Chapter 3: Say It Again

Say It Again

He came down the corridor at a walk, and people moved out of his way without being told to.

Nell had seen him from the far end of it and had not been able to see his shoes. Now she could. Kidskin, thin-soled, no mud on them: he had stepped out of a carriage under a roof and had not been outdoors since. The watch chain lay flat across his waistcoat and did not swing. The coat had cost more than she earned in a year, and it fit him, which was worse than the cost.

Somebody had forgotten to empty a bucket at the end of the corridor. It smelled of that, under the cigars.

The storeroom door stood open. Nell was in the doorway of it with the crate at her back, and the corridor in front of her was all evening clothes. The patrolman had his hand on the door and stepped back when Mr. Van Alst came up, but he kept hold of it.

“Mr. Van Alst,” said Clarice Lund. She had a paper in her hand. “This one has been standing in a hotel corridor telling every soul here—“

“Say it again,” said Mr. Van Alst.

He did not turn his head. He said it to Nell.

Lund’s mouth stayed open for a moment.

Nell’s knees had gone to water. There was still gray on the back of her right hand. She put it flat on the edge of the crate, thought better of it, and put it behind her back.

“Say it again, sir?”

“What you said before I came out of that room.” He lifted the paper in his hand half an inch and let it down again. “In your own words. Not hers.”

Nell thought it over. What came to her was that the trouble wasn’t that any of it was a lie.

Say it as you said it. Nothing extra.

“You’re in time, sir,” she said. “I was just telling them I wanted somebody with a pen. He asked me to the dinner tonight. Himself. If he never wrote my name down in the book, that’s his mistake to answer for, not a crime of mine. And I’d like to know which of the two I’m being held for. The dinner, or the gun.”

There was a sound down the corridor like a room drawing breath.

“Asked her himself,” said a man at the back.

“She says he,” said a woman. “Just he. As though there’s only the one he in the city.”

Half the people in that corridor owed the Van Alst family something or hoped to, and the other half had come to the dinner to be seen hoping.

Mr. Van Alst did not look at any of them.

“You use his name,” he said.

“That’s what he’s called,” said Nell.

Somebody down the corridor laughed and thought better of it.

“Evidence,” said Mr. Van Alst. “Name it.”

“What would there be to show?” said Nell. “We talked in a carriage. Talk doesn’t leave a paper behind.”

“There’s Silas Marsh,” she said. “Ask him.”

That got the corridor’s attention.

“Who?” said somebody.

“Van Alst’s man,” said another. “Marsh.”

Mr. Van Alst said, “You know Marsh.”

“I know he was with him,” said Nell.

“Anybody might know that,” said Clarice Lund. Her voice went up at the end of it.

Nell found a splinter on the edge of the crate and worked it loose with her nail. It came away and she rolled it between her fingers.

“I asked him for an invitation,” she said. “A proper one, my name on it, because I know how these things go. He said no, come up in the carriage with me. So I did. And we came out the east gate of the house, and you were there yourself, sir, with your hat off to him, and you said good morning, and you said you’d be along as soon as you’d finished copying out what he’d set you.”

Somebody at the back said, “Oh.”

Mr. Van Alst’s thumb moved once along the edge of the paper.

“There was nobody at that gate but me,” he said.

“No, sir,” said Nell. “There wasn’t. So there’s nobody in this corridor can call me a liar but you.”

Somebody at the back moved their feet.

Her heart was going like a bird in a sack. She was aware of the paper in his hand without looking at it, and she could not read one line of what was on it.

The deer on his coat. Tell him where it came from.

She looked at his lapel. A small gold deer with its legs together, no bigger than a bean. She had never noticed it before, and did not know what it was, and she said it anyway.

“He spoke about you in the carriage,” she said.

Mr. Van Alst did not move.

“He said you were the pick of the young ones coming up,” she said. “And that deer. He took it off his own coat the morning the list went up and put it in your hand. He said it wasn’t for wearing to dinners.”

Nobody said anything at all.

Mr. Van Alst looked down the corridor at the gas jets and the doors and the room at the end of it.

“Nobody in that house knew where this came from,” he said. “They thought he was telling me to spend more on my clothes.”

He said it quietly, to the corridor or to himself. Then he said, “Miss Corrigan.”

“Sir.”

“Take her out of there,” said Mr. Van Alst.

The patrolman did not move. He looked down the corridor at the room Mr. Van Alst had come out of, and then at Miss Lund, who was turning her paper over.

“Now,” said Mr. Van Alst. “And if anybody wants a name to put to this, put mine.”

The patrolman let go of the door and began going through the ring at his belt, key by key, though the door stood open.