Frances Liddell called his desk line at ten past eleven on Wednesday, not his cell, and from that alone he knew she had stopped expecting the cell to be answered.
He had a closing file open on the second monitor, a house in Wyeth Township with a lien release that nobody had recorded, and he had been reading the same page for forty minutes. He clicked the file to sleep and picked up the receiver.
"Mr. Dunmore. I'll be brief, since brief is what you'll want."
"Ms. Liddell."
"Your wife wrote to me at three o'clock this morning. She says she has something, she wants to meet Ms. Teague, and she has a condition. I don't know what the something is. I didn't ask, because I'd rather not be holding things I'll be asked about under oath." A page turned at her end. "I'm telling you because you're the other record owner."
"Thank you."
"There's something else. A paralegal from my office put a letter in your hand yesterday at 2:15."
"Yes."
"It says all papers of Leland Dunmore relating to the 1996 investigation. It doesn't say the ones you think are relevant, or the ones you've read. It says all." Her voice did not rise. Evan, who wrote paragraphs like it, could hear the clause she was leaning on. "Anything in your house, in your truck, in a cabinet. It stays where it is, as it is. Do you understand me?"
"I understand it."
"I'd like you to say it."
"It stays where it is."
"Thank you. Friday at five, Mr. Dunmore."
He sat with the receiver against his ear until it began to make the noise a receiver makes.
At noon he took a sandwich to the truck, on the third level of the garage on Mill Street, and ate none of it.
He did the accounting as he did every accounting, in order of priority, exceptions last. The money was safe, since on Tuesday Vera Teague had waived every civil claim she would ever have against his father, and the deed was dead, folded across the signature line in the pocket of his good jacket. What was left was the question he had been walking around since the fourteenth of June, and it turned out to have very few sides.
He was going to sign. He had come to it on Monday night, at the kitchen table with Nora's pen still lying where it had rolled, as you come to the bottom of a stair in the dark, by the floor arriving before you expected it, and he had not yet said so to himself in a sentence with a verb.
Let the house talk, then. It would say what the county had done, and say it in the county's own screws, and he could stand in the doorway and hold the door for it.
It would not say what his father had said. That was under the seat, eleven inches below his right leg, and Frances Liddell had asked for it in the only way the rules allowed her, which was to ask for everything.
He put the sandwich back in its bag. He took out his phone and found Frances Liddell's direct line, and looked at it until the screen went dark in his hand, and did not call.
He started the engine and let it run.
Mara's car wasn't in the drive when he got home. Her text had said, Working late. Don't wait. He had read it twice and found nothing in it to hold on to.
Nora had made a chicken with lemons and rice. The kitchen was too warm and smelled like Sunday in somebody else's house. She had laid three places, and as he came in she took one of them up again without comment.
"She's working herself to a thread," she said. She ladled rice onto his plate. "We were up till two last night, did she tell you? Down on the kitchen floor like she was eight years old, and I did her hair. She let me."
"She didn't say."
"Well, she wouldn't. She's private about being loved." Nora sat and shook out her napkin. He moved the rice from one side of the plate to the other, and she watched him do it, and let him. When he stood she said, "Go and do whatever it is you've got to do, sweetheart. I'll keep it warm."
He looked at her. She was cutting a lemon wedge into smaller wedges, with attention.
The fire pit was a ring of fieldstone at the back corner of the yard, under a crabapple that had dropped its fruit into the grass and left it to brown. He had burned the moving crates in it the first Saturday, and stacked the black stones tighter afterward, and been pleased.
He went out at 8:40 with pine offcuts from the bench and a newspaper, and built it as his father had, a floor of thin sticks and the thick ones leaned in over them like a tent. It caught on the second match. He fed it until it stood up to his knees, and then he went into the garage and reached under the driver's seat of the truck with his whole arm.
The notebook was smaller than he ever remembered. A detective's memo book, three inches by five, wire-bound across the top, its black cover gone soft and gray at the corners from years in a shirt pocket. He touched the inside pocket of his good jacket, where the deed had been since Monday, once, to be sure of it.
He brought the notebook to the fire and sat on the upturned bucket and opened it on his knee.
He did not need the firelight to read it, and read it anyway, from the beginning, from the thirtieth of September and A's res., page by page in his father's flat capitals, dates and initials and measurements, the whole plain grammar of a man writing down what he had done so that no one could ever say he hadn't. The nineteenth of October ran across two pages. Near the top of the first was painted panel, kids' — prime w/ rest, a line he had read at fifteen and again in September without knowing what it was. At the foot of the second, above his father's initials, was the last line of the entry. He had read it at fifteen on an upturned bucket on Cutler Avenue, and again in September at his father's bench with the box open.
crawl 18 in to grade — test pit 4 ft — NO VOID — NO TUNNEL.
Under it his father had put his initials and the time, 1:40, and pressed hard enough to emboss the page beneath.
Nothing. Eighteen inches of packed earth and a pit four feet deep, and his father on his knees in it with a flashlight and a carpenter's pencil, writing down that there was nothing there, at twenty to two on a Saturday afternoon. And then, in June of the next year, his father in a witness chair, sworn, asked whether his search of the premises had disclosed anything inconsistent with what the children said. Two words.
