The Hollow Meridian: The Bar Where Nobody Orders

The door to The Dredge was heavier than it had any right to be, and Margot Kline felt the weight of it in her shoulder as she pushed through into the dim interior of Cal Brennan's bar. Seven o'clock on a Tuesday in Hollow Meridian, and the place smelled the way it always had: floor soap that had been mopped over the same pine boards for thirty years, a faint staleness from the brass foot rail, and underneath it all, something almost sweet, like the ghost of a cigarette smoked decades ago and never quite exorcised. She paused on the threshold to let her eyes adjust and felt, rather than saw, the regulars at the bar shift their weight a half inch farther down the rail, opening a pocket of empty air beside them like a stone dropped into still water.

Nobody looked up. That was how it worked in The Dredge. You did not stare at Margot Kline. You did not ask where she had been, or why she had come back, or what she had been writing in the small back office of the Historical Society that made certain members of the town council go quiet when she walked into a meeting. You simply made room, the way you made room for weather.

Cal Brennan was behind the counter. He had been behind the counter for as long as she could remember, in one form or another, since he was twenty-two and learning the place from his uncle, since she was seventeen and had sat on the same stool in a sundress and lied about her age to get a ginger ale. Tonight he wore his work boots, the brown leather ones with the steel caps, and a flannel shirt the color of wet bark, and there was a glass of water in front of him that he had not touched. He was watching the door. Not her. The door. The way a man watches a road he cannot leave, in case something finally comes down it that he has been waiting for, or dreading, for a very long time.

He set down the bar towel when he saw her. His hands were still.

"Margot."

"Cal."

That was all. Two names, the same two names they had traded across this counter for twenty years, in different orders, in different seasons, in different lives. He did not come around the bar to hug her. She did not go to the rail to order. She simply walked to the small table near the front window, the one with the wobble in the back left leg that nobody had ever fixed, and she sat, and she laid her canvas satchel on the floor beside her boot, and she unzipped it halfway and took out the small notebook she had carried since college, the one with the elastic band around it that had lost most of its elasticity.

Cal brought her a gin and tonic without asking. He set it on the table without ceremony. The glass was cold and beaded on the outside and the lime wedge had already started to weep. He did not linger. He went back behind the counter and picked up the towel again, and resumed the quiet, performative labor of wiping down a surface that was already clean, the way men in small towns have always done when they want to be near a person without having to talk to them.

The regulars were the usual four, the same as last week. Ed Voss at the far end, hunched over his schooner, watching nothing. Marcy Holt, who had been a senior when Margot was a freshman, reading a paperback with the cover torn off. Two younger men whose names Margot had never bothered to learn, sitting close enough to share a basket of pretzels but far enough apart to make clear they were not, technically, together. They all gave her the space. Ed Voss did not even glance over. Marcy's eyes flicked up, registered, and returned to her book with the precise disinterest of a woman who had once been married to a man who had once been married to someone Margot was investigating.

Margot took a sip of the drink. The gin was sharp and clear and she had not realized how thirsty she was. The lime was a small, sour mercy.

Then she heard the voice from the back booth.

It came low and clipped, in that particular cadence Margot had spent three weeks now learning to parse, a French-Canadian inflection that turned certain English vowels into something almost ecclesiastical. Simone Duval was on the phone. Simone Duval was always on the phone, or appeared to be. She had arrived in Hollow Meridian eight days ago with a rented car and a single suitcase and a handshake that had been exactly the right pressure and not a millimeter more, and since then she had been a fixture at the back booth of The Dredge in the early evenings, ordering club sodas with lime, talking to people in three different languages, never quite saying what she was doing here even when she was asked, and especially when she was asked.

Margot did not turn around. She turned a page in her notebook, although the page was blank. She uncapped her pen with her left hand and held it poised over the paper the way she had learned to do in graduate school, the way that made you look busy enough to be left alone and bored enough to be unremarkable.

Simone's voice dropped lower. Then rose, on a single word. Then dropped again.

