At 8:52 on Tuesday morning Vera Teague was standing at the curb in front of 1127 Larch Street with both feet on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the gutter, which belonged to the city and not to the Dunmores, and Evan, who had spent twenty years reading who held what, saw that she had chosen it for that.
She had no camera. Her hands hung empty at her sides, which struck him as stranger than the note: seven weeks of holding something up at eight and at five, and now nothing to point.
He came up the walk in yesterday's shirt. He had left Mercer General at 7:50, when the night nurse told him for the third time that his father's numbers were unchanged and that unchanged was a kind of good. His father had not opened his eyes since Friday. Somewhere in the small hours Evan had found that he was rehearsing a sentence.
Frances waited on the porch in her black coat with a legal pad under her arm. She looked at him and said, "You didn't sleep," and then, lower, with her eyes on the street, "If it's there, Pardee will say you wrote it. You had the key, and you've burned the one record that would say otherwise. He doesn't know about the fire yet. He will. Say nothing today you can't put a document under."
The rest had come in two cars. The special master was Patricia Wendt, four years off the bench, small and upright in a navy parka, with the manner of a woman who had listened to a great many excuses and kept none of them. The Assistant Attorney General was Colin Pardee, tall, in a long charcoal overcoat, who shook Evan's hand as he might have shaken a juror's, warmly and once. Behind him came an engineer with a headlamp, a photographer with a camera on each shoulder, and a court reporter who carried his machine like a small piece of luggage.
Mara stood in the front hall in the green sweater. She had set out coffee and nine cups on the hall table, one of them for a woman who had not yet been let in. When he came in she looked at his shirt and then at his face, and went to the closet under the stairs and put a sweater in his hands without a word. It was his own.
Wendt read the protocol on the porch, in the cold, in the flat voice of someone saying grace over a meal she had eaten too many times. The east partition of the front bedroom, its floor, the cellar and the crawlspace, and nothing else. Photographs before and after every act, the owners to touch nothing. She had read Ms. Teague's log of the curb, which showed one contractor's truck and its departure. She had also read Mrs. Dunmore's photographs of the wall as it stood at three on Friday morning, and Mr. Pardee's letter about them. Pardee said the State had no objection to Ms. Teague's presence, and added, in a tone that cost him nothing, that he was glad the day was fine.
Mara asked for one thing. Wherever the photographer shot an old mark, would she lay a fresh pencil line beside it on the same surface, for a control? Pardee thought it fussy and did not object.
Vera came up the five steps by herself. At the door she stopped and looked down at the shallow trough a hundred years of boots had worn in the oak of the threshold, and then she stepped over it.
She did not look at the walls. She crossed the living room in her good shoes, over the taped dust sheets, straight to the piano, and lifted the lid off the keys and pressed the A above middle C. It went down and did not come back. She freed it with a fingertip. Evan drew his sleeve across the piano's top, and Vera watched him do it and made no remark.
She went as far as the door of the front bedroom and stopped on its sill.
Haddad marked the window at 9:31 with a soft pencil and a four-foot level, two feet wide and four tall, its bottom edge three feet four off the floor. He set it to take in both holes Nora's bar had made, so that what she had done and what he did could be told apart in Salo's photographs. He was a compact man who spoke to no one but the wall. Then he set the oscillating tool to the pencil, and the room filled with fine bright dust and a noise like a very large mosquito, most of which a shop vacuum took away.
Pardee had stood over the holes for some time before that. "The State would like it noted that this wall was opened once already, by a third party, and the State wasn't there."
"The State wasn't there," Frances said, "because the person who did it meant that nobody would be. A woman doesn't take a pry bar to a wall she believes holds nothing. I'll call that consciousness of guilt, and I'll say so in writing."
"Or consciousness of what a jury would make of a wall." He said it mildly. "The State takes no position on Mrs. Frain's state of mind."
"It is photographed," said Wendt, "and it will be photographed again. Mr. Haddad."
The panel came out whole, on its screws, with her work along one edge of it. Ingrid Salo turned it over on the sheets, and on its back, in a ribbon of blue ink, was a mill mark and a date, 07 96. Pardee bent to it. "July of that year," he said pleasantly, with his eyes on the stamp. "Three months before the arrest. A stamp tells us when a board was made. It doesn't tell us who hung it."
"No," Haddad said, straightening from the panel. "It doesn't."
Behind the drywall stood furring strips, two-by-threes set on edge, and between them the studs the county had stripped, bare at twenty-four inches, and behind the studs, gray and rough, the brick face of the chimney chase, in courses as even as the day the mason laid them in 1924. Nothing lay behind the brick. On the last strip, low down, a hand had written in carpenter's pencil in square capitals that Evan read upside down, as he had once read deeds across a counter.
