Episode 243 · The Guide Who Wouldn't

The day before the entry, Krista came back from the town archive with a roll of tracing paper under her arm and snow in her hair.

She spread it on the kitchen table before she had taken her coat off, and weighted the corners with the salt, the sugar and two of Maxim’s mugs.

— The mill, she said. Before the road was built.

The plan was older than anyone who could have drawn it. The wheel was there, and the bank, and a channel cut beneath the mill floor that ran out under the bank and down to the river. Someone had shaded its far end in pencil and written one word beside it.

— Bricked, Krista read.

— When? Tesa asked.

— It doesn’t say.

Soles followed the channel with his finger. It passed under the shelf where the bolts were, close enough that the two lines on the paper almost touched.

He had been thinking about the new bolt all night. He had checked it with Tesa twice, and it had held both times, and that was what bothered him: it held exactly as well as the old one. About a rope he hadn’t tied, held by a man he hadn’t chosen, going down to a place the man who signed for it had not come back from.

— It’s a second way in, he said.

— Or a second way out, said Krista.

Tesa leaned back from the table.

— Do we tell the chief?

— Not until we know it’s open.

— That’s two things we’re keeping off the wall, Krista said. The sheets and this.

She didn’t say it as a complaint. She wrote it down.

The hardware shop stood at the head of the bridge, across the road from the detachment. Rope hung in coils in the window, beside snow chains and a row of lamps. When Maxim pushed the door open a bell rang above it, and the man behind the counter looked up and then at the passes around their necks.

He was about fifty, broad, with forearms that had carried sacks before they had carried anything else. He went back to the box of screws he was sorting.

— Detachment’s across the road.

— We know, Maxim said. They don’t sell shackles.

He had already picked one off the wall. He worked the pin with his thumb, held it to the light, and put it back.

— That one’s soft. Who sold you that?

The man looked at him properly for the first time.

— My father. Thirty years ago.

— It’s lasted well for a soft one.

— Everything in here has.

Maxim put out his hand across the counter.

— Maxim.

The man looked at it, then shook it once.

— Bram.

Something in the shop eased. Not much. Soles let Maxim have it.

Krista put the tracing on the counter, turned so the man could read it.

— This is your family’s mill?

He looked at it a long time without touching it.

— Was. My father ran it till the road took the trade.

He put a finger on the shaded end of the channel.

— We bricked that when I was twelve. Before that I went through it with a candle and his belt around my waist, and he held the other end.

— How far does it go? Soles asked.

— Under the bank. Out to the river. Unless it doesn’t any more.

He said it the way men describe a road they have driven too often to think about.

— Stone arches. Low. After the second one you go on your knees. There’s a step where the water used to drop, waist high, and then it’s level to the grating.

— We’d like you to show us where it starts.

— Why?

— Survey work. Something has changed under the bank.

Bram put the lid back on the box of screws.

— The river’s been warm since summer. The fish went downstream. The ice doesn’t hold under the bridge any more. The detachment came in the autumn and half of them don’t come in here any more because they don’t like what I ask.

He looked at Soles.

— Don’t tell me survey.

Soles had stood in front of men with knives and kept his voice level. This was harder. He could feel the terms pinned on the wall across the road, seven pages, closed files stay closed. He could feel how much of the rest he did not know himself.

— What happens to the people who go down there? Bram asked.

— I can’t tell you.

— Can’t, or won’t?

Soles thought about lying. It would have been easy. It would have been the first lie in this town, and the man would have walked into the dark on it.

— Both.

Two weeks ago, at Krista’s table, he had told the three of them everything, because half would have been a lie. Now he was giving a stranger half, and saying so.

Bram nodded slowly, as if Soles had paid for something with the right money.

— Then find somebody who doesn’t want to know.

Tesa had stayed by the window the whole time, watching the road. She didn’t turn around.

— That’s fair, she said.

— I know it is, Soles said.

Krista rolled up the tracing. She did it carefully, without hurrying, the way she closed a book she meant to come back to.

— Thank you for the plan, she said. And for the shackle.

— I didn’t sell you a shackle.

— You told us which one not to buy.

Maxim held the door. The bell rang again. Outside, the cold took Soles’s breath, and across the road a cleaner in the detachment yard turned to watch them come out of the shop.

— I liked him, Maxim said.

— He threw us out, Tesa said.

— Politely. With advice. That’s the best kind of customer.

They were halfway across the road when the bell rang behind them.

Bram stood in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, as if he had not decided to follow them until he was already outside.

— The surveyors asked too, he said. Three of them, before they went down. I said no to them as well.

Soles waited.

Bram looked past him at the mill on the far bank, its wheel locked white in the ice.

— One of them came back up anyway. At night. Through the race.

He went back inside. The bell rang once more and stopped.