Chapter 16 The Truth of the Ledger

"Start at the beginning," Verity said, "and don't leave anything out, because I have read every door in this town for a living and I will know." Netta Wexford put her hands in her coat pockets and looked out at the fog on the water, and she told it the way people tell a thing they have carried alone for years, which is to say slowly, and in the wrong order, and with the parts that hurt placed carefully where they were hardest to say. Her grandfather, Arthur Wexford, had owned the mill, and by 1979 the mill was finished, worn out, worth less than the debt against it, and the bank had begun to be patient in the way that banks are patient, which is to say it was waiting for a reason. That autumn there was a fire. It started in the mill office, at night, and it did not spread far, but it did enough, and the insurance money would have cleared the debt and left a little over, and the insurance company, being a company, asked who had set it, and somebody, somewhere, answered. "The town decided it was my grandfather," Netta said. "Not in a court. Courts need proof. The town decided it in the way towns decide things, over the counter and at the market and in the post office, and by the spring my mother could not walk to the shop without being looked at, and by the summer she had gone." "Gone where?" "To her sister's, first. Then London. Then anywhere." Netta's voice stayed level. "She made a new life, and she married a man who did not know where she had come from, and she never told me any of it until the last year of her life, and then she made me promise that if she died before the truth came out I would not go looking for it." She turned. "I came looking anyway. She was my mother, and she spent a life being somebody the town had decided was a criminal in the middle of a market." "The things you took," Verity said. "The bell. The photograph. The jam." "The bell was on a shelf in a tea room run by a woman whose mother was given it by my grandmother. The photograph was our bakehouse before it was a bakery, and it had my great-grandmother's hand on the back of it. The jam was the one thing in this town I could still laugh about, and I took it because I wanted to remember that I could." Netta looked down at her hands. "I did not take a single thing that was not ours. I looked at every one of them first. It took me a year to find them, and I had your father's ledger to do it, and I copied that ledger by hand one winter so that I would not have to carry it about the town, and I know what that sounds like." "It sounds like a person who was frightened and did it anyway." "It sounds like a person who has been letting herself into houses at night and telling herself she was tidying up her family." Netta's voice stayed level. "I am not asking you to say it was right. I am asking you to hold all of it in your hands before you decide what it was." Verity looked out at the water for a while. Then she said, "Show me what your grandfather buried." Netta opened the tobacco tin and set it on the ledge between them, and inside were papers folded thin: accounts, receipts, a mill ledger ruled for a trade that had stopped before Verity was born. She read them by torchlight, one at a time, the way she read everything, and what she found was at once nothing and a great deal. A mill already drowning two years before the fire. A bank that had stopped writing letters and started merely waiting. And a line near the foot of a page, in Arthur Wexford's hand: *If the fire was not mine, it was someone's, and I will not be buried with it.* A man had written that the winter before a fire, and had kept it, and had rented a box a week later, and had gone to the locksmith, and had shaken so badly the week after that he could not write his name. "The tin proves he was afraid," Verity said. "It doesn't prove who he was afraid of." "No," Netta said. "That is in the other place. That is what the last year has been for." "And your grandfather?" "He died the winter after the fire. The bank says of a bad heart. My mother always said it was of being looked at." Netta reached over and put her hand flat on the lid of the deed box, the way Verity had put her hand on Enid's green door, and on the church wall, and on the photograph in the shed. "A week before the fire he rented a deed box at the bank, and a day after the fire he came home and dug up the floor of the mill office and buried something under it, and I know that because he wrote a letter to my mother that I found in her things, and in the letter he said that if the truth was ever needed it was in the mill, and that the key to it was with the locksmith." Verity looked at the box. "My father's ledger." "Your father's ledger," Netta said. "Every lock in the mill house in 1979, and the margin that says keep for Mr. W. Your father was the only man in this town who did not think we had set the fire, and he was the only man who could open the doors my grandfather needed, and I think the two of them made an arrangement, and I think your father kept it for the rest of his life, and I think he never told a soul, because he was the sort of man who kept a promise even when the person he had made it to was dead." Verity sat with that, in the cold at the mouth of the tunnel, with the fog going over the water like something looking for a way in. "There's one thing I don't understand," she said. "You dug under the mill office floor. I saw the hole. And you found something, because you've stopped digging. So why do you still need the ledger?" "Because the box is not under the floor," Netta said. "The thing under the floor was a tin of papers, and I have them, and they are the accounts of a mill that was already finished, and they prove nothing. My grandfather moved the real thing." She opened the deed box, then, and took out a single sheet of green-ruled paper, torn along one edge, and held it up in the light of her torch, and it was a page from a ledger that Verity knew as well as she knew her own hands. "There's a second list," Netta said. "The list of who came to my grandfather that year, and what they wanted, and what they were willing to do. And the only copy was in your father's book, and the only other copy—" she stopped. Verity had gone very still. "The only other copy," she said, "is in the deed box. The one that requires a key. The one that requires the bank. The one that has not been opened since the year it was rented, because the key has been lost." She looked at Netta. "There is no lost key, is there. There's a key that was never lost. There's a key in my father's drawer with a heart on its bow and a W cut into the shank and a tag that lies about a tea room." Netta Wexford looked back at her, and in the fog at the mouth of the tunnel her tired face finally, for the first time, looked like the face of a woman who had stopped being alone. "That's the one," she said. ---