The first grey suggestion of dawn found Walter Fenwick already awake, his boots laced tight, his old Raleigh bicycle waiting in the yard like a patient hound. He pressed his palm flat against the workbench where he had drawn his first survey of Hollow Creek forty-three years ago, the wood still cool and faintly resinous, then walked out into the silence before the birds.
Marigold Hask coasted down the lane on her own bike, one hand loose on the bars, the other lifting in a wave she didn't bother to finish. Her sneakers were damp with dew. Her hair was tied back in the kind of knot that suggested she had lost a fight with a mirror and given up.
"You're earlier than early," Walter said.
"I couldn't sleep." She dropped from the saddle, walked the bike the last few feet, and leaned it against his fence post. "I kept thinking about what she wrote. About hearing a hinge."
Walter nodded once, the way he did when he meant a great deal and intended to say very little. He lifted his own bike from its rest, checked the chain with a thumb, and swung a leg over the crossbar. "The Thornbury gate is a fair ride."
"I know how far it is, Walter."
"I wasn't telling you. I was telling my knees."
A thin fog lay along the road in ribbons, and the air held the metallic taste that came before the sun burned it off. Somewhere a dog barked twice and stopped, as if it too had decided there was no point. They rode in easy single file, Marigold's front tire tracking slightly left of Walter's rear, the gravel crunching under them in a rhythm she counted without meaning to. One, two, one, two-three. The world smelled of cut hay and woodsmoke from the Pruitt place, where Della's chimney was already breathing.
They passed the old general store, shuttered now, its false front peeling. They passed the white frame church with the bell rope still hanging outside, frayed at the end where the children grabbed it. They passed the road that bent up toward the cemetery, and Marigold's eye went to the line of cedars at its crest without her choosing. Walter saw her look and said nothing. Some silences were best left to do their own work.
At the fork where the county road surrendered to a dirt track, Walter slowed. The ruts here were deep from the spring thaw, and his front wheel slid a half inch before biting. He corrected with the easy instinct of long practice and swung left, away from the river, up toward the spine of the ridge.
The Thornbury property began, as all the old properties did, not with a fence but with a feeling. The trees closed in overhead until the road became a tunnel of green and grey light, and the underbrush thickened into ferns that brushed their ankles as they passed. Marigold felt the temperature drop by a full degree. Her arms prickled.
"Walter."
"Mm."
"Who owned this land after the Thornburys?"
He considered the question the way he considered a contour line, slowly, with respect. "Nobody, officially. Calvin Meeks tried to claim it for back taxes in nineteen-twelve. The county refused to record the deed. I saw the letter myself, in Owen's archive. Three lines, no signature."
"Why?"
"Because the Thornbury deed was never released. Calvin filed an affidavit saying the line of inheritance was broken, but the clerk in Charleston wrote back that some doors are not for the county to open." Walter's mouth twitched. "He was a careful man, Calvin. He kept that letter in a cedar box."
Marigold glanced at him. "The cedar box."
"The very one."
She let out a short breath that was almost a laugh. "Everything in this town is in a cedar box."
"Only the important things."
The track curved around a stand of birch, and the gate appeared between the trees as if it had been waiting there for them. Two rusted iron uprights leaned at a slight inward angle, the crossbar long since gone, replaced by a length of chain that someone had looped and padlocked with deliberate care. Beyond the gate the ground fell away into a hollow so choked with brush that the old house site was invisible from the road. No path led through. The ferns grew chest high and moved in slow, independent waves.
Walter dismounted and laid his bike on its side in the grass with the gentleness of a man laying down a child. Marigold did the same. She stood for a moment, head tilted, listening. The forest had that taut, held quality of a room where someone had just left.
"The lock's new," she said.
Walter crouched. He did not touch it, only looked. "Within the month. I'd say the week."
"Someone's been up here."
"Someone's been up here more than once."
She crouched beside him, ignoring the damp that immediately soaked through her jeans. The padlock was a common brass variety, the kind sold in every hardware store from here to Charleston. The chain was newer than the gate, and the gate itself was older than the memory of most living residents. She could see the date 1887 stamped into a flange of the left upright, partly obscured by rust. Her eyes moved down the post to where it met the earth, and there she stopped breathing.
