Chapter 17
"Tell him," Callahan said. "Tell him the rest of it, Margaret, because he is standing on top of it and he has earned that much. Tell him about the night Edwin left the facility."
Margaret's hands were shaking now. She folded them in front of her, then unfolded them, then pressed them flat against her thighs as if she could hold herself still by force. The froth kept sliding toward my foundation, and the hatch kept rattling, and none of it seemed to hurry her. If anything, the pressure under the ground made her slower, more careful with each word, the way people get careful when they know the next sentence cannot be taken back.
"He left his bed at half past one in the morning," she said. "Not through the front door. Not past the nurses' station. He had it arranged weeks ahead, the way he arranged everything. A side door that did not latch properly, a corridor nobody watched at that hour, a gap in the rounds he had memorized from the schedule posted on the wall. He walked out of St. Anne's in his own clothes, not a gown, because he had been keeping a set of clothes folded in the bottom drawer for exactly that purpose.
She paused, and I could see her picturing it, the way she must have pictured it a hundred times since, lying awake and replaying a night she had not witnessed.
"He drove the Cadillac here himself," she went on. "He parked behind the water pumping station first, the way he always did when he did not want the car seen from the road, and then he brought the car around to the back of the house, quiet, no lights, and he came in through the cellar doors."
"And then?" Callahan asked, though from his face I thought he already knew, and from the way his jaw was set I thought he had heard some version of this before and had chosen not to hear all of it.
"And then he went down into the cellar," she said. "He stayed down there five hours. He had a welder with him, and two canisters of industrial solvent, and whatever else he had been collecting for weeks in boxes I was told not to open. I heard the welder through the floor. I heard it start and stop, start and stop, all through the dark, and the smell came up through the vents, sharp and chemical, even with the windows shut. I did not go down.
She stopped and looked down at her shoes. The mud on them was the same mud I had been digging in all morning, dark and heavy.
"His chest gave out down there," she said quietly. "Not all at once. He came up the steps once, halfway, holding the rail with both hands, and he said his arm felt strange, like it belonged to someone else. I told him to stop, to come upstairs and lie down, to let me call someone. He went back down instead. He said he was almost finished and that nobody could be called until it was finished, and that if I called anyone before it was finished, everything he had built would be wasted. When I went down at first light, he was on the concrete floor beside the welder, and one of the canisters had tipped over and was leaking a thin dark line across the floor toward the drain, and his hand was still curled around the handle of the torch."
I felt my stomach turn. "You left him there?"
"I did not know what else to do," she said, and for the first time that morning her voice cracked open. "If I called an ambulance to this house, they would have found the cellar. They would have found the welder and the canisters and the locker and everything he had been hiding down there since November. And if they found that, they would have found the rest of it, and the rest of it would have taken down people who were not even in the room. So I called the one person I thought could move a body without questions, and that person was standing in my kitchen within the hour, and by noon there was a man in a bed fifteen miles east with Edwin's name on his chart."
She did not look at Callahan when she said it. She did not need to. The silence after her sentence did the looking for her.
"Five hours in the cellar," Callahan said, almost to himself. "With a welder and solvent. And a heart that was already failing."
"He thought he had more time," Margaret said. "He always thought he had more time. That was the one thing Edwin truly believed about himself, right up until the morning he did not."