The fluorescent tube above the table stuttered once, twice, then held its light steady against June Holleran's knuckles where she gripped the edge of the metal chair.
"Between the hours of three and five yesterday afternoon," Cass Delacroix said, "you were somewhere between your father's bedside and the library."
June did not look up from her own hands. She had been counting the small dents in the metal table since she sat down, tracing them with her thumbnail, a child of eight again at her grandmother's farm table checking for wabi in the wood. The room smelled of burnt coffee and floor polish, a chemical sweetness that could not quite mask the older smell beneath it. Sweat. Fear. Long hours no one had aired out.
"I was here or there," she said. "I told you."
"Here or there isn't what I asked."
He was leaning back in his chair, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, a posture that wanted to be casual. His jaw was not casual. A muscle there jumped each time she spoke, a small involuntary tell she catalogued automatically. Cass Delacroix wanted something from her, and he was not used to not getting it.
"Where is here? Where is there? I need specifics, Ms. Holleran."
She lifted her gaze at last. The man across from her was younger than she had expected from the rumors that had drifted up through the family grapevine, late thirties maybe, with the kind of face that looked better half in shadow than it did in the unforgiving tube light overhead. A thin scar bisected his left eyebrow, pale against the olive of his skin. He wore a charcoal jacket over a black shirt, no tie, the collar open one button too many. He looked like a man who had once cared about dressing well and had since stopped bothering.
Behind him, half turned toward the wall so the room's occupant would catch it in peripheral vision and a visitor would not, a photograph sat on the corner of the desk. A girl of maybe sixteen smiled out of the frame, dark hair pulled back from her face, her arm slung around the shoulders of a younger Cass Delacroix. Teeth bright in summer light. Behind them a lake, something Midwestern by the look of the pines. The girl was laughing. He was laughing. Whoever had held the camera had caught them both at the exact moment before they understood what would come next.
June filed it away. She did not look at the photograph a second time, because looking twice was looking too long.
"I was checking on my father," she said. "I was in the library after."
"In what part of the library?"
"The reading room, mostly. The stacks."
"Alone?"
"Yes."
"And no one saw you in either place."
"Probably not. My father was unconscious when I went in. The reading room was empty. I sat for a while. I read. I tried to read. I gave up and walked home."
"Walked home."
"It's a mile."
"Across the back pasture, past the collapsed boathouse, around the orchard. Yes, I know. I walked it this morning." Cass uncrossed his legs and recrossed them the other way, a small restless maneuver that shifted the chair an inch across the linoleum. "It's a long walk for a woman carrying two thousand dollars' worth of grief."
The observation landed where he had aimed it. June felt it settle in her chest, somewhere behind the sternum, a small hard pebble of truth. She did not let it move her face.
"Are you a poet, Mr. Delacroix, or a question-asker?"
"I'm whatever the situation requires." His mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "Right now it requires me to ask you again. Between three and five. Where were you."
"I told you where I was."
"You told me a sequence of locations. I asked you for a sequence of times. Those are not the same thing."
The fluorescent tube hummed faintly above them, the high thin sound of old wiring under load. A clock somewhere beyond the wall marked each second with a plastic tick that June felt more than heard, a faint click against the back of her teeth. The burnt coffee smell had begun to settle into the wallpaper, the long memory of every forgotten mug poured in this room.
June waited three of those ticks before she answered. Letting silence do work for her was something she had learned late in life and practiced early.
"If I tell you I was at the bedside," she said, "you'll ask why I left. If I tell you I was in the library, you'll ask what I was reading. If I tell you I was walking home, you'll ask what I saw on the way. So before I give you anything else, I'd like to know what it is you're actually investigating, Mr. Delacroix. Because the questions you're asking have nothing to do with my father's heart attack."
The muscle in his jaw fired again. This time she caught the smallest pause before he spoke, a held breath on the inhale that he did not seem to know he had taken.
"Your father didn't have a heart attack, Ms. Holleran."
The pebble in her chest moved.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You heard me."
"Heart failure," she said carefully. "The doctor told me. The county coroner called it. Cardiac arrest secondary to chronic condition. Those were the words."
"Those were the preliminary words." Cass reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and withdrew a folded paper, a single sheet, which he laid flat on the table between them. "Tox screens came back this morning. Your father had enough digoxin in his bloodstream to stop a horse."
The word sat in the air, ridiculous, almost funny. June did not laugh.
"Digoxin," she said. "That's a heart medication."
