The frosted glass of Sully's Tavern caught the late afternoon light and threw it back in dull amber, the kind of glow that made the snow beyond the windows look older than it was. Inside, the place smelled of lemon polish, spilled stout from the night before, and the particular staleness of rooms that had been closed up too long against the cold. A single lamp burned behind the bar, its shade yellowed and webbed at the seams.
Sully Crane stood with both hands flat on the counter, leaning forward as though trying to hear the wood itself. He had opened the place at noon, as the usual, because habits, in his experience, were the only thing that kept a man upright when the rest of him wanted to lie down. The chairs sat empty. The jukebox was off. Somewhere beneath the floorboards, a pipe ticked and settled.
The bell above the door gave its thin, brassy complaint.
Maren Halloway stepped in from the white world outside, stamping snow from her boots onto the rubber mat that had worn thin in the shape of every regular's step. She wore a wool coat the color of wet bark and had a notebook pressed against her ribs beneath her arm. Her eyes moved once across the room, cataloguing, then settled on the man behind the bar.
"Mr. Crane," she said. "I hoped I'd find you alone."
Sully straightened. The motion cost him something; she could see it in the way his shoulders reset, the small adjustment of a man who had learned to hide his aches. "Door's unlocked and the heat's on. That's about all I can promise you, miss."
"Maren. Maren Halloway." She unbuttoned her coat but did not remove it, as though she might yet need the barrier of it. "I spoke with Celestine Vargas at the library. She said you might be willing to talk to me."
At the name Vargas, something moved behind Sully's eyes. He reached beneath the counter for a glass and a bottle of something brown, poured two fingers without asking, then set the second glass on the counter's edge nearest her.
"Vargas talks too much," he said. "Always did."
"She said you keep things." Maren approached the bar slowly, the rubber soles of her boots whispering against the floor. "Records, photographs. The kind of things people hand you when they don't want them anymore."
Sully lifted his glass. The liquor caught the lamp. "People hand me empties," he said. "That's the job."
"This isn't about empties." She stopped two stools away from where he had set her glass. "This is about a man whose fingerprints were removed before he was buried."
The glass paused halfway to Sully's mouth. He set it down with a carefulness that suggested he was buying himself time. The tap of the base on the oak sounded very loud in the empty room.
"Now why," he said, drawing the word out, "would a journalist from the city come all the way up here to ask a barkeep about a thing like that?"
"Because," Maren said, "the man under the bridge is not the only one. And because whoever cleaned him made a mistake I think you can help me find."
Sully's thumb traced the rim of his glass in a slow, absent circle. Outside, the wind shifted, and the loose sign above the tavern's door knocked once against its frame. The sound came in muffled, as though filtered through snow.
"Sit down," he said. "Before you fall down. You look like you haven't eaten in three days."
"I haven't," she said, and took the stool next to the glass. She did not drink. "I came straight from the morgue in Concord. They let me look at the file. The hands, Mr. Crane. The tips. Someone took a file to them. Someone patient."
"You don't have to tell me what someone did to a dead man," Sully said. His voice had dropped half a register, rougher now, as though the words had to climb out of somewhere deeper. "I seen it done."
Maren set her notebook on the bar and did not open it. "I need to know who."
Sully studied her. His face was a topography of weather and patience, creased in ways that suggested he had once smiled more often than he did now. He had the heavy jaw of a man who had eaten too much salt over too many years, and eyes set deep enough that whatever lived in them had learned to keep its own company.
"You know who I am," he said. It was not a question.
"Celestine said you were known as The Cleaner. In certain circles. That you take things that need to be taken."
The lines around Sully's mouth deepened. He looked away, toward the long mirror behind the bar where bottles stood in patient rows, their labels faded by years of damp. The reflection showed him what the room could not: the tiredness around his eyes, the way his hands, resting on the wood, had gone a little unsteady.
"That was a long time ago," he said. "I was a younger man. A stupider man."