A boot print. Fresh, the edges still soft, the water not yet filled the depression. A work boot, size ten or eleven, the lug pattern aggressive and modern, the kind sold for hiking the new trails at the state park. Beside the print, half-caught in the hinge of a fern, a scrap of canvas. Olive drab. Coarse weave. Torn from a larger piece, the edge ragged, a single brass grommet still set near one corner.
Marigold reached for her phone and took three photographs before she remembered that the cell signal died two ridges back. She pocketed the phone anyway, out of habit.
"Walter."
"I see it."
"That's not a hiker. Hikers don't cut across a posted, chained, abandoned property line with a padlock that wasn't here last spring. You told Owen you'd walked this in March."
"I did. No lock then. No print. No canvas."
She lifted the scrap with two fingers, careful not to crush whatever trace of grit or thread might cling to it. The canvas was stiff with something. She brought it close to her nose without thinking, then pulled back. Turpentine. Faint, but unmistakable, the ghost of a solvent that did not belong on a forest floor.
"Walter," she said again, and this time her voice was not steady.
He rose, slow, his knees protesting audibly. He stood over the print and studied it the way he would study a contour on a map, reading its depth, its lean, its message. "The weight's forward. Whoever made this was carrying something. Heavier on the right, I'd say, from the way the lugs compressed deeper on that side."
"He?"
"Could be a woman. Could be anyone. But the stride was short, and the foot planted square. Not a kid. Not a hunter in a hurry."
"You sound like you want it to be a stranger."
He looked at her steadily. His eyes were the pale blue of a winter sky, and they did not blink. "I want it to be anyone but who I'm afraid it is. And I'm afraid it's Della Pruitt's nephew, the one who came up from Columbia last summer asking questions about mineral rights."
"Russell."
"Russell Pruitt. He was up here in March. I saw his truck at the general store."
"And you didn't mention it."
"I mentioned it to Owen. I didn't mention it to you because you'd have done what you're doing now, and I wanted one more week of peace." He scratched the back of his neck, a boyish gesture that sat oddly on a man of eighty-one. "I was wrong. I'm sorry."
Marigold folded the canvas scrap into a square of her bandana and tucked the bundle into her jacket pocket. The brass grommet clicked faintly against the lining. She straightened and looked past Walter, past the gate, into the hollow where the brush moved in its slow, secretive rhythm.
"Someone's been inside."
"Yes."
"And whatever's in there, they've seen it before we have."
"Yes."
She turned back to him. "I need to get over this gate."
"Mari."
"I need to, Walter. You know I do. She heard a hinge. She wrote about a hinge in that letter, and she never left this property, and now there's a hinge with a new lock on it."
Walter Fenwick stood very still. The fog had burned off enough that the first true rays of sun reached the gate, turning the rusted iron the color of dried blood. He looked at the lock, at the print, at the canvas in her pocket, at the long grass beyond, and he made the decision she had seen him make before, slowly and with full knowledge of the cost.
"I'll get the bolt cutters from my barn. You stay here. You do not climb this gate. You do not put your hands on that lock. If a vehicle comes down that track, you walk your bike into the birches and you wait until it's gone. Do you hear me, Mari?"
"I hear you."
"Say it back."
"I will not touch the lock. I will hide in the birches if a vehicle comes."
"Good girl." He paused, and the word sat strangely between them, too tender for the morning. "Your Aunt Bea would have done exactly what you're doing. She would have done it sooner."
Marigold's mouth trembled, then set. "Then she would have told me to come back with you."
"She would have told you to come back with me and with Owen and with a flashlight and a thermos of tea. She was a sensible woman, your great-aunt. Sensible until she wasn't."
Walter wheeled his bike around and pushed off down the track, his thin legs working the pedals in a slow, stubborn circle. Marigold watched him go until the birches swallowed him. Then she sat on the wet ground beside the gate, her back against the iron post, and she looked at the print in the mud and thought about hinges.
In the cedar box in the library archive, in a letter dated fourteen years ago this June, her great-aunt Beatrice Hask had written a single line in a hand that shook with something Marigold had never been able to name. The hinges of the Thornbury gate are not rusted. Someone oils them in the night. Marigold had read the line so many times that the words had worn grooves in her memory, and now she sat beside the very gate her aunt had described, and the chain on it was new, and the lock was new, and the boot print was fresh, and the hinges, when she finally allowed herself to glance up at them, were, indeed, free of rust.
