Episode 151 · The Unnamed Gardeners

Later that evening, Krista cleared a space on the archive table by moving the unnamed gardeners to the left, two uneven stacks of photographs beside the lamp.

She had come down to put a date to the woman holding the watering can. The employment books offered three possible names. One had been crossed out so hard that the paper had torn, and Krista had spent an hour matching the surviving letters against signatures elsewhere in the book before admitting that the hand belonged to a clerk, not to the woman. Another name ended before the date penciled on the back of the print. She moved it to the bottom of the sheet without crossing it out. Dates on prints could be wrong too. She had promised herself, on the night the exhibition reopened, that nobody in those boxes would be labeled “Staff” again if she could help it. Some of them she would never name. She could live with a question mark. She could not live with a guess dressed up as a name.

The book lay open where she had left it. Across the other half of the table, held flat by her phone and a box of paper clips, was the garden’s original plan.

Cabinet three. Alden had told them where to find it before they went under the bridge. She had looked at it then for a way down. Tonight she was trying to see what else she had stopped looking at once she had found one.

The draughtsman’s ink had faded to brown. Beds, paths, greenhouses; a garden arranged for people who would arrive by the front gate and keep their feet dry. Along the riverbank, the five arches were little more than strokes beneath the footbridge. Beside them, the architect had given the stonework a single word.

Existing.

She laid the old photograph beside it. Five low arches, the water halfway into them, the bank behind. All of it smaller than she remembered, because the photograph had been taken from above, by someone who had been interested in the bridge.

The plan included the width of the flowerbeds. It gave the spacing of the trees along the main avenue. Below the bridge, the lines stopped at the edge of what the surveyor could see.

Krista had treated the blank paper beyond them as empty space.

She followed the ink back toward the bridge. The measurements belonged to the garden above; she had been borrowing their certainty for the stone below. On the back of the plan there was no second drawing. Only old stains, and the ring of a glass.

She pulled a sheet of tracing paper from the drawer and copied the bank, then the bridge. She marked the way they had gone down. After that she put the photograph away and tried to draw the turn in the passage from memory.

At the end of the turn she drew the slab.

She stopped with the pencil against the paper.

It was easy to put things where a drawing wanted them. A straight passage, a square room, a door in the middle. She had made the chamber wider to fit the tree. She rubbed out the wall and drew it again, leaving the width unmarked.

You were there. That isn’t the same as having measured it.

She wrote a question mark beside the turn.

She tried a scale using the bridge’s width from the plan. That made the passage on her tracing absurdly narrow. In the photograph, she had copied a sloping edge as though it were square to the camera. She drew a line through the scale and left it there. A tape would have to come with her. For now she could mark the places to check without pretending she knew the distance between them.

The photograph was useful again. On the bank, just beside the third arch, a pale line divided two patches of stonework. She had taken it for a crack when she first looked. Now she moved the lamp closer and turned the print beneath it. The line followed the edges of the stones for a short distance, then disappeared under the bridge’s shadow.

A repair, perhaps. A joint. The light could have made it look deeper than it was.

She searched for it on the plan. There was a stroke in roughly the same place, too faint to tell whether it belonged to the drawing or to a fold in the old paper. She traced it lightly, stopped where it stopped, and wrote another question mark.

The clock above the filing cabinet clicked. She looked up. Nearly midnight.

Her phone had been holding down the other end of the plan. She lifted it, and the paper curled immediately toward her hand.

She opened Soles’s messages. For a moment she tried to compose the thing she would have to say: she had been looking at the passage again; there was something she wanted to check; she did not know what it was yet.

He would ask where. Then he would want to come.

She could picture him putting the jacket on badly, trying to make the injured arm cooperate, getting angry with the sleeve instead of with her. The picture made her smile. She missed him enough to want to put the books away. She had not slept at her own place since the prison wall came down, and she had not yet decided what to call that either. She did not intend to decide it tonight.

Instead she typed Still at work. I’ll call when I’m done.

She read it twice, then sent it.

On the table, the woman with the watering can waited under her three possible names. Krista slipped the employment book into a paper wrapper, marked the page and placed it beside the photographs. She would finish that search tomorrow. She wanted to finish it.

The tracing paper was thin enough to fold into her bag. She folded it along the riverbank, keeping the two question marks inside. Three things to check: the distance from the bridge, the turn, the join in the stone. She did not write them down. She never lost that kind of thing.

She had put the three in order before she admitted what they were for.

She would check them at the bank. Then she turned off the lamp.