"I don't care about then," Maren said. "I care about now. A body was pulled out of the river in March. No one identified him for weeks. No one tried. When I went looking for dental records, I found a gap. Someone had scrubbed the dental charts for three counties."
Sully turned back to her. His gaze was level, and for a moment, the bluster fell away and something else looked out from behind it, something older and less certain of itself.
"You come in here," he said, "talking about scrubbed charts and missing fingertips, and you don't even know what you're asking."
"Then tell me."
"No."
The word landed between them like a glass striking stone. Maren did not flinch. She had been bracing for it. She had told herself she would not flinch.
"Mr. Crane," she said. "I have been working this story for four months. I have lost my apartment in the city, my editor's patience, and most of my savings on bus fare. I came back to this town because a woman I never met disappeared from this town in 1978, and someone, somewhere, knows where her body is. I am not here to expose you. I am here because the man under the bridge may be the only witness I have left."
Sully's hand moved, a small, reflexive motion toward his mouth, then stopped and returned to the counter. He looked at the glass he had poured for her, still untouched.
"Who was the woman?" he asked.
"Lillian Thorne," Maren said. "She was seventeen. She worked at a boarding house on Harbor Street. She vanished on the night of the first hard frost. No body was ever found. No charges were ever filed."
"Lillian," Sully said, and the name came out of him as though he had been carrying it in his mouth for years. "Lord. I remember Lillian."
"Then help me find her."
Sully picked up his own glass and drank. The motion was slow, deliberate. When he set the glass down, there was a faint tremor in his fingers that he could not entirely suppress.
"I can't help you," he said. "I won't help you. Not because I don't want to, but because the kind of help you're asking for would get people killed."
"I am not asking you to break the law," Maren said. "I am asking you to tell me what you know."
"And what I know," Sully said, "is that some doors you open, you can't close again. I closed one of those doors a long time ago. I nailed it shut. I poured concrete over it. And here you come, with your notebook and your questions, asking me to pry it back open."
Maren leaned forward. Her elbows rested on the bar, her hands folded. The posture of a woman who had learned to wait.
"Who nailed it shut with you, Mr. Crane?"
Sully looked at her for a long moment. The lamp behind him hissed faintly as the wick adjusted. Outside, the wind had picked up; she could hear it working at the eaves of the building, trying to find a way in. She could also hear, very faintly, the creak of floorboards somewhere deeper in the building, as though the tavern itself were settling around them.
"That's the question," he said softly, "isn't it. That's always the question."
He poured himself another measure and did not offer her one. The bottle clinked against the glass as he set it down. He looked at her the way a man looks at a fire he cannot decide whether to feed or smother.
"Who sent you to me?" he asked.
"Celestine."
"Just Celestine?"
"And a man named Ira Sandoval. He runs a print shop out on Birch Lane. He said you once paid him to dispose of a bundle of photographs that turned up in the walls of the old mill."
Sully's mouth thinned. "Sandoval," he said, as though tasting the name. "He talks too much, too. Whole town's got a bad case of the talking disease lately."
"They talk to me because I listen," Maren said. "And because I came back."
"Back." Sully turned the word over. "You got family here?"
"Halloway," she said. "My mother was a Halloway. Delia Halloway-Thorne. She left this town in 1979 and never came back. She made me promise not to come back either."
Sully set his glass down. The sound of it was very precise, very controlled.
"Your mother," he said, "was the best reader of people I ever knew. If she told you not to come back, you ought to listen."
"I can't," Maren said. "Not anymore. The story found me. I didn't find it."
She reached into her coat and withdrew a manila folder, creased at the corners, and laid it on the bar between them. The folder held three photographs, all of them black and white, all of them older than she was. In one, a group of teenagers stood in front of a soda fountain, arms slung over one another's shoulders, grinning at a camera no one could see. In another, a young woman in a waitress uniform leaned against a jukebox, her hair pinned up, her eyes half-lidded as though caught between songs. In the third, a man in a brimmed hat stood at the edge of a crowd, half-turned away, his face a blur.