BCF D.R. 10/21/96 — close up after SO search.
The initials were Del Rudnick's. Del's boys rush, his father had said in a room at Linden House, and Evan had asked him what, and his father had said the floor and gone. He thought of the crew closing up that Monday while he sat in a classroom in Averill copying a spelling list.
Above the window the old plaster began. A foot under the ceiling molding a strip of lath of a different width ran across the wall, and Pardee put a finger to it. "That looks to the State like an earlier opening, before the county came in."
Haddad brought the light and then his face close. The plaster had squeezed through the lath behind it and hardened in lumps, and the lumps ran unbroken across the joint. "Cut and patch, you'd break those. Nobody cut here. The builder ran short in 1924 and spliced."
"The State reserves on the ceiling course," Pardee said, and Odom's fingers moved.
The floor took forty minutes. When Haddad had lifted the ends of two oak boards, what lay under them was the plainest sight Evan had ever seen inside a house: the original joists running on beneath the patch without a cut, sixteen inches apart, the nails of 1924 driven in pairs and dark as tea. One had been doubled with a length of new two-by-eight. "Sistered," Haddad said, to nobody. Nobody had ever framed an opening in that floor.
Evan had heard the word once already, in a hospital, in the night, and he put it down again, because there was a wall in front of him.
Wendt knelt at the east baseboard at 11:20 with Salo's light laid almost flat along the wood, and her knees cracked once and she said nothing about it. The arch stood up out of the paint as it had for Mara. From six inches it was two small windows, a knob, a mouse sitting up on its haunches with its tail curled along the board, and a word, and he read the word as Wendt read it, one letter at a time.
KNOCK.
He had read it before. Not the word: the line above it in his father's capitals, on the first page of the nineteenth of October. painted panel, kids' — prime w/ rest. His father had stood on this floor on a Saturday morning and seen what the children had meant by a door, and had written three words about it, and gone on to the floor.
Mara had told the special master before anyone asked that the plate had come off twice: once in October, by her, and put back with its own screw, and once on Friday morning, by a flat bar. The second was in her photographs, with a scale. Haddad measured what the bar had left without touching it: three inches of paint and primer gone to the fir down the left side of the arch, and behind the fallen plate, in a collar of raw pine three inches deep, a cast-iron gas cock from the twenties with a brass cap gone green, in a cavity that a hand could have covered.
"Somebody boxed that," Haddad said, "on purpose, to the depth of the new drywall. You do it when you mean the plate to stay reachable." He said it to the wall, and Odom took it down.
Pardee stood over it a while, a fair man in the ways available to him, and looked at the little hollow as he had looked at the lath. "The children described a door," he said.
"They did," said Frances.
The furnace came on under the floor, and nobody spoke.
"I painted it in 1992," said Vera, from the doorway, and she did not move from the sill.
At 12:40 Pardee asked whether anyone had brought bolt cutters, and Haddad said there was a pair of thirty-sixes in his truck, and Evan put his hand in his pocket.
"You won't need them."
The key was warm from the wool. It lay in his palm, small and ordinary, the S in BCSO rubbed almost to nothing.
Frances had turned all the way round. "Evan. You've had that since—"
"June of last year."
"I'll want the chain of custody, Mr. Dunmore," said Wendt, "and I'll want it in order."
He gave it to her in the cellar, under the forty-watt bulb, with the padlock on its hasp in front of them and Odom holding his recorder between them like a lantern: the driveway on Cutler Avenue, the console, the Saturdays, the eighth of October. He had never put it in the lock. Wendt traced the conduit down to the panel, where a breaker slot stood capped and labeled in marker, TEMP — BCF, and wrote that down as well.
Pardee wrote it all before he spoke. "So the key has been handled by Leland Dunmore every week for a year."
"Yes."
Evan turned it, and it stuck, and then it gave, and the shackle came up out of its body with a small dry sound and hung open on the hasp. Wendt said she would take the key and leave the lock, which was part of the premises.
The hatch swung out on its strap hinges. The air that came through it was colder than the cellar and smelled of packed earth and mortar and something mineral that he had last smelled on his father's clothes, in a truck, in October.
Haddad went in first, on his belly, with the light, and Salo followed with a camera against her chest. Evan had asked for leave to follow as an owner. Pardee said the State would prefer he did not, and then, courteously, that it would prefer even less to have it said that the State had prevented him. Wendt set the terms: he was to touch nothing and speak when addressed.
There were eighteen inches between the earth and the joists, and it was still a surprise how little eighteen inches was. He went in on his forearms with his shoulders scraping, and the cold came up through his shirt.
