Della
At twenty-five to eight on Saturday morning I left my headset on the seat of the Sentra and got back into Royce's car, and he hadn't moved.
He was still at the wheel with both hands on it, and the seat belt chime had given up. The car smelled of new upholstery and old fries, and the phone was still on its mount by the mirror, showing a blue box with nobody in it.
"Is he okay?" said Royce.
"No."
"Are they—"
"Nobody's okay, Royce. Nobody in that tin can is okay. Who's they?"
He looked at me as if I'd asked him the capital of something.
"They swore it was pulled. You said they. Who swore? Did Ailsa Strachan stand in your office and swear?"
"No." He rubbed his face with both hands, hard, like he was trying to get it off. "No. I never spoke to them about it. I told Sully. Monday morning, on the phone, I said pull it, the whole thing, tonight. He came back on the Tuesday and said Castellane's people had pulled the alarm and the segment could stay as a wave."
"Sully told you."
"Sully deals with the software people. I don't talk to engineers, Della. They make me feel like I'm on a podcast."
"On Tuesday, before the push, you told forty people you'd cut him off. Did you?"
Royce looked out of the windscreen at the furniture shop for a long time.
"I thought you did," he said.
"Me?"
"From your thing. Your channel. I thought you had a button."
"I don't have a button, Royce. I have a phone that falls off the dashboard."
He nodded slowly, and I got out of the car.
I sat in the Sentra with the door open and my feet on the tarmac, and said into my phone, low:
"One. Somebody cut him off. Not Royce. Two. Somebody heard the grandmother. Not me. Three. Royce is a liar. Check the liar."
Then I did something I'd never done in my life. I went back through my own memos.
I keep nearly every one, and I'd never gone further back than the night I made it. I started at the Monday, eight days out, the green sofa, and I couldn't find the one I wanted, so I heard all of them.
One. Find a Mack. One. Gloves. One. Keep him quiet. One. Tell him to sit. One. Don't let him talk on the loop. One. Make him eat. One. Make him sleep. One. Tell him nothing until he needs it. One. Tell him less. Every morning and every night, my voice, flat and Atlanta, giving orders about a man as if he were luggage.
I found it on the first Monday. One. Find a Mack. Two. Find out who signs. And behind me, on the recording, a man in a quarter-zip shouting into his collar. I turned it up as far as the phone would go and held it against my ear.
"… pull it, Sully, pull the whole Moment, tonight …"
Royce, on the Monday, telling the truth for once in his life, and I'd been standing in front of it with my back turned.
So. Royce told Sully, and Sully told the software people, and the software people swore. Somebody at the end of that line was a liar, and Ailsa Strachan was at the end of it, with her mints and her file and her walk out of the room at the word October. I decided it right there.
And somebody was on my channel.
Royce had known about the grandmother within twelve hours, and I'd thought it was Royce listening. Royce had just told me he thought the button was mine. Either he was still lying or somebody else had the button and was feeding him.
There's only one way to find out who's in a room. You say something in it, and you see who gets up.
I keyed it at eight.
"You there?"
"Always." Ronnie, low, in my headset, late as ever. "Did you eat?"
"Listen. Bette's found the speeches. The ones Mack hid. His own words. I'm driving to Cocoa Beach to get them at ten."
"His speeches? Like, what he was going to say? Della, that's Tess's. That's her dad. That's the true thing. Can I tell her?"
"Not yet."
"Why not?"
"Because I haven't got them yet. Ten o'clock. I'll call you after."
"Okay," said Ronnie. "Okay. Ten. Della. Thank you."
I took the headset off and put it on the passenger seat face down, as if it could see me, and I sat there for a minute with my hand on it.
I told nobody else. Not Kip, not Royce, not my phone. I went in through the lobby for a coffee I didn't drink, and read the pool-car board upside down while pretending to look for a pen. Six hooks, four empty. Ailsa Strachan's name on the sheet from eleven last night. Royce kept one on permanent loan, like a man who'd been promised a company car by his mother.
Then I drove to Cocoa Beach an hour early, which for me is on time, with the phone on the floor from the first left.
I parked four houses up from the Tolliver house, under a tree that dropped things, at ten past nine.
Waiting is the worst thing I do, because I can't hold. I adjusted the mirror and adjusted it back. I ate a cracker I found in the door pocket. I called my dry cleaner in Atlanta and asked them to keep my coat another week, and the girl said it had been eight months, and I said I knew. I wrote Plan A on my hand, and then I didn't have a Plan A, so I drew a cross through it.
