Episode 93 · Key Fourteen

Krista was breathing with her mouth open.

The lamp was still a lamp. The tea had gone cold, a skin forming at its edge. Outside it was growing light. Her fingers lay spread on the table, far from the sheet. There was an ink stain on her right index finger.

She had no bottled ink in the house. She wrote with pens from the gas station.

She rubbed the stain with her thumb. It did not come off.

No. I read too much and fell asleep over an old page. That’s all.

She picked up the magnifying glass. Her hand shook until she braced her elbow on the table. She still could not read the lines. But she counted down from the top, as she counted shelves in the archive to keep from getting lost. The seventh line began with a round mark, closed like an eye.

Inside the mark, where the loop closed, was a tiny line. As fine as a hair, drawn from left to right.

Krista set the magnifying glass down very slowly, as though it could break.

The line had been there all along. In her pocket, through the tunnel, through the water, under the dictionaries. No one had looked.

She stood, because otherwise she would have stayed there until evening, and did what she always did when afraid: she made a list. Time: seven twenty. Investigator: nine. Invoices: in the blue folder, numbered. Sheet: in a protective sleeve, not her pocket. Ink stain: soap, then alcohol, then nothing.

It did not come out.

At eight thirty she put the sheet into a sleeve, the sleeve into a stiff envelope, and the envelope into the blue folder on top of the invoices. She pulled on her gloves though it was not cold.

The investigator received her at nine ten in an office that smelled of coffee reheated twice. He counted the invoices with his thumb without reading them, the way Maxim counted bills. Then he started over and read them.

— Numbered, he said.

— And copied. The originals are in the archive, in Alden’s register. If any disappear, we’ll know where from.

Krista did not take out the envelope.

— I need something else, he said. The garden claims it’s closed at night. Gates locked from ten, guard, logbook. If that’s true, whoever was in the tunnel didn’t enter through there.

— And if it isn’t true?

— Then I want the logbook. The past few months. They’d give it to me in three weeks, with a letter signed by the right person.

— I’ll bring it today.

He looked at her longer than necessary.

— I’m not asking you to steal it.

— I’m not stealing it. I’m copying it. There’s a difference, and it’s written in our regulations.

For the first time that morning, the corner of his mouth moved.

The garden’s service gate stood on the canal side, an iron door with a little wicket cut into it, beside a brick guardhouse with a sheet-metal roof. The water had come through there too. A brown line remained on the guardhouse wall at knee height, straight as if drawn with a ruler. Three sandbags stood before the door, placed a day too late.

The day guard recognized her from ten paces away and stepped into the doorway with his mug in hand.

— Ms. Krista. I heard they took your room away too.

— They took my key. The room is still there.

— Still there, he agreed, as if that were good news.

Inside it smelled of new mold and a hot radiator. The logbooks the water had reached lay open across the radiator, their pages rippled and the ink blooming blue along the edges. On the upper shelf stood the old ones, their years written on the spines in marker.

Krista took off her gloves. If the guard noticed the stain, he said nothing.

The logbook had five columns: date, entry time, exit time, gate, remarks. At night, between ten and six, the columns were almost empty. The pump technician after rain. The greenhouse gardener on freezing nights.

And her.

Small wicket. 11:40 p.m.–3:15 a.m. Key no. 14 (Ms. Krista, exhibition).

She looked at the line as Anselm had looked at his, with the book open beneath the window. The writing was not hers. It belonged to some night guard, round and neat, with a large, confident K, as if he were writing a familiar name.

She turned the page. Another one, four nights later. Another. 12:10–4:40 a.m. 10:55 p.m.–2:30 a.m.

— Tell me, she said, her voice too calm. At night, when the wicket opens, who sees it?

— Nobody sees it. That light comes on. He pointed to a red bulb above the window, wired to the wicket frame. — The night guard checks the list for the key used on that side and writes it down. We don’t go outside at night. It’s in the regulations.

— And key number fourteen?

The man put on his glasses and looked at a sheet taped inside the cupboard door.

— Yours. Issued in your name, it says here. By the administration.

Krista had never had key number fourteen. She had had the key to the small room, which she had surrendered by noon on Monday, and the key to Soles’s house, now lying in her pocket like a stone. That was all.

— Where’s the application?

— With the administration, on file. We aren’t allowed to see the file.

She climbed onto the chair beside the cupboard without asking and took the logbooks down from the upper shelf, one by one. The guard let her.

She photographed them page by page, as she had photographed the room’s shelves before handing over her key. Then, so she would not have to look again, she counted.

The first entry dated back four years, to an October night. The last was five nights before the flood. Between them, sometimes once a month, sometimes three times a week, the little wicket had opened in her name one hundred and ninety-seven times. Never before ten thirty. Never after five. Like someone careful not to meet anyone.

One hundred and ninety-seven nights when she had slept, worked, made lists and crossed things off them. When she had dealt fairly with everyone: the committee, the sponsors, Alden, the guard at the gate, who smiled at her every morning because Ms. Krista never forgot to say good morning. She had thought that was enough. That a person who owed nothing to anyone could not be used.

Someone had made a key from her name. And night after night had entered the place she loved most with it, while she knew nothing.

— Are you all right? the guard asked.

— Yes.

She replaced the logbooks and climbed down. Her hands shook as she opened a blank note on her phone.

For a moment it was a sheet held out beside the pale leaves of her garden. Anselm was looking at her, waiting. His fingers touched hers when she reached for it.

Write.

The guard’s radio crackled. She looked down at her phone. He had given her no name to accuse. She wrote the question herself.

Who knows what they call me at the gate?