Chapter 114: Eleven Days

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 114: Eleven Days

Day one.

Nobody asked him what Dov said at the door, because nobody knew Dov had said anything. That was the first thing Cole noticed about keeping it — how little effort it took. He'd assumed a secret would require maintenance. This one just sat there.

He went to school. He ate toast. He told Dana about the truck and the escort and the forearm and left out four seconds at a service door, and she wrote it all down and said "good work" and he said "thanks."

Day two.

Trina came to the apartment with a bag of pastries she couldn't afford and put them on the table and said, "I need to say something and then I'll go."

"You can stay."

"I know. That's why I'd rather say it standing." She had her hands in her sleeves. "I propped a door that people came through to hurt your sister. I've been sitting with that for four days and I keep waiting for somebody here to say it out loud and nobody has, and it's making me insane."

Mia was at the table. Everyone looked at her, which was the correct thing, because it was hers.

Mia thought about it for a while.

"Did you know it was me?"

"No."

"Would you have done it if you had?"

Trina went white.

"I don't know," she said.

Mia nodded slowly.

"Okay," she said. "That's the right answer. If you'd said no I wouldn't have believed you."

Day four.

The Ministry review into "the incident at Fairhaven Resonance Care" concluded. Routine. No injuries. Two unidentified men, hospitalised, released without charge into the custody of nobody in particular, which is a sentence Dana read out loud three times.

Dov Vossberg was transferred at ten a.m. on Tuesday to a facility in the north with a higher security classification, exactly as scheduled, with a great deal more paperwork.

Visiting hours: none, pending assessment.

Trina's appeal was filed the same afternoon by a lawyer Iris paid for and did not mention paying for.

Day five.

Cole didn't sleep, and it wasn't the mark.

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He lay in the dark and turned over four words in a language that did not exist and found that he could still hear them exactly — not remember them. Hear them, the way you hear a song you've had in your head all day.

He got up at three and wrote them down phonetically on the back of an envelope.

He looked at what he'd written for about a minute and then tore the envelope into pieces small enough that nobody could reassemble them, and put them in the bin under the coffee grounds, and stood in the kitchen wondering why he'd done that.

Day seven.

Reeve broke a glass in the sink and said, "Are we going to talk about the fact that you've been weird since Tuesday?"

"I'm always weird."

"You've been quiet weird. Not smug weird. There's a difference and I've had six years of taxonomy."

Cole dried a plate.

"Yeah," he said. "There's a thing I'm not telling you."

Reeve stopped.

"Okay," he said, slowly. "That's — you've never actually said that before. You usually do the joke."

"I know."

"Is it bad?"

"I don't know yet. That's genuinely the reason." Cole put the plate down. "If it turns out to be nothing, I'll have worried six people over nothing. If it turns out to be something, I'd rather bring it to everyone with an answer attached than a question."

"That's how you ended up sitting on a stairwell for twenty-two minutes by yourself."

"Yeah."

"Right." Reeve went back to the sink. "Eleven days."

"What?"

"You get eleven days." He didn't look up. "Then I tell Vesper, and she is a lot worse at letting things go than I am."

Day nine.

Marguerite sent a letter.

An actual letter, posted, with a stamp on it, addressed to the apartment in handwriting that Dana confirmed against the ledger within about four seconds.

It contained one sheet of paper and one sentence.

Corvin has not reported in since Monday and I would like you to know that I did not do it.

Day ten.

They found the car on Wednesday.

Not Corvin — the car. Parked legally on a residential street four blocks from the northern facility, unlocked, keys in the cupholder, a cold coffee in the other cupholder with a skin on it.

And on the passenger seat, squared up neatly like somebody had taken care over the placement: a single sheet of paper with eleven names on it.

Nine were crossed out.

"Those are caretakers," Aldric said. His voice had gone somewhere flat. "Those are the eleven people who maintained Kaelmoor. That's the list. I'm on it — there, that's me, I'm not crossed out."

"Who's the other one?"

"Hollis Verrin."

Dana was already reaching for her phone.

Day eleven.

Hollis Verrin was alive.

He was sixty-one years old and he answered his own front door in a cardigan and he had no idea that anybody had been looking for him, and when Dana explained about the list he sat down on his own step and said, "Oh. Oh, so that's what that was," and then didn't say anything else for about a minute.

"Mr. Verrin?"

"A man came Thursday. Polite. Said he was from a pension administrator." He was looking at his shoes. "Asked me eleven questions about the old job. Wrote everything down. I told him everything, because it was nine years ago and I've never once been asked and I wanted somebody to — "

He stopped.

"Nine crossed out," he said. "That's nine people I worked with."

"We don't know what the crossings mean."

"Don't do that." Verrin looked up. "Please don't do that. I'm sixty-one, I've been waiting nine years for somebody to knock on this door, and I would rather you didn't start by being kind about it."

Cole told them that night.

All of them, in the kitchen, at ten o'clock, with the list on the table and Hollis Verrin's phone number on the fridge and Corvin's car impounded by a police force that didn't know what it had.

"At the service door," he said. "Dov said one more thing. Only I heard it."

Nobody said anything.

"It was in the other language. I understood it." Cole had both hands flat on the table. "And I've had eleven days to work out how to say this and I haven't found a good way, so I'm going to say it badly."

"Say it," Vesper said.

Cole looked at the eleven names. Nine crossed out.

"He said: 'They're going to start counting again. Don't let them get to the end this time.'"

[End of Chapter 114]