The photograph sat on the passenger seat of Maren Holloway's rental car like a passenger of its own, face-down against the worn upholstery. She had not looked at it again since the copy machine at the Blackfern County Library had spat it out, that thin strip of cyanide-laced paper carrying a ghost she had not invited. Outside, the two-lane road narrowed where the asphalt met the river, and the trees leaned in close enough to scrape the roof. Their branches were bare, January-black, and the sky behind them had the color of old dishwater.
Maren took the curve past the cannery at a speed that made the tires hiss against the wet. The cannery had been closed for almost thirty years, its windows papered over with plywood that had gone the same gray as the river rock beneath the waterline. She did not slow down to look. She had promised herself she would not slow down to look, not yet, not until she had what she had come for. The town waited on the other side of the bridge, its church spire the first thing to breach the tree line, white against the smear of cloud.
The Blackfern Valley Historical Society occupied a converted bank building on Mercer Street, its vault turned into a climate-controlled archive. The brass plaque by the door had been polished so often that the letters caught the weak daylight and threw it back. Maren parked across the street, killed the engine, and sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel, listening to the tick of the cooling block and the distant complaint of a train somewhere west of town. Then she picked up the photograph, slid it into the manila folder on the seat beside her, and went inside.
The bell above the door chimed twice. The interior smelled of paper and carpet cleaner, the particular chemical sweetness of institutions that had to fight a slow war against damp. Display cases lined the lobby, each one holding its own small museum of the hollow: a miner's lantern with a cracked lens, a wedding dress yellowed to the color of weak tea, a framed program from the 1962 Fall Festival with a paper ribbon still pinned to its corner. Behind a long counter at the back, a man in a tweed jacket looked up from a card catalog, and his face did something complicated when he saw her.
"Maren Holloway," he said. Not a question. The syllables landed flat, and yet the air between them seemed to contract.
"Hello, Simeon."
Simeon Quill set down the pencil he had been holding and came around the counter. He moved the way a man moves when he has spent most of his adult life in a room too small for his opinions, careful, precise, and with a kind of contained caution that read as either dignity or fear. He was older than she remembered, though she had not seen him in fourteen years, since the spring she had left. The lines around his mouth had deepened into something that looked like it had been carved with a tool meant for other work. He wore his reading glasses pushed up onto his forehead, and the lenses caught the overhead fluorescents and threw two small squares of light onto the wall behind him.
"I saw the car," he said. "I thought it might be you. Or the insurance adjuster. One of the two." He did not smile. The absence of the smile was a kind of honesty, she thought. "What brings you back to the vault?"
"I need to look at a photograph. Old one. I was hoping you could help me place the second man in it."
"Place him." Quill's mouth moved around the verb as if tasting it. "That is a careful way of putting it."
"I'm a careful person."
"You used to be a reckless one. Or so I was told." He gestured toward the door behind the counter. "Come through. Mind the step, the floor is uneven near the reading room. The building was a bank, and we have not had the budget to make it anything else."
The reading room had once been the loan officer's office. A heavy wooden desk dominated the center, and the original banker's lamp sat on it, green glass and brass, with a bulb that gave off a yellowish light. Quill pulled out a chair for her and then took the one opposite. He did not sit so much as arrange himself, hands folded on the desk, his back very straight.
"Show me what you have."
Maren opened the folder and slid the photograph across the desk. Quill did not touch it at first. He leaned forward and looked, the way a man looks at a thing he has been waiting to see and dreading in equal measure. The fluorescents hummed somewhere beyond the plaster, and the lamp threw their two shadows long across the wood.
"1998," he said, after a moment. "The town hall. Cornerstone ceremony. I was there. My wife made me go, because she wanted to see the mayor in his good suit." A pause. "She is gone now, seven years this March."
"I'm sorry, Simeon."
"Apology accepted. It does not bring her back, but it is the correct thing to say." He reached out and touched the edge of the photograph with one finger, as if he were afraid it might burn him. "The man on the left. I do not know him. He was a contractor, perhaps. Someone brought in from out of town. I did not make a study of him."
"And the other one."
Quill did not answer. His hand had gone still on the photograph, and his eyes had gone somewhere she could not follow. The silence in the room thickened, and the hum of the lights became briefly louder, or perhaps that was only her perception sharpening, the way a reporter's perception sharpens when the source is about to say something that will cost him.
"His name," Quill said finally, "was Halden Voss."
"Voss." Maren kept her voice even. "The architect."
