Chapter 24: A Quarter Past Six
The parcel came to the gatehouse on the morning of Tuesday the twenty-second of September.
Fifty-four dollars, the cheaper model, ordered on the eighteenth from a chair in a nursery at midnight.
Marco Ruiz carried it up to the house himself and put it on the kitchen table and said one word, which was, “Parcel.”
Then he went out again through the yard door without looking at me.
He did not log it.
I found that out in November, when a man in a suit went through the delivery book for that autumn and there is nothing on the twenty-second.
It is the only thing Marco Ruiz did for me in the whole of that year, and he did it before he had decided to like me.
I sat on my bed that afternoon with the box in my lap for a long time.
I want to set out the reasons not to open it, because they were all good.
Aaronson had told me to notify his office before any further contact with the police, and I had already broken that once.
Illinois requires the consent of every party to a recording, and Serena Montigue had known that at four minutes past eight in a foyer.
The first recorder had been taken out from under a table in front of five witnesses and was at that moment in a drawer belonging to a man with lawyers.
A nanny with one recorder is a nanny with a doctor.
A nanny with two recorders is a woman building a case.
I knew that.
I am not going to pretend I worked it out afterwards.
I sat on a bed with a cardboard box and I knew it.
Here is why I opened it.
Because a pediatrician in Evanston had asked me to do a thing in March and had not withdrawn the request.
Because nobody else in that building was going to be in the room at two in the morning.
Because I am not able to sit with that child and not count.
And because of the last line on that sheet of paper, which said forty-four seconds, and which was the worst number I owned.
So I opened it.
And then I did the thing that saved me, eleven months later, in front of twelve people.
I wrote to everybody and told them.
I wrote a letter to Detective Ruth Hale at the police department and I posted it on the twenty-third.
I said that Dr. Elias Moreno had asked me in March to keep an audio log of the child’s breathing episodes.
I said that the original device was in the possession of Mr. Blackwood and that I had bought another one on the eighteenth for fifty-four dollars.
I said I would begin recording again on the evening of the twenty-second, from a quarter past six until six the following morning, in the nursery, for that purpose and no other purpose.
I said the files would go to Dr. Moreno and that a copy of anything at all would be provided to the police on request.
I sent the same letter to Marvin Aaronson’s office and a shorter one to Dr. Moreno.
Nobody replied to any of them for six weeks.
But there is a stamped copy in a file, dated the twenty-third of September 2026, in my handwriting, sent before anything else happened.
A man in a good suit spent two hours trying to make that letter look clever.
It was not clever.
I was twenty-six and frightened and I did the only thing I know how to do, which is write it down and hand it in.
That evening I gave Ethan his bath at ten to six with the cast in a plastic sleeve and my hand round his elbow.
He got the red ring wet, which he was not supposed to, and he laughed like a cough because I blew on his neck.
I put him in the blue sleepsuit with the poppers up the front, because the ones with sleeves you pull did not go over a cast.
At six I put him on the rug and he brought me a sock, and then a lid off a jar of cream, and then the sock again.
At ten past six he went to the window with both hands on the glass, and there was nobody outside, and he said his word anyway.
At a quarter past six I took the new recorder out of my apron pocket and pressed the button.
The red light came on.
I held it about twenty centimetres from my mouth, the way I had for six months, and I said it out loud into a quiet room.
“Twenty-second of September, six fifteen p.m. Ethan Blackwood, fourteen months.”
“Room’s twenty-one degrees. He’s had a hundred and sixty millilitres at five forty and half a banana.”
“Chest clear.
Nothing on the out-breath. Resting rate twenty-nine over a minute, counted twice.”
“Left forearm in cast, day eight. Fingers warm.
No swelling. He used the left hand three times today.”
“No episode last night.
Twenty September, no episode. Nineteen September, no episode.”
Then I put it back in my pocket and it ran all night, the way it always had.
It was a Tuesday.
Nothing happened at all that night, or the next one, or the one after that.
I was so relieved that I did not look at that page again for six weeks.