The First Line

"A person who has told one lie to protect someone will tell the second to protect himself, and by the third has forgotten which was which."

Ethan went to Hudson Street on Wednesday afternoon, alone, with his sister's phone number on a card in one pocket and a microcassette recorder the size of a lighter in the other.

He had told Lauren that he was going to the Queens Library to look at newspaper microfilm. He had said it at breakfast, over cold toast, with a casual lift of one shoulder, and she had said All right without looking up from the map of the Adirondacks she was marking with a yellow highlighter. That was what hurt. She had not argued. She had let him go, the way she always let him go, and he had walked out into the bright cold morning with the clear knowledge that she was giving him a rope and watching to see what he would do with it.

He took the F train to West Fourth and walked north.

The street looked different by day. Hudson Street in late October was a long avenue of brick and iron balconies with the maples going gold and the sky a hard pale blue, and the building at the corner of Perry was ordinary, tall, tasteful, and slightly sad, like a good suit that had been worn to too many funerals. The doorman recognized his face from the previous week, from the afternoon of the penthouse, and gave him a look of such careful blankness that Ethan understood he had been told. He was expected.

"Thirty-one," said the doorman, and pressed the button himself.

…

She opened the door in a gray sweater and a pair of old corduroy slacks, with her hair down and her feet in socks.

It was the most deliberate thing he had ever seen. On the television she had worn black and silver and a perfect pale mask of grief. Here she was a woman at home, on a Wednesday afternoon, who had put the kettle on and happened to be reading. She had reading glasses pushed up into her hair. There was a smear of ink on the side of her right hand, and the apartment behind her smelled of coffee and warm bread and, faintly, under the bread, of lavender and the particular dry odor of fresh floor polish.

"Mr. Vance," said Sophia Lindqvist. "You came alone. I'm so glad."

"You said I might."

"I said whichever you preferred." Her eyes moved over his face with a warm, frank, professional attention, like a portrait painter's, and he had the strange sensation of being measured for a frame. "And you prefer this. Interesting. Please come in. I've left the study open."

He stepped into the hall.

The mirror was gone from the wall. He saw it at once and did not let himself stop. A rectangle of slightly paler plaster showed where it had hung, with a dark wire-mark at the top, and in its place was a framed print of a pen-and-ink drawing of a lighthouse. It had been hung very straight. He walked past it with his hands in his pockets, and he felt, quite distinctly, the weight of his sister's absence at his left shoulder, as if she had walked into the room and was now standing exactly where he had left her.

The mirror was on the wall on the eighth. Now it is not. He filed it in the part of his mind where he kept the things he would not say aloud. She has moved it. She wants me to see that she has moved it.

…

The study was the room at the end of the hall.

It was a small, square, high-ceilinged room, lined with books to the cornice, with a deep green armchair by the window and a long oak table under the lamp. He had been in rooms like it. He had sat in a thousand of them, through a decade of interviews, in the houses of men who had done terrible things, and what he had learned there was to look first at the desk. The desk would tell you whether the person was writing for the world or for themselves.

Hers told him both.

On the left of the table lay a stack of printed pages, three inches thick, bound with a black clip, with a title sheet on top. On the right lay a single fountain pen, uncapped, on a clean blotter. In the center sat a small black microcassette recorder, the twin of the one in his pocket, switched off, with its lid open and a tape inside it.

"You'll forgive me," said Sophia. "I always ask to record. It's a habit of the trade. If you'd rather I didn't..."

"Not at all." He sat in the armchair. "In fact I'd feel safer if you did."

She looked at him, and a very small, genuine smile flickered at the corner of her mouth. "Yes. You would. All right." She pressed the button. The red light came on. "It's Wednesday the twenty-third of October, a little after two. Ethan Vance, formerly of the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, visiting my home at my invitation. I want that on the tape." She sat down on the other side of the table, and folded her hands. "I've been very ill-mannered, Mr. Vance. I wrote to you on Monday, and I've heard nothing. Did your sister object?"

"My sister doesn't know I'm here."

"No." She nodded slowly. "I thought not. She looks like a woman who would object. She looks like a woman who has been objecting to things on your behalf for a very long time."

