Chapter 18
Callahan was quiet for a long time after Margaret finished. The hatch kept rattling, and the froth kept creeping, and the morning had gone from strange to something colder, the way a day feels when you realize the people around you have been lying so long that the lies have their own history, with chapters and witnesses and casualties.
"You are forgetting someone," Callahan said at last. His voice was rough, and he was not looking at Margaret anymore. He was looking at the ground, at the mud and the grass and the dark line where the hoses disappeared under the fence.
Margaret frowned. "Who?"
"The watchman," Callahan said. "The man at the depot. The one whose uniform they pulled out of the rubble."
Margaret went very still. I watched the color leave her face, and I understood, before he said another word, that this was the part of the story neither of them liked to tell, the part they had agreed, silently or otherwise, to leave out of every version they had ever given anyone.
"The depot fire was supposed to be clean," Callahan said. He was talking to me now, but his eyes stayed on the ground. "That was the plan Edwin sold everybody. Burn the yard, create a debris field, bury the paperwork problem under a pile of ash and twisted metal so deep that no investigator would ever dig to the bottom of it. A fire at a town depot is a tragedy, not a crime scene, if you do it right. The manifests burn. The logs burn. The questions burn with them."
He swallowed. "But there was a watchman on duty that night. There was always a watchman on duty. Edwin knew that. Everybody knew that. The watchman walked the yard every hour with a flashlight and a thermos, and he signed a sheet at the gatehouse, and he was supposed to be somewhere else when the timer went off. Only he was not somewhere else. He was in the yard, or near enough to it, when the fire took hold, and he did not get out."
Margaret's voice was barely audible. "He was not supposed to be there."
"Nobody is ever supposed to be where a fire finds them," Callahan said. "That does not bring them back."
I looked from one of them to the other, trying to fit this new piece into the shape of what I already knew. "Whose uniform was it?" I asked. "Who was the watchman?"
Callahan hesitated, and in that hesitation I saw the whole weight of the thing. He was not deciding whether to tell me. He was deciding whether he could stand to say the name out loud in his own yard, in daylight, with another officer's career and his own conscience both listening.
"He was my cousin," Callahan said finally. "My mother's sister's boy. He took the night job at the depot because the county was hiring and he needed steady work, and he had a kid on the way. He was twenty-six. When they pulled his uniform out of the rubble, there was not enough left of him to identify by any normal means, and the dental records β the records that would have settled it one way or the other β were missing. Gone from the file. Nobody could ever prove, cleanly, on paper, who that body in the rubble was."
The words sat in the air between us like something heavy that had been dropped and could not be picked back up. "Did Edwin know?" I asked. "Did he know the watchman was there when he set the timer?"
Margaret shook her head, but the shake was slow, uncertain, the shake of a woman answering a question she had asked herself a hundred times and never answered to her own satisfaction.
"He said he did not," she whispered. "He said the yard was supposed to be empty. But Edwin said a great many things that turned out to be arrangements rather than facts, and I stopped being able to tell the difference a long time before that night."
Callahan looked at her then, really looked at her, and for the first time I saw something in his face that was not calculation or control. It was grief, raw and unpracticed, the grief of a man who had helped bury a fire and then discovered that his own family was part of what had been buried.
"I carried that," he said. "I carried it through every report I ever wrote about that fire. And I told myself it was the price of keeping the rest of it from falling apart. But there is no price that covers a twenty-six-year-old kid with a baby on the way, and I have known that since the morning they handed me his uniform in a bag."
Nobody said anything after that. The hatch rattled. The line hissed. And the yard felt, for a moment, like a place where the dead were standing closer than the living.