The Place at the Table
Clara reached for the stove latch.
Eddie caught the edge of the table as he stood.
“Wait.”
Her hand stopped.
The knock came again.
Three hollow blows against iron.
The kitchen fire had burned down to a bed of coals. A little heat still reached Eddie’s face from where he stood, and the kettle on the back plate gave an occasional dry tick.
There was no room inside for a man.
Clara drew her hand away.
“Then tell me what to do.”
Mary Jane took the poker from its hook.
“First, nobody puts their face in front of that door.”
She crouched to one side and looked beneath the stove.
Nothing.
The pipe rose through the ceiling in the usual way. Ash lay beneath the grate. No loose fitting struck the wall.
Another knock.
Mary Jane pressed the poker lightly against the stove’s side.
The vibration traveled into her hand.
“That’s coming through the iron.”
Eddie looked at the register.
Samuel Vale’s name remained pressed into the paper.
No ink.
No receiving mark.
Upstairs, a floorboard creaked.
Anna appeared in the kitchen doorway with Lucy behind her.
“What was that?”
Nobody answered quickly enough.
Anna saw their faces.
Then she saw the open book.
***
Lucy tried to get past her mother.
“Papa?”
Anna caught her by the shoulders.
The stove gave a low scrape.
Something dragged behind its closed door.
Eddie moved between Lucy and the range, careful not to make it look like a sudden defense against her.
“Stay by your mother.”
“Is he in there?”
“I don’t know.”
The child looked at the stove.
Then at him.
“He can’t fit.”
“No.”
The plainness of that seemed to trouble her more than any explanation would have.
Anna drew Lucy back into the doorway.
Mary Jane lifted the latch with the poker.
“Everyone behind the table.”
She waited until they moved.
Then she eased the fire door open.
Coals glowed beneath white ash.
A split length of wood lay where Clara had left it.
Nothing else.
Mary Jane held the door open for several seconds.
Hot air moved into the kitchen.
From somewhere beyond the coals came a man’s voice.
“Annie?”
Anna’s hands tightened on Lucy’s shoulders.
The voice was faint, strained by distance.
“Annie, where’s the light?”
Anna took one step.
Eddie raised his hand.
She stopped, but the look she gave him was fierce enough to make him lower it.
“Samuel?”
The coals brightened.
Not much.
Enough that Mary Jane saw it.
“Anna,” she said, “stay where you are.”
“My husband is speaking.”
“I hear him.”
“Then let him speak.”
Mary Jane did not close the door.
Eddie looked into the narrow firebox.
“Samuel Vale?”
A sound came through it like a man coughing into his sleeve.
“Who’s there?”
“My name is Eddie. Your wife and daughter are here.”
The stove pipe shuddered.
Soot fell into the fire.
Mary Jane glanced up.
“How many?” the voice asked.
Eddie looked at Anna.
“What?”
“How many came out?”
Anna’s face changed.
“Samuel, it’s me.”
For a moment, there was only the sound of coals settling.
Then the voice said, “Don’t send them down.”
The knocking began again.
Harder now.
Mary Jane shut the fire door with the poker and dropped the latch.
The sound continued for two blows.
Then stopped.
***
Anna rounded on her.
“Open it.”
“The pipe was moving.”
“He was there.”
“I know what we heard.”
Anna reached for the latch.
Mary Jane put down the poker.
“If that joint comes apart, hot soot comes into the room. Lucy is standing behind you.”
Anna looked back.
The child had pressed herself against the doorframe.
For several seconds, Anna did not move.
Then she knelt and drew Lucy close.
Eddie waited until the little girl’s breathing slowed.
“Mrs. Mercer,” he said, “could you take Lucy somewhere away from the kitchen?”
“I want to stay.”
“I know,” Clara said. “But I need help with something upstairs.”
Lucy did not release her mother.
Clara waited.
Anna brushed the hair back from the child’s forehead.
“I’ll come in a minute.”
“You won’t go?”
“No.”
Lucy looked at her until Anna said it again.
Only then did she let Clara lead her away.
***
Anna stood in front of the stove.
“He called me Annie.”
Eddie stayed beside the table.
“Did many people call you that?”
“No.”
“Would anyone here have known?”
“No.”
Mary Jane checked the pipe joint with a cloth around her hand.
It had shifted enough to leave a thin black ring around the collar.
Anna saw it.
Some of the anger left her face.
Not much.
“What did he mean?” Eddie asked. “About sending them down?”
She kept looking at the stove.
“He said that after the accident.”
“At the quarry?”
“Yes.”
“What accident?”
Anna sat before answering.
“The lower gallery fell in.”
Mary Jane stopped working.
“There were galleries?”
“They followed the good stone beneath the overhang. Samuel said they’d gone too far.”
“Was he below?”
“No. He went after.”
Anna folded her hands in her lap.
“The bell rang. Everyone went running. They brought some men out before the second fall.”
“How many?” Eddie asked.
“I don’t remember.”
“Was Samuel hurt?”
“His shoulder. Smoke in his chest.”
“Smoke?”
“The engine shed caught. There was oil stored against the wall.”
Anna closed her eyes.
