At five past five on Saturday she told Evan she was taking out the recycling.
"There's a lot of it," he said from the workshop, over the whine of the miter saw.
"There's a lot of it."
She carried nothing. The note was in her coat pocket, in its sleeve, flat against her ribs. She went down the five steps and across Larch Street with the sun in her eyes. Halfway over she heard the saw bite into something and run its length and stop. She did not look back at the garage. She had walked into rooms full of registrars with a better plan.
The screen door of the white house had a patch in its lower corner, cut from a different mesh. Behind it a television was on, loud. A man was telling somebody she had won a dinette set. Mara knocked on the frame. Nothing. She knocked harder, and the sound in the room changed as someone found the remote.
The old woman who opened the door came up to Mara's collarbone. Quilted vest, white hair set in rows, a hearing aid in one ear and none in the other. She turned her good side to Mara and looked up.
"I'm Mara Dunmore. From across the—"
"I know who you are. You leave the porch light on all night." Her voice filled the hall. "Is it about the upstairs?"
"I want to talk to the woman who—"
"Ask upstairs." She said it the way other people say try baking soda. Then she leaned out past Mara and bellowed toward the side of the house. "Upstairs! The girl from across!"
Overhead a door opened. Feet came down the outside staircase, one step and then the next, unhurried. She came around the corner of the porch with a mug in one hand and the green pad under her arm. Gray cardigan. Braid pinned flat. Glasses on their cord.
She looked at Mara's hands first. Then her face.
"You crossed at five past," she said. "I'd have said Thursday."
"I waited for my husband to start a saw."
Something moved at the corner of the woman's mouth and was put away.
"Agnes, I have this."
"You have tea," said Agnes, and went in, and the television came back up.
The woman sat on the second step and set her mug on the board beside her. She left a yard of gray paint between them. She sat with her spine clear of the post, ankles together, like someone who had spent years on child-sized chairs and never gotten used to a real one. Mara sat on the top step, with her coat around her knees. The boards were cold through the wool.
"The records say you never lived there," Mara said.
"They do."
"Evan pulled everything. Deeds, tax rolls, the court index. You're on none of it."
"He would have." The woman looked into her tea. "The records are right. Neither did the people you bought it from."
Mara waited. She had learned to wait from a hundred sheets of paper that would not tell her anything until she stopped asking.
"The Aldous trust owned it," she said. "The trustee's nephew sold it to us, a man named Wick. They're in Arizona."
"They were in Arizona. Nobody named Aldous or Wick ever slept a night in that house." The voice was low and dry. "It was a line in a ledger. Someone in Scottsdale collected the rent in cash, through a man who came on the first of the month and never came past the porch. No lease. A lease is paper, and paper is how you get found. The electric was in the trust's name. So were the taxes." She lifted the mug and did not drink. "If you go looking for who lived there, you'll come back with nothing."
"For how long?"
"Seven years. I'm not going to say more than that."
The pad had slid on her knee. Along its top edge, where the spiral ran, hung a fringe of little green tabs, the perforated strips left when each sheet was torn away. Mara looked at them. Then she took the sleeve out of her pocket.
"May I?"
The woman didn't answer. She held the pad still.
Mara laid the sleeve's edge against the spiral. The note's top edge was a row of small gray mountains, and two of them had lost fiber where the paper bridges tore late. One of the tabs had the fiber. A tuft stood up from its lower edge, and when she brought the two together, the tuft went into the scallop like a key into a lock. The red center line ran off the note at the tear and picked up in the tab exactly where it should.
She had made a hundred joins like it, on torn maps and split bindings. She had never made one with the owner of the other half watching her do it. She sat back.
"You wrote this."
"Yes."
Mara looked at the pad on the woman's knee, at the way it had slid to show her the spiral. "You brought it down open."
"I bring it everywhere." The mug did not move. "You'd have wanted to be sure. People are careful with what they're sure of."
"Why?"
"Because somebody in that house should say it out loud." The woman looked at the sleeve, not at Mara. "And it wasn't going to be him."
"Evan says he doesn't know what it means."
"I expect he does say that."
Across the street, the saw had not started again.
"Why would he—"
The woman put up one hand. It was a small hand, dry, with a healed nick across the first knuckle. "I've made promises about what I talk about. You're not the reason. The case is."
"What case?"
"Look it up. You look things up." She glanced at the sleeve again. "You put it in plastic."
"I do that with everything."
"Good," the woman said. "Somebody should."
She stood. It took her a moment, and she let it. She picked up the mug and stood at the foot of the steps with the pad against her chest, and for the first time she looked at Mara straight on and for slightly too long, the way you look at a page in a language you used to read.
"Is the piano still in the front room?"
"The upright. Yes."
"The A above middle C sticks. It stuck in 1991." She turned toward the outside staircase. "Go home and press it."
"Wait. What's your—"
"Vera," said Agnes, through the screen door, without having been asked. "It's Vera."
From across the street, faint and cheerful, a saw started up.
The key went down with a soft wooden knock and did not come back.
She pressed it again at ten that night, alone in the living room with the lamp off, while Evan ran the tap in the kitchen. A above middle C. She counted up from the low end to be sure. It went down and stayed down, and she had to pull it up with a fingernail, and when it rose it made a small dry sound like a knuckle.
Nothing in the sale packet said that. The listing hadn't. Nobody had told her.