The house could not do that to him. A house could show what the county had cut and where it had found nothing, and a special master would photograph it, and Vera Teague would walk out into daylight, and no one who stood at that wall would need to think about Leland Dunmore at all. A wall has no handwriting. The notebook had a date and a time and a hand, and it was the man himself, in pencil, and then the witness chair, and Frances Liddell would read it aloud to a judge in a level voice. It would be in the Courier by the weekend, over his father's name, with his father in a bed on Orchard Road who would never know why.
She can have the house, he thought. She can't have him.
He tore out the first sheet along the wire and held it over the flame by one corner. The thirtieth of September, A at a kitchen table at half past ten at night, went first. The paper was cheap stock gone soft as cloth, and it took at once, and for a second the pencil stood up silver on the burning page, every letter shining, before the page curled and the letters went with it. He fed in the next one. He did them in order, the thirtieth of October in its turn, and did not stop at it, and the leaf after it, with its one line, last. Sparks went up past the crabapple into the dark, and the smell was the smell of a school in autumn. When the last leaf was out he took the cover in both hands and bent it, and it did not tear. It was some kind of vinyl, and it did not burn so much as give up, curling in the coals and giving off a black smoke with a chemical sweetness that got into his teeth. He pushed it under with the poker. The wire spiral was all that stayed, lying in the ember bed, going orange, then a dull red that would not go out.
The screen door at the back of the house shut with its spring. Grass, wet under a footstep, and then another.
Nora had put on her camel coat over her cardigan. She stood behind him and a little to his left, where his father had used to stand when they burned brush, and she looked at the fire, and the poker, and the black curl of the cover, and did not ask what any of it was.
She laid her hand flat on his back between the shoulder blades.
"Good boy," she said.
Her hand was warm, through his shirt, and steady. It moved once, a small pat, and stayed. The sickness rose to the back of his teeth and stopped there. He stayed where he was on the bucket. He did not step out from under her hand.
"Don't stay out too long," she said, after a while. "It gets cold once the fire goes."
The screen door shut again. When he looked around, the kitchen window was yellow, and she was standing in it.
Mara came through the side gate at 10:30. He heard the latch, and her steps stop.
The fire had gone down to a bed of coals with the wire spiral lying in it, and he had not fed it. He sat with the poker across his knees and ash to the wrist. She stood at the edge of the light in her coat with her kit bag on her shoulder, colder than he had ever seen her, and not shivering.
"What are you burning?"
"Pallet wood. Whatever was in the garage."
She looked at his hands, and at the coals, for what seemed a long time. Behind her the kitchen window held its yellow square, and in it Nora, with a dish towel, not drying anything. On any other night she would have asked twice.
"I watched A-3. All of it, with Anil, in his closet at the lab." Her voice stayed level, and her jokes had stopped. "It has nine minutes the transcript says never happened, and my mother is in them. That's all I'm telling you tonight."
"Mar."
"I'm going to sign. You can do what you want."
She went across the wet grass to the side door without looking at the kitchen window, and the door opened and closed. A minute later, above his head, a light came on in the workroom under the slope of the roof. He heard the little brass hook he had screwed into the frame in August, so she could work without being walked in on, drop into its eye.
He hosed the pit until the last coal hissed and the yard filled with steam, then raked the ash flat and swept the flagstones around the ring with the push broom from the garage, and shoveled what was left into the galvanized pail and set the pail square to the back fence. It was past midnight when he stopped, and he had not washed his hands, and it did not occur to him until much later.
The house was dark except for the strip of light along the floor of the upstairs hall. Nora's door, across the landing, was shut, with none showing beneath it. He stood outside the workroom in his socks and took the quitclaim out of his jacket, folded once across the signature line, the line still empty. At its lower corner, where he had held it, was a gray thumbprint of ash. He did not wipe it. He slid it under the door until only the edge was left in the hall, and then let go.
For a while nothing happened. Then a shadow crossed the strip of light, and stopped, and the light stayed on.
He went downstairs to the bed in the front room and lay on his right side, facing the window.
The phone went at 2:50.
"Evan, it's Bev."
She did not say that nothing was wrong. She had said it every time since September.
"Wendell found him at quarter past two. He'd been coughing since one and his oxygen was in the eighties. They think it's aspiration, it's gone to the lung, and they're sending him to Mercer General now. The ambulance is here." He heard a door, a wheel on tile. "Come now."
He dressed in the dark. At the top of the stairs he went up four steps and stopped outside the workroom, where the strip of light still lay along the floor, and raised his hand. He had already put one thing under that door tonight. He lowered the hand and went down.
In the garage he opened the console and took the ring out from between the tire gauge and the church bulletin, and laid it on the passenger seat, because his father would ask for it before he asked for anything.
Orchard Road was empty and wet. The dash clock said 3:00. He worked it out at the first stop sign, without meaning to: 5:00 p.m. on Friday was thirty-eight hours away, to the minute, and the notebook was ash in a pail by the back fence. The ring slid on the seat as he took the turn. The brass key swung up into the light off the dash, and lay there, and went dark, and lay there again.