"It's a heart medication in quantities a body is not meant to see." He tapped the paper once with his forefinger. "Your father was in end-stage congestive failure, yes. He was on a regulated dose, yes. Someone gave him a regulated dose three times in the seventy-two hours before he died. The rest was murder."
Somewhere beyond the wall a door opened and closed. Footsteps in the corridor, quick and shapeless, the sound of someone passing through on the way to somewhere more pressing. The clock ticked. June listened to all of it because listening was easier than thinking for a moment, and because she was aware, suddenly, that the man across the table was watching her with the particular attention of someone who wanted to see her break.
She did not break. She had not broken yet in any of the rooms she had occupied in the past month, and she did not intend to start.
"Poison," she said.
"That's what I said."
"Poison administered to a dying man."
"A man with months. Maybe a year. Maybe two years."
A man with months. Maybe a year. Maybe two years.
The clock on the mantel took up the count. June looked down at her father's photograph, still propped against the chipped sugar bowl, his lined face half in shadow and half in the weak October light filtering through the kitchen window. The digoxin revelation sat in her chest like a stone swallowed whole.
"Who," she said.
"That is what I am attempting to determine." Cass folded the paper and tucked it away with the practiced ease of a man who had shown that paper to other people before her, other children of other dying parents. "Whoever wanted your father dead wanted him dead on a particular schedule. Three doses over seventy-two hours is not panic. It is regimen."
June's fingers found the rim of her teacup. The porcelain was cold.
"My father," she said carefully, "was ninety-one years old. He had not left his bed in three weeks. He could not have been a difficult target."
"He could not have been." Cass leaned back in his chair, the wood groaning beneath him. He studied her the way he had been studying her since he sat down, with the cool professional interest of a man who had already decided several things about her and was waiting for her to arrive at the same conclusions. "Which is why I suspect the person who did this had access to his medication. Had reason to be in that house. And had reason to want your father's particular life to end on a particular day."
"His particular life."
"Your father's particular life, Ms. Holleran. With its particular documents. Its particular visitors. Its particular locked rooms."
She did not ask him how he knew about the locked rooms. She had ceased being surprised by what this man knew three days ago, when he had first appeared on the gravel drive in a sedan the color of dried blood and asked her, with the courtesy of an undertaker, if she had a few minutes to spare.
"I have to go," she said.
He raised an eyebrow but did not ask where. He was not the kind of man who asked questions he could find the answers to by other means.
"If you think of anything," he said, and slid a card across the table toward her, white stock with a single black number printed in the corner. "Anything at all."
She took the card. She left it on the table beside her father's photograph, where it sat like a small paper flag planted at the edge of a grave. She went to find her coat.
The town green was a quarter mile down the road, past the white clapboard library and the post office with its flag hanging limp in the still air. June walked because she needed the walk. She needed the cold air in her lungs and the sound of her own boots on the pavement to drown out the small, clinical voice in her head that kept repeating the word digoxin in the cadence Cass had used, as though the word itself were evidence, as though the syllables could be entered into a ledger and weighed.
The afternoon had that peculiar late-October quality of light that seemed to come from nowhere and land on everything, turning the grass the color of old gilt and the faces of the gathered townspeople into a row of pale, attentive masks. Someone had strung paper lanterns between the oaks, although no one had thought to light them yet. A long table stood at the near edge of the green, draped in a cloth the color of weak tea, and on it sat the usual apparatus of small-town mourning: a bowl of punch, a stack of plastic cups, a plate of cookies no one was eating, a framed photograph of Margot Calloway at perhaps sixty, smiling the careful smile of a woman who had learned not to trust the camera.
June took a cup of punch she did not want and stood at the periphery, watching.
The mourners moved in their slow orbits, the way mourners do, touching shoulders, lowering voices, performing the rituals of grief with the practiced choreography of a people for whom grief was a seasonal occupation. June recognized most of them. She had grown up among these faces, had left them behind for ten years, and had returned to find them aged in the particular way New England faces age, by losing color first and then contour, until what remained was bone and the memory of bone.
Troy Calloway stood near the punch bowl.
He was unmistakable and yet nearly invisible, the way a man becomes when he is trying very hard not to be seen. He wore a dark suit that did not belong to him; the shoulders were too broad, the sleeves a quarter inch short at the wrist, exposing the pale blue cuff of a dress shirt he had clearly put on that morning for the first time in some while. His tie was knotted too small and sat an inch below his collar. He held a cup of punch in both hands, swaying almost imperceptibly, the way a man sways when he has been standing in one place for too long and is afraid to leave it.