"The middle one," Maren said. "That's Lillian Thorne. The man in the hat appears in three other photographs from the same year. No one I've talked to can place him. Ira Sandoval thinks he's the reason the photographs ended up in the wall instead of a shoebox."
Sully stared at the photographs as though they might speak. He did not reach for them. His hands stayed where they were, flat on the oak, as though he were holding the bar down against some wind only he could feel.
"I know that hat," he said finally. The words came out like something pulled on a hook. "I know that hat."
Maren did not move. Did not write. Did not even breathe, for a moment, as though she were afraid any motion of her own might spook whatever was about to walk out of him.
"Tell me," she said.
Sully looked up at her. The bluster was gone. The pride was gone. What was left was the face of a man who had been waiting a long time to be asked, and who now wished someone else had asked instead.
"Not here," he said. "Not now. You come back tonight. After nine. Bring me that photograph of the hat. And bring me a bottle of something I can stand to drink."
"Sully," Maren said, and the use of his first name surprised them both.
"Sully," he repeated. "All right. Sully. You call me Sully, and I'll call you Maren, and we'll both pretend that's a fair trade for what you're asking me to give up."
He reached across the bar and turned the middle photograph so it faced her again, then slid the folder back toward her side of the counter.
"Tonight," he said. "After nine. And don't tell Vargas I said any of this. She worries."
Maren took the folder. Her fingers did not shake. She had been bracing for so long she had forgotten how to tremble.
"Tonight," she said.
She stood, pulled her coat tight around her, and moved toward the door. At the threshold, with her hand on the brass of the handle, she paused and looked back.
"Mr. Crane," she said. "Sully. If you decide not to come back, I will understand. But I want you to know that I am not going to stop. I have been promised things my whole life, and I have been let down, and I have kept going. I will keep going without you if I have to. But it would be easier with you."
Sully stood behind his bar with his hands flat on the wood and his shoulders a little lower than they had been when she came in. He did not nod. He did not speak. He only watched her go, the bell above the door shivering at her passing.
When she was gone, he reached beneath the counter and withdrew a folded rag, then a key on a leather cord. He did not look at either of them for a long moment. He simply held them, as a man holds a letter he has been afraid to open and more afraid to send back.
The lamp hissed. The wind pressed. Sully Crane, who had been known in certain circles as The Cleaner, locked the front door behind her and went to find what he had promised to find.
The rag smelled of lemon oil and something older, something Sully had stopped trying to name years ago. He turned it over in his hands, feeling the weave of it, the fraying at the edges where he had gripped it too many times while polishing the same stretch of mahogany. His thumb found the small burn mark in one corner. He remembered when that had happened. He tried not to remember when that had happened. He remembered anyway.
He set the rag on the bar and picked up the key.
The leather cord was cracked along one side where it had bent against the ring for so long that the dye had worn through to a pale tan. The key itself was nothing special. Brass. A simple pin tumbler design, the kind that could open a hundred different doors in a town like this one. He had not used it in seven years. He had not needed to. The things it opened had stayed shut, the way he had always intended, and Sully had built his life around the quiet assurance of those shut doors.
He put the key in his pocket.
The lamp hissed again, and Sully crossed the room to turn it down. In the lower light, the photographs of Celestine Vargas, the snapshots he had slid across the bar to Maren Halloway, glowed faintly where they sat inside the folder she had taken with her. He had only glanced at them when he took them out, just long enough to confirm that they were where he had hidden them, and that they were the ones he meant. He did not need to study them. He knew what was in them. He knew because he had been the one to take them, in a life he had tried very hard to leave behind, in a town he had tried very hard to forget.
He sat back down in the booth by the window.
For a long while, he did not move. He listened to the wind. He listened to the way the old building ticked and settled. He listened to the particular silence that gathered in a room after someone had been in it and was no longer, a silence that carried the shape of the person who had left, the way a glass carries the shape of water after the water is gone.