Margot wrote nothing. She let the words wash over her the way you let a tide come in, not fighting it, not chasing it, just letting it lay its salt against whatever shore was closest.

"Not yet," Simone said, "but she's circling the nest."

The sentence arrived whole and stayed in the air a half second longer than language usually did. Then Simone laughed, a small, private sound, and said something in rapid French that Margot could not catch, and the call ended with the soft plastic click of a phone being set face-down on a table.

Margot did not turn. She wrote a single word in her notebook, in her own shorthand, and underlined it twice. Nest. She did not yet know what it meant. She suspected it meant several things at once, which was usually the case with Simone Duval.

The bar breathed. Cal's towel made its slow round across the wood. Somewhere in the back, behind the partition that separated the public room from the kitchen, a glass clinked into a rack and a faucet coughed twice and went quiet. Marcy Holt turned a page. The two younger men did not move at all, as if they had been paused by some unseen hand.

Margot lifted her glass. The ice had settled into a smaller, tighter configuration. She took a second sip and let the cold of it sit on the back of her tongue while she watched the street through the front window. The street was empty in the way that Hollow Meridian's streets were always empty at this hour: not abandoned, just held, the way a breath is held before a note is sung. The lamp at the corner threw a long, yellow rectangle across the asphalt. A single moth batted itself against the glass of the hardware store across the way. Somewhere, very far off, a dog barked twice and stopped, as if corrected.

She had been back in Hollow Meridian for forty-one days. She had been trying, for forty-one days, to find the seam. There was a seam. There was always a seam in a town like this, a place where the official history and the lived one had been stitched together just slightly off, where the thread showed if you knew how to look. She had found it first in the drainage records at the Historical Society, then in the plat maps from 1881, then in the absences in the census rolls from the founding through the second generation. She had found it in her own mother's face, the third time she had asked Ruth about the name on the original land deed and Ruth had looked away toward the kitchen window as if she had heard something out there that Margot could not.

The seam was there. She could feel it, the way you feel a tooth that has not yet begun to ache but will, soon, and you cannot quite remember which one it is.

Footsteps behind her. Soft-soled shoes on the pine floor, the kind that made almost no sound at all, which was how you knew Simone Duval was approaching and not Cal, because Cal's boots announced him whether he wanted them to or not.

"Margot."

Simone's voice was cool and close and amused in the particular way of a woman who had decided, before entering a conversation, exactly how much of it she intended to give away.

Margot did not startle. She closed the notebook, kept the pen in her hand, and turned on the stool so that her back was to the window and her knees were almost, but not quite, touching Simone's. Simone stood with one hand on the back of the empty chair opposite, the other hand holding her club soda at the exact angle that meant she was not going to sit down yet, that she was still deciding.

"Your mother called me," Simone said. "She is very worried about you."

"My mother," Margot said, "is very worried about herself, and she has decided that those are the same thing. It's a family tradition."

Simone did not smile. But something moved at the corner of her mouth, an acknowledgment of a shared grammar if not a shared allegiance. She set the club soda down on the table, carefully, on a coaster she had brought with her in her other hand, a small brown felt thing embroidered with a monogram Margot could not quite make out in the low light.

"I have the first packet ready," Simone said. "The parish records from the north shore. They are not what we thought they would be."

"What are they?"

"They are older." Simone paused. "And they are in two different hands."

Margot looked at her. Simone looked back. The regulars at the bar had not moved. The moth outside had given up on the hardware store and gone somewhere else. The lamp at the corner threw its long yellow light, and the street held its breath, and somewhere in the back of Margot's mind a door she had been keeping shut for twenty years shifted, just slightly, in its frame.

Margot sat with the weight of what Simone had not yet said. The two different hands in the parish records. Older than expected. She turned the pen over in her fingers, watching the streetlight press its long yellow rectangle across the bar's wood floor, and thought about her mother and whether worry was ever, in the Kline family, really about the person it claimed to be about.

