Closing Day

Rico Barrera died at six minutes past two in the morning on the county road nine miles below the gate, in the back of a car with a broken headlight, with Adrian Vance's hands on his chest and Grant Halloway holding his right hand in his left, because Grant's right arm was gone and Rico had always been the sort of man to notice which hand was free.

He said two things. He said the first to Vance, and it was: "Don't tell my mother I was doing a good deed, tell her I was buying a building." And he said the second, some minutes later, to all of them and to nobody, and it was: "He's got to close tomorrow. Nobody keeps a store open on a night like this."

They buried him in Texas on the fourth of September, and the four of them went, and there were three hundred people at the church, and it was the only day in that entire year on which Ruth Kessler did not write anything at all.

They went back up the ridge on the sixth, in daylight, with a state police escort that had been arranged by Grant Halloway's family's lawyers in the amount of one phone call, and that was withdrawn, politely, by the same lawyers, four hours later, for reasons nobody in the family ever explained.

The ridge was empty.

Not ransacked. Empty, the way a building is empty at the end of a tenancy. The lamps were gone from the gravel and the generator was off and the west wing door stood open onto an undercroft with nothing in it but thirty rows of empty steel and two hundred tons of soil that took six trucks and three days to remove and that the Department of Environmental Conservation would spend eighteen months deciding not to test.

The library was empty of paper.

Every binder, every shelf, every folder: gone, and the shredder truck had been through and the flakes of it were in the loading bay in a pile the size of a car, and the state police evidence technician went through that pile with a rake for nine hours and found, at the bottom of it, one piece of paper that had not been shredded, and the piece of paper was a corner of an envelope with a Brooklyn address on it in a small square hand.

The book was gone.

That was the whole of it. That was the sum total of what a woman who kept the record had to show for eleven months and one man's life, and Ruth stood in the middle of a cleared library in a cold house above Pierce Hollow with the second folder in her hand and understood that everything she had was a copy, and that a copy is only evidence in a room where somebody is prepared to believe the original existed.

And then Owen, who had not spoken for four hours, went out onto the west veranda and stood in the snow in his coat, and said: "He's still here."

"Owen."

"He's still here, Ruth. He's not gone, he's closed." Owen had a voice for this that nobody had heard before: not the voice of a man who had been frightened, which is a voice everybody has, but the voice of a man who has read the same three pages of the same book that nobody else alive has read. "The house is a shell and the shells are the ones he can replace. It's the ledger he can't replace. He's not going to burn it in a truck in a yard. He's going to dig where he started, and he started in the north, under the trees, and there's an acre of ground on this ridge that nobody bought, because I read the deed out loud for three pages and there is no lot in it that faces the water."

They found it at four in the afternoon, in the hour before dark, by walking the boundary with the survey lines Ruth had pulled from the county records office in the spring: a quarter acre on the north face, in the hemlocks, unfenced, unlisted, unassessed, with a stone slab in it the size of a table and, when they lifted the slab, a stair, and at the bottom of the stair a second door, steel in a stone frame, with a keypad, and Owen Mercer put in 1-8-7-1 because it was the year on the brass plate of the oldest deed in that library, and the lock made a sound like a coin in a slot, and this time the door opened.

The undercroft under the hemlocks was older than the sanatorium by a century and a half and it was dry.

The book was in a case on a stand at the bottom of it, and the case was open, and the pen was laid across the register, and there was a lamp in the corner burning with a light that had no flame and no bulb, and there were four crates of soil left in it, and there was a bed of the same soil with a sheet over it.

They did the rest of it in eleven minutes and they have never agreed, any of them, on the order in which it happened.

Grant Halloway put the lamp out with the copper pipe and the lamp broke the pipe, and Vance put the whole of the box of blood products he had brought up from the Institute — the last eleven units, the ones that came off a van from a distributor that did not exist — down on the stair in a row and opened every one of them and bled them into the soil, because he had thought about it for three days and had decided that a man who keeps an account should be paid in the currency he keeps it in.

Ruth Kessler took the folder out of her coat and put it on the stand next to the book, and then took it off again, because it was the only copy, and stood there with it held against her chest like a hymn book.

And Owen Mercer, who had signed a register in that library in March, who had written on the last page of it a sentence asking to be entered that nobody had ever read, and who had read three pages of that book out loud at a ceremony of no legal effect, walked down the stair and up to the stand and read the last line of the ledger again, which was his own name, and then turned to the empty page past it, and put the pen in his hand, and in a hand that was steady for the first time in eleven months, wrote on the blank page the only entry he was entitled to make.

He wrote the date. And under DATE he wrote, in the NAME column: VOID.

There was a sound from the corner of the undercroft and it was not a sound a room makes. It was the sound of a man who has been at the same desk for eight hundred years looking up.

What Grant Halloway did then he did without a word and without a plan and with a length of broken copper pipe in his one working hand, and what Vance did he did with a scalpel from a bag he had carried two hundred and sixty miles for exactly this, and what Owen Mercer did was to put both arms around the case and hold it, and the book came apart in the middle and the brass corners came off and the pages went across the soil in the light, and eight hundred years of dates and names went down into the ground under the hemlocks of a ridge that nobody in Albany had ever heard of.

He was in the room. Everybody who was there has said so. They have all said, separately, in statements taken years apart, that the man was in that undercroft the whole time and that he was not in it at the end, and not one of them has ever been able to describe the interval, and not one of them has ever claimed to have seen a body.

What Ruth Kessler said, on the seventh of September, at half past five in the morning, standing in the snow outside the west wing of an empty house with the only copy of everything in her arms, was: "Write it down before we sleep."