Maren Halloway had carried herself into his bar the way Delia Halloway-Thorne used to, and the way Ira Sandoval used to, and the way Wren Halliday used to, and Sully had felt something in his chest that he had not felt in a long time. Not a softening. More like a recognition. The town kept producing them, these women with questions in their eyes and the particular stubbornness of people who had been told no by someone who should have said yes. He had loved three of them in his life, and he had lost all three, and he had tried to make that mean nothing, and it had not worked.
He took the key out of his pocket and looked at it.
The Hollow had a drive-in theater once, on the far side of the old quarry road, past the place where the asphalt turned to gravel and the gravel turned to mud. The Starlight, it had been called, a name that had been somebody's idea of poetry in 1957 and had stayed painted on the marquee long after the projectors rusted and the speakers came down and the field behind the screen grew up in sumac and alder. Sully had bought the property in 1994, the year after he came back to town, and he had not told a soul why. He had let the weeds grow. He had let the screen lean. He had let the town forget it was his, or never know in the first place.
He went into the back room and unlocked the cabinet that he had not opened in seven years.
Inside, stacked neatly in a wooden crate lined with oilcloth, were the things he had taken from the things he had cleaned. Photographs, mostly. Documents. A few items of clothing that had belonged to people he had been hired to make disappear, or to find, depending on the year and the client. He had kept them because he could not bring himself to destroy them, and he could not bring himself to let them go. They were the residue of a life he had tried to outrun, and they were the only proof that the life had happened at all.
He lifted out a manila envelope, thick with prints, and carried it back out to the bar.
He did not open it yet. He set it on the counter and sat down across from it, the way Maren Halloway had sat, and he let his hands rest on either side of it, the way a man rests his hands on either side of a coffin.
At half past eight, he got up, turned off the lamps, and put on his coat.
The drive to the old Starlight took eleven minutes if he did not hurry, and he did not hurry. The roads were still glazed where the town trucks had salted, and where the salt had not reached, the black ice lurked in the ruts and the shadowed curves, waiting. Sully drove the truck he had driven since 1998, a green F-150 with a slipping clutch and a heater that worked only when the engine was warm, which was never on the nights he needed it most. He kept the windows cracked. The cold came in and met the cold that was already inside the cab, and the two colds settled together like old companions.
The quarry road was worse than he remembered. He had not been out here in three years, maybe four. The ruts had deepened. A birch had come down across the lane in the last storm, and he had to back up and swing wide into the brush to get around it, the truck lurching in the soft ground, the tires grabbing at roots and frozen clods. He did not curse. He had not cursed at a road in twenty years, not since the last time he had driven a road like this one with someone in the passenger seat who had asked him to please be careful, and he had not been careful, and he had not lost them, but he had come close enough to remember.
The screen appeared first, a pale rectangle against the darker trees. Then the marquee, its paint all but gone, the letters visible only as a faint ghosting of color on the plywood. Then the field, white and still, with the speaker posts still standing in their crooked rows, the cones long since stripped for scrap or weather, leaving only the iron standards, each one a small black vertical in the snow, like a row of headstones for an audience that had never come back.
Sully parked behind the projection booth, a low cinderblock building that had been somebody's idea of practical in 1957 and had held up better than the rest of the place. He killed the engine. The silence rushed in, enormous and close.
He got out, and the cold hit him across the face like a hand.
The booth door groaned when he opened it, the hinges protesting in a way that sounded almost human. Inside, the air was thick and tasted of dust and machine oil, and Sully pulled the string for the single bulb that hung from the ceiling, and the bulb came on, orange and weak. The projector stood on its metal stand in the middle of the floor, a Revere dual-format unit, the kind that took either 8mm or 16mm film, and it had been Sully's for thirty-one years. He had bought it from a man in Montpelier who had been selling off the estate of a cousin who had traveled in the fifties and sixties and had shot everything. Sully had paid four hundred dollars for it, in cash, and he had not had that much cash on him, and the man in Montpelier had not cared.