He had been out of Chittenden for nine days. June knew this because she had read it in the county register the morning after his release, in the same column that listed his sentencing judge and his original offense and the name of the warden who had processed his papers. She had read the column twice, then folded the paper and put it in the drawer with the other documents she had been collecting about the Holleran estate and the various lives that had brushed up against it.
Troy did not see her. Or if he saw her, he gave no sign. He continued to sway, and to watch the crowd with the particular attention of a man who has spent several years in a place where watching the crowd is the only entertainment available.
"June. June Holleran. Is that you? It is you, of course it is you, I would know that face anywhere, I have known that face since you were four years old and you came into the library with your father and asked me whether the books on the high shelf were the ones the dead people had read."
Walter Pike arrived the way Walter Pike always arrived, in a rush of words and slightly ill-fitting corduroy, his spectacles sliding down his nose, his hands already extended. He had been the high school principal once, before his voice gave out and his wife left him and he retreated into the back rooms of the historical society, where he had spent the better part of two decades cataloging the papers of long-dead Hollerans. He was a small man with a large manner, and his manner was currently bearing down on June with the force of a small but determined weather system.
"Walter," June said.
"Your father. Your poor father. I heard, of course everyone heard, I was at the historical society when the ambulance came, I saw the lights on the road, I thought at first it was the Henderson boy with his truck again, but no, it was the ambulance, and I said to Marjorie, I said, that is the Holleran place, that is where they are going, and she said, Walter, you don't know that, and I said, Marjorie, I have lived in this town for sixty-one years and I know an ambulance bound for the Holleran place when I see one." He paused for breath only because the sentence had ended. "I am so sorry. I am so very sorry, June."
"Thank you, Walter."
He took her hand between both of his. His hands were dry and very warm, the way the hands of men who spend their days handling old paper are warm, as though the paper had given them its temperature. He pressed her fingers gently, and his face, which had been all motion a moment before, settled into something quieter.
"Your father," he said, and his voice, for once, slowed. "Your father was a good man. A difficult man, perhaps. A complicated man, certainly. But a good one."
"Yes," June said, because it was easier than the alternative.
"And Margot." He shook his head. He did not let go of her hand. "Margot was a troubled woman, June. I have said it before and I will say it again, though God knows I liked her well enough. She was a troubled woman chasing ghosts. I told her so. I told her so to her face, more than once, in this very room, in the historical society, with the file boxes open between us. She would not listen. She had that look, you know the look I mean, the look of a person who has decided something and will not be talked out of it by anything short of the Second Coming."
June knew the look. She had seen it on her own father's face, more than once, in the last weeks of his life.
"Chasing which ghosts, Walter?" she said, as lightly as she could manage.
Walter Pike's eyes, behind his sliding spectacles, sharpened. The sharpness did not belong to his face, which was a face built for kindness and small confusions. It belonged to the man he had been before his voice gave out, the man who had kept order in high school hallways for thirty years, the man who could spot a lie at thirty paces and had the courtesy not to call it by name.
"The Holleran ghosts, dear," he said softly. "The Holleran ghosts. Whose else would she have been chasing, in this town, with her whole life wrapped up in that house and the people who lived in it?"
He patted her hand once more, then released it, and was already turning toward Marjorie, who had appeared at the edge of the green with a casserole dish in her arms and the particular expression of a woman who intended to feed the bereaved whether they consented to be fed or not.
June stood very still.
Across the green, Troy Calloway raised his cup of punch to his mouth and did not drink. He was looking at her now, or perhaps at the place where Walter Pike had been standing, or perhaps at nothing at all. His face was the color of old paper, and his eyes were the eyes of a man who has been paroled into a world that has not been waiting for him, and who has come back anyway, because there is one thing he has to do before he can put the rest of it down.
June did not go to him. Not yet. She finished the cup of punch she had not wanted and set the empty cup on the table beside the photograph of Margot Calloway, who had been sixty when the photograph was taken, and who had died at sixty-three, alone, in a room no one had entered for three days.
The paper lanterns swung gently in a breeze that had not yet arrived. The light on the green was already beginning to thicken toward dusk.
Somewhere in the crowd, a child began to cry, and was hushed.
The library sat on the corner of Elm and Calloway, a brick building with copper-green trim and a cupola that had not seen paint since the first Bush was in office. June had walked past it twice a day for the first seventeen years of her life, and she had not walked past it once in the decade since, and tonight she found herself doing it again, slowly, her hands in the pockets of the canvas jacket she had borrowed from the hall closet at the estate because her own coat was still in a bag somewhere in the back of her car.
