Anil cleaned the heads twice, once with the swab and once, when she didn't leave, with the cleaning tape.
It was ten past eight on Tuesday night. The reading room overhead had closed at seven, and the whole library had gone quiet in the way of buildings that hold paper. Beyond the glass partition the lab lay dark except for the blue pilot light of the humidity chamber. In his closet at the end of it, Anil had three decks going and a whiteboard that said 912 / 1,140 in green marker.
"This one." He showed her the swab first. It had come away brown. He held the cassette up by its edges. The label had been written in pencil, in capitals, flat and heavy, each stroke pressed in. A-3 MASTER. She had seen that hand on a length of pine casing in her own garage, climbing the edge of every September of her husband's childhood. "It's clean. No shed, no mold. It's been kept in tissue, tails out, in the dark." He turned it over. "Somebody looked after this."
"It's a family tape," Mara said, and he looked at the label, and at her, and let it go. He had spent his life in other people's weddings.
She had told her mother the lab. She had told Evan only that she would, and he had not asked again. The tape had lain in the flat-file drawer under her bench since the seventh of October with a treatment tag on it. For thirteen days she hadn't touched it. On Saturday it had turned into something else.
Anil pointed her to the good chair in front of the monitor, with the headphones hanging from its arm, and dropped onto the stool at her back, at the console. "I don't watch client tapes. I watch numbers. Deck counter, waveform, dropouts. Whatever's on it, they're only numbers to me."
She put the headphones on, and the room went to velvet.
In her bag, in a folder, was the page she had printed from the court's public docket on Sunday night, names blacked to letters: Exhibit 6 to the petition, the State's transcript of the interview of Child A. Nineteen pages. At the bottom of the seventh, a line in brackets. She had read it more times than everything else in the file put together.
[TAPE PAUSED 14:32–14:41]
She laid the folder on the desk. Behind her the deck took the cassette with a soft mechanical swallow.
"Rolling," Anil said.
Blue. White capitals from an office character generator, the kind that came with a camcorder in the nineties.
A-3 11/14/96
Then a room.
Beige walls and beige carpet, a window with the blinds down. A table so low that its edge came to the knee of the woman kneeling at it, three small chairs and one large, and on a shelf a stack of board games with taped corners. In the lower right of the picture a clock ran in white digits over the room: 14:00:11.
The woman sat with her knees folded to one side. Fifty, perhaps, in glasses round as saucers and a lavender cardigan, with her hair drawn back in a clip. She held a stuffed bear in one hand and a rabbit in a checked vest in the other, at the edge of the table, so that a child would have to look at them to look at her. The bear had one arm. Someone had whipstitched the other sleeve shut.
Across from her, in a red sweater buttoned one hole wrong, sat a girl.
Mara did the arithmetic without wanting to. Four years and eight months. The girl wore her hair in two barrettes, one set lower than the other, and her shoes didn't reach the floor. She pulled her sleeves down over her hands until only the fingertips showed. Short fingers.
They were Mara's own hands, on a child.
She waited. It was what she had come to do, and she did it as she would have done it to a sheet: held the girl to the light, turned her, held her again. She looked for the watermark. There was a girl in a red sweater at a low table, and behind her there was nothing at all.
"Libby," the woman said. "Mr. Bear wants to know something."
The voice was slow and bright, the voice of a person handing you a coin.
"Did anyone at Miss Vera's ever ask you to play a secret game?"
"No."
"Did anyone hurt you at Miss Vera's, Libby?"
"No."
"You can tell Mr. Bear. He won't tell."
"No."
Mara counted, because counting was what she had. The no's went by at an even pace, hoarse and level and very small. Some the woman asked through the bear and some through the rabbit and some with her own face. The child answered each in the same tone, pulling a sleeve down or pushing it up, while the clock turned over past 14:12 and 14:19. Nine.
"Your friends already told us about the room," the woman said. She said it gently, as she might have handed over a gift. "Kevin was so brave."
The girl looked at the bear.
"Can I go home now?"
"Soon, sweetheart. After we finish."
And from beyond the edge of the picture, from somewhere behind the camera, a man's voice, low and unhurried. "Take your time, sweetheart."
Mara's hands were under her arms. She didn't remember putting them there.
It was a voice she had heard say grace at her own rehearsal dinner, thirty years younger, and it had the warmth a man uses to settle a horse, and it belonged to someone the camera wouldn't show.
Lee Dunmore got it out of you in one night.
Mara waited for him to come into the frame.
The child said, "The mouses have a door."
She said it to the bear. Clearly, a little scornfully, as if reminding it of something it ought to have known.
"The door to the room under the floor?" the woman said.
The girl didn't answer. She looked at the bear, and then at a place on the table beside it, and her sleeve came down over her hand again.
"It's little," she said, after a while.
"A small door. That's very good, Libby." Pettibone had a pad on her knee, and wrote. "That's very brave."
On the desk beside the monitor Mara's page lay in its folder, and her eyes went to it and back.
The clock said 14:31:50.
"Would it help if Mommy came in?"
The child lifted one shoulder and let it drop.
The woman rose, and the bear and the rabbit went with her, across the beige carpet and out of the frame. A door opened on the tape and closed. The clock ran on. A child sat alone at a low table in a red sweater, looking at nothing, for thirty-one seconds by the counter. Mara watched the edge of the frame for the man whose voice it was, and behind her Anil sat still and watched a number.
A door opened. Quick steps on carpet, in shoes with a small heel.
Mara had not been ready for how young she was.
She wore a denim jacket over a white sweater, and her hair was in a clip that had slipped. Her face was wet, the mascara cried down into the creases under both eyes. She was thirty-four years old, exactly Mara's age: two women of thirty-four in a room, and one of them on a screen.
