Chapter 97: Speakerphone

He didn’t play it.

He sat on the couch for ten minutes with the phone face down, and then he turned it over, and without opening the voicemail he wrote to Reed.

She left me a voicemail. 302 number. 41 seconds. I haven’t listened to it.

Reed called back before the message showed as read.

"Don’t listen to it," Reed said. "Don’t delete it. Don’t call the number back, don’t block it, don’t save it as a contact. Don’t do anything to that phone except charge it."

"Okay."

"Did you pick up?"

"No. It rang five times. I watched it."

"Good." There was a television on in the background at Reed’s house, something with a crowd cheering, and then it went off. "I’ll be at your place at nine tomorrow. I’m calling Miller tonight. If she calls again, same thing. You watch it ring."

"Reed. The preview said her name. The phone wrote it out."

"I know. Phones do that now. It’s not your fault what your phone reads to you." He paused. "You’re doing this right, Lucas. I know it doesn’t feel like it. Go to bed."

He didn’t go to bed for a long time. He read three pages of the canal book without taking in a word. At one point he got up and put the phone in the bread box, which was ridiculous, and then took it back out because Reed had said charge it and the charger didn’t reach the bread box.

Reed came at nine with a paper bag of bagels and a small digital recorder that looked older than Lucas.

"Miller wants it preserved two ways," Reed said, setting the recorder on the kitchen table. "Your phone stays as it is. We play the message once on speaker, this records it, and I take this to the annex Monday. Morgan’s people will image your phone if they want it. Probably they won’t."

"Do I have to be here when it plays?"

Reed looked at him. "It’s your phone and your voicemail. You don’t have to listen. You can go stand in the hall."

Lucas thought about it. Standing in the hall seemed worse.

"I’ll stay."

Reed pressed the button on the recorder. He said the date and the time and both their names in his flat courtroom voice. Then he nodded, and Lucas opened the voicemail and pressed play and put the phone on speaker.

The voice was older than he remembered, and lower, and it had the slightly careful sound of someone who’d written down what she meant to say.

"Lucas, this is Ruth Abernathy. You probably won’t remember me, but I used to run the twelfth floor. You did the board books once and tab six was upside down." A breath. "I’m not supposed to be calling you. My lawyer would be very angry. I’m calling anyway because I’m going to tell them everything on Monday, and I don’t want you to hear about me from a lawyer first. I asked for that card. I didn’t know what it was going to be used for. It was never supposed to have anything to do with you. I’m sorry about the file. Please don’t call me back."

The message ended. The phone said, in its calm phone way, To delete this message, press seven.

Reed stopped the recorder and said the time again.

Neither of them said anything for a bit. Outside, someone was trying to parallel park and not managing it, the engine whining forward and back.

"She remembered the tabs," Lucas said finally.

"She did." Reed took a bagel out of the bag and didn’t eat it. "That’s how you start when you want someone to believe you. You remind them you were kind to them once."

"You think it was a trick?"

"I didn’t say that. I said it’s how you start." Reed tore the bagel in half. "I’ll tell you what I noticed, and then I’ll tell you what I don’t know. I noticed she said ’it was never supposed to have anything to do with you.’ People don’t usually say that unless they know who it was supposed to have something to do with."

Lucas sat with that.

"What don’t you know?"

"Everything else." Reed shrugged. "Whether she’s telling the truth. Whether her lawyer knows she called. Whether she called anyone else last night. That last one is the one Miller’s going to care about." He wrapped the recorder in a paper napkin, like a sandwich, and put it in his coat pocket. "You did nothing wrong here. An unrepresented party called you, you didn’t answer, you told counsel within ten minutes. If anyone ever asks you about this under oath, that’s your whole answer, and it’s a good one."

[Objective status: Blank Line. Maintained. Unsolicited contact documented through counsel.]

"Should I tell Victoria?"

Reed’s face did something tired.

"You can tell her you got a call you can’t talk about. You already told her that sort of thing on Thursday, I’m guessing."

"Yes."

"Then tell her again if she asks. Don’t say who. Don’t say what." Reed stood up and buttoned his coat. "You’re going over there today?"

"This afternoon."

"Good. Go. Eat something that isn’t a bagel. And Lucas." He stopped at the door. "If she has heard from Ruth Abernathy, she’s not going to tell you either. Remember that before you feel bad."

Victoria lived on the eleventh floor of a building on Locust Street with a doorman who wore white gloves in November and a lobby that smelled like expensive candles. Frank was waiting by the elevators in a fleece and jeans, which Lucas had never seen him in.

"Day off clothes," Frank said, catching him looking. "I’m still working. I just don’t have to look like it inside." He pressed the button. "She’s been cooking since one. I’d prepare yourself."

"Is it bad?"

"I didn’t say bad. I said prepare yourself."

[Quest Issued: Saturday.]

[Objective: Spend the evening with Victoria. Keep the rule. Disclose observations. Do not ask what they mean.]

