Chapter 2: Visitor Log

The hill was the last of it, and he ran the hill. Where the road bent around the stone wall he came down to a walk, breathing hard through his nose, and looked at his watch. 7:35.

At 7:06 he’d had twenty-four minutes for a walk that took fifteen. He had spent thirteen of them in his seat.

Until Monday it had been eight. Mrs. Alcott had given him the new time sideways, in the middle of setting something down on the sideboard: seven-thirty now, and not to be late to it. He hadn’t been late all week. Nothing had been attached to it by way of explanation and he hadn’t asked.

The gate was iron, ten feet of it, running on a track. Beside it was a walker’s gate wide enough for a man, and a keypad on a steel post with a lamp over it that came on at dusk. In June there had been a vine on the post. In October the vine was down to wire.

He keyed the four digits. Red, then green, and the gate started to travel on the track.

The gatehouse window slid open.

“Book,” the man inside said.

He had been on nights three weeks. He knew Ellis’s face. He did not know his name until he asked for it.

Ellis went to the window. On the desk inside there was a screen listing the last four codes used and the minute each had come through, and beside the screen was the book, a green ledger open at a page with nine lines on it in nine different hands.

The man wrote the time first. 7:36.

“Name.”

“Ward.”

“First.”

“Ellis.”

He wrote it, then turned the pen around and tapped it twice against the next column, which was headed DL NO. Ellis said nothing. The man drew one short line across the column, straight through, and capped the pen.

“You want me to call up?”

“No.”

“All right.”

There was a buzz from under the desk and the latch on the walker’s gate let go.

Ellis went through. Behind him the window slid shut.

If anybody asked, the answer was 7:36. 7:36 was the version on paper, in ink, in a hand that wasn’t his.

The drive was gravel and raked and it ran two hundred yards up through the trees to the house. The house showed six windows lit on the ground floor and two on the second. The garage doors were down. There was no way to tell, from the drive, whether anyone had come home.

He went around the east side, past the kitchen windows, which were fogged at the bottom corners, and up the three stone steps to the service door. It wasn’t locked. It never was, before nine.

The mudroom smelled of the wet wool mat and, from further in, of chicken and lemon. The inner door stood open on the short hall, and past the hall the dining room, and he stopped on the mat.

He switched his bag from his right hand to his left. He stood there two seconds.

The table was laid for two. The chicken was already out, uncovered, with the lemon halves going dark at the edges, and there was a bowl of something with a skin starting over it. The second chair was pulled out four inches and nobody was in it. Mrs. Alcott stood at the sideboard with a napkin over her arm and nothing in her hands.

She never put food out before he was in the room.

He asked, quietly, “Has he been back?”

Mrs. Alcott didn’t answer. She raised her eyes from the napkin, past his shoulder, up, and held them there a moment. Then she looked down again.

He turned.

The stairs came down into the front hall and the upstairs corridor crossed the top of them. Nathaniel was in the middle of the corridor.

He had come out of the bedroom at the end of it. His hair was wet and pushed back off his forehead, and the collar of his shirt was dark where it had run. The light in the corridor was on behind him and the fan in the bathroom was still running, which meant the shower had been off for a few minutes at most.

He didn’t say anything. He stood there with one hand on the newel post and he didn’t move.

Ellis looked up at him. Nathaniel looked back. Ellis looked away first, at the floor.

He did not know how long Nathaniel had been standing there before Ellis turned.

He should have walked straight through to the table. He’d wanted to know first, and now he had asked from the doorway, with his bag in the wrong hand, and stood there while she raised her eyes past him. Five minutes was nothing. It was the standing on the mat that had been on show.

Mrs. Alcott moved the napkin from one arm to the other. She did not look up again.

Ellis came in off the mat and pulled the door to behind him. The storm door took its time over the last two inches and then let go and shut.

Upstairs, a door closed.

Ellis bent and took his shoes off, one and then the other, and set them together on the mat.