She did not touch the lock. She folded her hands in her lap and waited. The forest breathed around her, and somewhere in the hollow, something that was not wind moved through the ferns.
The something-that-was-not-wind moved again, closer now, the ferns parting in a low arc. Marigold's hand drifted toward her satchel, fingers brushing the brass zipper of the camera case, and she thought, absurdly, that her great-aunt would have laughed at her for sitting on the wet ground in good boots.
She sat up straighter. She did not stand.
A footstep, then another, the soft crush of a sneaker on damp loam. A girl came around the bend in the creek path, a scuffed canvas bag slung over one shoulder, a camera with a long lens swinging from her neck. She was thirteen, maybe fourteen, with hair the color of toasted wheat pulled into a knot that was losing its war with the humidity. Her cheeks were flushed from walking. She slowed when she saw Marigold and stopped altogether when she saw the gate.
For a long moment the girl did not speak. She stood with one sneaker cocked at an angle and her hands shoved into the pockets of a faded denim jacket, and she looked at Marigold the way a child looks at a stray cat she has been told not to feed.
"Hello," Marigold said. Her voice came out more gently than she had intended. "Are you all right?"
"Fine," the girl said, too quickly. "I was just, um. Birds."
"Birds?"
"At the creek." The girl lifted the camera an inch, as if the gesture were an explanation. "There's a kingfisher. He's been working the bend past the alders. I was trying to get him in the light before the cloud moved, but, um." She trailed off. Her eyes flicked to the gate, then back to Marigold. "Are you with the historical society?"
Marigold almost laughed. "No. I'm Marigold Hask. I'm a journalist."
"Oh." The girl's mouth made a small O. "From the paper?"
"From a paper. Not this one. I'm writing something about the property line and the gate. The Thornbury gate."
The girl's gaze sharpened. "You're related to Miss Beatrice."
It was not a question. Marigold studied the girl a beat longer. "How do you know Miss Beatrice?"
"I don't. I mean, I never met her. My mom knew her, sort of, from the library. I do research for Mr. Meeks sometimes. After school and in the summer. Cataloging, and, you know, the scanning project." The girl was talking faster now, as if the words were a small door she could open and step behind. "Mom told me about Miss Beatrice. That she used to come in and ask about the boundary surveys and read the old maps on the table. That she was nice. That she asked questions."
Marigold uncrossed her ankles and set her hands on her knees. "What's your name?"
"Iris." The girl hesitated, as if deciding whether to offer the rest of it. "Iris Thorne."
"Hello, Iris."
"Hi."
The creek made its small noise. A dragonfly skimmed the surface and vanished into the alders. Iris Thorne shifted her weight and looked at the gate again, and this time her mouth thinned in a way that was older than her face.
"I saw someone," she said.
Marigold did not move. "When?"
"Two nights ago. Tuesday." Iris's voice dropped. She had the cadence of someone rehearsing a sentence she had already rehearsed many times. "I come down here a lot. Not at night, usually. I was coming for the heron. He fishes the shallows at dusk, and if you're real still on the bank by the big rock, he'll let you get close. I had my dad's old point-and-shoot, not this, this was a Christmas gift, so I was using the small one, and I didn't want to spook him. So I came late."
She stopped. The camera lens caught a scrap of cloud light and threw a brief, pale ring onto the iron of the gate.
"I came up the path from the south side," Iris said. "The path that runs along the creek and then turns up by the birches. It's a deer track, mostly, but it's clear enough if you know it. And I saw someone on the other side of the gate."
"Man or woman?"
"Man. I think. He had on a jacket, like a canvas one, and he was bent down at the chain. He had something in his hand. Not a bolt cutter, more like a little bottle, or, I don't know, a rag, and he was doing something to the chain, like rubbing it, and then he looked up. Not at me. At the gate. And then he opened it and went through and shut it behind him."
Marigold's hands had gone cold on her knees. She kept her voice even. "Did he see you?"
"I don't think so. There was a long time, I mean like maybe twenty minutes, where I just sat behind the birches and waited for him to come back. He didn't come back out. I waited until it was full dark, and then I walked home by the road because I was afraid of the path in the dark."
"Why didn't you tell anyone?"