He said nothing. The kettle clicked off in the kitchen.

"It's all right," said Sophia gently. "I lie to everyone I love. It's how I know how." She rose to fetch the tea. "I'm going to tell you something, and I want you to hold it up against everything you've heard, and see if it matches. I'm going to tell you who I've been cooking for."

…

She brought it on a tray, with two cups and a plate of the warm bread, and sat down again, and poured. Her hand shook very slightly at the lip of the pot. He noted it. He noted also that she let him see it.

"For the past three months," she said, "I've cooked every night for four people. I set four places. I do not always eat. But I cook, and I set them, and I sit down." She looked at the steam. "They are people who aren't there. Do you know the sort of thing I mean? A woman who loses a child is told by her friends to give away the clothes. And she can't. She keeps them in the closet. Once a month she takes one out and smells it."

"Who are the four?"

"I'll tell you. But I want to tell you in order. It's the only way I know how to tell anything." She wrapped her hands around her cup. "May I?"

He nodded his assent.

"There is a writer, Mr. Vance, who has spent twenty years inventing monsters for people to be pleasantly frightened of. Then she meets a real one. She sits with him for five months, in a glass house, and she learns to love him a little, God help her, in the way you love a very dangerous animal at the zoo. She writes his book. She makes him famous. And on a night in June, she discovers that the man she's been feeding is not a case study. He's a hunger. He's the thing she wrote about for twenty years and never believed in." Her eyes were on the cup. "And she goes home and she can't tell anyone, because she has a tape and a contract and a husband and a publisher, and because the man has a senator for a father, and because, God forgive her, she is a little bit proud that she walked out alive."

"You never told the police."

"Who would have believed me? The woman who looked evil in the eye?" A tiny, brittle laugh. "I'm a brand. I've been on forty-one television programs. They would have said that I was shaken, that I'd had a terrible shock, that I should rest."

It was beautifully constructed. He listened to it with the strange and double attention that he had practiced for ten years, one ear for the sense and one for the music. The sense was entirely plausible. It was even touching. But the music had a pattern in it. Each phrase fell into its place with a faint click, as of a sentence read from a page, and there was one thing in the whole speech that had not been polished, and that was the one that she had said without thinking. She is a little bit proud.

That is true. That is the truest thing she has said since I came in.

"And the four places?" he asked.

"Are the girls," said Sophia, very low. "The ones he wrote to. The ones who came to the gate with flowers. There are thirty-one thousand letters in a warehouse in Westport, Mr. Vance. Some of them he answered. I've been trying, for three months, to find out which." She raised her eyes, and they were brimming. "Is that what your sister believes? That I did something to Ray Miller? That I have a girl in a pipe somewhere? I know what you smelled in my hall. I know it's why you came. I'm not stupid."

"What did we smell?"

"I don't know." She said it simply. "I don't know what it is that you can do. I only know that when you walked into my apartment that morning, I saw it in your face, and I thought: These two know. They have always known. They have been waiting their whole lives for someone to be guilty."

It was so close to the truth that it went into him like a thin cold wire.

…

"I want to show you something," said Sophia. "As a reader. Not as a policeman."

She lifted the stack of pages from the table and held it for a moment against her chest. Then she held it out across the oak.

"It's a proof," she said. "Not the finished book. The finished book isn't due until March. This is the first hundred and twenty pages, set in galley, with the typos in. I've shown it to no one. Margaret hasn't seen it. Nathan hasn't seen it." She hesitated. "It's called The Margin. It's fiction. A novel, my first in nine years. I've been working on it since the summer."

He took it. The paper was heavy and slightly warm from her hands. On the title sheet, centered, in plain black type, were two words and a line:

THE MARGIN

a novel

Sophia Lindqvist

"Read the first page," she said. "Please. Aloud, if you will. I've never heard it in anyone else's voice."

Ethan hesitated. Every instinct he owned told him to refuse. He had read enough in his life to know when a book was an invitation, and enough of Desmond Hale's to know what it meant when a writer asked him to read aloud. But he sat in the green armchair, in the clear light of the afternoon, with the red light of her machine blinking between them and his own machine against his hip, and he thought of the yellow note in a dead girl's handwriting, and of how a person looked who had been reading the same page for three months. He turned the title sheet.