The yellow tape across the front doors caught the light from the streetlamp on the corner. POLICE LINE, DO NOT CROSS. She had helped Walter Pike tape it there, two days ago, when Margot's body had still been on the second floor and the sheriff had still been treating the building like a place where a thing had happened instead of a place where a thing had stopped happening. The tape was beginning to peel at one end, and June resisted the urge to press it back down with the side of her thumb.
She had told herself she was coming down to look at the marquee. The marquee read, in letters that Marjorie's daughter-in-law had painted by hand on white poster board, IN MEMORIAM, MARGOT CALLOWAY, 1932 to 1995. The apostrophe in Margot's had been painted as a comma by mistake
The apostrophe in Margot's had been painted as a comma by mistake, and the woman who had painted it had been too undone by grief to climb back up on the stepladder and correct it, and no one else had been willing to say the words out loud, and so the small error had been allowed to stand for two days now, a typographical wound that the whole town had silently agreed to treat as a feature.
She stood there for a long time. A breeze came up off the green, finally, and the copper weathervane on the cupola turned with a sound like a spoon against the rim of a cup. Somewhere behind her, a man coughed, and a woman laughed, and the child who had been crying started up again, and was hushed again.
June's hand found the peeling end of the police tape. She pressed it back against the brick with her thumb, held it there for a count of five, then let it go and watched it curl away again, slow as a petal falling.
She ducked under the tape.
The smell of the library hit her first: old paper, lemon polish, the particular dust of a room where the heating pipes ran along the baseboards and had been slowly cooking the bindings of books for ninety years. The front desk was unmanned. The card catalog stood where it had always stood, a wooden coffin of oak with brass pulls that had oxidized to the color of old honey. She ran one finger across the top of it as she passed, and the dust came away on her skin like pollen.
Walter Pike was in the reading room, sitting at the long table beneath the green-shaded lamp that had been Margot's favorite. He had a stack of folders in front of him, and a pair of reading glasses pushed up onto his forehead, and a mug of something that had stopped being coffee and had begun its slow transformation into a small biological experiment. He looked up when he heard her footsteps on the carpet, and his face did the complicated thing it always did when he saw her, which was equal parts relief and apology and the particular discomfort of a man who had spent forty years cataloging other people's secrets and was not entirely sure which side of the catalog he himself stood on.
"June," he said.
"Walter."
"I wondered if you'd come down."
She pulled out the chair across from him and sat. The folders were labeled in his careful block printing: CALLOWAY, MARGOT. PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE. CALLOWAY, MARGOT. PROPERTY RECORDS. CALLOWAY, MARGOT. MISCELLANEOUS. There were seven of them.
"I thought you'd sealed these," she said.
"The sheriff sealed them." He took off his glasses, folded them, put them back on. A reset. "I unsealed them."
"Walter."
"She was my friend, June. Forty-one years. I wasn't going to let them sit in a box in the evidence room until whatever this is finished being whatever this is." He gestured vaguely at the folders, at the building, at the night. "Besides. Half of this is mine. I cataloged it. I know what's in here better than he does."
June looked at the one marked MISCELLANEOUS. "May I?"
He pushed it across the table. The folder was thinner than the others. Inside were three envelopes, a key on a leather fob, and a single sheet of paper covered in Margot's slanted handwriting, the kind of handwriting that got smaller toward the end of a sentence as though the writer were running out of room or out of time.
The sheet was dated a week before Margot died. It began, Dear June, and June's chest did something she was not prepared for.
She read it twice. Then she looked up at Walter.
"She knew," June said.
Walter nodded. The lamp hummed. Somewhere outside, the child had stopped crying, and the green was quiet.
"She knew," he said, "for a long time. Longer than I did. Longer than anyone."
The key on the leather fob was warm in her hand, or her hand was warm on the key. She slipped it into her jacket pocket beside her own keys, and the weight of it sat against her hip like a small, patient animal.
Outside, the lanterns on the green had begun to gutter. The sheriff's cruiser, parked at the curb across the way, idled with its lights off, and she could see the shape of someone in the driver's seat, watching. The watcher watched, and was watched, and the green held its breath between them.
June stood, tucked the letter into her pocket beside the key, and looked once more at the marquee with its misplaced comma and its two years bracketed like the dates on a headstone. Then she walked back out under the police tape, across the sidewalk, and into the dark.
Maeve had been sitting on the cold stone bench near the bandstand since nine, watching the green the way her mother had once watched weather roll across the valley: with patience, and a kind of fatalism, and the quiet understanding that whatever was coming would arrive on its own schedule.