“He came home black with it. Kept asking how many they’d found.”
The kitchen grew quiet.
Eddie looked at the register.
A husband calling for his wife.
A man still standing beside an old disaster.
He could not tell whether they had heard Samuel as he was now, or something he had once been.
That uncertainty felt worse with Anna sitting in front of him.
“Did he recover?” Mary Jane asked.
“Yes.”
“How long before you and Lucy became sick?”
“Two winters.”
Eddie looked up.
Anna nodded.
“He’d been well again. Working.”
She turned toward the stove.
“He shouldn’t have been back there.”
***
Hollis came when Clara sent for him.
He listened without interrupting, then asked everyone to move out of the kitchen while he examined the stove.
Mary Jane showed him the displaced joint.
He looked into the firebox.
He looked up the pipe.
Finally, he stood.
“I don’t know what I expected to find.”
“Neither did we,” Eddie said.
Clara returned to the kitchen carrying her account book.
“Lucy’s with Esther.”
“Is she all right?” Anna asked.
“She wants her father.”
Anna looked down.
Clara placed a hand briefly on her shoulder, then opened the book.
“I wrote down what he said. As close as I could.”
Mary Jane compared it with her own notes.
Hollis watched them.
“Shaw asked for you.”
Eddie turned.
“When?”
“About ten minutes ago.”
“What did he say?”
“He wanted to know if someone had answered.”
***
The marshal’s office smelled of old coffee and sun-warmed pine.
There were two cells at the back.
Shaw occupied the nearer one.
He sat on the cot with his hands between his knees. Without the lamp or register, he looked smaller. A tired clerk waiting for an employer who had decided not to come.
He stood when Eddie entered.
“Did you open it?”
Hollis shut the outer door.
“Open what?”
“The place he spoke through.”
Eddie stopped beyond the bars.
“A stove.”
Shaw’s mouth tightened.
“Was there fire?”
“Coals.”
“Did anyone call him by name?”
“His wife.”
Shaw gripped a bar.
“Did she invite him through?”
“No.”
He released it.
Mary Jane stepped beside Eddie.
“You’re going to explain why that matters.”
Shaw looked toward the front window.
“People follow what they recognize.”
“We’ve seen that.”
“A voice can reach before the rest.”
“Before the rest of what?”
“The person.”
Eddie took the folded cloth from his coat and opened it enough to show the brass check.
Eight.
“Anna came through without anyone opening a stove.”
“The house was hers.”
“And Clara’s isn’t Samuel’s?”
“No.”
Mary Jane drew a chair close to the cell but remained standing.
“Lucy heard Eddie asking about her home. Anna heard them from wherever she was. Then Anna appeared in that house.”
Shaw nodded.
“Who put the check beneath Lucy’s bed?”
“I didn’t.”
“Who supplied it?”
“I don’t know.”
Eddie folded the cloth again.
“What do you know?”
Shaw looked at him.
There was resentment now beneath the fear.
“I know that your name was supposed to bring one man to the bell. I know the first arrival happened instead. I know the road began widening after that.”
“And you kept using the fitting.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I couldn’t close what it had opened.”
Eddie waited.
Shaw swallowed.
“And because I was afraid to tell the man who sold it to me.”
***
Hollis pulled the chair around and sat.
“Describe him.”
“Older than Bone. Younger than me, perhaps.”
“That helps no one.”
“A work coat. Gray hat. Burn on his wrist.”
“Which wrist?”
“The right.”
Mary Jane wrote it down.
“Which side?”
Shaw rubbed his own wrist.
“Inside. Here.”
“What kind of burn?”
“A narrow band.”
“His voice?”
“Ordinary.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“At the quarry.”
“When?”
“Nine days ago.”
Eddie counted backward.
Before Clara’s first letter.
Before the moon had become a thing people watched from their windows.
“What did he offer?”
“A way to clear the waiting.”
“The dead?”
Shaw nodded.
“How many were waiting?”
“I don’t know.”
Hollis leaned forward.
“You keep a register.”
“Of those who arrive. Not everyone on the other side.”
“What did he want in return?” Mary Jane asked.
Shaw’s gaze dropped.
Eddie watched his face.
“There it is.”
“He wanted the old book.”
“The one we have?”
“No.”
“What old book?”
“The quarry account.”
Hollis sat back.
“The payroll?”
“Part of it.”
“Where is it now?”
“He took it.”
Eddie remembered the paper in the fitting.
His name.
Ash Springs.
“Why would my burial be in a quarry account from before I was born?”
“It wouldn’t.”
“Then where did that strip come from?”
Shaw looked up.
“I asked him.”
“What did he say?”
“That he’d found a man who had already made the journey.”
***
Mary Jane closed her notebook.
“You called the book an account. What did it account for?”
“Wages. Stores. Loads of stone.”
“And the dead?”
Shaw said nothing.
Hollis rose.
“You keep leaving that part until someone drags it out of you.”
“It recorded what was owed after the collapse.”
“To the families?”
“Yes.”
“Was it paid?”
“Some.”
Eddie thought of the voice inside Clara’s stove.
*How many came out?*
“Did Samuel Vale keep that book?”
