Chapter 53: Forty-Eight Hours
Detective Renata Ferreira called me back at five past two on the Friday and gave me twenty minutes at four.
The room was the same one. The poster about seatbelts is still crooked.
On the second of October she had read my innocent column before she read anything else.
That is the only reason I telephoned her and not the number on the letterhead.
I put three sheets on the table and turned them round to face her and took my hands off them.
The route. The window. The object.
She read for six minutes without a word.
“Eleven minutes,” she said.
“Median twelve. Range seven to nineteen. Twenty-six feeds, in another woman’s handwriting, and she has no idea she gave it to me.”
“And the corridor has no camera on it.”
“Not on that table. There’s one further along that sees the linen room door.”
She wrote that down, and I did not understand why for another week.
Then I gave her the photograph.
I told her where I had taken it and on what date and that I had had no business being on that floor.
I said that part first, unprompted, before she asked. It is the only credit I get from that fortnight.
She looked at the screen for a long moment.
“Lot number?”
I read it off my sheet. She wrote all eleven characters and read them back to me.
“You didn’t open it.”
“No.”
“Didn’t count it.”
“No.”
“Good,” she said, and it was the last comfortable thing anybody said to me for three days.
Then she put the pen down and turned it parallel to the edge of the pad.
“I’m going to say a thing and I’d like you to take it as a favor and not as a warning.”
“There is an indictment in this house. That means every adult in it now speaks through counsel, and counsel is being paid to wait for exactly one thing.”
“Which is?”
“You. Being wrong about something in writing.”
I said I was not wrong.
“That isn’t the point. You have one credibility. It is not a renewable resource.”
“If you are wrong about a bottle in a bathroom, you don’t get to be right about a hundred and seventy-six days afterwards. Not with me. Not with anybody.”
“So tell me not to.”
“I’m not going to tell you not to. I’m going to make one call and see what comes back.”
She said she would ask the family’s counsel to account for the medicine and to account for two dates of my choosing.
I gave her the twenty-fourth of July and the fifth of August, because they were the two longest durations in the log.
Sixty-four seconds and sixty-eight seconds. The two worst nights of that whole summer.
“Monday morning,” she said. “Nine o’clock, at the house, with everybody present. I’d rather it happened in front of me than around me.”
I walked to the bus in the dark feeling something I have not felt since and do not expect to feel again.
Somebody with a badge had made an appointment on the strength of a thing I had written.
I had all of Saturday and all of Sunday, and I had a hundred and seventy-six days of dinner times on a photocopy on my floor.
Dr. Moreno had asked me for one piece of arithmetic. Subtract the bottle from the onset. Nineteen times.
Nineteen subtractions. It is eleven minutes of work. I have timed it since, out of a kind of penance, and it is eleven minutes.
On Saturday I cleaned the coach house instead, including the inside of the oven, which had not been used since 1994.
On Sunday I wrote out what I would say on Monday, rehearsed it standing up, and changed the order four times.
I did not do the subtraction.
I have thought about this more than about anything else in this account, and I am going to put down the true reason rather than the flattering one.
It was not that I forgot. It was not that I ran out of time.
It was that I already knew the shape of those numbers, the way you know a thing in your hands before you know it in your head.
And I wanted forty-eight more hours of being a woman who had found something.
On Sunday I had my hour early, at four, because Miss Devlin had asked for the change.
He had learned that week to put a block on top of a block and then look at me for the whole of one second before he added a third.
Seven blocks. He got to seven and it came down, and he did not mind, because the coming down is also the game.
At twenty to five he brought me the sock.
I put him down at ten to five with two pats on my collarbone and left the room with my hands empty.
Twelve hours later I sat down in the morning room with a folder on my knees and no arithmetic in it.