cold stone yard where the cars are kept. The Mercedes is gone, with the driver; the Bentley is under a sheet. In the end stall stands my own, a gray Audi, unregistered, plain as a bread van. I get in. I turn the key.

I do not know where I am going.

I drive down the long white drive, between the lanterns, with the lights off. At the gate I turn left. At the second crossroads I turn right. I pass a farm, and a church, and a gas station with a single yellow bulb. I come to a bridge over a frozen river.

I stop.

I sit with the engine running and my hands on the wheel, looking at the black water, and I think: I could ring her.

I take my phone from my pocket.

I do not have the number. I do not know the paper. I do not know the street. I know a name, a color, a make of car; and a woman in a green Subaru is driving up Mill Street at this moment with the radio on, humming along, perhaps, to something she likes. And in the dark behind her, at a decent distance, with his lights out, there is a man in a gray sedan who has done this a dozen times and never once been stopped.

I sit.

A Marrow never begs.

A Marrow never apologizes.

A Marrow settles.

I look at the phone. The screen has gone dark. My own face is reflected in it, faintly: the stranger's face, the beautiful lie. Behind it, as in a mirror, as in a kind of dream, I see for a moment another face. A thin one. A small pale one with a crow's-wing cap of hair and a gaze that goes straight through me.

I just do it. I don't know why.

I put the phone on the seat.

I drive on. And at half past nine, on a dark road under a dark sky, I arrive at last at a pair of iron gates, and a stone lodge, and a long drive lined with beeches.

ALDENMOOR, says the sign, in white letters. A SANATORIUM FOR NERVOUS DISORDERS.

It's a Friday. It's my night.

I turn in.

I have not yet reached the house when my phone, on the seat beside me, buzzes once. I pick it up. It is a message from a number I do not know, and it contains only two words.

She lives.