Chapter 27
Two minutes. That was the number Callahan gave me, and he gave it the way a man gives a weather forecast he does not believe in anymore.
"Two minutes out," he said, listening to the sirens stack up behind the trees. "Maybe less. The alert goes to the county response unit first, then to the fire investigation unit, then to everybody with a badge in a twenty-mile radius. The pressure drop you caused β that bleed β it tripped the line. The system thinks the vault is failing."
"It is failing," I said. "The gauge was past sixty-six. It's holding in the low fifties now because I bled it. That was a reprieve, not a repair."
"Tell that to the county," Margaret said. "They won't hear a reprieve. They'll hear a breach. They'll come in hazmat suits and they will seal this yard before they ask a single question. And by sunrise, both lots will be condemned under eminent domain. Your house, Elias. My house. Gone on paper before the dew is off the grass."
"And me?" I said again, because I needed to hear it plain.
"You will be a material witness," Callahan said. "In a five-year-old arson trial that has been waiting for a body, a ledger, and a man willing to stand up and say what happened. The prosecutors have been sitting on that trial for years because the evidence was locked in a box under a root cellar. If that box opens in front of a county crew, you don't get to choose what happens next. The trial chooses for you."
Margaret stepped closer, and for the first time all morning she did not look like my enemy. She looked like a woman who had been holding a door shut for years and had finally run out of strength. "Elias, listen to me. I am not warning you to protect myself. I am warning you because once you are a witness, you are a witness forever. They will ask you about the fence. About the pin. About the card in the mud. About every morning you woke up in that house and did not know what was under your neighbor's stairs. And every answer you give will be written down and read back to you in a courtroom, years from now, by people who were never here."
The sirens were close enough now that I could feel them in my chest, a second rhythm fighting the pump under the cellar. Blue light flickered through the cedar slats.
"Then why are you telling me this?" I asked. "Why not just let them come?"
"Because I am tired," Margaret said simply. "I have been tired since the night Tom came to my back door with Edwin's coat. I kept this yard quiet for five months. I kept the pump running. I kept the story straight for a grand jury. I told them Edwin was off the project site two days before the blast. I swore he was in St. Anne's cardiac wing. Every word of it was a lie, and every lie cost me something I can't name. I am done paying."
Callahan looked at her, and something in his face cracked. "Margaret β"
"No," she said. "No more. Tom, you sat in that car. You divided the escrow. You signed the impound release eight days after the fire. You have been the law in this yard for years, and the law in this yard is what buried two men. I will not bury a third."
"Two men," I said. My mouth was dry. "Edwin and β"
She stopped me with a look. Just a look. And in that look I understood that she knew, and had always known, exactly what was in the vault, and that she had been waiting for someone to ask the right question in the right order.
"Two minutes," Callahan said, and his voice was almost a whisper now. "Elias, decide. Do we let the county open it, with cameras and seals and a condemnation order? Or do we open it ourselves, right now, while it's still ours to open?"
I looked at the bilco doors. I looked at the padlock. I looked at the gauge, trembling in the low fifties, buying me minutes I had not earned. And I thought about why I had really come here β not for a cheap house, not for fifty-five cents on the dollar, but for a brother who had vanished four nights before a fire, and who had never once, in all the years I knew him, taken a payoff from anyone.
"Open it," I said. "Now."