Chapter 96: Board Books

He knew the name before Reed finished saying it.

Not the way you know a celebrity’s name. The way you know the name of the woman at the post office who once told you your package was taped wrong and then fixed it for you. He stood on the corner of Eleventh with the phone against his ear and a pretzel cart steaming beside him, and for a second he was twenty-three again, carrying a stack of board books up to the twelfth floor in his first month at Vertex.

"Lucas," Reed said. "Are you there?"

"I’m here."

"You went quiet. Quiet means you know her."

"I knew her a little," Lucas said. "Everybody on nine knew her a little. She ran the board floor."

"Okay." Reed’s voice did the thing it did when he was writing something down without a pen. "I’m going to ask you one question, and then I’m going to tell you some rules, and then I’m going to hang up and you’re going to go home. Have you spoken to Ruth Abernathy since she retired?"

"No."

"Email? Text? A card at Christmas?"

"No. I don’t think I’ve spoken to her in two years. Maybe more."

"Good. Then here are the rules." Reed breathed out. "You don’t call her. You don’t look her up. You don’t type her name into anything with a search bar, and that includes your phone, your laptop, and your mother. You don’t ask Camilla about her. You don’t mention her name to Victoria."

That one landed harder than the others.

"Victoria worked with her," Lucas said. "For years. Ruth kept the directors’ calendars."

"I know. That’s exactly why. Victoria is recused. If you tell her the name before Pellman and Hoyt do, and the committee finds out, then the one clean thing about her recusal stops being clean. And the one clean thing about you stops being clean too." Reed paused. "She’ll find out. Probably soon. It shouldn’t be from you."

"Okay."

"Say it back."

"I don’t call her, look her up, or say her name to anyone but you."

"Good man. Go home."

[Quest Issued: Blank Line.]

[Objective: Do not search for, contact, or discuss Ruth Abernathy with anyone other than counsel until she has spoken to Pellman and Hoyt.]

[Reward: 250 AP.]

He put the phone in his pocket and bought a pretzel he didn’t want, because he’d been standing next to the cart long enough that it felt rude not to.

The board books were the first thing he remembered, walking home.

In his first year, before he’d been trusted with anything that mattered, the junior analysts on nine took turns printing and binding the quarterly packets for the directors. Three hundred pages each, tabbed, spiral bound, twelve copies. It was the kind of job they gave you to see if you’d complain. Lucas hadn’t complained. He’d just done it slowly and carefully, and on his first try he’d carried twelve copies up to the twelfth floor at ten to seven on a Wednesday and set them on the desk outside the boardroom.

Ruth Abernathy had picked up the top one, opened it to the middle, and looked at it over her glasses.

"Tab six is upside down," she’d said.

He’d checked. It was. It was upside down in all twelve.

"I’m so sorry. I’ll fix them tonight."

"You’ll fix them now," she’d said, not unkindly. "The directors get here at eight tomorrow and some of them come at seven-thirty to look important." She’d pulled a chair over to the side of her desk and handed him a pair of scissors and a roll of tabs from her drawer. "Sit. I’ll get you tea."

He’d sat there until almost nine, re-tabbing. She’d brought him tea in a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST GRANDMA and she’d worked on her own computer the whole time without talking to him, except once, near the end, when he’d asked whether anyone actually read the back half of the packet.

"Nobody reads page two hundred," she’d said. "But one day somebody will, and it’ll be the day it matters."

He’d thought about that line for a long time after. He’d thought about it, in fact, on the night of the close, when he’d been changing a number on page forty-seven and telling himself nobody would look.

He stopped at a crosswalk and waited for the light, and he realized he was holding the pretzel so hard he’d dented it.

[Notice: Subject’s recall of named individual is emotional, not evidentiary. Recommend separating the two.]

"I know," he said out loud, and a woman with a stroller looked at him and moved a step away.

At home he did the things he’d been doing since this started. He took off the good tie and hung it on the door. He washed the one mug in the sink. He opened the notebook on the kitchen table, the one where he wrote down only what he knew, and he sat with the pen for a while.

He wanted to write a lot of things. He wanted to write that she’d had a grandson who played hockey, because she’d mentioned it once. He wanted to write that she’d left a box of clementines on the ninth floor every December with a note that said TAKE TWO, NOT FOUR. He wanted to write the question that was sitting in his chest like a stone: why would a woman who re-tabbed his board books at nine at night sign her name to a company that walked into a library at 12:14 and made his mistake look worse?

He wrote:

R.A. Board EA, 11 years. Retired last spring. Signatory, Brandywine Ridge (per Miller via Reed). Card requester (per Hoyt, not named). Agreed to talk.

Then, under it, after a long time:

Brought me tea once.

He looked at that last line and almost crossed it out. It wasn’t evidence. It was the kind of thing a lawyer would tell him had no business in a notebook like this. But it was true, and he knew it, and the whole point of the notebook was to write down what he knew. He left it.

His phone buzzed at seven-forty.

Observation, Victoria had written. Frank ate the last of the hummus and blamed it on the cat. I don’t have a cat.