Haddad's light moved across the underside of the floor, joist after joist, each one gray and blank, until it found two stakes with rags of flagging tied round their tops, a pink gone pale as a child's toy. Beside them lay a square of earth four feet on a side, a shade darker than the ground around it and very slightly lower, as ground is where it has been dug and put back. Haddad pushed a probe into it four times and drew it out clean.
For a long stretch there was nothing. Evan lay on his back in the cold and looked up at twenty inches of Douglas fir with a cobweb in it and not one mark that anyone had made. He had come down to see it, and now he saw it: a place where men with saws had broken a house open on a Saturday morning and found the inside of it. He had carried that Saturday in his stomach for thirty years. It turned out to be eighteen inches of dirt.
Haddad's light stopped.
It rested on the first joist over the pit. New wood, pale beside the old fir, planed, with a lumberyard's ink stamp and two bolt heads. It was blank.
Salo's shutter went once, from habit, on nothing. Haddad held the beam where it was. Evan had been told where to look by a phrase in a letter: on the wood. He lay under the joist the crew had doubled in October of 1996, and there was not one mark on it, and he thought: He meant some other wood. He thought of a man at a kitchen table on Cutler Avenue, writing to a lawyer he had never met, and of every word in that letter that might have been wrong. He thought of a galvanized pail by the back fence, and the sentence he had rehearsed all night, and how it would sound with nothing under it.
Mind the sister.
"That's the sister," Haddad said. He said it as he had said everything, to the wood. "Whoever wrote on this, wrote on something else."
The light slid on, crossed the seam and rose, and rested on the underside of the next joist over the darker ground, the old one, at the height of a man's face lying down. The writing ran along it in flat capitals, gray on gray.
10-19-96 LD — 18 in to grade — test pit 4 ft @ 7 ft off N wall — NO VOID — NO TUNNEL.
Salo's flash went off, and went again. He watched her lay a scale bar beside the seven, and the stroke through its stem, short and hard, and two inches off it a fresh line of her own in HB, bright as a scratch, for the control Mara had asked for.
His father had lain exactly here, on his back, in a shirt white to the elbows, and reached up with a pencil sharpened by a knife, and put his initials on the underside of the floor of a house where he had found nothing. Then he had climbed out into the afternoon and driven a boy home without a word.
From the hatch Pardee said, "Anyone could have written that."
He had come to the edge of the light on one knee, courteous, uncomfortable in his good coat. It was a fair objection. Anyone with a key, and Evan had held one for sixteen months.
Haddad did not hurry, and passed the light down the joist as a man reads down a column. "There's a crust on the wood. It's on the pencil and on the bare fir either side. There are cobweb anchors across some of the strokes. The ground takes a footprint like snow, and the only tracks in it are ours, and the hatch was padlocked." He lowered the beam. "I can't tell you when the pencil went on. That isn't engineering."
"Then the State reserves," Pardee said quietly, and went away from the hatch.
Evan came out on his hands and knees into the cellar light with both knees black. Frances looked at them and then, quickly, elsewhere.
Upstairs Salo had put the photograph on her laptop, and Wendt asked whether anyone offered a comparison. He took the board from the hall, where it had leaned since Friday, and held it upright beside the screen with its foot on the sheeted floor, so that the two hands stood side by side, joist and doorframe. On the board, at the level of his own ribs, in a younger, more careful hand, one line read EVAN 9-97 — 4′ 11″ LD.
Wendt said that he would need to be sworn, and did it where he stood, with his hand on the wood.
Evan spoke to the screen and not to any of them. "That's my father's hand. The seven with the bar through it. He did it on everything. I watched him do it from the time I could stand at his bench."
He took the glassine from his shirt, where it had been since Frances read it in Mercer on Friday and gave it back for him to produce himself, and handed it to Wendt. She read the page through the sleeve, once, slowly, and laid it face up on the piano bench.
Evan kept his hand on the board. "There's something else. I'd rather it were said by me."
He stated it as he would have stated an encumbrance. On the twentieth of October a paralegal from the Clinic had put a preservation letter in his hand. On the evening of the twenty-first he had burned his father's notebook behind this house, and the ash was in a galvanized pail by the back fence, where Wendt's people could have it. He could give two entries from memory and would swear to them. The thirtieth held the District Attorney's instruction not to volunteer the search log. The nineteenth held a line about a panel on the nap-room wall, painted, kids', prime.
"My father saw that door on the Saturday," he said. "He wrote it down, and he had it painted over. I burned the only copy of that."
He did not say why, and nobody asked.
Pardee's voice had no edge in it. "You understand the State will refer that."
"Yes."
"The court will decide what weight your account of the notebook carries," said Wendt. "Not I."
Mara had come forward with a folder under her arm, and he had not seen her go for it. She laid the drawing in its Japanese tissue on the piano bench beside his father's letter, and a sixteen-page report in a clear cover, signed on the last page. The rest of the box had gone to the master's office on Monday under a log. The drawing was a house in wax crayon, and Evan did not look at it.