The door opened behind her, and the bell above it gave its small, brassy complaint. Cal Brennan came in the way he always came into rooms, as if he had been there already in some other version of the evening and was only now walking into his own arrival. His jacket was the canvas one with the salt stain on the cuff he had been meaning to treat since October. His hair was darker than she remembered from the reunion, which meant he had finally stopped letting the sun at it, or he had been wearing a hat. Both were possible. Both were very him.

He nodded at the bartender without speaking. The bartender, who had known Cal since Cal was a boy who broke his collarbone falling out of the pear tree behind the rectory, set a glass on the bar without being asked and began to pour. Cal hooked the stool leg with the toe of his boot and swung it out and sat. He did not, for a long moment, look toward the back corner where Margot and Simone were sitting.

Margot watched Simone watch Cal. Simone's face did not change, but her hand moved the coaster a quarter inch clockwise, which Margot had learned, over the past two weeks of working with her, was the genealogist's equivalent of an open ledger.

"He's with you," Simone said, very quietly.

"He was, once."

"That is not what I asked."

Cal lifted the glass when it came, and drank, and set it down, and finally turned on the stool until he was half-facing them. The light from the window caught him along the jaw. He looked older than he had any right to look at thirty-eight. He looked, Margot thought, like a man who had been keeping something in a drawer for a long time and had only just now realized the drawer was not going to hold.

"Margot," he said.

"Cal."

"You going to introduce me to your friend, or am I supposed to guess?"

"Manners," Margot said. "Simone Duval. Simone, Cal Brennan. Cal knows every beam and joist in this town. Cal is also the reason the reservoir road is still closed."

"Reason is a strong word," Cal said. "I called the town. They sent a guy. The guy took one look and called the state."

"Called the state about what?" Simone asked, in the tone of a woman who already had a clipboard in her mind.

Cal glanced at Margot. Margot gave him the smallest possible nod.

"Voss," he said.

The name landed on the table like something wet. Margot did not look away from him. Simone's pen, which she had produced from somewhere inside her jacket without seeming to reach for it, did not move.

"The reservoir," Cal said. He drank again. "What they pulled out last Wednesday."

"They told us it was a deer," Margot said.

"That's what they told the people they wanted to tell it to."

Simone said nothing. Her stillness had the quality of a held breath that had been held for a long time and was no longer costing her anything.

Cal turned the glass on the bar top. The sound of its base against the wood was a small, slow, turning thing.

"I was up there Tuesday," he said. "Tuesday last. The conservation crew had me in to look at the boathouse. The original decking is still on the north side, which is a miracle, and they want to salvage it before they redo the whole thing. I had my tape measure out and my notebook and I was down at the waterline, and I saw something I did not like at the bottom."

"By the south bank," Margot said.

"How did you know that."

"Because that's where the silt is deepest. Because that's where the current loses its nerve."

He looked at her for a long moment. Something in his face rearranged itself into the expression of a man who had forgotten, for twenty years, that this was the kind of thing she knew, and who was remembering now.

"They brought the dive team up from the county," he said. "Wednesday morning. I went back because I wanted to see how they were going to handle the decking without disturbing the floor of the lake. I brought coffee. Bad coffee, from the machine at the gas station. The diver came up and he did not want the coffee. He stood on the bank with his mask pushed up on his forehead and he did not say a word for about four minutes."

"What did he say after four minutes," Simone asked.

"He said he had been diving for nineteen years and he had never in his life seen anything wrapped that tight. Factory tight, he said. Like they sealed a shipment."

Margot set her pen down on the table, slowly, so that it would not make a sound.

"Polyethylene," Cal said. "The black construction grade. The kind you use to wrap a foundation before you pour. Three layers, maybe four. And then over that, contractor's tape, the silver kind, wound in a spiral around the whole thing like a sausage. And then over that, baling wire. The wire was the part that made him sick. He said he had pulled bodies out of rivers before. He said the wire was the part that was new to him."

"How long," Margot said. Her voice sounded to her like someone else's voice, someone who had been asked this question in a room like this many times.

"Months," Cal said. "The state forensic estimate, which I got from a guy I know who got it from a guy he knows, because nobody is putting that estimate in writing, was somewhere between four and seven. They cannot be more specific because the cold down there is not consistent. There are springs under the reservoir. The water temperature varies. The body was suspended in the silt, not lying on the bottom. That is why the wrapping was intact. That is why he looked the way he looked."