She had not gone into Walter's archive. June had asked her to wait outside, and Maeve had agreed because she had learned, in the months since Margot's passing, that some doors were not hers to open. Not yet. Maybe not ever. The bench had been her classroom for the evening. She had counted seventeen moths against the glass of the lit marquee. She had listened to a child cry and stop crying. She had watched a man in a sheriff's cruiser sit in the dark and not move.
Now she watched June cross the green.
The figure moved slowly, her coat a darker shape against the darker shape of the lawn. The police tape hung slack behind her, unstirred, a yellow comma sagging in the still air. June's hands were in her pockets. The lanterns on the green had begun to fail one by one, like a string of small surrenders, and in the patchwork of light and absence, June's face came and went, came and went.
Maeve did not call out. She did not rise. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and her grandmother's ring heavy on her finger, and she watched her mother walk toward her as though toward a dock, or a door, or the edge of something she had been crossing for years.
Walter had told her, that afternoon, what he had told June. Some of it. Enough of it. The part about Margot being afraid, the part about the key, the part about the envelope that said dear June in handwriting that got smaller toward the end. He had not told her about the green. He had not told her about the marquee, or the comma, or the child who had cried. Walter was careful with his distributions of pain. He parceled it out the way his mother had once parceled out the Sunday roast, slicing thin so the meal would last.
The bench was damp. The stone had drunk the evening's fog and was now giving it back, a slow exhalation that climbed the backs of Maeve's legs and settled in the hollow of her throat. She tasted salt. She tasted metal. She tasted the faint, sweet rot of fallen apples from somewhere on the green, the year's harvest given up to the ground.
She had not known Margot well. That was the thing she kept turning over, the stone she could not leave alone. Margot had been a presence at the edge of her childhood, a voice on the answering machine, a hand that ruffled her hair at Thanksgiving, a smell of lilac and something sharper, medicinal, that Maeve had never asked about. Margot had been a closed door with light leaking under it, and Maeve had been a child who knew better than to knock.
Now Margot was gone. Now the door was open. Now the light leaked out into the world, and Maeve was twenty-six and tired and sitting on a bench that her great-grandfather had donated to the town in 1912, and her mother was walking toward her across the grass, and Maeve could see, even from this distance, that June was carrying something new in her body. A weight. A knowledge. A key.
June sat down beside her. The bench took them both. Neither spoke for a long moment. The marquee buzzed. The last lantern, the one nearest them, coughed and held.
"I have it," June said finally. Her voice was low, almost conversational, as though she were telling Maeve about the weather or the price of eggs. "She left me something."
"I know."
June looked at her sidelong. Maeve could feel the glance, though she did not turn her head.
"Walter told you."
"Some of it."
"And the rest?"
"The rest I have to hear from you. When you're ready."
June was quiet again. Her hand came out of her pocket and found Maeve's hand on the bench, and their fingers laced together the way they had when Maeve was small, crossing parking lots, crossing streets, crossing the long lawn of the estate on summer evenings when the lightning bugs were out and Margot was somewhere in the house not coming down to dinner.
"She was afraid," June said. "She was afraid for a long time. And she didn't tell me."
"Did you want her to?"
The question landed in the space between them and lay there, breathing. Maeve felt June's grip tighten, then loosen, then tighten again.
"No," June said. "I wanted her to be okay. I wanted her to never have been afraid. I wanted to go back and redo it. All of it."
"You can't."
"I know."
The sheriff's cruiser had not moved. The shape inside it sat like a patient sentinel, watching the green, watching the women on the bench, watching the marquee with its misplaced comma and its bracketed years. Maeve wondered, distantly, who had hired Cass Delacroix, and whether the answer was in the envelope June had not yet opened, and whether opening it would help or only confirm what they already knew.
She decided, in that moment, not to ask. Not tonight. Tonight was for sitting. Tonight was for the bench and the damp and the moth-count and the hand in her hand. Tomorrow there would be questions. Tomorrow there would be the estate, and the lawyer, and the lock the key fit, and whatever lay behind it. Tomorrow there would be the long work of grief, which was not a road but a room, and they would have to walk the walls of it until they found the door.
But tonight, on the bench, on the green, under the dying marquee, Maeve let her mother lean against her shoulder, and she let her own shoulder take the weight, and she watched the last lantern gutter and go out, and the green went dark around them like a held breath finally released.
Somewhere inside the cruiser, the watcher shifted. Somewhere inside the envelope, the truth waited. Somewhere in the house on the hill, a lock waited for its key.
Maeve closed her eyes, and did not let go of her mother's hand.