Iris looked at her then, and there was something in the look that Marigold recognized from her own face in mirrors when she was thirteen, the particular hurt of a person who had not been believed the right number of times. "I told my mom," Iris said. "She said I imagined it. She said there aren't any trails that go through there, and anyway, who would come out to a gate in the woods at night to oil a chain? She said I should come inside and do my homework."
"But you didn't imagine it."
"I know what I saw."
Marigold studied her. The girl had the clean, sharp features of a child who would grow up to be considered striking and who knew, in some inarticulate way, that she was already being watched by the world and had not yet decided how she felt about it. Her hands were shoved deep in her jacket pockets. The knuckles of her right hand were white.
"May I see the photograph?"
"I don't have one. I had the point-and-shoot. I didn't want to make a sound. I turned it off and put it in my bag and I didn't take the shot. I should have." The girl's voice caught. "I should have taken the shot."
"It's all right."
"It's not." Iris Thorne looked past Marigold at the gate, and her jaw tightened in a way that Marigold understood perfectly. "He was real. I know he was real. And the chain is new. It wasn't new before. I've been coming down here since April. The chain had that fuzzy green rust on it, the kind that takes years. Now it's silver and clean and it wasn't like that a week ago."
Marigold let out a breath. She had not realized she had been holding it. The air smelled of cedar and wet stone and the green, mineral scent of the creek.
"I believe you," she said.
Iris blinked. "You do?"
"Yes."
"Most people don't."
"I know."
The girl looked at her then with the cautious, measuring look of a child deciding whether to trust a stranger with the smaller of her two injuries. Marigold thought of her own mother, who had been unable to stop the small cruelties of the world and had compensated by warning against them, and of her aunt Beatrice, who had not warned against them at all and had walked into them anyway.
"I want to help," Iris said, in a small voice.
"You are helping."
"I want to help with the gate."
Marigold almost smiled. "That's not a small help."
"I know." The girl squared her shoulders. She had the expression of a person making a decision that had been ready to be made for some time and only needed a witness. "I don't have school until September. I can be here in the mornings. I can come down after lunch. I can take pictures."
"I thought you were here for the heron."
"I was." Iris lifted the camera again. "I am. But I'm also here."
Marigold stood up. Her knees protested, the damp having stiffened the fabric of her jeans. She brushed herself off and slung her satchel over her shoulder and looked down at the gate, at the new chain, at the print in the mud that had begun, in the thin sun that had broken through, to lose its edges.
"What's your mother's name?"
"Claire. Claire Thorne. She's a nurse at the clinic." Iris paused. "She's going to be mad I'm talking to you."
"Most mothers are mad about something," Marigold said. "It doesn't mean they aren't good at it."
Iris almost laughed. It was a small, surprised sound, and it broke something open in the air between them.
The girl looked at the gate one more time, and then she reached into her canvas bag and pulled out a folded piece of paper, slightly crumpled, the corners soft with handling. She held it out without looking at Marigold.
"This is a sketch," she said. "I did it from memory. It's the man. It's not very good. But I thought someone should have it."
Marigold took the paper. The sketch was done in soft pencil on a sheet torn from a spiral notebook. It showed a man in three-quarter view, bent at the waist, one hand extended toward something out of frame. He wore a cap with a brim that shadowed his face, a canvas jacket, and boots that ended in a suggestion of mud. The proportions were those of a child, but the line of the shoulders was careful and the angle of the cap was exact. Marigold could see, in the careful pressure of the pencil, the hours the girl had spent trying to remember.
"It's very good," Marigold said.
"It's not."
"It is." She folded the paper once and slid it into the inner pocket of her satchel, against the letter from her aunt. "Iris. I want you to listen to me. I want you to keep coming down here to the creek. I want you to take your pictures. But if you see that man again, or anyone you don't know, you don't speak to him. You don't let him see you. You come to me, or to Mr. Meeks at the library, or to Mr. Fenwick at the general store. Do you understand?"
Iris nodded. Her eyes were wide, but her chin was up.
"And," Marigold said, "you take a picture."
Iris's mouth opened a little. Then it closed. Then, slowly, it curved.
"I have a zoom lens," she said.
"I noticed."
"I could get the gate from the path."
"I'd like that very much."
The girl shouldered her bag and lifted the camera, and for a moment she looked like a very small soldier setting out for a war she had not chosen but had decided, in her own quiet way, to fight. Marigold watched her walk back along the path toward the bend, the long lens swinging gently against her chest, and she did not call after her, because the girl was not the kind who liked being called after.