"You have heard the name."
"In passing. In town. The way you hear a thing people are not supposed to say out loud."
"That is roughly the size of it." Quill leaned back in his chair. The wood creaked. "Voss was brought in to design the new town hall, and the public works project that went with it. The grid, the water lines, the new bridge approaches. He was here for the better part of a year. He lived in the rental on Sycamore, the one with the green shutters. He took his meals at the diner, paid his bills on time, and spoke to almost no one outside of his work." Quill's voice had taken on a clipped, almost professorial cadence, the rhythm of a man delivering a lecture he had been composing in his head for years. "And then one morning in November, he was gone. His things were still in the house. His drawings were still on the drafting table. The back door had been left open, and there was mud on the floor, and the police could not find him, and we have not found him since."
"Presumed dead."
"Presumed, yes. The county issued a death certificate in 2010, after my predecessor in this office had spent a decade assembling the paperwork. It was a quiet business, very official, very thorough. But the body was never recovered. The river kept what it took." Quill paused. "That is the phrase the old people use. The river kept what it took. You will hear it if you stay long enough to listen."
"I do not intend to stay that long."
"No," he said, and the word carried a weight that had nothing to do with her. "I did not think you did."
Maren looked at the photograph. The second man was tall, even in the company of the contractor beside him, and he had the kind of face that does not photograph well, all angles and deep-set eyes. He was not smiling, but he was not unsmiling either; he wore an expression that suggested he was listening to something only he could hear. The cuff of his coat was dark with rain, and the cornerstone behind him had not yet been sealed.
"What was he like?" she asked. "The people who knew him. What did they say?"
"They said very little. He was not the sort of man one made small talk with. He was courteous, and he was brilliant, and he kept to himself. He had a reputation in the wider world, I am told, for buildings that did not quite look like buildings. The firm he worked for was in Roanoke, but the projects he took on were scattered up and down the coast, and they all had a certain quality that the architecture journals either loved or despised." Quill reached up and adjusted his glasses on his forehead, though they did not need adjusting. "He was also, in the estimation of certain people on the town council, a problem. He kept changing the plans. He kept insisting on certain things that did not match the budget. He wanted to put something into the foundation of the town hall that nobody could quite describe, and the council told him no, and he told them yes, and by the time the cornerstone was laid, the argument had gone quiet, but it had not been settled."
"What did he want to put in the foundation?"
"I do not know. I was not on the council. I was a schoolteacher, and my concerns were the school budget and the heating bill and the fact that the kindergarten wing had a crack in the plaster that nobody would fix." Quill stood and went to one of the filing cabinets along the wall. He opened a drawer and began to leaf through a set of tabbed folders, each one labeled in his own precise hand. "I can show you what I have, but I should tell you that it is not much. Voss was careful. He kept few records, and the ones he did keep, he took with him when he went. Or someone took them. That is one of the questions the police were never able to answer."
He pulled a folder and brought it back to the desk. Inside was a single sheet of paper, brittle with age, covered in a fine architectural hand. The drawing was of a cross-section, the way a building looks if you slice it down the middle and look at the bones. Maren studied it, though she did not have the eye to read it fully. There were lines, and there were measurements, and there was a shape at the center of the foundation that did not match anything she recognized from the building she had grown up walking past.
"What is this?" she asked. "The shape."
"That is the question." Quill sat down again. "I have shown that drawing to three different architects, on the quiet, and not one of them could tell me what it was supposed to be. One of them said it looked like a pressure vessel. Another said it looked like a kind of lantern. The third said it looked like a small room with no door." He folded his hands. "Voss called it, in his notes, a keeper. That is all. A keeper. Whatever that means."
"May I take this?"
"You may look at it. You may not take it. Nothing leaves this building without the express written permission of the society, and I have not the authority to grant that on my own." He closed the folder but did not put it away. "If you want copies, I can make them for you, on the copier in the back, for a modest fee. I will even give you the receipt, so that you can put it on your expense account, if you have an expense account, and if your expense account will accept a receipt from the Blackfern Valley Historical Society, which I would not bet money on."
Maren almost smiled. Almost. "Who would have the authority, then?"
"The president of the society. That would be Della Roth. She is in town, as it happens. She comes in on Wednesdays to do the books. Tomorrow is Wednesday. If you come back in the morning, I will introduce you, and you can make your request to her in person, and she can say yes or no, and I will be out of it, which is where I prefer to be."
"Out of it."