He set the manila envelope on the workbench and opened it.
The photographs were 4x6 color prints, developed from negatives he had kept in a separate envelope inside the same crate. There were forty-three of them, taken over the course of four months in the winter of 1994 and the spring of 1995, when Celestine Vargas had been twenty-three and working three jobs and sleeping in the studio apartment above the laundromat on Mill Street, and when Sully had been newly returned to town and trying very hard to be a different man than the one he had been. The photographs were of her, mostly. Some were of her and other people. Some were of her alone. All of them were stolen, in the sense that he had taken them without her knowledge, from a distance, with a long lens that he had since sold, and all of them were the only evidence in the world that she had been alive and in this town in that last year before she had not been.
Sully did not look at them for long. He had seen them enough. He had studied them in his workshop, alone, in the years when he could not sleep and could not stop, and he had come to know the way she wore her hair in those months, the coat she had favored, the way she stood with one foot turned in when she was listening to someone she did not entirely trust. He had come to know these things the way a man comes to know a house he has watched from across a street for years, without ever stepping inside.
He loaded the first reel onto the projector and threaded it, his hands steady, his breath slow.
Then he went to the back of the booth and lifted the canvas cover from the old arc lamp that he had rigged to throw light through a slide carrier, an arrangement of his own invention, cobbled from parts he had bought at the hardware store and the junkyard. The lamp hummed when he switched it on, a low and almost musical sound, and a single hard beam of white light lanced out through the open window of the booth and struck the screen, and the screen woke up, enormous and pale, sixty feet across and thirty feet high, a surface for the dead and the living to share.
He did not start the projector yet. He went back to the car and sat in the cab for a few minutes, with the engine off, listening to the cooling of the metal. Then he started the engine and turned the heater up, and he sat there, waiting.
At quarter to ten, he saw headlights on the quarry road.
They came in slow, the way headlights come in when a driver is not sure of the road. They swung wide around the birch, the way Sully had swung, and then straightened, and then turned off the access track, and then a car pulled up beside the booth and stopped, and the engine died, and the headlights died, and the dark came back.
A door opened. A door closed. Footsteps in the snow, careful and quick.
Maren Halloway came around the front of the booth, and Sully saw her face in the spill of the bulb through the window, and he thought, again, that she looked like her mother, and her aunt, and the girl who had worked at the library in the summers, and he thought, again, that the town kept producing them.
She had not come alone. There was a second figure behind her, a woman, slight and quick, and Sully's chest tightened, because he had told Maren to come alone, and he had meant it, and now he saw the second figure step forward into the light and lift a hand, and he saw who it was, and he understood, and he was not sure whether to be angry or relieved or something in between that he had no name for.
Celestine Vargas stood in the snow in her parka with the fur trim, and she looked up at the screen, and she looked at Sully, and she did not say a word.
Maren climbed the two steps to the booth door and held it open. The three of them stood in the dust and the oil-smell, and the projector waited on its stand like a patient animal, and the beam of the arc lamp held the screen steady and waiting, and Sully looked at Maren, and Maren looked at Sully, and Celestine Vargas looked at the screen, as if she could already see what was going to be on it, as if she had always known.
Sully closed the door behind them and turned the deadbolt, and the sound of it was louder than it should have been, because the room was small and the three of them were very close together and the snow outside had stopped making sound of its own and was only the sound of what moved through it.
He took a breath. He let it out. He looked at Maren, and then he looked at Celestine Vargas, and then he looked back at Maren.
"Sit," he said. "Both of you. Over there."
He pointed to the two folding chairs against the far wall, the ones he used when he had to do the books, the ones that smelled of old canvas and lamp oil. There was a small table between them with a lamp on it, and the lamp was off, and the only light in the room was the projector beam and the spill of the bulb through the window.
