No Prints at All

No Prints at All

Ethan stayed.

Neither of us talked about it. There was no negotiation, and nobody said the word out loud.

The first night, after the steak, he carried the dark canvas bag up to the second floor himself, pushed open the door of the empty room at the end of the hall, the room nobody had slept in for 46 years, and shut it behind him.

The room had a single bed frame and a mattress in it, both older than me. He carried them down the next morning and left them out under the back porch eave, and they stayed there through the rain. After that the only mark in the dust on that floor was a rectangle about six feet long along the north wall.

The next morning I came down to the kitchen and the coffee was already made.

He had made it in my mother's aluminum percolator, which had sat in the cabinet under the sink since I cleaned the house out. Eight cups. He never drank any of it. I cooked that month and he made the coffee, and by the end of the first week I had stopped setting an alarm.

A month went by like that.

We relaid the tin roof on the back of the house. We replaced all the plumbing that had been rotting since the eighties.

I paid cash for the materials at the hardware store in town and he carried them in from the car. He would not take money and he would not take a receipt. In the second week he wore through the toe of one leather shoe, cut a strip off an old inner tube, and bound it, and he wore it that way until the end of the month.

Ethan repainted the front of the house in a coat of white so thick and so even that when it dried, the two-story wood house in Milton looked exactly the way it looks in the photographs from 1987, before anything in it had gone bad.

He used 11 gallons of exterior white and one brush, and he washed the brush every night in a coffee can of mineral spirits. The ladder was aluminum, 28 feet. Moving it six feet along the wall took me both hands and a shoulder. He carried it under one arm and never set it down between windows.

He worked from four in the morning until the sun went down. No lunch. No water.

Saturday nights he set the Parcheesi board out on the oak table. Two of us played, two colors each. He always took yellow.

He never asked why the box held four wooden pieces and nothing else. I never told him. The board went back in the hall closet when we finished, and in a month of Saturdays neither of us said our parents' names out loud at that table.

And for the first time in 31 years, I slept the night through without taking anything for it.

I took that for healing.

But I had learned a long time ago, and learned it in blood, that a quiet stretch from God was never a pardon. It only meant He was changing the reel.

The message came in at 9:20 p.m. on a Tuesday.

I was at the sink washing dishes. Hot water, soap, china plates knocking against each other. Out in the dining room Ethan sat under the yellow lamp, working a careful mend into the worn elbow of a gray wool sweater.

The phone on the counter buzzed twice, short.

I dried my hands and picked it up. Unfamiliar number, no name saved, an out-of-state area code. A screenshot.

It was the personnel record of a house painting company in Poughkeepsie. Ugly layout, default font, an ID photo in a box at the left. Employee name, tax number, start date, the same name Ethan used and the same trade he had given me in the GhostInk window almost two years ago.

But the face in the photo box belonged to a dark-skinned man with curly hair, somewhere around 30.

Not Ethan.

The phone buzzed once more. A line came up under the picture:

"The man in your house is not a painter. Don't let it touch you."

I raised my head. Through the kitchen doorway I could see Ethan still sitting there, head tipped down, the needle going up and down through the gray wool. The lamp put a flat ring of light on his cheek with no shadow in it.

I called the number back.

The number you have dialed is not a working number.

I didn't ask him. I did the thing I had done for 20 years to make a living. I watched.

Day one. I sat on the porch and watched him take the first-floor window frame down with a scraper and coarse paper. The blade slipped and opened a cut an inch and a half long across the back of his hand. He looked down at it, blinked, and went back to sanding.

No blood.

I sat up straight and stared at that hand for 20 minutes. By afternoon the cut had closed to a thin white line. By night it was gone. A hematologist would have called it a clotting disorder, the same compound they had been putting in him for 10 years driving his blood the wrong way, and I wrote that down and then texted Deakins the address and the time, the way I had every night since Ethan moved in.

Deakins answered at 11:40 p.m. with one word. Copy. He had sent that same word back every night since Ethan moved in, twice at four in the morning. I kept the car backed into the drive with the nose at the road and the tank over half, and it had not gone under half since the afternoon Ethan came.

Day two. I counted.

A normal person blinks somewhere between 15 and 20 times a minute. Ethan blinked four. Even, exactly 15 seconds apart, and any anesthesiologist would have told me that a compound holding a man's heart and breathing down for 10 years will hold the blink reflex down with them.

I kept a count of what he ate as well. Over three days it came to four bites of steak, half a potato, and two spoonfuls of the beans I put down in front of him. He filled a glass at the tap at nine every night and carried it up, and every morning he brought it back down full.

I counted his breathing while he slept too. At two in the morning I stood outside the door at the end of the hall with my ear against the wood, holding my own breath to listen. I had put a chair under my own doorknob before I walked down there.

Four a minute.

Day three. I cleaned.

I wiped down the whole stair rail, the tabletops, the doorknobs, the chair arms, cleaned all of it with alcohol, then dusted a thin layer of flour over every surface the way the forensics techs do in the books I used to write. I did it with the car keys in my pants pocket, where they had been since the first night.

The flour came out of a five-pound bag I bought that morning, and I laid it on with a soft brush of Emily's that was still in the drawer in the downstairs bathroom. I did the second floor while he was out at the ladder, and the first floor after he came in. That night I put the chair under my doorknob again and slept in my shoes.

Twenty-four hours later Ethan had been over every one of those places. He had opened doors, taken the stair rail, pulled chairs out, carried plates.

There wasn't one print in the flour. Not because he wiped. Not because he wore gloves.

Because he didn't have any.