Marigold turned back to the gate. The sun had come fully out, and the chain threw a thin, sharp shadow on the gravel. She crouched, slowly, and looked at the print again, and then at the place where Iris had said the man had knelt, and she saw, now that she was looking, a second mark in the dirt, fainter, that might have been the impression of a small bottle or a folded rag.
She took her phone from her pocket and photographed both prints, and then the gate, and then the hinges, and then the sky over the treetops, because she did not know yet which of these things her aunt would have wanted.
When she stood, her knees popped. She brushed her hands on her jeans and set off down the path toward the road, toward the library, toward Owen Meeks, who would want to see the sketch, and toward Walter Fenwick, who would want to know about the chain, and toward the box in the archive, where a letter dated fourteen years ago sat in her aunt's shaking hand and said, very simply, that someone oils them in the night.
The forest breathed behind her. She did not look back. She did not need to. The gate would be there in the morning, and so would the print, and so would the girl with her camera, and so would Marigold Hask, who had not come home to find her aunt and had found, instead, a thirteen-year-old with a sketch and a story and a pair of eyes that had decided, against all advice, to believe what they had seen.
The road from Briar Hollow to the library was a long two miles that bent along the river, and Marigold drove it with the window down and the morning cold against her knuckles. She did not switch on the radio. The sketch lay on the passenger seat, weighted by her phone, and every time the road turned she could see, in her quick glances, the curve of the gate and the careful slope of its posts. The print of the bare foot was still bright in her mind, and the smell of the chain oil came back to her whenever she blinked, faint and mineral, like wet iron, like something that had been handled for a long time by hands that did not want to be seen.
She parked in the small lot behind the library, between a green Civic and a blue pickup that had not been moved in so long a dandelion had set up house in its rear wheel well. The brick of the building was the same brick as the post office and the firehouse, the brick of the WPA years, the brick of men with good intentions and not enough money, and she had grown up thinking of it as old and now, in her thirties, she thought of it as the kind of thing that was built to be leaned against.
The front door complained when she pulled it, a long metal yawn that echoed into the rotunda, and from somewhere behind the circulation desk a voice said, without rising, that the bathroom key required a deposit, and she called back, "It's just me, Owen."
"Just you," Owen Meeks said, and then, after a pause long enough to be polite, "and what have you brought me."
It was not really a question. Marigold came around the corner of the stacks and saw him exactly where she had left him the day before, at the long table under the high windows, with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a magnifying lamp pulled low over a brittle sheet of onionskin that he was nudging, with a cotton swab he had dipped in something that smelled of wheat, into the gutter of a fold. His glasses had slid down his nose. He did not look up. He never did, when he was working, because he had told her once, years ago, that if you looked up too often the page took offense and went back to being illegible.
"I have brought you," Marigold said, "a sketch, a footprint, and a theory about a chain."
"And I," Owen said, "have brought you a small headache about archival policy." He straightened at last, and the magnifier rocked on its spring, and he blinked at her over the rims of his glasses with the mild, surprised look of a man who had been expecting company and was pleased, in a measured way, to receive it. "Sit down before you tell me. The floor in this building has opinions."
She sat. The chair was oak and had been oak since the Coolidge administration, and it took her weight with a creak that sounded like a question. She set the sketch in front of him, flat, and watched his face as he took it in. Owen Meeks did not have many expressions, but he had a small one, a tightening at the corners of his mouth, that meant he had seen something he recognized and was not sure, yet, whether to be glad or sorry about it.
"Miss Iris," he said.
"She did."
He picked up the magnifying lamp and moved it across the drawing in slow passes, and Marigold could hear the faint hiss of the bulb, and the even fainter creak of his chair, and somewhere in the stacks a tin of date due cards slid off a shelf and fell, softly, to the floor. She did not get up to retrieve it. She watched Owen.
"This post," he said, at last, tapping the corner of the sketch where Iris had drawn the fluted iron. "And this diagonal. And this." He tapped the chain. "She has drawn it accurately, which is to say she has drawn it as it was drawn, in 1952, in the surveyor's sketch that accompanied the petition for seizure."
Marigold's mouth went dry. "You have the surveyor's sketch."