He smiled at that, and then he stopped smiling, because his thumbs had already started to type something else. Do you remember Ruth

He deleted it letter by letter. He sat with his hands flat on the table until he was sure.

Observation, he wrote instead. Frank strikes me as a man who would invent a cat.

He’s a former state trooper. He’s invented worse. Then: Are you okay? You went quiet after the badge.

That was the trouble with Victoria. She heard silences the way other people heard car alarms.

I’m okay. Something came up after I left Reed that I can’t talk about. It’s not bad for me. I just can’t say it.

The dots came and went twice.

Then don’t, she wrote. That’s the rule and it’s a good one. Saturday still?

Saturday still.

Bring nothing. I mean it. Last time you brought wine and Frank lectured me about open containers in a protected vehicle.

Friday he got the haircut.

His mother had been specific, the way she was about haircuts and funerals: not a trim, a haircut, the kind where you could see his ears. He went to the barbershop on Ninth, the one with the sign that still said OPEN SUNDAYS even though it hadn’t been for years, and sat in the second chair while a man named Manny with forearms like bread loaves asked him what he wanted.

"My mother wants to see my ears."

"Mothers always want to see ears." Manny put the cape on him and snapped it at the neck. "Job interview?"

"Sort of. I’m going back to work Monday. Different department."

"Different department is good. New people don’t know your stories." Manny started on the left side. "Old people know all your stories and they tell them wrong."

The television in the corner was on a local channel with the sound off. It was the noon news, a story about a water main on Spring Garden. Lucas watched it and didn’t watch it. His phone was in his lap under the cape, and the cape was the only reason he didn’t take it out. He knew exactly what he’d type. He could see the search bar in his head, her name in it, the results loading. A retirement announcement. An obituary for a husband, maybe. A photo from some charity luncheon with her in a pastel jacket. A home address in some suburb in Delaware.

That was the thing. If he searched, he’d find out where she lived. And once he knew where she lived, he’d know, and nobody could ever take that back out of him. Miller would ask him one day, under oath, whether he’d looked, and he’d have to say yes.

[Warning: Objective at risk. Proximity of device detected.]

"Hold still," Manny said. "You tensed up."

"Sorry."

"You thinking about the new department?"

"Something like that."

Manny worked around his ear with the clippers. "My brother-in-law," he said, "changed departments at the Navy Yard. Went from welding to inventory. Hated it for six months. Then he found out inventory is where all the gossip is. Now he loves it. Knows who’s getting divorced before they do."

"I’m trying to avoid gossip."

"Then go back to welding." Manny turned the chair toward the mirror. "Look. Ears."

Lucas looked. It was a good haircut. He looked younger in it, or maybe just less tired. He took a photo and sent it to his mother, who replied within thirty seconds: THANK YOU. Now you look like someone who should be trusted with money.

He paid Manny and tipped him too much, and on the sidewalk outside he took his phone out and opened nothing. He put it back. It felt like closing a door quietly in a house where someone was sleeping.

Camilla called at four.

"Last day of my police car," she said. "Officer Burke brought Andre a patch. A real one, off a jacket. Andre’s going to sew it on his backpack and get suspended."

"Is Burke the young one?"

"Young enough to call Denise ma’am, which she loved." A door closed on Camilla’s end, and the background noise went away. "Lucas. Somebody from Pellman and Hoyt called me this morning. Not Hoyt. The young one with the laptop."

"Oyelaran."

"Him. He asked me if I’d ever dealt with anyone at Vertex who arranged building cards for outside firms. Back when my companies still did business there."

He didn’t say anything. He could feel the quest sitting in the air like a hand on his shoulder.

"I told him what I remembered," Camilla said. "That’s all. I’m not telling you what I said. I just wanted you to know they asked, in case it means something to you. And if it doesn’t, forget I said it."

"I can’t really talk about it."

"I know you can’t. That’s why I’m the one talking." She laughed, short and tired. "This is how it works with us now, right? I say things, you say you can’t, and we both feel better."

"Something like that."

"Okay. Andre says you should come for spades again. He says you’ve had time to practice losing."

"Tell him I’ve been practicing every day."

After she hung up, he stood at the window for a while and watched the street. No sedan. No silver Ford. Just a FedEx truck double-parked and a kid on a scooter, and the tree outside his building losing its last yellow leaves onto the cars.

The call came at eight-forty that night.

He was on the couch with a library book about the history of canals, which he’d picked because it seemed like the least likely book in the world to remind him of anything. The phone lit up on the arm of the couch. A number he didn’t know, a 302 area code.

Delaware.

He watched it ring. Four times. Five. It stopped. A minute later, the phone buzzed once and showed him a voicemail, forty-one seconds long, and a transcription preview that the phone had helpfully generated in gray letters under the number.

Lucas, this is Ruth Abernathy. You probably won’t remember me, but I used to

That was where the preview stopped.

He put the phone face down on the cushion and sat very still with the canal book open on his knee, and he didn’t touch the screen.

[Alert: Contact initiated by named individual. Objective status: unchanged. Do not respond.]