Page 9 of Buried Accounts

He went out the side door. Victor sat for one more breath in the blue light, looked at the search and the hole laid side by side, the two halves of a person he could not prove was a person, and then he turned the monitors off, which he never did, and went to find his keys.

The Blossom Springs branch library held the day's heat in its brick and gave it back through the front doors, and inside it was cool and smelled of paper and the particular glue of old carpet, and a woman behind the desk was running returns under a scanner that chirped once for each one.

Victor had spent the eight-block drive deciding who to be, which was a thing he was bad at and knew he was bad at. Caleb could be anyone. Victor could only ever be a slightly different arrangement of himself. So he had settled on the truest available lie, which was a man doing dull administrative work, because it was ninety percent what he actually was.

“Afternoon,” he said. “I hope you can help me. I'm doing some records cleanup for a county grant — usage on the public machines, nothing with names, just trying to reconcile the guest-pass log against actual sessions because the numbers don't match and they never match and somebody has to be the one who cares.”

It was the right key. The woman — her tag said RUTH, and she had the specific weariness of a person who had been the one who cared about something for a long time without help — set down her scanner. “They never match,” she said, with feeling.

“They never match.”

“You'd think a guest pass and a person would be one to one.”

“You would think that. Two-forty this afternoon, the corner machine —” Victor let it sound like a line item, a number he was chasing, not a person. “— I've got a session, and I'm trying to confirm it ran. If you don’t remember that far back, it's fine, I can —”

“The woman with the bag.” Ruth said it without effort, producing a thing that had no reason to have stuck and had stuck anyway. “Sure. Quiet. Took the corner one, the one that faces the wall, which people do when they don't want you reading over their shoulder, but everybody wants that, that's not anything. Sat a long time before she started. I noticed because she didn't ask for help and the ones who sit a long time before they start usually end up asking for help.”

Victor kept his hands still on the counter and his voice in the register of a man reconciling numbers. “You remember her.”

“I remember she didn't print anything, which is the only part that's in your log or not in it, I'd guess. Didn't print, didn't ask, gave the pass number back to nobody because she just left it on the machine and went. Paid nothing because guests don't.” Ruth considered. “Canvas bag. The kind that's seen some miles. Held it like it had everything she owned in it, but —” and here the woman did the thing Victor had driven eight blocks for and dreaded, which was try to be helpful past the edge of what she actually knew, “— you know, some people just hold their bag like that. I couldn't tell you her hair. Brownish? Under a cap, maybe, or not. She wasn't anybody, is the thing. I mean she was somebody, obviously, everybody's somebody, but she was the kind of nobody you get in here all afternoon, and I only remember her at all because she sat so long before she started and because she had the face.”

“The face,” Victor said, and hated how much he wanted the answer.

“The face people have when they're about to do a thing they've decided on.” Ruth picked her scanner back up, the memory spent, already returning to her returns. “We get them in here too. People deciding things. Library's free and it's cool and nobody asks you why you're sitting. You'd be surprised what gets decided in a building like this.”

“No,” Victor said. “I wouldn't.”

He thanked her. He didn't ask the questions crowding the back of his throat — which way she went, whether she'd been in before, whether she'd come back — because Caleb was right, because a face that asked too many questions was a face that got remembered and described to the next person who came asking, and there would be a next person who came asking, and Victor did not intend to make that person's work easier than the woman with the bag had already, recklessly, blessedly made his.

He walked to the corner machine instead. It faced the wall. Its chair was pushed back at the careless angle of a thing left in motion, not squared, and Victor stood behind it where she had sat two and a half hours ago and looked at what she had looked at, which was a blank wall and a dark screen and nothing, the most private public seat in the building.

She had sat here a long time before she started. Ruth had noticed it without knowing what she was noticing. Victor knew exactly what she was noticing, because he had sat that way himself, in front of a thing he'd decided to do that could not be undone, letting the last of the time when it was still undone run out before he spent it. The woman with the bag had sat in this chair and known precisely what typing those names would do — had known it the way only someone who had lived inside the structure could know it — and had spent forty minutes climbing toward a name at the top that Victor could have told her she would not find, because he had climbed the same ladder and found the same nothing, and then she had stood up and pushed the chair back and walked out into a town that didn't know her into a head start she knew how to use.

And she was alive. He let himself have it now, standing behind the chair, with the caveat written down in the file where it belonged and the feeling here where it lived. The hole in the payroll had a pulse. She had been erased, and she had lived, and she had spent five years being no one, and today, eight blocks from where he sat inventorying the corpse of the thing that had unmade her, she had decided to stop. Not carefully. Not the way the live hand did things. She had walked into the field at noon and said the secret out loud, and the only two people in the world certain to hear it were the man who wanted to save her and the hand that had tried to erase her, and it was a coin, and she had flipped it, and Victor stood behind her empty chair and understood that she had flipped it knowing both faces.

That was the thing the documents could not hold, and he could not stop turning over. A person had weighed being found by the wrong one against another year of being no one and had chosen the coin. He dealt in what held up, and nothing about her held up — not a name, not a face Ruth could give him, not a fact he could put in front of Ronan that wasn't a feeling wearing a timestamp. And he believed in her anyway, standing there, which frightened him more than the live hand did, because the live hand was only trying to kill someone, and this was asking him to be a different kind of man than twenty years of paper had made him.

His phone went off in the parking lot, against the brick that was still giving back the day's heat, and the name on it was David Mien, which meant Victor answered before the second ring, because David Mien did not call to talk.

“Tell me you're somewhere you can listen,” Mien said, no hello, the voice of a man who had been the team's tripwire to the wider world for longer than Victor had been on it.

“Parking lot. Go.”

“Something moved in the federal docket on your frozen friend. Two hours ago, give or take. A query came in against the Montgomery asset filings through the public access system — not a party to the case, not a firm, not a credentialed anybody. Public terminal.” A pause, the sound of Mien reading something. “I flag access on that docket as a favor to nobody, Victor, because I had a feeling about that case the day it sealed. And today somebody who isn't supposed to know that case exists went looking at it from a library in your town. I'd ask if that means anything to you, but you've gone quiet, which means it does.”

Victor watched the heat come off the brick in a shimmer and chose his words the way he chose all of them, for what would hold. “It means something. I don't know what yet. I'm working it.”

“Work it fast. Because here's the part I called to say.” Mien's voice dropped into the register he used for the thing under the thing. “I'm not the only flag on that docket. There's a second alert configured against the same filings, sitting on a channel I'm not supposed to be able to see, and I can't read who set it, but I can tell you it's older than mine and it's quieter than mine and it pinged at the same minute yours did. Somebody else is watching the Montgomery money for exactly the thing that just happened. Whoever your library ghost is, Victor, they didn't only get heard by the people who'd want to help them.”

“I know,” Victor said.

“Then you know you've got a clock now, and you didn't have one this morning.” A beat. “Ronan good? Lila?”

“Everybody's good.”

“Keep them that way.” And Mien was gone, the way he always went, no goodbye, just an absence where a voice had been.

Victor stood in the lot with the dead phone in his hand and the day's heat on his face and ran the arithmetic, which came out the way Caleb's had and the way his own had and now the way Mien's did, all three of them landing on the same flat sum. A woman who knew the structure from inside had surfaced in his town two and a half hours ago and gone to ground. She was alive, she was reachable, and she was the witness he had wanted for five years without letting himself want anything.