"I have the surveyor's sketch," he said, and stood, with the careful motions of a man whose knees were not what they had been, and walked, with her behind him, into the archive room.
It was the same room it had always been. The metal cabinets, the rolling ladder, the smell of paper that had been breathing, slowly, for a hundred years. Owen went to the third cabinet on the left and pulled the second drawer with the flat of his hand, and the drawer sighed out on its runners, and there, in a pale blue folder, was a sheet of onionskin the size of a placemat, and on it, in a draftsman's hand, was the gate.
"The diagonal," Owen said, "is a later repair. After the seizure, the county came out and restrung the chain, because the original had rusted through. But the post is the original. The fluting is the original. The hinge, the cap, the proportions. Miss Iris has drawn the gate as it was, with one exception. She has added a wreath."
Marigold looked. The wreath was a small circle at the apex of the arch, where the two sides of the gate met, and she had not noticed it in the field, because the foliage had been thick, and Iris had drawn it in lightly, in a pencil of a different grade, as though she had remembered it at the last minute.
"What," Marigold said, "is the wreath."
"It is," Owen said, "the symbol of the Hollow Creek Horticultural Society, which met in this building from 1923 until 1956, and which decorated, each May Day, the graves of the lost. There is," he added, with the air of a man delivering a postscript, "a list of the lost."
He pulled a second folder, thinner, and set it beside the first, and the list was there, on a single sheet, in the careful hand of a secretary who had known what she was about. The names were in two columns. There were eleven of them. At the bottom, in a third column, headed Disposition, were the words Found or Not Found, and against the seventh name, the name of Elise Thornbury, the words Not Found were written in a different ink, in a hand that trembled.
"She is on the list," Marigold said. She could hear her own voice as though from a distance.
"She is," Owen said. "And so, I am sorry to tell you, is Della Pruitt."
The archive room was very quiet. Marigold could hear the clock in the front hall, and the creak of the tin of date due cards as it settled, and her own breath, and the small sounds that Owen made as he set the magnifying lamp back in its cradle and took off his glasses and polished them, slowly, on the hem of his tie.
"Della Pruitt," Marigold said. "Walter's Della."
"Walter's Della," Owen said. "Who was not, when she disappeared in the spring of 1952, Walter's Della at all, but a girl of twenty-three who worked at the post office and had, so far as the society could determine, no enemies and no plans. She was last seen," he added, "on the road that runs past the Thornbury place, walking, it was said, toward the gate."
"And Elise."
"Elise was last seen, by her husband's recollection, at the kitchen window. She had been watching, he said, for Della. She had been watching for some time."
Marigold sat down on the stool by the cabinet, because her legs had decided, without consulting her, that they were finished. The onionskin list trembled in her hand, and the names on it were ordinary names, the names of women and men who had lived in the county and walked on its roads and drunk its water and, eleven of them, not come back.
"The society," Owen said, and his voice was gentle now, because he had seen her face, "kept the list because it was their custom to remember. It was not, I should tell you, an official list. It was a private one, maintained by a Mrs. Cosgrove, who taught botany at the high school and who believed, with some force, that the lost deserved to be named. She died in 1971. The list came to the library with her papers, and I have kept it because no one has asked for it, and because it seemed to me, when I was young, that the lost were the kind of thing one ought to keep."
"Owen."
"Yes."
"How many of them were never found."
"Four," he said. "Elise Thornbury. Della Pruitt. A boy named Thomas Birch, who was eleven. And a Mrs. Adelaide Frain, who was, I am sorry to say, the president of the society itself."
"Found," Marigold said, reading down the column. "Found. Found. Not Found. Found. Not Found. Not Found. Found. Found. Not Found. Found. Found."
She set the list down on the cabinet, very gently, as though it were a bird.
"The seizure," she said. "The seizure of the land."
"In 1952," Owen said. "After the disappearance. The county argued that the land was abandoned. Mr. Thornbury argued that it was not. The county prevailed. The house was taken down. The outbuildings were taken down. The road was rerouted. The gate, however, was left, because the gate was, in the language of the petition, a hazard to be removed by the owner, and the owner, by then, was the county, and the county had other things to do."
"And the chain."
"The chain," Owen said, "was restrung by the county in 1953, and restrung again in 1971, and again in 1989, and again, if I am not mistaken, very recently."