At twenty past nine a man walked a dog past my window and the dog looked at me.
At a quarter to ten a white car turned into the street.
It was a Halyard pool car. I knew it by the little rope painted on the door. It came down slowly, past me, past the tree, and pulled into the Tolliver drive, and stopped.
I already had my phone up. I already had my thumb on record.
"One," I said. "Ailsa Strachan signed out a pool car at eleven last night. Two—"
The driver's door opened.
He got out the way he got up from his console, in two stages, with a hand on the roof. He wasn't in the polo shirt. He was in a windbreaker and old canvas shoes, a big slow man on his morning off. He went round to the back of the car and took out two paper grocery bags, one in each arm, with a loaf sticking out of one and celery out of the other, and he went up the path and rang the bell with his elbow.
The door opened, and he went in, and the door shut.
My phone was still recording. It recorded eleven seconds of me not saying two. Then it recorded me saying, "No," quite quietly, and then nothing for a while.
I didn't move, and I couldn't have. I sat in the Sentra under the tree, and something fell off the tree onto the windscreen, a seed pod like a small brown slipper, and I watched it slide down the glass.
Things I knew. One. I'd said ten o'clock on one line in the world. Two. He was early. So was I.
He was in there twenty-two minutes, and when he came out he had no bags. He stood on the step for a moment and looked up the street, toward me, as if he were checking the weather. I was lying across both front seats with my face on the handbrake. I heard his car start, and I heard it come up the street and pass me, not fast and not slow. I stayed on the handbrake until I couldn't hear it any more, and then I stayed a little longer.
Bette opened the door before I'd rung.
"You're the second today," she said. "Come in. You look worse."
The kitchen smelled of coffee. On the table there were eggs, a dozen, in a carton, and a bag of oranges, and a bunch of celery lying across the jam jars like it had fainted.
"He brought eggs," said Bette. "Sully. He did last Saturday too." She sat. "He asked had I been going through Tolliver's papers. Nobody's asked me about papers in a week."
"What did you tell him?"
"That I haven't been in anything. Which is true. I can't open a drawer in this house." She looked at me over the jar. "Why are you that colour?"
I sat down across from her. I put my hands flat on the table, because it was the only thing in the kitchen that wasn't moving.
"Mrs Tolliver. Who told you to hide the bottle?"
She didn't answer straight away. She turned the jar a quarter turn on the table, as if it had a better side.
"Sully," she said. "He was here before anybody. Before I'd got my slippers on. He said it'd kill the girls to read it in the paper. He said, put it somewhere, Bet, nobody needs to know he did it." She looked at the model capsule over the toaster. "So I put it in the nose."
Bette looked at me like a nurse reading a chart, and the jar stopped halfway to her mouth, and she put it down again without drinking.
I said, "The speeches."
She didn't ask which. She got up. I followed her through the utility door into the garage.
The freezer was a long white chest, humming. Bette lifted the lid and the cold came up like a ghost getting out of a bath.
It was full of casseroles. Foil trays, stacked four deep, every one with a strip of masking tape on the lid and a name in marker. From the Pettigrews, Get Well Soon, Reheat at Three Fifty. From the Mulcahys, Thinking of You. Chicken and Rice, Love, Pam. A tray that just said Feel Better. Halyard had sent flowers. I'd written him a head cold, and the whole of Brevard County had sent lasagna for it.
"He's under the big one," said Bette. "I couldn't throw them out, and I couldn't read them. So I froze them. Don't look at me like that. I'm a nurse. It's what you do with a thing you can't deal with yet."
I took out my phone. "One," I said, into it, with my other arm in a freezer up to the elbow. "Get the notebook out from under the lasagna."
It was a spiral notebook, the cheap kind with a blue cover, and it was frozen stiff, and it came out with frost on it like sugar, and the pages were stuck together into a block. I held it against my stomach to warm it up, standing in a widow's garage, and after a while the cover would turn.
The first page was in big blue loops, the same hand as the card clipped beside Ronnie's screen. At the top it said, From up there. Ten minutes. Say it slow.
I read the first page. I'm not going to put it down here, because it isn't mine.
What it said was that sixteen years ago, on the console for a test flight, Sully Kessel had sent a command to the capsule early, and a man called Rafe Aldana died of it. And that Mack had brought the capsule home, and the two of them had blamed a valve the size of a thumb and stood on it for the rest of their lives.
Bette had come round beside me, and she read it over my arm, and she didn't say anything. She took the notebook out of my hands, quite gently, and sat down on the lid of the freezer with it on her knees, and turned to the second page.