Maren sat. Celestine Vargas sat. Their knees were close together, and neither of them looked at the other, and both of them looked at Sully.
He did not sit. He stood with his back to the projector, and his shadow fell across the screen, and the bulb behind him hummed.
"You told me to come alone," Maren said.
"I did," Sully said.
"You didn't say why."
"I didn't," Sully said. "I thought you'd come alone. I thought you'd listen."
"I did listen," Maren said. "I listened for a long time. I listened to the snow. I listened to the way you said her name. I decided."
Sully looked at Celestine Vargas. She had not moved. Her hands were in her lap, and her gloves were off, and her fingers were pale against the dark fabric of her coat.
"You," Sully said. "I told her not to bring anyone. I told her to come alone. I told her it was safer."
"I know what you told her," Celestine Vargas said. Her voice was steady, and it had that warmth in it that had always unsettled him, that warmth that sounded like it came from a place he had never been allowed into. "She told me. She told me on the phone, while you were waiting in the booth. She told me what you said, and she told me what you didn't say, and I came anyway."
"She shouldn't have called you."
"She had to call someone," Celestine Vargas said. "She couldn't call her aunt. She couldn't call the police. She couldn't call the man who runs the paper, because that man would have come himself, and that man would have brought his camera, and that man would have put it on the front page by morning."
Sully looked at Maren. Maren did not look away.
"I didn't want her here," Sully said.
"I know," Maren said. "But she's here. And you're going to tell us both. Or you're going to tell me, and she's going to hear it. Or you're going to tell her, and I'm going to hear it. The math is the same, Sully. The math has been the same since I walked in."
He stood very still for a long moment. The projector hummed behind him, and the bulb hummed through the window, and the snow outside made no sound at all.
"All right," he said. "All right."
He turned around and looked at the projector. He put his hand on the housing. The metal was warm.
"I didn't do it," he said. "The thing you think I might have done. The thing you drove out here at midnight to ask me about. I didn't do it."
"What thing?" Celestine Vargas said.
Sully did not turn around. He kept his hand on the projector.
"Three days ago," he said. "Three days ago, I got a call. A man. He didn't give his name. He said he was calling on behalf of someone, and he didn't say who. He said there was a job, and he said I was the one to do it, and he said it had to be done by morning."
"Done what?" Maren said.
"Clean," Sully said. "The library. Specifically. The records room. Specifically. He said there had been a woman in there, an older woman, and he said she had touched things, and he said she had left her hands on things, and he said the hands had to come off."
He let go of the projector. He turned around. Maren's face had gone very still, and Celestine Vargas's face had gone very still, and neither of them spoke.
"He offered money," Sully said. "A lot of money. More money than I have seen in a long time. More money than I needed. He said it was a clean job, and he said it was a quiet job, and he said I was the one to do it because I knew the building, because I had known the woman, because I knew the town."
"Why you?" Maren said.
"Because I was already on a list," Sully said. "He said that. He said my name was on a list, and that the list had been made a long time ago, and that the list had my number on it because I had done other work, years ago, before I bought the place, before I became what I am now. He said I had a reputation. He said the reputation was why he was calling."
"And you said no," Maren said.
"I said no," Sully said.
"Why?"
Sully looked at her. He looked at her the way he had looked at her mother, once, in this same booth, when she had asked him something he did not want to answer.
"Because," he said, "when I got there, the job was already done."
Celestine Vargas drew in a breath. Maren did not move.
"I drove out to the library anyway," Sully said. "I drove out because I didn't believe him, or because I did believe him, or because I needed to see. I parked in the back. I used my key. I went in. The records room was dark. I didn't turn on the light. I stood in the doorway, and I listened, and I could hear the boiler in the basement, and I could hear the wind in the chimney, and I could hear my own breath."
He stopped. He put his hand on the back of the other folding chair, the one no one was sitting in, and he held it, and the metal was cold.
