Chapter 3 Nine-Ten

Rhys

At seven on Monday morning the freezer bag was still on his blotter, and Rhys Calloway had not slept since he'd said Sign by Tuesday.

Thirty-one floors below his office the container port was working in the rain. The cranes were lifting boxes off a ship out of Rotterdam and setting them down in rows, red and blue and rust.

He'd watched cranes since he was six, standing on this same floor with his grandfather's hand on his shoulder. Every box is a promise somebody made, Edmund used to say. We're the people who keep them.

His coffee had gone cold an hour ago. He hadn't drunk any of it.

His thumb was moving on his ring finger. He felt the band there, smooth and warm, and made himself stop.

He pulled a legal pad toward him and wrote it out the way he'd write out any deal that had gone wrong, because that was the only way he knew to think when the ground went.

On the left, what he knew.

Vial. Grandfather's digoxin, his label, empty. Came out of her bag.

She made the tea. Her hands, her pot. She carried it up.

She was alone with him.

She knew his medications by heart. She recited them to the paramedic without looking.

On the right, why.

$412,000. Helen Fairley's hospital bills. Grandfather paid them in full, 2017.

Grandfather arranged the marriage. Pushed it. Wouldn't say why.

Grandfather met with his lawyers twice in February. Changes to the will. Wouldn't say what.

He looked at the two columns until the handwriting stopped looking like his.

He'd known from the start what she was. A girl from Old Harbor with a dead mother and a mountain of debt, who'd done CPR on an old man on a ferry and found herself, a few months later, with every bill paid and a standing invitation to Sunday lunch at Larkmoor.

Rhys had been in business long enough to recognize a position being built. He'd said so to his grandfather, once, and Edmund had moved a rook, taken his time over it, and said, Marry her and find out.

So he'd married her. He'd given her a house and his name and three years of his patience, and he'd waited for the ask. He'd thought it would be money. He hadn't imagined it would be this.

His desk phone buzzed. His assistant's line.

"Ms. Sutter for you," said Owen. "She's crying."

"Put her through."

---

Vivienne had been crying for some time. He could hear it in the thickness of her consonants, the little catch before each sentence.

"Darling, I haven't closed my eyes," she said. "I keep seeing it. His face. And the bottle in my hand."

"I know."

"I only opened her bag to help. You heard the paramedic. He wanted the list, and she was just kneeling there, and I thought, someone has to do something." She drew a long shaky breath. "I didn't even know what it was until I saw the label."

"I know."

"I'll say it to anyone. To the police, to a judge. I'll put it in writing. I don't care what it does to my career. Darling, I owe you that much. I owe you everything."

He closed his eyes.

She'd been saying that for eleven years. I owe you everything, when it was the other way around, when he was the one who owed her. She'd been eighteen and he'd been nineteen and she'd kept him alive on a frozen road.

Afterward she went to Los Angeles and he went back to college and then into the company. And when his grandfather put a stranger in front of him and said this one, Vivienne hadn't said a word against it. She'd come to the wedding. She'd hugged the bride.

"Write it down," he said. "Everything you saw. Send it to Carrow's office today. I'll have Owen send you the address."

"I will. I'm so sorry, darling. I'm so sorry this is happening to you."

He didn't tell her it wasn't happening to him. It was happening to a man in an ICU bed with a tube down his throat, who'd been about to make a speech. Rhys didn't know what the speech was going to be. He'd assumed it would be the usual: the company, the family, the harbor. Now he'd never know.

He thanked her and put the phone down.

---

Delphine came at half past eight. She stood in his doorway without coming in. She never came into a room of his unless he asked her to. She was in a dark wool coat. She'd come straight from the hospital.

"He's stable," she said. "They'll try taking the tube out tomorrow."

"I know. They called."

"Of course they did." She looked past him at the cranes. "Have you eaten, sweetheart?"

"No."

"You should." She didn't move. She was holding her gloves in one hand, the soft gray leather ones she wore in the garden and out of it, and she ran them through her fingers. "I've been going over and over it. I keep thinking there must be something I missed."

He waited. Delphine had married his father when Rhys was twelve, three years after his mother died. She'd never tried to mother him. He'd been grateful for that, and over the years the gratitude had turned into trust. She was the only person at Larkmoor who never asked him for anything.

"Last week," she said, and stopped.

"Go on."

"It's nothing. I'm sure it's nothing." She looked at her gloves. "Margot asked me which of his pills were the heart ones. In the kitchen at Larkmoor, on Tuesday, I think. She said she wanted to make sure the nurse was giving them at the right times." Delphine's mouth turned up at one corner, fond and tired. "I thought it was sweet. I thought, what a conscientious girl."

He felt the column on his legal pad grow by a line.

"I'd never want to be the one who said it," Delphine said. "Please understand that. She's your wife. I've only ever wanted you to be happy."

