Chapter 8 A Voicemail From a Dead Woman

The voice message arrived on the Friday morning, and the phone showed a number with no name, and Coralie answered it in the lobby with Bette's linseed smell still in the air, and the voice that came out of the phone was Sylvie's. Not a voice like Sylvie's. Sylvie's. The teacher's voice, the one that had called her Cor across a kitchen, the one that had said a face is a rumor a voice is a fact, the one that had said I always tell you the truth. The cadence was exact. The little dry clearing of the throat before a hard sentence was exact. The way she ran the last words of a thought together, as if the thought and the breath were one thing, was exact, and Coralie stood in the lobby with the phone against her ear and the whole building going away around her. "You're going to want to sit down," said the dead woman, gently. "I can hear you standing." There is a thing the ear does that the eye cannot, and it is this: the ear can recognize a person who has been dead for weeks. A photograph of the dead is only a photograph. A face in a memorial is only a face, flat and gone and useless to Coralie in any case. But a voice keeps. A voice is stored in the body the way a tune is stored in a hand; it comes back whole, with the breath in it, with the room in it, with the day the recording was made still caught in it like weather. So when the dead woman spoke her name across the lobby telephone, Coralie did not think ghost. She thought Sylvie, and her whole chest answered, and then she thought file, and something in her went down like a lift. Coralie sat on the step. She had the register in her bag and she could not reach for it, because to reach for it she would have had to move, and to move would have been to admit the voice was not Sylvie, and she was not yet ready to admit that, not even with everything she knew. "It isn't really you," she said. "No," said the voice, still warm, still Sylvie, still the woman who had spent forty years teaching the frightened. "It's a recording. She read something for a student once, years ago, a passage from a novel, to show him how the breath carries a sentence. He kept the file. Or he copied the file. Or he made the file from the pieces. It doesn't matter how, Cor. It matters that I can do this." "And what is it you want?" "Only to tell you something you already know." The recording paused where a person pauses, and Coralie, who had spent her whole life taking voices apart, could not hear one seam. "You are going to come to Dunkery Street. I could stop you, but I don't want to stop you. I want you to come. I want you to stand in a room full of borrowed voices and try to find me, and I want you to fail, because that is the whole point of you. You cannot point. That is the gift you were born with and never learned to use." "That's a strange gift." "It's the only one I ever wanted." The voice softened further, exactly as Sylvie had softened every ending of every phrase she practiced, and Coralie finally heard the thing, not a seam in the recording but a seam in the world: whoever had assembled this call had learned to soften the way Sylvie softened, and had studied her, and had been in her flat, and had taken her cards and her files and her voice, and had spent, by now, weeks making a mask out of a dead woman. "Before you go," said the voice, "there's one more thing. Ask your husband where he was on the Thursday you found her. And then ask him where he really was. And then, Cor, sit down again." She sat with the phone in her lap and let the building come back around her one sound at a time. The drip in the basement. The lift door, dead again, breathing a little. A door on the fourth floor, and a footstep, and a woman's cough she knew. It was the most ordinary minute in the world, and it was full of a man's work, and she had never felt so crowded in a hallway she had walked through ten thousand times. Whoever had made that call had made it to be understood. That was the part she could not stop turning over. He had not called to frighten her. He had called so that she would know, precisely, what he had and what he could do, the way a good craftsman shows you the joint, because a joint that holds is a kind of beauty, even when it holds a blade. The call ended. Coralie sat on the lobby step for a long time. She thought, then, of the parade, which had not yet happened, and of the six men who would stand behind a screen and read a passage, and she knew that the man she was hunting would already have found a way to stand among them and be innocent, and that her own unreliability would be the proof of his innocence, and that the only way to win was not to win the parade at all. She did not yet know what she meant by that. She only knew that Sylvie had said, once, that the eye is the liar in the head and the ear is the witness, and that a witness, unlike a liar, does not have to be believed to be right. Above her, on the fifth floor, in a flat where a woman had been murdered, someone from the police was moving furniture and closing a piano lid, and downstairs in the basement the drip went on being a drip, and in the middle distance the television that lived two doors down laughed at itself, and Thornlea Court held her in its old bones the way it always had, and gave her the only thing it had ever really given her, which was the truth. The man had been in Sylvie's flat. He had taken her cards. He had taken her voice. He had all of her friend, and he was using her the way a pianist uses a piano, and there was not one thing in Sylvie's flat to point to except the cards and the street and the three words on her cards, two masks, in three different inks, and there was not one thing in Coralie's own head to point with except a drag in a left foot and a ring on a rail and a set of endings swallowed whole and the sound, exact and warm and impossible, of her husband saying her name from a stairwell he was not in. She went up to her own flat with her keys held the way she had begun to hold them, which was like a small weapon, and before she slept she did one thing that would matter later. She wrote the time of the call, and the number it came from, on the back of a card, and she wrote the sentence the dead woman had said about her husband, word for word, exactly as it had been said, because exactness was the one gift she had, and she was not going to waste it on her own grief. She took out the register and turned to the newest card, the almost-empty one, and read it back. Emrys Rellick. Nephew. No drag. No ring. Ends words clean. And then she wrote, at the bottom, in a hand that had begun to shake, the first line she would ever write against her own card for Lorcan. Thursday. The night she died. He says Dunkery. He says a session. I cannot see his face. I cannot see his face. ---