They wrote it down.

They wrote it down in a motel in Pierce Hollow with the heat on and Grant's arm in a sling and Vance asleep sitting up, and it took four days and it ran to sixty-one pages, and it is the document that the folder now begins with, and it is dated, and it is signed by three people, and none of the three has ever retracted a word of it.

Ruth Kessler filed her copy with a lawyer in Manhattan in October. The lawyer read the first thirty pages, and then read them again, and then asked her what she wanted done with it, and she said: keep it. There was no reward and no headline and no case. The ridge went to the county for taxes in the spring. The trust in Sioux Falls was dissolved by a filing in December, and the mailbox was closed, and the broker in Albany is still in Albany.

The suite on the lower floor of the building on Nassau Street was given up in the spring, and in November a business weekly sent a reporter to the lobby, and the man at the desk had been at the desk for twenty-two years and remembered a man in a dark suit coming in twice a year for as long as he could remember, and could not describe him, and had not noticed, at the time, that he could not.

Nothing was ever found of Nadia, Iris and Sonya. The roster in the passage by the kitchen — three names, a duty rotation, and a column of absurd hours — was photographed by Ruth on the sixth of September and is in the folder, and a check of every register the county keeps came back with nothing under any of the three names, and no warrant was applied for and no inquest was opened, and in the end the only completely real names in the entire file belong to three women who have never been accounted for at all.

Kyle Brennan resigned from the service in the following spring, eighteen months after the Marisol came ashore, which is exactly what he had told a lawyer in a basement conference room he would do; he runs a marina on the Connecticut shore now and does not talk about the ship, and he answered Ruth Kessler's letter in eleven words, and the eleven words are in the folder.

Owen Mercer went back to work in November at the same firm, and he is a careful man, and he does not sign anything before the client signs first.

Ruth Kessler closed the folder in October and opened it four more times before the year was out, and every time it was to add a page rather than to read one.

The first concerned a barometer. Grant Halloway had bought it at a country auction in June because he had heard Delia say, once, in September, that she liked knowing what the weather was going to do before it did it, and the auction house sent it to him in November after three months of a disputed invoice, and in December he drove it up to Salt Harbor and hung it in the hall of a narrow brick house that had been sold in September to a family from Philadelphia. He did it at night. He did not tell the family. He was not sorry.

The second was a letter to a woman in Portland. Emmett Doyle's daughter was forty-one and had not spoken to her father in six years and had been told by a hospital in the Hudson Valley in August that he had died of a cardiac event. She wrote back four pages, and the four pages are in the folder, and the last line of them is: nobody else called me. Nobody at all. Thank you for telling me he had a name.

Then, on the same afternoon in January, two envelopes came — four photocopied pages from a county clerk in the morning post, and a padded envelope from a laboratory in New Jersey that had been forwarded twice — and she did the thing she had been avoiding doing for five months, which was to put them both on the kitchen table under the light and read them in one sitting, because a record should be read the way it was written: by one person, in one place, at one time.

The register lists three hundred and forty-one names between 1944 and 1971 and not one of them is the man who was on the third floor of the west wing. Two of the three names on the lined sheet — the one headed SLEEP, four hours and three hours and six, taken off a corkboard in the spring — are in the register. The third is not in the register and not in the death index and has no date of discharge, and she sat with the two pages in front of her and understood, finally, that she had been looking at a household inventory, written in the man's own hand, of the hours he could expect out of each of them. Under it she wrote the question she had been carrying since May and left it there unanswered, which is the only honest entry in the whole folder: who wrote thank you for the voyage, in what ink, in what year, and why that line and not another.

The language was a separate errand. In February she sent a copy of the tape to a professor of comparative linguistics in Chicago, who listened to it four times and wrote back two pages, and the two pages are in the folder, and the short of them is that it is a south Slavic dialect of no particular place, learned by a speaker who was already old when he learned it, and that it has no word in it for a child.

The laboratory report says, in the language of men who are paid to be careful, that the negative shows no evidence of retouching and no evidence of a person, and that the disturbance in the grain of the film is consistent with a lens defect. It is three pages long and it cost four hundred dollars of Grant Halloway's money. She has never once believed it and has never once been able to say why not, and she has thought more than she likes to admit about the woman in Brownsville in 1994, who came up from under four times and was well by the spring and was certain she had never been hypnotized, because that is the only evidence she has ever had that a person can be read and then be left.

She was still at that table at eleven when Owen came in from the cold with his collar up, and he did not ask her what it meant, because he had learned by then not to ask her that. He asked her what she was going to do, which was the only question he had ever been able to answer for her.

"Keep it," she said. "And keep the empty column."

"Which empty column?"

"The one in front," she said, and did not explain, and he did not ask.

And on her own left forearm, by the spring, there were still five marks in a line, in pairs and one alone. They had not faded. She had stopped wearing long sleeves in the house, and she had stopped expecting anyone to ask.

And on the ninth of April, the following year, a padded envelope came to the office on a Tuesday, and it had no return address, and inside it was a single sheet of paper, and on the paper, in brown ink, in a small square hand, in a script that no printer had set since the reign of a king nobody in the room had heard of, was one line.

THERE IS ROOM IN THE LEDGER FOR A CORRECTION.

Ruth Kessler read it at her desk, and then she took a fresh page out of the folder, and dated the top of it, and copied the sentence out in her own clean hand, and wrote underneath it, in the space she left for the record:

Noted. Received by R. Kessler, April 9. Nothing further.