Episode 60 · What Is Missing

Soles looked at the truck. The raised hood. The exposed engine, with one hose taken off and laid on the fender.

— What’s wrong with it?

— It’s losing fluid somewhere. I can’t find where.

Soles got up from the crate, his hand on the wheel, and bent over the engine as far as his ribs allowed. Not at the hose that had been taken off. At the one beside it, which ran down under the block to a place nothing could be seen without a mirror. A dried green streak marked the block beneath it.

— You have a mirror?

— In your shed. Top shelf, beside the clamps…

Maxim stopped.

— Why?

— There’s dried coolant under the hose behind it. Let’s look before we take anything else off.

Maxim went into the shed and came back with the mirror. He pushed it under the block, the flashlight in his other hand, and looked for a long time.

— The clamp, he said. It’s cracked underneath. From the front it looks perfect.

— From the front it always looks perfect.

Maxim turned the mirror over in his hand.

— Last time it was the pump. And you said you had a good drill bit.

— Now I have a good mirror.

Maxim snorted. It was not quite a laugh, but it was closer than anything all morning. He sat back down on the cardboard by the wheel, and this time his shoulders were not held so high.

By noon he was asleep there, sitting up against the tire, the mirror still in his hand. Lucky lay across his boots. Soles brought a blanket from the house and did not wake him.

The tire at Maxim’s back was warm. Then it was rough. Bark.

He sat beneath a tree he had never seen, in a garden without color. Gray outlines of plants stood around its roots. One shone, low and dark, its leaves stiff as needles. It smelled of pitch.

At its base lay a flat stone with a name cut into it.

Tertius.

No one stood beside it. Maxim reached out and closed his hand on the needles.

— Fire I —

Tertius had kept the fire on the harbor tower for twenty-two years. He could feel the grain ships an hour before anyone saw them, the way old bones feel weather. It was a gift of the tower. He had never left the tower at night to learn otherwise.

His son fished beyond the rocks with a lamp in the bow. That night the wind turned after midnight.

Tertius piled wood onto the fire, enough to last until daylight, and went to the railing. His son’s lamp was out there beyond the white line of breakers, very small. It bobbed. Then it was gone.

The ships were still far to the south. An hour, perhaps more.

One hour, he told himself. I go down, get the boy out, come back up.

He rowed toward the rocks with his face to the tower. Down on the water, he felt nothing. Not the rocks, not the waves, not the ships. Away from the tower he was an old man in a small boat in the dark, like every other man on the sea.

He found the boy clinging to the overturned hull and hauled him in. He did not feel the wave coming.

The last thing he saw, from the water, with his son’s hand gripping his tunic, was the tower. The fire had burned down to embers. Beyond it, a ship’s lantern was coming straight toward the breakwater.

Tertius tried to shout. His mouth was full of sea.

❦

Maxim woke with the blanket over his knees and the smell of pitch in his nose. Nothing in the yard was burning.

That evening they gathered at Soles’s house.

Krista came first, with a new, cheap phone still in its box and a spiral notebook under her arm. Maxim came in from the yard with washed hands and a bag of pretzels. Tesa arrived last, with a fresh bruise below her eye.

— Gym, she said when Soles looked. You can stop feeling responsible for that one.

Varren’s folding chair stood open by the corner of the table. Varren had not come. At noon he had written: Can’t make it today. A problem that won’t solve itself. I’ll come tomorrow with bread. Look after those ribs.

Tesa looked at the empty chair and sat nearest the door without taking off her jacket.

— I checked my account this morning, Krista said. The last photograph uploaded at ten past eleven, up on the footbridge. Varren’s cups. Everything from the tunnel stayed on the phone.

— And the phone’s with the man from the wall, Maxim said.

She opened the notebook to rows of signs, grouped as they had been on the walls.

— These repeat. The small marks beside them change. I don’t know what they mean.

— You remember all that? Maxim asked.

— What I looked at. I can’t prove these came from a wall.

The man had taken the photographs. He had not taken everything.

He had inspected the slab and the fresh drill dust, then their hands. He had not asked their names.

Two.

— I think he came to check the door, Soles said. He looked at our dry palms and counted two.

— And the phone? Tesa asked.

— It leaves us without photographs. Whatever else he wanted, he’s made that harder to prove.

— And easier to deny, Krista said. Keep the drawings. Don’t treat them as a translation.

A lamp seemed to come on inside Soles. The questions arranged themselves more neatly than they had all day. Elias’s patience, or something of it, had reached him. It was easy to trust the feeling. He still had to check the facts.

He drew Krista’s notebook toward him, turned to a blank page and took the pencil from her hand. She let him take it, surprised.

— Kerr, he said.

He wrote the name. Under it, a line.

— The guard says the cell stayed locked. No visitor overnight. They told us his heart, pending the examination. He wrote two pages. Now they can’t find them.

His handwriting came out smaller than his own. More cramped. He did not notice. He drew a box around the lines, the corners joined.

— A locked room. Missing pages. Yesterday we saw a man enter without using a door.

The silence settled over the table like a blanket.

— The man from the wall, Maxim said.

— Or someone like him.

The possibility fitted so neatly that Soles wanted it to be the answer. He drew another line under the missing pages.

— Soles.

Tesa was not looking at the notebook. She was looking at him.

— Say the other part too. If someone took the pages, who was meant to read them?

— The police. His lawyer. I don’t know.

— He asked for you.

She leaned across the table.

— You’re making it a problem about getting into a cell. Kerr wanted to tell you something after he’d confessed. If someone silenced him, maybe it was to stop you hearing it.