Wednesday, 7:55 a.m.
"Han? You seen my keys?"
He was in the mudroom, going through the pockets of the canvas coat he hadn't worn since April. I could hear the coins in it, and the rattle of the hooks as he lifted each coat and put it back.
"Aren't they on the hook?"
"Would I be asking?" Friendly. Not yet worried. "I want the charger out of the truck."
"Did you have them last night?"
"I must have. I drove home." A pause, and the coats again. "Didn't I?"
The spare was in my jacket pocket with the flip phone, the twine loop around my finger. I could feel the two of them against my hip every time I moved, a small hard weight and a smaller one. "I'll look upstairs," I said, and went, and on the fourth stair I thought about him standing below listening to it knock.
The fire safe lives on the floor of our closet under his winter boots, and I knelt and dialed it open while downstairs he went through the kitchen drawers one after another, slamming none of them. It held what it has always held: the deed to the farm, the practice papers in their fat envelope, my father's wristwatch that doesn't run, our passports, the courthouse marriage certificate with a coffee ring on one corner, and a manila folder with CAL on the tab in my hand. His birth certificate was in it, the long form I'd sent away for when we got married, because he said he didn't have one. Callum James Reeve. 14 October 1981. Kettle Lake, Kettle County, Wisconsin. Plurality: single. I read that last word three times. I had not known I'd been thinking it, the stupid thing, the thing out of a Sunday movie, a brother, the same face, until the word killed it.
Under the certificate was the oldest photograph of him I own: a class picture from the farrier school in Minnesota, 2003, fourteen young men in aprons in front of a forge, him at the end of the back row with his arms folded and his chin down. Twenty-one.
There is nothing of him before that. Not a baby picture, not a school photo, not a snapshot of a boy on a dock. My mother wasn't a photo person, he told me, the one time I asked, and he said it lightly, the same as he said everything he didn't want to say again.
I sat back on my heels and opened the bank app on my phone.
The joint account. The mortgage out on the first, the practice draw, the feed mill, the electric co-op. And on the first of June, a Monday, a cash withdrawal at the Marten Falls branch counter: $3,000.00. He doesn't use cash. He pays for gas with his card and complains about the fee. I scrolled back six months and there was nothing else like it, not a hundred dollars, not forty.
Then I was thinking of a night in February, five years ago, supper on the table and his phone going face-up beside his plate, a Port Ashby number. He looked at it and turned it over. It rang out and rang again and he turned it over a second time, and the third time he got up and took it out onto the porch without answering it, and stood there in his shirtsleeves in the cold till it quit. Two days later he told me his mother had died. The funeral was Saturday. He wasn't going. My sister'll handle it, he said. She's good at handling things. And she had, I supposed. She'd buried their mother without him. The card that came the next March went into the drawer with the others.
"Found 'em?" he called up.
"No."
At nine he gave up. He stood in the kitchen with his hands on his hips and looked at the empty hook as if it had personally let him down.
"They'll turn up," he said. "They always do. I'm going to lie down again, my head's splitting. You still want me for the mare?"
"She's passing oil. I don't need to tube her. Go to bed."
He kissed my temple on the way past and went up. The coffee he'd made sat in the pot going to tar. I poured it out and rinsed the pot and set it upside down on the rack, because something in the house should be finished. The fourth stair, the ninth. The bed took his weight overhead. The receiver on my belt, which I had not taken off since midnight, gave me the rustle of him settling, and a long breath out.
* The hay loft is the only place on the farm where nobody can walk up on you without your hearing them on the ladder. I went up with my phone in my hand and sat on a bale by the open loading door with the yard under me: the house, his truck by the rig, my truck with its drug box locked now, the road beyond the pasture fence, empty and shining.
The number on my arm was nearly gone. I'd copied it into my own phone at six, under no name.
At 9:20 I called it.
It rang. I sat with my elbows on my knees and the phone at my ear and let it ring, eight times, twelve. No voicemail picked up, no recording, no the person you are calling. It just rang, into nothing, until my phone gave up on it and the call ended by itself.
I put the phone face down on the bale beside me.
The loft was already warm. Dust stood in the bar of sun from the door, and a pigeon walked back and forth on the beam over my head, complaining. The hay smelled green and sweet. Below, Pilot put her head over her stall door and blew.