The first page was nearly bare. It carried a chapter number, One, and a line from Sappho, and under it, in a plain serif face, a single paragraph.

He read it aloud.

"The girl came up in the elevator at nineteen minutes to eight, and she was carrying a bag of oranges."

He stopped reading.

Nineteen minutes to eight was seven forty-one. He knew it. He had the log by heart. He had held it in his hands in a doorman's cubicle on the eighth of October with the old man's thumb on the line: 7:41 P. J. Yingying — Thirty-one. Guest of S.L. And no one had seen it, no one, not the police, not the press, not a soul, for the entries had been removed from the building's public record by a lawyer named Hugh Foley on the Friday before the girl was reported, and the only copy of that page in the world was in Lauren's file, in a locked drawer in Rego Park.

Nineteen minutes to eight.

He made himself continue. His voice was quite level.

"She had never been in the building before, but she walked as if she had, with her chin up, a small brave person in a borrowed coat. The man had come ahead of her by five minutes. He had said he would wait, and he was good at waiting. He sat in the writing room in a chair that did not suit him, with his hat on his knee, and his glasses were round, and he had put a butterscotch candy in his mouth so as not to think."

He put the pages down.

"Mr. Vance?"

"A bag of oranges," said Ethan.

"Yes. I like to give a character one small thing that is unlike herself. It makes her real." Sophia was watching him. Her head was a little tilted, her hands quiet on the table, and her face was entirely open, kind, interested, and calm. "Is something wrong?"

He understood, in the long half-second before he answered, that this was the test.

She had not written the first line as a confession. She had written it as a mirror. She had put the real time, the real man, the real candy into the first page of a book that would be set in type and sold in every store in America, and she was sitting across the table from him with a recorder running, daring him to say what he saw. If he said That's the time on the doorman's log, she would say, in a puzzled, hurt, perfectly clear voice, How would you know that, Mr. Vance? I made it up. And the tape would say that a man who had no business knowing it knew. If he said nothing, she would know that he knew.

It was a beautiful trap. It was the kind of thing he would have admired, once, in a lecture hall, with a pointer in his hand.

"No," said Ethan. "Nothing's wrong. It's very vivid."

"Thank you."

"Does she find him? The man in the glasses?"

"I haven't decided." Sophia smiled. "I think it depends on the reader."

…

He stayed another forty minutes. He drank the tea. He asked about the lighthouse print, and she told him it was from a trip to Maine; he asked about the garden on the roof, and she showed him through a glass door, a small wind-stripped square of pots and trellises, where a few late marigolds hung on. He did what he had been taught to do. He let her talk, and he said nothing that could be quoted, and he watched where her eyes went when he mentioned the word upstate. They went to the telephone. They went there for exactly a second.

At the door she took his hand in both of hers.

"Take it with you," she said, of the proof. "I'd like you to read the rest. I'd like to know what a real reader thinks." Her palms were warm and dry. "And Mr. Vance. If you do decide to come to see the place where I write, the margin, you only have to say. It is a very quiet house. I think you would like it. It has a good kitchen."

"I'll think about it."

"I know you will." She did not let go of his hand. "You have a scar. Here." Her thumb moved across his left palm, over the old white seam. "From a knife?"

"A pan."

"It's lovely. I'd like to write about it."

He took his hand back. He had not intended to do it so quickly. He saw her see that, and write it down in her mind.

On the street the wind had risen. He stood on the corner of Perry Street with the thick proof pressed flat against his chest under his coat, and he felt his own heart going very fast and hard, and it came to him that he had not taken a single breath all the way down in the elevator.

The recorder in his pocket was still running. He took it out and looked at the little window, where the tape was turning, and he thought, quite clearly: Laurie will see that I've been to see her. She will see it on my face before I'm through the door.

And he thought, a moment afterward: Good. Then I shall not have to say it.

He put the machine away, and walked toward the subway, holding the pages like a man carrying a candle through a draft.