Chapter 57: The Two That Did Not Fit
Roz’s books do not live in the kitchen any more. Since the fourteenth they go down to the estate office at six every evening and come back at six every morning.
Mr. Foyle calls it safekeeping. Roz calls it nothing at all, which is how she says most things.
I went in at three and stood at the end of the scrubbed table and asked for March to September again.
“You told me to tell you first,” I said. “So I am telling you. I want the books, and I am not going to say what for.”
She looked at me for about four seconds.
Then she wiped her hands and took both of them down and put them on a folded towel.
“You do not write in them.”
“No.”
That is the entire negotiation, and it is the second time I have had it with her.
I was after three things and I had them in my pocket on a card.
The ninth of April. The eleventh of August. And the first week of June.
The ninth of April is one of the two that did not fit. Onset 02:20. Duration fifty-one seconds. And beside it, in my column four, the word IN.
Roz’s entry for that day says Mr. V — in. Six for dinner. And then a note in the margin.
M’kee canc. 21:40.
I asked her what M’kee was.
“Milwaukee. He was going up for two nights and it came off. He telephoned about a quarter to ten and I remade the beds.”
“So the house had run all day expecting him to be gone.”
“The house had run all day expecting him to be gone.”
I wrote that down and my hands went cold, and I did not tell her why.
The eleventh of August is the other one. Onset 01:20. My earliest onset in nineteen entries. Column four: IN.
Roz’s entry says Mr. V — Midway, late. And underneath, in her own shorthand, car 00:40, home 02:05.
He came into that building at five past two in the morning.
The episode began at twenty past one.
He was not in the house when it started. He was in a car on the Stevenson.
Roz writes IN if a man sleeps under that roof. She is a cook, not a witness, and her definition was never mine.
Two entries. Two explanations. Both of them documentary, both of them in another woman’s handwriting, neither of them mine.
Nineteen out of nineteen.
I sat at the end of that table with a pencil and did not move for a while.
Then the third thing, which is the one I actually went in for.
June.
The book for June has an entry on the fourth in the housekeeping column.
Hum. out — descale.
And on the ninth: Hum. back.
Six nights. The tank was off that shelf and in the scullery with citric acid in it, and I was the one who scrubbed it.
Victor Blackwood was out of the state on three of those six nights.
There is no episode in my log for any night between the third and the tenth of June.
Not one. Six nights, three of them under the exact condition that produced seventeen out of nineteen.
Nothing happened to that child at all.
There is one thing I have to put down here honestly, because I found it on the fifth of June and again on the seventh. Both nights he stirred and made a sound I did not like, and I was up and had the light on inside eight seconds.
Both times under a minute. Both times he came back on his own, without me touching him.
They are not in the log because they did not meet my own threshold, which is sixty seconds and an intervention.
I have never regretted a rule of my own more, and I have never once thought I should have broken it.
So: six nights with the tank out of the room. No episode.
A hundred and seventy nights with the tank in the room. Nineteen episodes.
I did not write the conclusion on Roz’s table. I wrote three dates and two margin notes on a card and put the card in my shoe.
Roz put the kettle on and did not ask.
“You’ve stopped telling me things again,” she said, with her back to me.
“Yes.”
“Is it worse than the last thing?”
“Yes.”
She poured two cups and set one down at my elbow and stood there with her own.
“Then keep it,” she said. “You’ll tell me when telling me is any use to you.”
At six o’clock Mr. Foyle came for the books.
He carried them under one arm, the way you carry things you have decided are ordinary.
Roz handed them over without a word and went back to the range.
I walked out through the courtyard with a card in my shoe and nineteen out of nineteen in my head.
And no water, no photograph, no sample, and nobody in the world I was allowed to tell.