She looked at him a moment longer with her soft, worried face, and then she put on one glove, and then the other, and went.

He sat with it.

He picked up the pen and wrote, under the left column: Asked D. which pills were heart pills. Last week.

The new line sat there in his own handwriting, as neat as an invoice.

---

He'd been nineteen. That was the thing he kept coming back to, staring at the cranes. Nineteen, home from his sophomore year for Christmas, driving too fast on Gull Point Road the night after New Year's because he'd had a fight with his father and wanted the sea on one side of him and nothing on the other.

He didn't remember the skid. He remembered ice on the inside of the windshield, a frost pattern like ferns. He remembered being upside down in his seat belt, the blood running the wrong way, into his hair. He remembered a seam of pain in his right side that went from the ribs down to the hip, so sharp and so precise it felt surgical.

And he remembered a voice. A girl's voice, at the broken window, in the dark. Telling him not to close his eyes. Telling him a joke.

He'd never been able to remember the joke. He'd tried for years. Some nights it was right there, on the edge of his tongue, and then it went. He remembered that it was terrible. He remembered that she told it more than once, and that each time she told it he'd tried to laugh and it had hurt so much that the trying kept him awake.

Then nothing. Then the bright ceiling of the St. Ansel emergency room, and someone cutting off his sweater, and Vivienne Sutter's face above him, mascara down to her chin, holding his hand. You're all right. I stayed with you. I stayed the whole time.

He'd known Vivienne since they were children. Delphine was her godmother. He'd never thought of her as anything but a pretty, noisy girl who was always at Larkmoor at Christmas. After that night he'd thought of her as the reason he was alive.

He'd filed the voice and the joke under her name and closed the drawer. He hadn't opened it since.

Vivienne had held his hand on a frozen road. Margot had held a pill bottle in her purse.

He picked up the freezer bag and turned it over. The amber vial slid to one corner. EDMUND CALLOWAY. DIGOXIN 125 MCG. TAKE ONE TABLET DAILY. The label was a little worn at the edges, the way labels get in a bathroom cabinet.

He got up, went to the paneled wall behind his desk, and opened the safe. Inside were his passport, the deed to Lantern Row, a velvet box he didn't look at, and three folders of documents his grandfather had told him never to let out of the building. He put the bag on top of the folders.

He would give her until tomorrow. If she signed, she could walk away, and he'd hand the vial and Vivienne's statement to the police and let them do what they liked with it. If she didn't sign, he'd do the same thing a day sooner. Either way she'd be out of his house and out of his family, and his grandfather would be safe from her.

He closed the safe and spun the dial.

His phone lay face up beside the coffee. Nothing from her. No calls since he'd left Lantern Row, no texts. He hadn't expected any, and he was annoyed with himself for looking.

He opened their thread anyway and scrolled. It didn't take long. Edmund asked if you're coming Sunday. Yes. Your gray suit is back from the cleaner, it's in the hall closet. Fine. I'm on nights till Thursday, there's soup in the fridge. No reply. Happy birthday. I left something on your desk. He couldn't remember what it had been. A book, he thought. He couldn't remember the title. It bothered him more than it should have.

Three years, and the whole of it fitted on his screen with room to spare.

He dropped the phone in the drawer and shut it.

---

Owen Pike came in at nine without knocking, which he only did when he had paper.

Owen had worked for him for four years. He was twenty-eight, narrow, neat, and had the manner of a man who'd been born holding a clipboard. He kept receipts for everything: lunches, taxis, phone calls, conversations. Rhys had once seen him produce a dry-cleaning ticket from 2018 to settle a dispute about a tie.

He was holding three sheets stapled together.

"Larkmoor's security company," Owen said. "I asked them for the logs from Saturday night. All cameras, all doors."

"Why?"

"Because you're going to want them." Owen put the sheets on the blotter, on top of the legal pad, so that Rhys's two neat columns disappeared under a grid of numbers. "The timestamps don't look right."

Rhys didn't pick them up. "In what way?"

"In the way where there's a hole in them."

"Owen. I have Vivienne Sutter's statement coming in by noon. I have a bottle of my grandfather's heart medication that came out of my wife's handbag in front of the mayor. I have Delphine telling me Margot asked her last week which pills were the heart ones. I don't need a hole in a security log."

"I think you do."

"Noted," said Rhys.

He turned his chair toward the window. It was the word he used to end things. People heard it and gathered their papers and went. He'd watched senior vice presidents hear it and go.

Owen didn't go.

He stood on the far side of the desk with his hands folded in front of him and waited. The rain ran down the glass. Below, a crane swung a blue container out over the water and held it there.

Rhys turned back.

"What?"

Owen reached over and tapped one line on the second page with the tip of his pen.

"The study camera went dark at nine-ten," he said.