Chapter 91: Green Glass

The cab smelled of pine air freshener and someone else’s breakfast. Reed sat with his briefcase on his knees and read the sports page on his phone the whole way to Market Street, and he didn’t say a word about the interview, which Lucas understood was its own kind of preparation.

The twelfth floor looked exactly the way it had on Wednesday. Same long table, same carafe of water nobody touched, same court reporter at the far end with her machine and her small, careful hands. Margaret Hoyt stood when they came in. She was in her late fifties, with reading glasses on a cord and a gray cardigan that looked like it had survived several trials. David Oyelaran stayed seated, a legal pad squared in front of him, three pens lined up beside it.

"Mr. Vintage. Thank you for coming back." Hoyt sat. "This session is narrower than the last. We’ll be an hour, perhaps less. Mr. Reed has the agenda."

"He does," Reed said.

[New Quest: Second Session.]

[Objective: Answer only from memory. Mark uncertainty as uncertainty. Do not repair a silence.]

[Reward: 300 AP.]

The court reporter read the caption into the record. Hoyt took her glasses off the cord and put them on.

"The night of the Halcyon close. Our records place you on the ninth floor for most of the evening. Do you recall leaving the ninth floor between eleven thirty and twelve thirty?"

"Yes. Once."

"Tell us about that."

"The printer on nine jammed. I was printing the signature pages for page forty-seven, the reprinted ones. I cleared the jam and then it told me it was out of toner. Nine never has toner." He heard himself and kept going, because it was true. "Fourth floor always does. The library staff order for it. So I took the stairs down to four and printed there."

"Do you recall what time you went down?"

"No. Before midnight. I remember I looked at my phone in the stairwell, but I don’t remember what it said."

Oyelaran wrote something.

"How long were you on the fourth floor?"

"Ten minutes. Maybe less. The pages were already queued. I waited for them, I checked them, I took the elevator back up."

"Did you walk past the library?"

"Yes. The printer’s at the end of the hall by the kitchen. The elevators are past the library. I walked past it going and coming back."

"Describe the library as you passed it."

He took a breath. He had the paper in his pocket and didn’t take it out. "Glass wall on the hallway side. The lights were off inside. The glass was dark."

"Did you see anyone inside?"

"No."

"Did you see anyone on the fourth floor at all?"

"No."

"Did you hear anything?"

He thought about it, honestly, the way he’d been taught. The hum of the printer. The ice maker in the kitchen dropping a tray. His own shoes. "The printer. The ice maker. Nothing else I remember."

Hoyt nodded slowly. "Is there anything about the library you noticed that you haven’t told us?"

This was the place. He could feel the silence open up in front of him, and he could feel how easy it would be to fill.

"I think there was a green light reflected in the glass," he said. "Like an exit sign. I’m not sure. I’ve thought about it since Sunday and I still don’t know if I’m remembering it or deciding it."

Reed didn’t move. Hoyt didn’t either. Then she did something Lucas didn’t expect. She smiled, very slightly, and took her glasses off.

"That’s the most useful sentence anyone has said in this room in two weeks," she said. "Thank you. We won’t ask you to improve it."

Oyelaran slid a photograph across the table. A color print, taken at night, of the fourth-floor hallway, the library glass running down the left side.

"For orientation only," Oyelaran said. "This was taken last Thursday, after hours, from the elevator bank. We’re not asking you whether it looks familiar. We’re asking you to confirm this is the hallway you walked down."

Lucas looked at it. Carpet, glass, the kitchen doorway at the far end with its light on. "That’s the hallway."

"There’s one exit sign on that floor," Oyelaran said. "It’s over the stairwell door behind where the photographer is standing. From the hallway, its light can show in the library glass." He took the photograph back. "We also note, for completeness, that the library terminals use a green screen when they’re locked. We’re not suggesting which, if either, you saw."

"I don’t know which," Lucas said.

"Then that’s the answer," Hoyt said, and Oyelaran wrote it down.

[Observation: Host has declined to resolve an ambiguity that would have flattered his account.]

[Assessment: Correct.]

Hoyt put her glasses back on and turned a page.

"Mr. Vintage, I’m going to read you a name and ask whether you know it. Mr. Reed has been told I’d do this. Have you ever heard of a company called Brandywine Ridge Advisory?"

"Yes. I heard it for the first time last night, from my counsel, in connection with another matter. I don’t know anything else about it."

"Have you ever done work involving it? Seen it on a document? An invoice? A distribution list?"

"Not that I remember."

"Thank you." She didn’t write anything. Oyelaran did. Then Hoyt folded her hands on the table, and her voice changed, not much, the way a doctor’s changes when the exam is over and the conversation starts.

"I’ll tell you something now, with Mr. Reed’s agreement, because you’re entitled to know why we called you back, and because it’s going to be in our report regardless." She looked at Reed, who nodded once. "The badge that entered the fourth-floor library at twelve fourteen was a contractor card. It was issued two years ago during Halcyon diligence to Brandywine Ridge Advisory. One card. No individual name on the record. It was supposed to be deactivated when diligence ended. It wasn’t."