Shaw looked at him.
“Yes.”
The answer came too readily to be anything but important.
Eddie stepped closer to the bars.
“Did he sign it?”
“I expect so.”
“Did he agree with what was written?”
“I wasn’t here then.”
“Then how do you know what it contained?”
Shaw’s fingers closed around the edge of his coat.
“Because some pages had been amended.”
“Names?”
“Yes.”
“Numbers?”
“Yes.”
“Who amended them?”
“I couldn’t tell.”
Hollis stood beside Eddie.
“Where are the people buried?”
“The cemetery above the quarry.”
“All of them?”
Shaw looked away.
Eddie waited until he looked back.
“All of them?”
“No.”
***
They left Shaw with paper and a pencil.
Hollis told him to write down every conversation he could remember having with the man in the gray hat.
Then he locked the cell and joined them outside.
Mercy had woken.
A wagon stood before the store. Two women had stopped beside the well. Across the street, a man Eddie had not seen before was arguing with one of the guards near Clara’s porch.
The guard looked relieved when Hollis approached.
“He wants Mrs. Mercer.”
“I heard there’s people coming back.”
The man wore a clean shirt badly buttoned at the throat. He held his hat in both hands.
Hollis stopped.
“What’s your name?”
“Doran.”
“What do you need?”
“My boy.”
Nobody spoke.
Doran looked from the marshal to Eddie.
“Somebody said you went up there.”
Eddie felt the folded cloth in his pocket.
“We did.”
“Then you know the way.”
“We know a road.”
“My boy was six.”
Mary Jane moved closer.
Doran kept his eyes on Eddie.
“I don’t need long.”
The words came out with an effort that made Eddie wish the man had shouted.
“Just enough to speak to him.”
Eddie took off his hat.
“I can’t promise that.”
“I didn’t ask for a promise.”
“If you go up there, you may find something that knows what you want. That doesn’t mean it can give it back safely.”
Doran’s face hardened.
“Easy thing to say when you’re standing here.”
Eddie accepted that.
“Yes.”
For a moment, it seemed Doran might strike him.
Then the man looked toward Clara’s upstairs windows.
“What about them?”
“They’re frightened,” Eddie said. “Some are forgetting their families while we sit beside them.”
Doran’s grip loosened.
“They don’t remember?”
“Some things. Not all.”
Hollis stepped nearer.
“Come to the office. Tell me about your boy.”
The man looked at him suspiciously.
“So you can keep me here?”
“So I know who we’re talking about.”
Doran glanced once more at the boardinghouse.
Then he followed.
***
Anna waited in the kitchen.
The stove fire was out.
Clara had moved the kettle to a smaller cooking grate in the yard. Cold breakfast stood on the table, untouched.
“Did he tell you how to bring Samuel here?” Anna asked.
“He told us enough to be afraid of trying it blindly,” Eddie said.
She took that badly.
He could see it.
Mary Jane sat opposite her.
“We heard your husband asking about the quarry collapse. You said it happened two winters before you and Lucy died.”
“Yes.”
“Did he keep papers from it?”
Anna looked toward Eddie.
“Why?”
“Someone took the quarry account book shortly before the first person returned. Samuel may have written things in it that someone else changed.”
Anna was quiet.
Then she reached into her apron.
Will’s letter.
She laid it on the table.
“He wouldn’t put everything in the office book.”
“What do you mean?”
“He stopped trusting it.”
Eddie pulled out a chair.
Anna looked at the folded letter.
“Samuel came home one night and asked me for the household account. I thought he wanted to know what we’d spent.”
“Did he?”
“No. He tore out the empty pages at the back.”
“What did he do with them?”
“Wrote.”
“Names?”
“Some.”
“Where did he keep them?”
Anna shook her head.
“I never asked.”
Mary Jane watched her.
“Did he have somewhere he kept money? Tools? Things Lucy wasn’t meant to touch?”
A small, painful smile crossed Anna’s face.
“There wasn’t much Lucy didn’t touch.”
Then the smile disappeared.
She looked toward the stove.
“The table.”
Eddie waited.
“He repaired the leg after the accident. Took the whole end apart. I told him it had only wobbled.”
“The packing-crate repair?” Mary Jane asked.
Anna nodded.
“He said it was better to fix a thing before it failed.”
***
A faint scrape came from inside the cold stove.
All three turned.
Clara stood in the doorway.
She had heard it too.
Eddie moved the register to the far end of the table and opened it.
Samuel’s name was still only an impression.
But beneath it, the paper had begun to dent again.
One short stroke.
Then another.
Not letters this time.
A row of marks.
Mary Jane counted under her breath.
Twelve.
The scraping stopped.
From behind the stove door came Samuel’s voice.
Closer now.
“Annie.”
Anna stood but did not approach.
“I’m here.”
A long breath moved through the iron.
“The table.”
“We remember,” she said.
“Don’t let them take it.”
Eddie looked at Mary Jane.
Her hand had already closed around her tool bag.
“Samuel,” Eddie said, “who was left below?”
The silence stretched.
Then the voice answered.
“They paid for eleven.”
The stove door gave one small knock.
“There were twelve.”
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