[Reward: 200 AP.]

She opened the door before he knocked. She was wearing jeans and an old gray sweater with a hole at one cuff, and there was flour on her cheekbone, and behind her the apartment smelled strongly of something that had been on the stove for too long.

"Don’t say anything," she said.

"I wasn’t going to."

"You were. You had a face." She stepped back to let him in. "It was supposed to be my grandmother’s chicken. It’s become a different chicken. Frank, you can come in, I know you’re hungry."

"I’ll eat in the hall," Frank said, and took a plate she’d already made for him, and closed the door on both of them with the delicacy of a man shutting a door on a sleeping baby.

The apartment was bigger than his whole floor and not as nice as he’d expected. It had good windows that looked out at the tops of other buildings and the river beyond them, and old furniture that didn’t match, and books stacked on the floor beside the shelves because the shelves were full. On the piano there were photographs in cheap frames. He looked at them while she rescued the chicken: a man in a work shirt holding a fish, a girl of about ten on the steps of a rowhouse, a woman at a kitchen table laughing at someone outside the picture.

"My father," she said, coming up beside him. "Me. My mother, the day she won forty dollars on a scratch-off and wouldn’t stop talking about it." She picked up the one of the girl on the steps. "Lancaster. Before the pickle factory. My hair was a crime."

"It’s good hair."

"It’s a crime and you know it."

The chicken was all right. It was a little dry and very salty, and there was rice that had been a good idea, and a salad that was mostly a vegetable he couldn’t name. They ate at a small table by the window instead of the big one, and the city went dark in pieces around them.

"Observation," she said, halfway through. "You got a haircut."

"My mother asked."

"Observation: your ears are very nice and I’d never noticed them."

"Observation: that’s a strange thing to say to a man."

"I’m a strange woman. I run a company. Ran." She caught herself and put her fork down. "Run. Until Monday, I run it."

He didn’t ask what Monday would bring. It was right there, he could see it, the question about what the committee would decide and what she thought they’d do. It was exactly the kind of thing the rule was for.

"Observation," he said instead. "You said ’ran’ first."

She looked at him for a long second, and then she laughed, the real one, with her head back.

"Yes," she said. "I did. Thank you for noticing that and not asking about it."

"It’s the rule."

"It’s a good rule. I thought it up in a bad week and it keeps turning out to be the best idea I’ve had all year." She reached over and moved a piece of rice off his sleeve. "Your observation."

He had one. It had been sitting under his ribs since nine o’clock that morning.

"Somebody called me last night," he said carefully. "Someone I can’t tell you about. I didn’t pick up. Reed has it now. I’m fine, and it’s not bad for me, I don’t think. But it happened, and I didn’t want to sit here pretending it didn’t."

She didn’t ask who. He watched her not ask. It cost her something; he could see it in the way her mouth went still.

"Okay," she said. "Thank you for telling me that much."

"That’s all of it that I can say."

"I know." She picked her fork back up. "I’m not going to ask. I’m going to eat this chicken that used to be my grandmother’s chicken, and I’m going to let you have more of it than you want, and that’s going to be how I deal with it."

He laughed, and she put another piece on his plate, and he ate it.

Afterwards they washed the dishes together because she didn’t have a dishwasher, which surprised him. "I had one," she said. "It broke in March and I found out I like doing this. It’s the only time in the day nobody can hand me anything." She washed; he dried. Her kitchen towels were old and thin and had little lemons on them.

"Observation," he said, drying a pot. "You hold a sponge like it owes you money."

"Observation: you dry a pot like you’re trying to get it to confess." She handed him another. "My father did dishes every night of his life. My mother cooked, he washed, that was the deal. He said it was the only job at home where you could see you’d finished."

"Did he lock up after?"

She glanced at him, surprised he remembered. "Every door twice. Then he’d stand in the kitchen and listen to the house for a minute. I used to think he was hearing something. I think now he just liked that it was quiet."

He put the pot away in the wrong cupboard, and she let him.

They watched half of a movie about a bank robbery, which she picked as a joke, and spent most of it pointing out what the robbers were doing wrong with the money. Around ten-thirty she fell asleep with her head on his shoulder and her feet tucked under her, and he sat very still and watched the credits roll on a movie they hadn’t finished.

[Quest Complete: Saturday.]

[Reward: 200 AP. Total: 8,900.]

Her phone buzzed on the coffee table at ten-forty. She woke up the way people do when they’re used to being woken up by phones, all at once, already reaching.

She read it. She sat up straight.

"It’s the chair," she said.

He didn’t ask. He watched her read it twice.

"Observation," she said slowly, and her voice was very even, the way it got in boardrooms. "He wants to know if I’ve heard from Ruth Abernathy. She ran the board floor for eleven years. She kept my calendar." She looked at the phone, and then at him. "He says she left him a message last night. And he says she asked him to make sure I wasn’t in the building on Monday."