Her mother knelt at the child's chair. She put a hand on the child's arm, on the red sleeve, just above the wrist.
Mara had felt that hand on her own arm every Thanksgiving of her adult life.
"Tell them like you told me, baby." Her mother's voice, young and steady and kind, came into the velvet in her ears. "About the room under the floor."
The girl said, "Under the floor?"
Her mother nodded.
The girl looked at her mother's face. She looked at it a long time. It was wet and hopeful and afraid, and the child went over it from the chin to the hairline and back. Then she said, slowly, in the voice of someone reading aloud a word she'd been handed, "The room under the floor."
Her mother's shoulders came down. She wiped her face with the back of the hand that wasn't holding the sleeve, and the crying stopped, as a tap stops. The child watched it stop.
"And the tunnel?"
Pettibone had come back into the frame and stood behind the small table with her pad against her chest. Her mother nodded.
"The tunnel," the girl said.
"Good girl." Stickers came out of a cardigan pocket, a sheet of them, bright foil stars. "Oh, that's such a good girl. Look at these."
Mara took off the headphones.
She put both hands flat on the desk. On the screen the clock said 14:33:09, and the child was looking down at a foil star being smoothed onto her sweater, and her mother had risen and stood by the wall with both hands over her mouth.
Nine no's before the woman spoke of a room, and two answers after. Mara did not write them on a card.
Nothing had come. Not a smell, not a cot, not the floor under a rug. She had asked, and held the child to the light, and the child had stayed a stranger who wore her face and her hands. It was almost a relief.
Parents wait outside. Every time. She had heard her mother say it into a phone for twenty years, in her reading glasses, with complete authority.
"Anil."
"Yeah." He had stopped rocking on the stool.
"Is it continuous?"
"Say again?"
"Between fourteen thirty-two and fourteen forty-one. Is there a break?"
He got up and leaned over the console with one hand on the stool, and he didn't look at the picture. He looked at the numbers. He ran the counter back with a thumbnail on the dial, and forward, and back, and she watched the back of his neck.
"No."
"You're sure."
"I ran a blank on that deck this morning, before you came, because I wanted to see what a pause looks like on a machine that age. Six pauses. Every one left a hitch in the control track, and the counter skipped, and the picture rolled for a frame when it started again." He tapped the waveform. "Between those two numbers there's none of that. And the clock in the corner of the picture runs straight on, second after second, through the whole stretch." He looked at her then, sideways, with his glasses pushed up. "I can't tell you what's impossible. I can tell you what's on this tape. Nothing on it says anybody stopped it."
"The transcript says they did."
"Then the transcript says something the tape doesn't."
She held up the folder. He looked at the bracketed line, and at her, and asked nothing.
She let the tape run to the end. It was another thirty-nine minutes, and she watched every one of them: a woman with round glasses pressing stars onto a sweater, a door, a coat being buttoned, the child's small voice, "Can I go home now?", the woman's, "Now you can." A sleeve. A door. Then blue snow, and the counter at 1:12:04, and the deck let go with a click.
She stood at the lab sink with the cold tap running over her wrists until her hands ached to the bone.
When she came back Anil was sitting on the cart with the working file open. He had named it the way he named all of them, accession number and date and the word MASTER, and it was eleven hundred megabytes. He didn't look up.
"I have to say something."
"Don't."
"I'm not going to say what I saw, because I didn't watch. I watched the numbers." He turned the stool toward her. "I can't unsee a timecode. I'm going to remember that this was continuous, and what time I transferred it. If anybody ever asks me, I'll say that, and nothing else."
"I need you to forget it."
"I know you do." His voice was quite gentle. "I won't."
She copied the file to a flash drive the size of a stick of gum, and put it and the tape into the padded case, and the case into her kit bag. Then she sat down at her bench in the dark, with her hands under her arms, until the night guard's keys went along the corridor at midnight.
After that she drove. The river road ran thirty miles beside black water, and she kept the window cracked to stay awake.
The kitchen light was on when she came in at twenty to two.
Her mother sat at the table in her quilted robe with a cup of tea, her hair pinned for the night and her reading glasses pushed up into it, and no book. The tin stood on the counter. Somewhere in the wall the pipes knocked, twice.
"You're shaking, honey."
"It's cold."
"It's a cold house." Nora put the cup down. "Old houses talk. I've been up since one, listening to it. Come here."
"It's the pipes."
"It's talking." She had pulled out the other chair, and then she moved it, and sat up straight and patted the floor between her feet. "Come here. Let me do your hair. Like when you were eight."
Mara stood in the doorway in her coat, with a tape in her bag and a gigabyte on a stick, as long as it takes a kettle to start.
She put down her kit bag. She took off her coat. She crossed the kitchen and sat on the floor with her back against her mother's knees.
The brush was the old one, with the boar bristles and the worn wooden back. It went through her hair from the crown in long slow strokes, and Nora's other hand lifted it and let it fall.
"There." Her voice had gone soft. "See? You go quiet as a church. You always did. You'd sit for an hour."
Mara looked at the tin on the counter, blue, with a picture of a castle in Denmark, and let the brush go down and down.
At three she sat on the closed lid of the toilet in the upstairs bathroom with the laptop on her knees and the door locked and the fan running. She put in the flash drive and turned the sound off.
She found the place by its clock, 14:32:41, and watched it once more, from the door opening to the last star. Her mother's mouth made the words, and the child's mouth made them back half a beat behind. When it was over her hands were steady.
She opened a new message and wrote to Frances Liddell.
I have something. I want to meet Ms. Teague. I have a condition.
She read it over. There wasn't an adjective in it. On the other side of the wall her mother's door stayed shut, with no light under it.
She pressed send.