"Yes."
"That's the number they use when they mean yes."
"Yes." Eleanor's hands were shaking. She put them flat on the table to stop it. "Emily —"
"I need to say something first." Emily's voice was steady, which seemed to cost her. She looked at Eleanor directly, and her eyes were the exact gray-green of the locket photograph, and Eleanor felt it like a hand closing around her throat. "I'm angry at twenty-three years. I'm angry that I grew up visiting a grave that wasn't —" She stopped. "Was there a grave?"
"A stone," Eleanor said. "In Mount Auburn. We visit — I visit — in March."
"I've been going to school and working and getting sick and getting better and nobody knew." Emily's hands were fists on the table now. "And I don't know who to be angry at. A fire doesn't answer back. And you —" She looked away, out the window, at the rain-streaked street. "You're not the villain in this. I can see that you're not the villain. That makes it worse, because there's nowhere to put it."
Eleanor wanted to reach across the table. She did not. Twenty-three years of wanting had taught her the discipline of not reaching.
"I don't know what happened," Eleanor said. "I know what I was told. I know I never saw —" Her voice broke. "They told me she died. I believed them because the alternative was that I would have to accuse people I loved, and I was sedated, and then I was grieving, and then the years — the years did what years do. They buried it under more years."
Emily was quiet for a long time. The espresso machine hissed.
"I'm not calling you Mother," Emily said finally.
"I would never ask you to."
"And I don't want money. If that's where this is going — a trust, a settlement, whatever rich people do — I don't want it."
"It's not." Eleanor meant it, and was surprised to find she meant it completely. "I want —" She stopped, because what she wanted was obscene in its size: the lost years returned, the small body in her arms, the life unburned. "I want to know what happened to you. That's all. That's the whole of it."
Emily picked up the letter, folded it once more, and put it in her jacket pocket.
"Okay," she said. "Then find out."
Chapter 7: The Fire Report
The investigator's office was above a hardware store in Charlestown, up a flight of stairs that smelled of cut lumber and machine oil. Marcus Bell was in his fifties, broad through the shoulders, his hair cut close and going gray at the temples. He had the stillness of a man who had spent years walking into rooms where things had burned and reading what the ash said. He shook Eleanor's hand, offered her coffee from a dented pot, and listened.
She told him everything. She had rehearsed it on the drive over and it still came out crooked: the restaurant, the wrist, the locket, the lab, the number. Ninety-nine point nine nine. She said it the way other people said a prayer.
Bell didn't take notes. He sat with his hands clasped and his eyes on her face, and when she finished he said, "Mrs. Whitmore, I'm going to ask you some questions that will sound unkind. They aren't meant to be."
"Ask."
"Did you see the body."
"No."
"Did anyone you trust, outside your husband, see the body."
Eleanor's throat closed. "I don't — I don't think so. It was a closed — there was a fire. They said identification was by —" She stopped. "Richard handled it. I was sedated for three days."
Bell nodded, once, the way he probably nodded at everything. "And the cremation."
"Two days later. Richard said — the condition of the remains. He said it was kinder."
"Kinder to whom."
She looked at him. "I don't know anymore."
He stood up and went to a filing cabinet and came back with a legal pad. "Here's what I'll do. I'll pull the fire report, the death certificate, the hospital's incident filings, whatever the city still has. Saint Anne's closed in 2011, so records will be thin, but fires leave paper. Then I'll tell you what the paper says, and what it doesn't." He wrote something down. "My retainer is five thousand. I'll bill against it at four hundred an hour."
Eleanor wrote the check without hesitation. Her hand didn't shake; she noticed that with a distant, clinical interest, as if the steadiness belonged to someone else.