"Out of anything that might involve the town, or the river, or the name Halden Voss. I have spent most of my adult life in this building, and I have made a practice of minding my own business, and I would like to continue that practice for as long as I am able."
The rain had started again outside, a thin, persistent sound against the high windows. The light in the room had not changed. The lamp still threw its yellow circle, and the fluorescents still hummed in the walls. Maren looked at the photograph on the desk between them, at the two men in their coats, and at the cornerstone that had not yet been sealed. She thought about the river, and she thought about the man who had walked away from his rented house in November and had never been seen again, and she thought about the shape in the foundation that nobody could name.
"Thank you, Simeon," she said.
"You are welcome, Maren." He stood, and this time the movement had a finality to it. "I will be here tomorrow morning, if you decide to come back. The door opens at nine. Della takes her coffee with two sugars, and she does not like to be kept waiting." He paused. "And Maren. Be careful. This town has a way of keeping what it takes, and it does not always give warning before it reaches out."
Maren pulled the collar of her jacket higher as she stepped off the library's front steps, and the rain found her at once, not heavy but patient, the kind that soaks through cloth in minutes and leaves the skin underneath clammy and uncertain. The street was empty. The few cars parked along the curb sat low in their pools of shadow, and the lamps at the intersections threw halos that the moisture thickened into milk. Somewhere a screen door closed, and then there was nothing but the rain and the soft complaint of her shoes on the pavement.
She did not go back to the inn.
She walked.
The town laid itself out around her in the geometry she had half-forgotten and half-feared she would never forget, a grid of streets that bent where the river bent, and houses that sat on their lots the way old dogs sit on rugs, with the patience of long possession. She passed the post office, its flag hanging limp. She passed the hardware store with its window display of rain gauges and work gloves, and the diner where the neon sign had burned out over the LETTER T so that the word read only DINER, missing its noun like a sentence missing its verb. She did not look in. She kept her eyes on the centerline of the road and let the water run down her temples and into the hollows of her collarbones.
Her hands were in her pockets. Her fingers found the edge of the folded paper she had carried out of the library, the page from the cornerstone box, and she let her thumb run over the crease the way one runs a thumb over a scar. The handwriting on it had been careful and small, and the ink had not feathered in the rain the way modern inks do, but had held its line as though the page had been waiting for her to find it. She had not yet decided what to do with it. She had not yet decided what it meant that Simeon Quill had given it to her at all, when he had given so little else.
The house she was looking for sat at the end of a cul-de-sac that did not appear on any map she had ever seen as a girl, though it appeared on the map in her memory as clearly as a scar on a familiar wrist. The street curved off Linden between two elms that had grown together at the crown and now formed a kind of arch, and beyond the arch the houses sat deeper back from the road, with longer drives and older trees, and fewer lights in the windows. The house she wanted was the second on the left. Its number had fallen off the post years ago, and the post itself leaned a little, and the brass cap on top had gone green and then black and then green again.
She stopped across the street and looked at it.
It was a narrow house, two stories, with a porch that ran the width of the front and a railing that had been painted white once and was now the color of old bone. The windows were dark. The lawn had been mowed recently, which surprised her, and there were new gutters along the roofline, which surprised her more. Someone was keeping the place up, even if no one was living in it. She thought about that for a moment. She thought about who would bother. She thought about the man who had rented this house and had walked out of it in November and had not walked back.
She crossed the street. The rain had thickened without her noticing, and her jacket was heavy on her shoulders by the time she reached the porch steps. The wood gave under her weight, a sound she had not heard in fifteen years and recognized immediately, the particular small complaint of pine boards that have been wet and dried and wet and dried so many times that the grain has loosened into something almost like speech. She climbed the three steps. She stood in front of the door.
The lock had been changed. The new one was a deadbolt with a brushed nickel face, and it sat in the old cutout like a modern tooth in an old jaw. The keyhole was at the right height for a person of average build, and the screws around the faceplate were fresh, their heads unmarred. Maren bent and looked at the threshold. There was no mail. There was no circular. There was a small rectangle of cardboard on the mat that advertised a lawn service, and beside it a twist of paper that had once been a candy wrapper and was now translucent with damp.
She did not have a key. She had not expected to need one. She had not expected, walking out of the library an hour ago, to find herself standing on this porch in the rain with her hands at her sides and her pulse in her ears and the smell of wet cedar in her nose. She had come back to this town for a reason, and the reason had a shape, and the shape was beginning to press against the inside of her ribs like a hand laid flat against a windowpane from the other side.