"He wasn't lying," Sully said. "Someone had been in there. But they hadn't cleaned. They had done the opposite. They had gone through the drawers, and they had gone through the files, and they had taken some things out, and they had put other things in. They had been careful. They had been very careful. But they had made one mistake."
"What mistake?" Maren said.
"They left a glove," Sully said. "A single glove, on the floor, by the desk. A leather glove. A woman's glove. A glove that fit, when I picked it up, like it had been worn by someone who knew what they were doing. Someone who had worn gloves before. Someone who had worn gloves in a place like this."
He paused.
"I put it in my pocket," Sully said. "I left the way I came. I drove home. I locked the door. I sat at the bar. I poured myself a drink. I didn't drink it. I sat with it until morning. And then I called you."
"Because?" Maren said.
"Because the man who hired me," Sully said, "told me that the woman who had been in the records room had left her hands on things. Her hands. Her prints. He said the prints had to come off. He said it was a job for a cleaner, and he said I was the cleaner, and he said it had to be done by morning. And I went out there, and the prints were not cleaned. The prints were preserved. Someone had been in there with the express purpose of making sure those prints stayed on every surface that woman had touched. And the only reason to preserve prints instead of cleaning them is if you already know whose prints they are, and you want confirmation, but you don't want them traced back to you."
He looked at Maren.
"You understand what that means," he said.
"Yes," Maren said. Her voice was low, and it was steady, and it did not waver.
"It means," Sully said, "that the person who hired me knows whose hands were on those files. It means they wanted Celestine to know that they knew. It means they wanted Celestine to go back, and to find the records undisturbed, and to see that her own prints were the ones preserved. It means they were not cleaning. They were confirming. They were sending a message. They were sending it to the only person in this town who would know to look."
Celestine Vargas had not moved. Her hands were still in her lap. Her face was pale, and her eyes were bright, and she was looking at Sully with an expression he could not read.
"Who was the man?" she said. "The one who called you."
"I don't know," Sully said.
"What did he sound like?"
"Like nothing," Sully said. "He sounded like a voice on a phone. He sounded like someone who had practiced sounding like nothing. He did not give a name. He did not give a number. He did not say where he was calling from. He said what he had to say, and he hung up, and when I tried to call back, the line was dead."
"And the glove?" Maren said.
Sully reached into his coat. He took out a small paper bag, the kind he used for the takeout he never sold, and he set it on the table between the two women, and he did not open it.
"The glove is in there," he said. "I have not touched it since. I have not shown it to anyone. I have not asked anyone to identify it. I have been waiting for the right person to show up, and I have been waiting for a long time, and I have been waiting alone, and I am tired of waiting alone."
Maren looked at the bag. Celestine Vargas looked at the bag.
"I should have called the police," Sully said. "I know that. A man in my position, with a record like mine, with a glove like that in a bag in my pocket, I should have driven to the barracks, and I should have walked in, and I should have put it on the desk, and I should have told them everything. But I didn't. Because the man who called me knew my name, and the man who called me knew my number, and the man who called me knew what I had done before I bought this place. And if I went to the police, the man who called me would have known that too. And the man who called me is the same man who had the prints preserved instead of cleaned. And that man is not someone who likes to be disappointed."
He paused.
"I don't know what any of this means," he said. "I don't know who hired me. I don't know who was in the records room. I don't know who left the glove. I don't know what Celestine found that was worth preserving. I don't know who the woman was who left the prints. But I know that I was called to clean a thing that was supposed to be cleaned, and instead someone made sure it was preserved. And I know that the man who called me knew my name. And I know that you, Maren, came out here tonight because you knew I was the one to ask. And I know that you, Celestine, came with her because you knew I would not tell her alone. And I know that the three of us are standing in this booth, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a snowstorm, in the middle of a town that has been holding its breath for longer than any of us have been alive."
He stopped. He looked at the projector. He looked at the screen. He looked at the two women.
"So," he said. "What do we do now?"