"The way he looked," Simone said.

Cal put his glass down. He did not pick it up again for a long moment.

"He was facing the water," Cal said. "Out toward the middle of the reservoir. Arms spread. Like a crucifix, except that is not the word for it, because nobody put him there on purpose. The diver said it looked like he had been trying to push something away. Or like he had been trying to swim. Or like he had been trying to hold the water back from coming in. The diver said he could not stop thinking about it, and I could tell that was true because his hands were shaking when he took the coffee, and he did not drink it, he just held it."

Margot looked down at her own hands on the table. The pen lay where she had set it. The notebook was open to a page that had, until Cal started talking, contained only a single line: Parish records - two hands - Simone to confirm .

"Cal," she said. "Did you know him."

"Everybody knew Voss," Cal said. "He was the kind of man who was hard to know and impossible not to notice. He drank at the bar on Fridays. He fed the stray cats behind the post office. He argued with the selectmen about zoning until they stopped coming to meetings. He was not a man who made friends easily. He was a man who made enemies carefully and kept them."

"Did he have any enemies that you knew of specifically."

"I am not the person you want to ask that question," Cal said. "I am the person who wants to ask you why you are asking it."

"Because his name was on a list."

Cal looked at her.

"What list."

"A list of names from 1919," Margot said. "A list of names that were supposed to have left Hollow Meridian and did not. A list of names that the parish record-keeper crossed out, one by one, between March and November of that year. A list that includes a man named Henry Marsh, who is the man my great-grandmother married six months after her first husband drowned in the reservoir. Which is not the same reservoir. Which is the reservoir that used to be the millpond, before they dammed the north branch."

Simone had gone very still. The pen in her hand had stopped moving, which was, Margot had noticed, the genealogist's equivalent of a shout.

"Henry Marsh," Simone said. "You are sure of the spelling."

"M-A-R-S-H," Margot said. "Same as the road. Same as the farm that is not there anymore."

"The farm that burned," Cal said, very quietly.

"Yes."

"The farm that burned in 1923, the summer my grandfather was seven years old. He used to talk about it. He said the smoke went up for three days. He said you could taste it in the milk."

Margot nodded. She did not trust herself to speak for a moment, because what she wanted to say was my mother told me that story when I was nine, and she told it the way you tell a story you are proud of, and I have not known what to do with that for twenty years.

"Simone," she said instead. "Do you have that packet with you."

"I do," Simone said. She reached into the bag at her feet without looking at it, and brought out a brown envelope with a string tie, and set it on the table between them.

"Do not open it here," Cal said.

"Cal."

"I am serious, Margot. There are people in this town who would not like what is in that envelope. There are people in this town who have spent a long time making sure that what is in that envelope is not anywhere. If you open it here, in this bar, in this light, on this street, you will be taking something home with you tonight that you cannot put back."

Margot looked at the envelope. She looked at Cal. She looked at Simone, who was watching Cal with the expression of a woman recalculating a column of figures she had thought she had already finished.

"We are not opening it here," Margot said. "We are opening it at my mother's house."

Simone raised one eyebrow, fractionally.

"Your mother," she said.

"My mother," Margot said. "She is the one who is going to have to answer for whatever is in it. I would like for her to be in the room when I find out what that is."

Cal set his glass down. He reached across the table, slowly, and put one roughened carpenter's hand over the envelope, and then pulled it back toward his side of the table, and then, after a moment, pushed it back toward the middle.

"I will drive," he said.

"You will not drive," Margot said.

"Margot."

"You have had two beers, Cal."

"I have had one and a half."

"You will still not drive."

"Then Simone will drive."

"I do not have a car," Simone said. "I have a rental, and it is at the motel, and the key is in my other jacket, which is at the motel."

"Then we are walking," Cal said.

"It is eleven o'clock," Margot said.