She tried the knob. It turned, but the deadbolt held. She stepped to the nearest window and cupped her hands around her eyes and tried to see through the glass. The interior was dim, but she could make out the edge of a counter, the pale shape of a sink, the dark mass of what might have been a table or a stack of boxes. The furniture of a man who had not intended to stay. The furniture of a man who had stayed longer than he intended and then had left in a way that suggested he had not intended to leave at all.
She went around the side of the house. The yard narrowed between the wall and a hedge of privet that had been trimmed within the last month, the cuts still pale against the dark green of the older growth. A gate in the hedge gave onto a small back garden, and beyond the garden a gravel path that led to a detached garage whose door was padlocked with a brass lock that had gone green with verdigris. The padlock was old. The screws that held the hasp were new.
She stood in the rain and looked at the padlock.
The sound came from inside the garage.
It was small and deliberate, a single tap of metal on metal, the sound of a pipe settling or a latch falling into place or a tool being set down on a workbench. It came once, and then it did not come again, and Maren stood very still with her hand on the padlock and her breath coming in shallow draws that did not feel like her own. The rain hit the roof of the garage in a thin hiss. Somewhere down the street a dog barked twice and stopped. The privet hedge held its dark shape against the gray of the sky.
She did not try the padlock. She stepped back from the garage and turned and went around the side of the house again and stopped at the back door, which was a slab of painted pine with a small window at eye level and a kick plate at the bottom that had been scuffed to the bare wood. The deadbolt here was the same brushed nickel as the front. The keyhole sat in the center. She bent and looked through the window and saw a kitchen she did not recognize, a sink full of clean dishes, a dish towel folded on a counter, a coffee mug on the table with the handle at four o'clock.
She straightened. She stood in the rain with her hands at her sides and looked at the back door and then at the garage and then at the hedge and then at the sky, which had not changed color in any way she could name but which felt heavier than it had when she stepped off the library steps. The mug on the table was the kind of detail that did not belong in a house that had been empty since November. The mug meant someone had been here today, or yesterday, or the day before, and had drunk coffee from a mug and had set it down with the handle at four o'clock and had not picked it up again.
She did not go in.
She went back around the house to the front, and she stood on the porch again, and she looked at the door with its new deadbolt and its old frame, and she thought about Simeon Quill and his caution and his measured sentences and the page she had folded into her pocket. She thought about Della Roth, who would sit in this same library tomorrow morning and would drink coffee with two sugars and would not like to be kept waiting. She thought about the cornerstone that had not been sealed, and the shape in the foundation, and the photograph of the two men in their coats, and the spiral on the page that looked like the inside of a shell or the inside of an ear.
The rain was steady on the porch roof above her. It made a sound like sand poured slowly onto paper, or like the pages of a book turned one at a time by a careful hand. She took the folded page out of her pocket and looked at it. The ink held. The line of the spiral held. The date held. She folded it again and put it back, and she turned up the collar of her jacket, and she walked back down the steps and out to the curb and stood there for a moment longer with her face to the rain and her eyes on the dark windows of the house where Halden Voss had lived and had not lived and might, by the evidence of a coffee mug and a clean dish towel, still be living in some fashion that the town had not yet been able to name.
She walked back to the inn. She did not hurry. The streets were empty, and the lamps made their milky halos in the rain, and her shoes made their soft complaint on the pavement, and she did not look back at the house on the cul-de-sac or at the garage with its old padlock and its new screws or at the privet hedge with its pale cuts. She looked at the centerline of the road, and she walked, and she let the rain do what rain does to a person who has been dry for too long, which is to find the seams and the cuffs and the collars and to enter there and to make itself felt.
At the inn she stood in the small vestibule and dripped onto the tile and unbuttoned her jacket with fingers that were colder than they should have been and hung the jacket on the hook by the door and went upstairs to her room. The room smelled of cedar and clean linen and the particular staleness of a room that has been closed for a season and then opened again. She turned on the lamp. The bulb took a moment to catch, and then the yellow circle of light fell across the bed and the dresser and the straight-backed chair by the window where she had sat last night and looked out at the street and seen nothing.
She sat on the edge of the bed. She took the folded page out of her pocket again. She set it on the dresser under the lamp and smoothed it flat with the heel of her hand and looked at the spiral and the date and the initials and the small careful letters of the note, which she had read once in the library and was now reading again as though the second reading might yield something the first had not. It did not. The note said what it had said the first time. The spiral was the spiral it had been. The date was the date.