Twenty minutes.
I thought about the front office on a Tuesday, the bell over the door, the counter, the ficus nobody waters but Marit. About who else had heard me say three ninety-one two out loud, and who else had seen the note, and the mortgage statement, and put them together to the dollar.
At 9:40 the phone buzzed against the bale.
I let it go once. Then I picked it up and spoke before it could.
"I'm going to talk now," I said, "and you're going to listen, and then you can say what you like. I don't know who you are. I don't know what you think you've got. My husband is asleep in my house. If you have anybody, anybody at all, you'll prove it. I want proof of life. Not a text. A voice. His voice, on this phone, saying something I'll know is today. You give me that, and then we'll talk about money. If you don't, there isn't any money, not a dollar, not Thursday, not ever. That's my terms."
I stopped. My free hand was shaking, and I put it flat on the bale and held it there.
Nothing. The line was open. It waited until I'd finished. Every time, last night and now, however long I took.
"You have never met Callum Reeve," the voice said.
A pigeon clapped off the beam and out the door.
"I have him. The man in your house took his name before you ever met him."
"That's insane," I said. "I've been married to him eleven years."
"Ten years and ten months."
I didn't say anything to that. It was right. August, the courthouse in Marten Falls, a Thursday, the clerk with a cold. I had rounded it up, as you round up a horse's age when the owner's lost the papers. Whoever this was had not rounded.
"You want proof. You do not need proof from me. You have more than enough in that house, if you look at it instead of loving it. You are a scientist, Hanne. Look."
"You'll get nothing from me," I said, "until I hear him."
"The note is a rope, Hanne. You know that. You have said it."
The loft went very still around me. I could hear the pigeons outside, and a truck a long way off on the county road, and the blood in my ears.
A rope with a bow on it. Osric at the filing cabinet, the bell going over the door. He says it every time the note comes up, he's proud of it, he's said it across that office every week since the spring. I had never heard anyone else say it. Not once.
Osric knew the figure. Osric knew my house and my truck and the drug box and which nights I'm on call. For a month he had been talking about the practice in a voice I didn't like, a voice with somebody else's money in it. I tried to put his voice under this one, the big Iowa vowels, the laugh he can't keep out of anything, and couldn't make it fit, and couldn't make it not fit either.
"Who is this?"
"Inga Reeve kept every photograph she ever took," the voice said. "Ask him where they went."
Inga. His mother. I had the name from one line of his, five years ago, on the porch in February. I had never said it at the clinic. I didn't think I'd said it anywhere. Nobody in this county had any reason to know it, or to know what she kept, or didn't. The only person from up there who had tried to reach him in eleven years wrote once a year in a looped, forward-leaning hand, from a box number in Port Ashby.
I listened to the voice's silence, and tried to hear under it. It was low and flat and dry, pressed smooth, with the grain taken out. A man, I'd thought, all night. Now I sat with it at my ear and couldn't say so. It could have been a woman under there. It could have been anyone at all.
"You will not ask him," the voice said. "That is the other thing. You will not ask him anything. The man in your bed is how I keep Callum. If he learns you know, I will not need Callum."
"What does that mean?"
"It means be careful what you do with your mouth, Hanne."
The line was gone.
I sat with the phone in my lap and the sun on my knees. On my hip the receiver hissed and breathed, in and the catch and out, the man in my bed, the man who wasn't anyone, sleeping.
The phone buzzed once more, a single short buzz. A picture.
It was newsprint, photographed close, so that the halftone dots showed, gray and black and the yellow of old paper. It had been cropped hard around a face. A young man on some stone steps with a sign behind him, a building with lettering on it, the letters cut off by the crop. He was nineteen, maybe twenty. His hair was dark and cut short and parted on the right. He was looking down and a little to one side, away from whoever held the camera, with his mouth set. At the left edge of the frame was the shoulder of a dark coat, somebody standing close beside him and cut out.
It was him. It was the chin, the ears, the head held down when people are looking. It was his face at the age of the boy in the farrier photograph, before the salt, before me.
And it wasn't. The part in his hair was on the wrong side. The bend in his nose went the wrong way. In the sign behind him, in the one whole word I could read, one letter was turned around backward, the way a child writes it.
I held the phone closer, up into the sun from the loft door.
The scar was on the other side of his mouth.