The court reporter’s fingers kept moving. Lucas watched them because they were something to watch.

"It was used four times in two years," Hoyt went on. "Three times during diligence. And once on the night of the close. In at the library door at twelve fourteen. Out through the loading dock at twelve forty-one."

Twelve nineteen, Lucas thought. The edit. Five minutes after the door.

He didn’t say it. Everybody in the room had already done the arithmetic.

"You were back on nine by then," Hoyt said. "The elevator logs say twelve oh nine. We’re telling you that so you understand we aren’t asking whether you were in that room. We know you weren’t." She paused. "We’re asking whether you saw who was."

"I didn’t," he said. "I’m sorry."

"Don’t be. You didn’t see anyone, and you said so, and you didn’t invent a shape in the dark to make us feel better." She closed the folder. "That’s all, Mr. Vintage. Off the record."

The court reporter lifted her hands from the machine.

[Quest Completed: Second Session.]

[Objective Met: Memory reported without extension. Uncertainty marked. No silence repaired.]

[Reward: 300 AP.]

[Current AP Balance: 7950.]

Outside, Market Street was loud and wet, a bus hissing at the curb and a man selling umbrellas from a shopping cart. Reed bought one without haggling and handed it to Lucas.

"You did the hard thing in there," Reed said.

"I said I didn’t know."

"About a green light. With a woman who’s billed out at nine hundred an hour waiting for you to say something with a shape to it." Reed turned up his collar. "Most people would have given her a silhouette. A tall man. A woman in a coat. Then they’d spend the next year believing it."

"Five minutes," Lucas said quietly. "In at twelve fourteen. Edit at twelve nineteen."

"Yes."

"Under my credentials."

"Yes. Which means whoever was at LIB-04 had your login, or had a session you left open, or had someone who could give them one." Reed held up a hand before Lucas could answer. "Don’t. That’s Hoyt’s question and Miller’s question, and they’ll ask IT, not you. Your job is done."

"It doesn’t feel done."

"Nothing that matters feels done when it’s done." Reed looked up the street for a cab. "Your badge question gets answered in their report. Which means soon. Not this week. Soon."

The cab came. Reed got in and then leaned back out.

"And Lucas. Get your passwords changed today. Every one. Not because anybody’s told you to. Because you’d sleep better."

He didn’t go straight home. He walked to Ninth in the rain under the new umbrella, because his legs wanted something to do and the bakery was the only errand he could think of that had nothing to do with anyone.

The woman behind the counter was the same one from Sunday. She looked at him, then at the umbrella, then at his tie.

"Funeral or job interview?"

"Neither. Something in between."

"Then you need a croissant." She put one in a bag without asking and slid it across. "On the house. The sourdough people get one free mistake a month."

"What was my mistake?"

"Coming in at two in the afternoon. Everything good’s gone by two." She leaned on the counter. "Your opinionated friend. Did she pass it?"

"Acceptable," he said. "That’s the top grade."

"Then I’ll take it." She wrote something on a pad by the register. "Next Sunday, same loaf?"

"Same loaf. Maybe two."

He ate the croissant at the bus stop, standing under the shelter with three other people who were also pretending the rain wasn’t coming in sideways. The ice maker, he thought. He hadn’t remembered the ice maker until Hoyt asked what he’d heard, and then it had been there, the clatter of a tray dropping in the dark kitchen at the end of the hall, as plain as anything. He wondered what else was in there that nobody had asked him about yet.

[Note: Memory is retrieved by questions. Host should not supply his own.]

"I know."

[Clarification: Host knew on Sunday. Repetition is offered as support, not correction.]

He almost laughed. The woman beside him moved half a step away.

He changed every password he had on the bus home. Bank, email, the streaming account he’d been paying for since college and hardly used. He couldn’t change the Vertex one, because he couldn’t log in to Vertex at all, which was its own kind of security.

At six, Victoria texted.

Observation. Darren took the long way home tonight. A dark sedan sat behind us from Rittenhouse to the expressway. He wrote down the tag. Delaware, temporary. My detail has it. The police have it.

He read it twice in the stairwell of his building, his hand on the rail.

Observation, he typed, and then stopped, because there was nothing in his day he could set beside that. He deleted it.

Are you all right?

It was a question, which was against her rule, and he sent it anyway.

The reply took a minute.

Yes. Darren is more annoyed than I am. He says the sedan drives like it’s never been to Philadelphia. Then, after a longer pause: Can I come over tonight? You can say no. I’d understand no.

He looked at the words for a long time. On Saturday, in his kitchen, with the coffee going cold, they’d agreed on Tuesday for texting, for the two of them practicing the rule. They hadn’t talked about Tuesday for anything else. He had the feeling she’d typed the message several times before she sent it, and that this version was the shortest.

Come, he wrote. Please.

Eight. I’ll bring dinner. Don’t clean anything, I’ll know.

He went upstairs and cleaned everything.