She sat for a long time with her hands on her knees and her eyes on the page and the rain on the window and the lamp making its yellow circle on the dresser and the room smelling of cedar and clean linen and herself, the way a room always begins to smell of the person who has been sitting in it too long without moving. She thought about tomorrow. She thought about Della Roth. She thought about the coffee with two sugars and the man who did not like to be kept waiting and the books in the locked room and the photographs that might or might not be there and the architectural drawings that had been promised in a letter and a ledger that was open in the back of a book and that had been written in by a hand she had not yet seen.
She thought about the coffee mug on the table in the kitchen of the house on the cul-de-sac, with its handle at four o'clock, and the dish towel folded on the counter, and the privet hedge cut within the month, and the padlock on the garage whose screws were new. She thought about the sound from inside the garage, the single tap of metal on metal that had come once and then not come again. She thought about the way a house breathes when someone is in it, and the way it holds its breath when no one is, and the way the two states can be told apart by a person who has learned to listen for the difference.
She had learned. She had not wanted to learn. She had learned anyway, the way one learns the things one most needs to know and most wishes one did not.
She got up from the bed and went to the window and looked out. The street was dark. The lamps made their milky halos. The rain had not stopped. She thought about the cornerstone that had not been sealed, and the shape in the foundation, and the two men in their coats, and the corner of the page that showed a curve of white at the edge of the photograph, which she had not remarked on at the time but which now, in the yellow light of the lamp, came back to her with a small insistence. The curve had been a wall, or the edge of a wall, or the beginning of a wall, and behind it there had been something else, a shadow or a shape or the suggestion of a shape, which she could not now remember clearly enough to name and which she knew, with the same certainty with which she knew the sound of her own name, that she would remember by morning or would remember that she had forgotten it, which was sometimes the same thing.
She closed the curtain. She turned off the lamp. She lay down on the bed in the dark with her clothes still on and her shoes still laced and the smell of cedar and clean linen and rain in her hair and the folded page on the dresser under the window where the streetlight made a thin pale line across the glass and laid a thin pale line across the page in turn, so that the spiral, where it crossed the line, looked for a moment as though it were turning very slowly in the dark, the way a shell turns when held to the ear, the way an ear turns when it is trying to hear something that is just beyond the edge of hearing.
She did not sleep for a long time. When she slept, she did not dream, or she did not remember her dreams, and in the morning the rain had stopped, and the street outside was wet, and the lamp in the room was off, and the folded page on the dresser had not moved, and the spiral on it was the same spiral it had been, and the date was the same date, and the initials were the same initials, and the room smelled of cedar and clean linen and the first coffee of the day, which someone had set on the small table by the door without knocking, and which she found when she opened her eyes, and which was still warm.
The coffee was strong, darker than she would have made it for herself, and it tasted faintly of chicory, and the cup was one of the heavy white diner cups that had not been made in this valley for thirty years, and the saucer beneath it was chipped at the rim in a way that suggested it had been chipped for a long time and by the same hand.
She sat up. She drank. She looked at the folded page on the dresser, and the page looked back at her, or did not look back at her, because pages do not look, and the spiral on it was still the same spiral, and the date was still the same date, and the initials were still the same initials, and the streetlight was no longer making a line across it because the streetlight had been turned off, or had burned out, or had been turned off by someone who did not want a thin pale line to fall across a piece of paper in a room where a woman was sleeping, or not sleeping, and who had, in any case, left a cup of coffee by the door, and the coffee was still warm.
She finished the coffee. She set the cup back on the saucer. She looked at her hands, which were the same hands they had been the night before, and at her shoes, which were still laced, and at the bed, which she had not made, and at the door, which was still closed, and at the window, which was still curtained, and at the room, which was still the room.
She got up. She unlaced her shoes. She left them by the bed, side by side, toes pointing at the wall. She went to the window and pulled the curtain back an inch, and the morning came in flat and grey and smelling of wet stone and wet cedar and the first cigarette smoke of the day, which was coming from the porch of the room next door, where someone she could not see was smoking a cigarette and tapping ash into a can that rang faintly each time the ash fell.
She let the curtain fall. She went to the bathroom. She washed her face with cold water. She looked at herself in the mirror, which was spotted and old and slightly convex at the edges, and her face in it was the same face it had been, and her eyes were the same eyes, and the small scar at the corner of her left eyebrow, which she had had since she was nine, when she had fallen from the railing of the footbridge over the cut, was the same scar, and she touched it with one finger, and the mirror was cold.