She lifted the fallboard and looked. The A had a hairline crack across the front of the ivory and a small brown darkening at its edge, worn there by thumbs. The hammer behind it was grooved deeper than its neighbors. Somebody had struck that one key thousands of times, and someone else had taught it to stay down. She pressed the key beside it. That one came back.
"Since when do you play?"
Evan stood in the doorway drying his hands on a dish towel. She hadn't heard him come.
"I don't."
"Then what was that?"
"The A sticks."
He looked at the piano. It was a short look, and it went to the fallboard and the music desk and the water ring, and it didn't come near her face. "Everything in this house sticks," he said. "You were gone half an hour this afternoon."
"Agnes talks."
"Agnes is deaf."
"She talks anyway." He hung the towel over his shoulder and looked at her, and she made herself go on standing there with one hand on the keys, looking pleased with a piano.
On Sunday morning she was wheeling the recycling to the curb when the old woman came out across the street, on a cane, to check her own mailbox. Mara crossed. It seemed rude not to.
"You've been to see Vera," Agnes said. "Good. She needs people who aren't lawyers."
"Mrs. Kettering, what is this—"
"It's the Teague place." Agnes squinted at her. "Your house. Was. They renumbered us in 2001, the county did, for the ambulances. It was eleven-eleven then. Yellow. You'd never have known it, you've painted it the color of a pond."
"We didn't paint it."
"Somebody did." She fished a flyer out of her box, looked at it, and put it back. "Nobody says a number around here. You say the Teague place, or you don't say. Vera never will. She promised somebody." She patted Mara's arm, twice, hard. "Ask her about the piano."
"I did."
"Then it's a start."
Mara went home and sat on the top step of her own porch with the laptop on her knees. Evan's saw was going in the garage. The morning was cold and clear, and the maples across the street had gone from yellow-green to yellow. The porch floor had a skin of frost on the north edge that would be gone by ten. She put the laptop on a folded towel so it wouldn't chill through her jeans, and she typed with two cold fingers.
She typed Teague Larch Street Averill.
The first result was a photograph from the sentencing, 1997. A woman of thirty-eight with her hair loose and brown, looking straight into the lens. The caption said Vera Teague, operator of Teague Home Preschool, in the Larch Street daycare case. The second result was a paragraph from the Courier about the house itself, and in its second sentence it said that the children had napped in the front bedroom.
She stopped there.
She sat with her hand on the closed lid, and the fan inside it ran on for a while and stopped. The front bedroom was on her left. Behind her, through a wall she could not see, there was a window with a blind she had raised herself that morning. She had made the bed that morning. She slept on the side against the wall.
Larch Street.
She did not read further.
She called at ten past seven, because that was when Nora called her, and the habit was so old that Nora picked up on the first ring.
"Hello, stranger. Tell me about the lab."
She told her about Anil and the sleeping bag under the steel cart, and the deed with the 40 on top of the 4. Nora laughed in the right places. She always did. She said, "Only you would be happy about a forged acre." She said Brett could start on the twenty-eighth, hadn't Evan told her? Mara said Evan had told her. "Men," Nora said. "He'll tell you the last thing that matters."
"Mom. Do you remember a case in Averill? A preschool on Larch Street."
"Everybody remembers, honey. It was the whole town."
"It was this house. Eleven-eleven. They renumbered the street in 2001." She looked at the living room, at the lamp, at the piano with the water ring. "It's mine now."
She heard, faintly, a kettle click off on the other end, and then no sound at all. She waited.
"I don't want you thinking about it. Those poor families. It's a long time ago and it isn't yours." Then the brightness came back all at once. "Have Brett out and gut that room. Make it yours. Get the closet opened and the floor done and it'll just be a bedroom. It's only a bedroom, Mara."
"I love you."
"I love you more."
She hung up and looked at the wall through the doorway of the front room. It looked like a wall.
She spent Monday at the lab with her attention a quarter-inch to one side of her hands. She logged a humidity reading twice, and Anil, passing the door with a cart, said, "You look like the tape ate you." She said she was tired. It was the first thing she had said to anyone in two days that she could have put in a report.
On Monday evening she came home and found a sheet of yellow paper stapled to the utility pole at the curb. Four staples, still bright. Someone had used a hammer stapler and not been shy.
30 YEARS — WE STILL BELIEVE — ANNIVERSARY WALK — SAT OCT 17 — NOON — COURTHOUSE TO LARCH ST.
She read it standing at her own curb with her bag on her shoulder. The walk began at the courthouse and ended, per the last line, at this pole. Her mother hadn't mentioned it. Her mother mentioned everything.
She went in and made supper. She didn't tell Evan about the flyer. She didn't tell him about the piano or Agnes or the photograph. He ate standing at the counter and asked whether they were out of the good mustard, and didn't ask why she was quiet.
Tuesday was recycling day, and by eight the bin stood at the curb with its lid up, and she was pressing a broken-down box into it when someone came along the sidewalk from the corner.
The sidewalk on Agnes's side had heaved where the maple roots went under it. Everyone who lived over there walked on this side. Mara knew that. She had watched the braid go by on Monday through the window.
Vera walked with her canvas bag on her shoulder, close to the curb, at the pace of someone with a bus to catch. She did not turn her head. She came level with the bin and with Mara's elbow, near enough that Mara smelled black tea and the cold air on her cardigan, and she said it to the street, evenly, without breaking stride.
"There was a letter. Thirty-first of August. He signed for it."