Chapter 5 THE MAN WHO BURNS THINGS DOMINIC POV

DOMINIC POV

The agency had answered on the first ring, and that was the first thing I didn’t like about it.

I had called at nine, an hour at which any real placement firm lets a machine take the message and apologizes in the morning, and instead a woman with a voice like warm milk said “Pryce and Lowell, how can I help you?” as though she had been sitting beside the telephone waiting for me.

I asked about Ivy Calloway. She told me Ivy was one of their very best, a gem, and that I was lucky to have her, and when I asked for particulars she told me the whole thing again in very nearly the same words, as if she had rehearsed the answer countless times.

I put the receiver down and stood in the study with my hand still resting on it. Nobody is that available, and nobody is that good, which meant I had hired a woman with at least one expensive friend, and a woman whose friends answer telephones at nine at night is a woman with a purpose. I had known that already. It was strange how much more I minded having it confirmed.

At supper she had cut Milo’s chicken into pieces of exactly the size Camille used to cut it, which meant either that she had watched a great many children eat or that she knew something she shouldn’t.

At ten I took the cloth from the hall cupboard and climbed to the gallery, as I do every night, because nobody else is permitted to touch that wall and I have never decided whether the rule is a kindness to the staff or a courtesy to myself. Camille came first, laughing, and I gave her frame its slow circuit with the cloth.

Lena next, with her folded hands. Then Seraphina, who sat for her portrait the way she did everything, with her chin lifted and her smile exactly polite, and in her dark hair two small silver pins in the shape of lilies.

She had them made as a pair for our second anniversary and wore them so constantly that I stopped seeing them. After the river the sheriff handed me one in a plastic bag with a number on it, and told me, with some embarrassment, that the other had never been recovered. I put the one I had into the casket myself, beside her ring, because it seemed wrong that she should be buried with half of anything, and in the eight years since I have wondered every so often where the other one went, in the same idle and useless way you wonder about a glove.

I checked the latches on all four nursery windows, and the catch on the playroom window seat, which sticks. Theo lay on his side with one fist under his chin and crayon still worked into his nails, a boy who had been scrubbed and who had not, in the manner of boys, agreed to it. Milo slept with his arms flung wide, taking up more of the crib than his size justified, with Camille’s dimple showing even in sleep.

I made the rule about the front door the week after we buried Lena. It was past two in the morning when someone knocked, three slow knocks, and I went down in my bare feet and opened it onto a black porch and a clean gravel drive and a single white lily laid across the step with string around its stem. The camera on the oak showed me an empty drive. That was the night I understood that whatever was in my house had no need to come through the door, and had chosen, for reasons I have never been able to guess, to knock on it anyway.

At supper I had asked Mrs. Pell whether Theo had drawn anything, because I ask every night, and every night she brings me what he has made and I do the thing I do with it. She said he had done one large picture on the good paper. I asked where it was. She said she doesn't know, and she said it to the stove.

So the girl had it. Ivy Calloway, who had told me dinosaurs in a voice as level as a table, who had looked me in the face and lied about the one thing in this house that no one but Mrs. Pell and I had ever known to lie about. I couldn’t decide why that should feel like relief, and then I could. A person who lies about a drawing is a person who thinks it matters, and for fourteen months I had been the only one in the house who did.

I didn’t go to bed. At ten to two I went down to the kitchen, where Mrs. Pell had left the folder on the table as she does, thinner than usual because she had fallen behind with it, and I opened the firebox and fed in what was there.

A purple house. A thing with orange legs that might have been a horse. A staircase, and another staircase, and a third, the same seventeen wobbling steps every time with the same woman smiling in front of them, and I did not look at any of them for longer than it took the fire to do its work.

When the last one was gone I stayed on my heels with the heat on my face and thought, as I do every night, that it was the least a man could do and also the worst.

IVY POV

I had lain awake for two hours with the drawing flat under my mattress and the house ticking around me, rehearsing the speech I would give to the first person who caught me out, and it was a good speech, full of reasonable-sounding lies, and I had it word-perfect by midnight and still couldn’t sleep. I had meant only to get a glass of water, and the plan was a good one for about as long as it took to reach the bottom of the back stairs

The kitchen was dark except for the stove, whose door stood open on a bed of orange, and Dominic Ashford was crouched in front of it in his shirtsleeves with his back to me, feeding paper into the fire one sheet at a time. I could see the colors as they caught: a purple that went black, a blue that curled at the edges like a lip. He moved with the unhurried care of a man performing a task he had performed so many times that it no longer needed his attention, and that was the part that made my skin go cold.

The room smelled of hot wax and singed paper, and under that of something faintly sweet, scorched sugar, which was exactly what my own room had smelled like on Monday afternoon. I put that away to think about later.

I know what a person looks like when he is destroying evidence. He is fast, and he glances at the door. This man was slow, and he never looked up at all. My recorder was upstairs in the lining of my coat, which I mourned at the time and which turned out to be the only favor the night did me.

“You can come in, Miss Calloway.” He didn’t turn. “The third stair from the bottom squeaks, and I didn’t hear it, which means you knew to step over it.”

“I have been here a day and a half, Mr. Ashford. I know where the loud boards are.”

“That is a skill most housekeepers take years to acquire.” He fed in another sheet. I came close enough to see that it was a child’s drawing in crayon, a red scribble and a green one and something that might have been a dog.

“What are those?”

“Theo’s.”

“You burn your son’s drawings.”

“Mrs. Pell brings me what he draws, and I burn them.” He said it without a flicker, as if I had asked how he took his coffee. “She’s fallen behind. It’s two days’ worth.”

“Why?”

For the first time he stopped, with a sheet halfway to the flames, and when he spoke his voice had lost some of its starch. “Because he has drawn the same picture every day for fourteen months, Miss Calloway, in every color Pell can find him, and I know what it is, and I can’t look at that staircase twice.”

He had said staircase. I hadn’t.

I stood on the cold tiles while fourteen months of a child’s memory went up the chimney in front of me, with the one sheet that hadn’t gone flat against my ribs under a cardigan I had slept in. I had taken a man who couldn’t bear to read the evidence for a man destroying it, and the distance between those two was something I had no instrument fine enough to measure.

He fed the last sheet in and shut the firebox door, and the kitchen went dark except for the glow that leaked around the edges of the grate.

“Whatever he drew you today,” he said to the fire, “keep it somewhere I won’t find it. I would rather not be shown.”

I stood there with a drawing of his dead wife pressed against my ribs and understood that the man I had come to destroy had just asked me, as courteously as a person can, to hide the evidence from him.