"Then we are walking at eleven o'clock. It is a fifteen-minute walk. I have done it in snow. Your mother will still be awake. Your mother is always awake."

Margot looked at the envelope on the table. The string tie on the envelope had a knot in it that her mother used to tie in the kitchen of the house on Kline Road, the knot she tied at the top of the bread bag, the knot Margot had never seen anyone else tie and that she herself could not replicate, even now, with her hands steady.

Simone finished her club soda. The bartender wiped a glass and did not look at them. The moth was gone from the window. The street outside was holding its breath again, the way streets do when they are about to be told something they have known for a long time and have been waiting, patiently, to be asked.

"Finish your beer," Margot said to Cal. "Then we walk."

Cal lifted the glass. He looked at her over the rim.

"I never left," he said, to no one in particular, and to her, and to himself.

"I know," she said. "That was always the problem."

The door opened at ten o'clock exactly. Not a minute before, not a minute after. The bell above the frame gave its single, indifferent chime, and the cold that came in with the figure smelled of pine resin and old wool and something sharper, like the inside of a filing cabinet left shut too long.

Dr. Alan Petrov stood in the doorway for a moment, blinking against the low amber of the bar. He wore a charcoal overcoat buttoned to the throat despite the warmth of the room, and his hands were buried in his pockets, and his face was the face of a man who had walked past this establishment a thousand times and never once gone in. He went in now as if he had been pushed.

Cal, who had been lifting his glass, set it down without drinking. Simone straightened on her stool by a fraction. Margot did not move at all. She watched the old man cross the floor with the careful, deliberate steps of someone who had once been taller than he now was, and she felt something tighten at the base of her skull, the way a string tightens before it is plucked.

"Doctor," she said.

He did not answer immediately. He reached the bar and stood at it the way one stands at a lectern, as if delivering a paper. The bartender, who had been wiping the same glass for some time, set it down and waited.

"Coffee," Dr. Petrov said. "Black. Two of them."

The bartender looked at Margot.

"She will have one," Dr. Petrov said, without turning. "If she is willing to accept a coffee from a man of my reputation, which I am told is poor."

Margot glanced at Cal. Cal raised an eyebrow. Simone was watching the old man with the particular stillness of someone cataloguing a specimen.

"I'll have the coffee," Margot said.

Dr. Petrov turned then. He looked at her, and for a moment the coldness of his expression softened into something more difficult to read, something almost like pity, or perhaps like the look of a man who has been waiting a long time for a door to open and is now surprised that it has.

"You are here late," he said.

"I am here when I am here," Margot said. "What are you doing here, Alan? This isn't your kind of place."

"It is no one's kind of place," he said. "That is precisely why I chose it. I did not wish to be overheard, and I did not wish to be in a place where my appearance would occasion comment. Here, my appearance will occasion comment, but the comment will be inaccurate, which is almost as good as silence."

The bartender set two cups on the counter. The coffee came in thick white porcelain, and steam rose from it in a thin, steady column. Dr. Petrov picked up both cups, carried them to the table, and set one down in front of Margot with the formality of a man presenting evidence.

"Sit," he said. "Please. I will not keep you long."

Margot sat. Cal and Simone did not, exactly. Cal remained on his stool but turned so that he could see the old man, and Simone lifted her club soda and held it in both hands, the way one holds a thing that is cold and useful.

Dr. Petrov lowered himself into the chair opposite Margot. The motion was stiff, the motion of a man whose knees had opinions about his choices. He did not touch his coffee. He looked at her over the rim of hers, and his eyes were very pale, and very tired.

"You have been asking questions," he said. "About your mother. About the town. About a number of matters that have been, for a long time, allowed to sleep."

"People have been asking questions for a long time, Alan. I am only one of them."

"You are the one who came back," he said. "That is different. That is, in fact, the only thing that is different."

He paused. He straightened the handle of his cup so that it pointed precisely toward the window.

"Are you doing research," he asked, "for the state?"

The question landed on the table between them like a coin dropped from a height. Margot felt Cal shift on his stool. She kept her face still.

"What state would that be?" she said.

