Chapter 7 Sylvie's Second Notebook

Harewood called her on the Thursday, and he called her the way he always did, letting the last word hang until she wanted to fill it, and this time she did not fill it, and the pause taught her something about him: that he liked a silence that made people talk, and that he would respect her more for not talking into it. "Mrs. Tunstall. I have a question," he said. "Does the word register mean anything to you besides the one you told me about?" "It's what I call my cards." "Then you'll want to come out to the flat," he said. "Your friend kept one too." The tape across the door had been taken down but its ghost was still there, a thin line of adhesive on the jamb that she felt with her fingertips as she went in, and she stood on the threshold longer than she needed to, gathering the room the way she gathered every room, by its sound and its smell and the small pressures of a space where a person had stopped being. Somewhere a radiator ticked. The fridge in the corner had been unplugged and stood silent, and its silence was the loudest thing in the flat, because Sylvie's fridge had always hummed, and Coralie had heard it through the floor for two years, and would never hear it again. They let her in because she was the one who had known Sylvie, and because, Coralie suspected, Harewood wanted to watch her read the room. The flat smelled of paper and eucalyptus and the ghost of coffee, and the piano in the corner was out of tune, and Coralie heard it the way she heard everything, a small dishonest wobble in the top register, and it hurt her, that the last thing Sylvie owned was drifting, and that no one had thought to close the lid. On Sylvie's desk there was a box of index cards, hand-ruled into columns, hundreds of them, filled in the same orderly hand Sylvie had used to write everything, and Coralie understood at once what she was looking at, because it was the twin of her own register, kept by a woman who had no prosopagnosia at all and had simply decided, a long time ago, that voices were the only descriptions that mattered. "Students," Harewood said. "Some of them going back forty years. We pulled the ones from the last two years." Coralie sat, because the room told on everyone, and read. She read the cards with her fingers as much as her eyes, the way she read everything, for the small ridges where a pen had pressed hard. Most of the cards were ordinary. Names, prints, notes on range and breath and the small faults each voice carried. Then, near the back of the box, in a section Sylvie had not labeled, she found the ones that made her go cold on a warm afternoon. There were three cards, in three different inks, and each one carried the same heading in Sylvie's capital hand. TWO MASKS. The first: came in winter, wanted to lower his range, ended words in his throat, left no name. The second: came in spring, same throat, same endings, different coat, different walk, and this time Sylvie had written, in the margin, a line that Coralie read three times: he walks left-heavy when he forgets. The third card was different. It had no date. It had only a street and a name. Dunkery Rooms. Ask for the man with three voices. "Three voices," Coralie said aloud. Harewood moved behind her. "Do you know what that means?" "I think I do." She set the card down gently, the way you set down a thing that has just started to burn. "A man with three voices is not a man who can do three accents. Anyone can do three accents. A man with three voices is a man who has three people he can be, and none of them is him." Coralie read the three cards again, and then a fourth time, and on the fourth reading she noticed the thing a person notices only when a name has started to matter. The handwriting on the second card was Sylvie's, but the pressure underneath the words had changed, the pen had gone harder, the letters had grown smaller and tighter toward the right of the card, the way handwriting goes when the hand is afraid the ear might turn toward the door. Sylvie had written the second card faster than the first. She had been writing it while he was still in the building. Coralie put her finger on the small cramped words and held them a moment, the way she would hold a hand. Harewood was quiet, and the quiet was not his interview quiet, not the silence that waits for you to talk. It was the quiet of a man doing arithmetic. "The Dunkery Rooms is a studio," he said. "Dubbing, voice-over, a little commercial work. I know the address. It's south of the river, on Dunkery Street." "He was there. She heard him there or was told to go there." "She was the kind of woman who went and looked," said Harewood, and Coralie heard the respect in it, and it landed strangely, because she had not known until that moment how much she wanted someone else to have understood who Sylvie had been. "The problem, Mrs. Tunstall, is that a studio like that has a client list full of men exactly like your husband's job. Voices. Doubles. Session singers. A whole building of people who sound like other people. And not one of them has to look like himself." The box of cards would go to the station, and Coralie would be allowed to photograph the three she needed, and she stood in the middle of her friend's silent flat and understood that she was looking at the only inheritance Sylvie had left anyone: a lifetime of careful listening, kept in a shoebox, waiting for the one person in the city who could read it. It was not, she thought, a bad thing to leave behind. It was, in its way, a will. And she was the executor, whether anyone appointed her or not, and the estate was every voice the woman had ever known, and the debts were all the seams one man had been trying to hide. Coralie stood, and crossed to the window, and put her palm against glass that was cooler than it should have been, and listened to the street below, where a woman was arguing with a parking meter and a delivery van was idling in a way that would ruin somebody's afternoon. "One of them does the endings," she said. "One of them has the drag in the left foot and the ring that rings. And if he works in a building full of borrowed voices, then every man in that building has an alibi made of sound, and none of them has a face you can hold." "So we go to Dunkery Street," said Harewood, "and we listen to a room full of men in the trade, and you tell me which one of them is the man from your stairwell." "Yes." "Mrs. Tunstall." And here the hang in his voice was not for her, and she heard it and understood that he was about to say something he did not like. "The man we're looking for knows what you can do. He has known it since the first day, and he has been arranging himself around it ever since. If we walk you into a room of voice people and ask you to pick him out by ear, we are using you as bait. I'm telling you that plainly so you can decide like an adult whether to come." Coralie looked out at the gray street and the idling van and the river beyond, and she thought of Sylvie's last unfinished word, and she thought of her own name spoken from a stairwell her husband was not in, and she made the decision that would cost her almost everything. "I'll come," she said. "And I'll bring the register." ---