She dried her face. She went back to the room. She picked up the folded page from the dresser. She unfolded it. She looked at the spiral and the date and the initials, and she understood, in the way she had understood the night before, that the spiral was not a spiral but a map, or a key, or a fingerprint, or a signature, or a way of saying I was here, which is what a spiral says when it is pressed into wet clay, or into wax, or into the soft earth at the edge of a garden, or into the page of a ledger that no one is supposed to read.
She folded it again. She put it in her coat pocket, which was the inside pocket, the one that buttoned, because she did not trust the outside pocket, which had a hole in it that she had known about for two years and had not mended.
She put on her coat. She left the room. She went down the stairs, which were dark and smelled of cedar and old carpet, and the carpet was thin in the middle and thick at the edges, and the stairs creaked in the places they had always creaked, and she stepped over the creaks without thinking, because her body remembered them even when her mind did not, or because her mind remembered them and her body was only following along.
She stepped out onto the porch. The street was wet. The air smelled of rain and cedar and cigarette smoke and the first bacon of the day, which was coming from the diner at the end of the block, and which she could hear hissing faintly on a flat top, and the sound of it made her stomach turn over, because she had not eaten since the bread and cheese the night before, and because the smell of bacon in this valley had always been the smell of the diner at the end of the block, and the smell of the diner had always been the smell of her grandmother's kitchen on Sunday mornings, and the smell of her grandmother's kitchen had always been the smell of her childhood, which was a smell she had tried, for a long time, to forget, and which she had not, in fact, forgotten, and which she had come back to find, or to be found by, or to stop running from, or to stop running toward, which was sometimes the same thing.
She walked to the end of the block. She went into the diner. The bell above the door rang, and the sound of it was the sound it had always been, and the man behind the counter looked up and nodded, and the nod was the nod he gave to everyone, and the coffee pot on the burner sent up a thin line of steam, and the steam smelled of chicory, and the cup in her hand, which was not yet in her hand, would smell of chicory too, because it always did.
She sat at the counter. She ordered eggs and toast and bacon and the strong coffee with the chicory in it, and the man behind the counter wrote it down on a pad that was yellow and curled at the edges, and the pencil he used was a short one with no eraser, and he wrote with the small careful hand of a man who has been writing down orders for a long time and who does not need to look at the pad to know what he is writing, and who knows, without looking, that the eggs will be over easy and the toast will be dark and the bacon will be crisp, because that is how she has always ordered, or because that is how everyone orders, or because that is how the man behind the counter thinks she should order, and which is sometimes the same thing.
The eggs came. The toast came. The bacon came. The coffee came. She ate. She drank. She looked out the window at the wet street and the wet cars and the wet trees and the wet sky, which was the same sky it had been the day before and the day before that, and which would be the same sky tomorrow, because the sky in this valley did not change, or changed so slowly that no one noticed, or changed only at the edges, where the ridges were, and the ridges were far away, and the change there was too small to see.
She paid. She left a tip. She went back out onto the street. She walked to the corner. She turned left. She walked three blocks to the building that had been, when she was a girl, the office of the Valley Ledger, and which was now, according to the sign in the window, which was faded and water-stained and had a corner peeled back, the office of something she could not quite make out, because the letters were too small and the light was too flat and the corner that was peeled back covered the most important part of the word.
She went in. The door was unlocked. The room inside was small and smelled of old paper and damp carpet and the faint sweet smell of old glue, and there were shelves along two walls, and the shelves were full of bound volumes and loose papers and cardboard boxes that had been sealed with tape that had yellowed, and there was a desk in the middle of the room, and on the desk was a lamp that was off, and a mug that was empty, and a pair of reading glasses that were folded and set down as though they had just been taken off, and a man sitting in the chair behind the desk, and the man was Simeon Quill, and he was looking at her, or he had been looking at her, or he had been looking at the door and was now looking at her, and the look on his face was the look of a man who has been expecting someone and who is not surprised to see them and who is not unsurprised either, and who is simply looking, in the way that archivists look, which is a way that takes in everything and gives back nothing.
He did not stand. He nodded. She nodded back. She walked to the desk. She sat down in the chair on the other side, which was a wooden chair with a straight back and a cushion that had been reupholstered at least once, and the cushion smelled faintly of cedar, and the wood of the chair smelled faintly of dust, and the room smelled of paper and glue and the damp that came up through the floor in winter and that never quite went away in summer.