She spoke to Wendt and not to him. "Two hands. The crayon is a child's. The square in the floor and the word are graphite, an adult's, and they were drawn after. It's in the report."
"The State notes," said Pardee, "that the original has been in private custody for twenty-eight years."
"It has." Wendt turned to Mara and asked, kindly, "Mrs. Dunmore, do you recall the room?"
Mara took her time. "I don't remember any of this. I'm not a witness to it. I'm a witness to the paper."
Pardee capped his thermos. "Then, so that Mr. Odom has it, the State's position on the joist. It is pencil on wood, in a crawlspace to which one man held the key. The only things that vouch for that hand are a doorframe his son kept and a notebook his son burned. The State does not say Mr. Dunmore forged it. It says the court can't tell, on his word, and his word is all there is."
Nobody spoke, and Evan found that he could not fault a clause of it.
"I'd like to see the raking set," Mara said from the piano bench.
"Mrs. Dunmore is an interested party," Pardee said, "and a paper conservator."
"Her report says what she is," said Wendt. "The State's objection is noted. Ms. Salo, the raking set."
Mara came round the laptop and did not touch it. She looked at the image from very close and without hurry, and when she spoke it was in the level voice she used at her bench, the one that said only what an object would bear.
"Two lines. The bright one is Ms. Salo's, from this afternoon. It sits on the surface. See the shine on the ridge of the grain, where the point rode over it? And the dust is shoved up along the edge in a little windrow. That's graphite that went on top of the dirt." Salo moved the light, and Mara went on. "Now the old one. No shine. The letters are flat and gray and there's a crust lying over them. Not beside. Over. It bridges the stroke of the seven, it sits in the trough of every letter, and it's the same crust, same thickness, same color, as on the bare fir either side. The cobweb anchor at the T lies across the stroke, and the graphite under its foot isn't scuffed. Nobody has rubbed this or gone over it. It went on the wood first. The crust and the dust and the spider came after. It's the test I used on the drawing, the other way round."
"How long?" Wendt said.
"I can't give you years. I can give you the order. The pencil is under the dirt, and the dirt is not under the pencil."
"Not one year's worth," Haddad said. He had not spoken since the cellar. He stood in the door of the front bedroom with the headlamp in his hand. "I said I can't date pencil, and I can't. But I've opened a lot of crawlspaces. A crust like that doesn't come in a season, and that hatch was padlocked and nobody's walked that ground but us. If the court wants a number in years, it should get one from somebody who dates surfaces for a living, not from me." He looked at the screen, and at Mara. "Whoever wrote this did it before the spider."
Pardee looked at the image for some time. "The State will reserve," he said, and this time it sounded like a man writing something down for himself.
"For the record," said Frances, "that line answers a question. Exhibit Nine, page six. On redirect the prosecutor asked Detective Dunmore whether the search of the premises had disclosed anything inconsistent with the children's accounts. He said, 'No, sir.'"
"The State has read that transcript," said Pardee.
"Then it has read both."
Wendt closed her book at 1:47. When the cases had been shut, Frances came and put a hand on Evan's arm just above the elbow, briefly, as one touches a railing.
Vera had not left the sill. She stood looking in at a room with its wall open to the brick and its rug rolled back from the floor, and one by one the others went out around her, Pardee to the porch, Haddad to his cases, Salo to her cart. Evan stayed in the hall with the board. When the last of them was gone she stepped in.
She crossed the bare floor slowly and lowered herself onto it at the east wall, beside the opening, with the plaster at her back and the brick behind her shoulder blade, as a woman sits in a place where she once sat every afternoon. She laid her hands in her lap and looked at the pale rectangle of board where the wardrobe had stood. Then she leaned, one hand on the floor, and knocked twice with one knuckle on the baseboard under the arch, and waited.
Nothing answered, and she stayed where she was.
Mara went in and sat down beside her, on the floor, in the green sweater, about a foot away, and neither of them spoke.
Evan carried the board out to the truck.
He reached Mercer General at 6:20 and went up to the fourth floor with the ring in his hand. Wendt had the key now, in an evidence envelope with a number. The padlock she had photographed, tagged and left open on its hasp, and it was the ring he had brought anyway.
His father lay as he had lain since Friday, turned a little toward the window, with the tube in his nose and his hands outside the blanket. They had been a carpenter's hands. They were the color of old soap, and someone had trimmed the nails for him and left one.
Evan sat down and put the ring on the blanket by the right hand. After a while, without waking, the fingers found it and closed, and the thumb went around the steel once, twice, to the place where the small one had been, and slid off, and started round again.
He leaned in until the air from the tube moved the hair at his temple.
"It's still nothing, Dad."