"Go and make your calls," she said, without looking up. "Take it when you go. Freezer bags by the door. Bring it back."
I left her there.
I called Kip from the Sentra.
"Kip. It's Della. Don't say basically."
"Okay."
"Can Sully hear my channel?"
There was a long, long pause on the line. I could hear the room behind him, the hum of the wall screens, and somebody laughing at something on the far side of the floor.
"Yes," said Kip.
I'd known it since a quarter to ten, and it still went into me like a nail.
"Say it."
"Your channel's on the backup antenna. Everything on the backup records at Flight's console. Mr Castellane's little radio rides it too. It's always been the default. He can play it back on his laptop. From anywhere. From his house."
"Thursday I asked you if anyone could hear it."
"I know."
"You said it was encrypted."
"It is encrypted. He's got the key." A sound like a can being put down very carefully. "It's his console, Della. He hired me. He taught me the whole board. He's Flight. I thought, if Flight wants it, Flight's got a reason."
"Who can put words on the commander's screen?"
"Only Flight's console."
"Sleep tight, Commander."
"Flight's console."
"The statement. Four in the morning. My statement."
He didn't answer that one.
"Is Ailsa Strachan in the room?"
"She's at the back. She came back at five. She hasn't sat down."
"Put her on."
A rustle. A mint. "Ms Quint."
"Your file. The thing you built for Royce. Can you prove it's clean?"
"I've been waiting since Wednesday for somebody in that building to ask me," said Ailsa. "I'll give the boy my archive login now. I want it proved more than you do."
I waited while Kip compared them. I got out of the car and walked round it three times in the street, with the phone against my ear, and a woman in a sun visor watched me from her lawn with a hose in her hand. On the fourth time round, Kip came back.
"Their block's clean," he said. "The one they delivered. It's an alarm, a sound, a screen. It never touches the engine." He breathed. "What flew isn't clean. Two changes since September. October, an ops login put one line inside the correction, and the plan got signed with it in. Then three in the morning, the Tuesday after Mack, from Flight's console, the same login took the alarm out and left that line where it was. Just the one line. That's the nineteen seconds."
"Right," said Ailsa, somewhere behind him. "So. That's my people out of it."
"Kip," I said. "The burn numbers. The real ones. Can you work them out without his tool?"
"On her simulator. From the raw tracking." He was already typing. I could hear it. "Forty minutes. Basically. Sorry."
"Do it."
The ship remembers everything. Mack had flown a practice in the real capsule on the Sunday he died, and whatever he'd found, he'd said it in there.
He needed it never to come home.
I called the sheriff's office while I waited.
I said my name. I said I had reason to believe Mack Tolliver had been murdered, nine days before launch, at his home in Cocoa Beach. I said it in the low voice, the real one, because I didn't have time to iron anything.
The deputy was polite. He put me on hold, and then he came back.
"Ma'am, I've got that one here. The county coroner has it as natural causes. It's marked pending. Somebody'll come out and take a statement from you in the morning."
"In the morning there'll be five more."
"Five more what, ma'am?"
"Never mind," I said, and he said he'd note that I'd called.
I couldn't warn Ronnie on the family line, because a second unbooked call in four hours would come up on Flight's board like a flare. I couldn't warn him on my channel, because I'd been talking into a man's laptop for five days. Everything I'd ever said to Ronnie Lark at three in the morning, Sully Kessel had heard over his breakfast.
Things I knew. One. He could hear me. Two. He could write on the screen. Three. He told a widow to hide a bottle. Four. He brought me coffee.
I said four out loud, in the car, to nobody, and then I hit the steering wheel with the heel of my hand until it hurt.
At three minutes past eleven Kip rang back.
"Two hundred and fourteen seconds," he said. "And the pointing's not the card's. It's close. It's not the card's." He read me three more numbers. I wrote them on my hand in biro, and then I wrote the first one again underneath, because I'd written it down as two hundred and forty-one.
"Kip."
"Yeah."
"Say every number twice."
He said them twice. I wrote them twice. My hand was full.
"Don't put them in your phone," said Kip. "Don't type them anywhere. I'm not saving the run, either. Anything in this building with a login on it, I don't know any more what he can see." He breathed. "Your hand hasn't got a login."
At eleven minutes past, my phone buzzed on the passenger seat beside the headset. It was a text. No name on it, just the number, which I'd never saved, because he'd always come to the window.
Back on at noon. Saved you a coffee.