"The state in which we find ourselves," Dr. Petrov said. "The state of inquiry. The state of affairs. I am using the word in its older sense. You are familiar with older senses. You took my seminar."

"I took your seminar ten years ago, Alan."

"Eight."

"Eight, then."

He inclined his head. He picked up his coffee and then set it down again without drinking.

"I have come to tell you something," he said, "that I have not told anyone. I am telling you because you are Ruth's daughter, and because I am old, and because I would prefer that you hear it from me than from someone who would tell it worse. I am telling you also because I have a feeling, which I do not enjoy, that you are going to find it out anyway, and I would like to control, insofar as I can, the shape of the finding."

Margot said nothing. Her hands were around the cup, and the warmth of it was the only warmth in her body.

"Your mother," Dr. Petrov said, "was my patient."

The words came out too quickly. They came out the way a man reads a passage he has read before, a passage whose meaning he no longer entirely believes but whose rhythm has been beaten into him by repetition. Stressed cardiovascular event, Ruth Kline, two years, monitored, declined rapidly, the body is a text, the text is finite, nothing more.

He said none of those things. What he said was:

"She was my patient for two years. Her final diagnosis, on the certificate, is recorded as a stressed cardiovascular event. That is what is written. That is what the file says. That is what I signed."

He stopped. He looked at his cup as if he had forgotten what it was.

"You signed it," Margot said.

"I signed it."

"You were her physician."

"I was her physician for the final two years of her life. Yes. She came to me in the autumn of the year you left. She did not tell you. She did not tell anyone. She came to me because I was, at that time, the only person in this town who knew something about the body that was not commonly known, and she needed someone who could be discreet. I was discreet. I have remained discreet. Until now."

"Why now?"

"Because you are here. Because you are asking. Because a man came to see me yesterday, a man I had not seen in many years, and he asked me whether I still had the file, and I told him that I did, and he told me that I should consider very carefully what I did with it, and he left. His name is not important. His interest in you is."

Margot's grip on the cup tightened. Cal set his glass down with a small, precise sound. Simone's eyes had not moved from Dr. Petrov's face.

"Alan," Margot said, "what was the diagnosis?"

"I have told you."

"You have told me the certificate. You have not told me the diagnosis."

Dr. Petrov was silent for a long moment. The bar was very quiet. The bartender had moved to the far end of the counter and was polishing something that did not need polishing.

"The diagnosis," he said, slowly, "is a matter of interpretation. I interpreted what I saw. What I saw was a woman under an extreme and sustained physiological stress, a stress of a kind that I had seen, in my career, in exactly one other place, and that place was not a clinic. I wrote what I wrote because what I wrote was, strictly, accurate. A stressed cardiovascular event. The heart, under stress, fails. The heart, under certain kinds of stress, fails in a particular way. I recorded what I recorded. I would record it again."

He pushed his chair back. He stood. He reached into his coat and produced a small leather folder, which he placed on the table beside the coffee.

"There is a letter in there," he said. "From your mother. Addressed to you. She gave it to me the week before she died. She asked me to give it to you if you ever came back. I have been carrying it for two years. I would like, very much, to stop carrying it."

Margot looked at the folder. She did not touch it.

"Why didn't you send it?" she said.

"Because I am a sentimental old man," he said, "and I wanted to give it to you myself. That is the truth. It is not a flattering truth. It is the truth."

He turned. He buttoned his coat. He walked back toward the door with the same careful steps, and the bell above the frame gave its single, indifferent chime again, and the cold came in and went out, and the door closed, and the street outside took him back.

He had not touched his coffee.

Margot sat very still. The cup in front of her was still warm. The leather folder sat on the table, and the string tie on the envelope inside, she could see, even from where she was, was tied in the knot her mother used to tie at the top of the bread bag in the kitchen of the house on Kline Road.

Cal looked at her. Simone looked at the folder. The bartender, at the far end of the counter, did not look at anything at all.

"Well," Simone said, after a while. "That is a man who has come to confess something."

"It is a man who has come to confess that he confessed nothing," Margot said.

She reached, at last, for the folder.