He looked at her over his glasses.
"You have been out to the gate," he said. It was not a question.
"I have been out to the gate."
"And you have seen that it is oiled."
"I have seen that it is oiled."
Owen Meeks set his glasses on the cabinet and took a small key from his waist pocket and opened, with the care of long habit, a shallow drawer behind the rolls of microfilm. He took from it a brown envelope, soft with age, and from the envelope a photograph, black and white, of a woman in a garden dress standing at a gate that was not the gate in the sketch, but was, in its proportions and its fluting and its chain, very like it.
"This," Owen said, "is Mrs. Adelaide Frain. It was taken in 1948 at her own gate, which stood, until the road was rerouted, at the fork where the Briar Hollow road meets the old county way. She was, by all accounts, a woman of method."
He set the photograph beside the onionskin list, and the woman in the garden dress looked up at Marigold from the cabinet with the calm, appraising expression of a person who had expected to be remembered and was prepared, if necessary, to wait.
"She was the last," Owen said. "The last to be lost. And the first to be found, in 1953, when a road crew came through to widen the fork and uncovered, in the foundation of her gate, a small box. The box contained, I am told, a length of chain, a phial of oil, and a note, which I have not seen, in which she explained, so the story goes, that she had been keeping the gates of the lost, and that she had grown tired, and that whoever found her would do well to take up the work."
Marigold did not speak. The clock in the front hall struck ten, and the sound came into the archive room in long, even strokes, and the cabinets caught the sound and gave it back, and the photograph of Mrs. Frain lay on the cabinet as though it had been placed there by a careful hand, and the list lay beside it, and the onionskin survey lay beside the list, and the air smelled of paper and wheat and the faint mineral tang of old iron.
"Owen," Marigold said, at last.
"Yes."
"Who is doing it now."
Owen looked at her, and his face was the face of a man who had been waiting, for some time, to be asked.
"I do not know," he said. "I have, for many years, suspected. I have not, for many years, asked. I believed, you see, that it was not my place to ask. Mrs. Frain left the work. Someone took it up. That is the way of these things. The chain is oiled. The gate is kept. The gate that no one opens is opened, by someone, and closed again."
He put his glasses back on, and the lenses caught the light from the high window, and for a moment he was only a shape behind a brightness, and then he was Owen again, with his sleeves rolled and his careful hands and his calm, appraising face.
"You have been to see Walter," he said.
"I have been to see Walter."
"And Walter has told you about the chain."
"Walter has told me about the chain."
"Then Walter," Owen said, "has told you as much as I can tell you, and a little more, and I will say only this. When you go back to the gate, and you will go back, because you are a Hask and Hasks go back, you will take with you a thing that I have kept for some time, and that I should have given, long ago, to someone who would use it."
He took from the envelope a small key, brass, on a length of red thread, and set it in her hand.
"It opens," he said, "the lock on the box at the foot of the gate. The box that Mrs. Frain built, and that Adelaide kept, and that someone has kept, since. I have had it since 1971. I am tired. I would like," he said, and his voice was very quiet, "to go home."
Marigold closed her hand around the key. The brass was warm from his palm, and the red thread was soft, and the archive room was quiet, and the clock in the front hall had finished its striking and was ticking, evenly, into the long morning.
"I will take it," she said.
"I know you will," Owen said. "You are a Hask."
He took the photograph of Mrs. Frain and the onionskin list and the surveyor's sketch and put them, one by one, back into their folders, and slid the folders back into their drawers, and closed the drawers with the flat of his hand, and the drawers sighed home, and the archive room was, again, only a room.
"Now," he said, "you will want to make a copy of the list. I will allow it, because I am the librarian, and because it is a reasonable request. You will not, however, photograph the survey. The onionskin will not bear it. You will sit at the table, and you will transcribe it, in pencil, and I will watch you do it, and when you are finished I will put the survey away, and you will take your transcription to Walter, and Walter will tell you what he has not yet told you, and that will be enough for one day."
He held the archive door open for her, and the morning light came in, and the smell of paper gave way, by degrees, to the smell of the river and the dust of the brick steps, and Marigold walked out into it with the key in her hand and the list in her head and the sketch, still, on the table where she had left it, where Iris would find it, when she came in, and would know, by the careful way it had been set down, that someone had looked at it and had seen, in it, what she had drawn.