Mr. Pruett had arranged a man to look at the boiler. The man arrived at eight the next morning in a white van with TULL AND SON, MARLOW CROSS painted on the side, though there was no son in evidence and the paint had faded to pink.
"Owen," he said, and shook my hand with a palm full of calluses. "You're the one with the haunted wall."
"Who told you that?"
"Woman at the shop. I stopped for a sausage roll." He grinned. He had sawdust in his eyebrows and a chipped front tooth. "Marlow Cross is two valleys over. We don't do ghosts. We barely do weather."
The boiler lived in a cupboard off the scullery and had, according to Owen, been fitted by someone who disliked boilers. I left him swearing gently at it and went to the study.
My grandmother had kept records of everything.
Ledgers filled two walls, cloth-bound, each spine labelled by year in the same small upright hand. 1952. 1953. On and on, all the way to this year, the last volume only half full. Coal deliveries. Church collections. Eleven pence for a reel of thread. The price of eggs in every month of 1971.
I'd spent nine years cataloguing parish records for the county. I knew how to read a ledger. You don't read the words. You read the habits, and then you look for the place where a habit breaks.
I took down 1968.
January to September was ordinary. Then, in October, her columns began to slip. A sum crossed out twice. A grocery bill entered under the wrong week. And in the margin beside the twenty-sixth of October, in a shakier version of that tidy hand, two words, underlined so hard the nib had torn the paper.
Forgive me.
Below them, on the first of November, a new line appeared. Twenty pounds, paid to M.H., 4 Mill Row.
I went through 1969 with my pencil between my teeth. The twenty pounds was there on the first of every month. So were other things. In March, two lengths of flannel and a bottle of gripe water. On the fourteenth of April, a payment of two guineas to a Mrs. Orr.
The fourteenth of April was my mother's birthday. She'd been born at home, she'd always told me, in the middle of a thunderstorm, and my grandmother had never let her forget the trouble of it. A midwife's fee, then. I made a note and moved on.
In June, a heavier hand. Three hundred bricks, Joseph Finch. Lime, two bags. Labour, four days.
I sat back.
"You all right in there?" Owen called from the scullery.
"Fine."
"You've said fine three times this morning. Boiler's fixed, by the way. It just needed someone to be rude to it."
"Did you ever meet her?" I called back. "My grandmother?"
"Once. Fitted a new ballcock in the bathroom, oh, ten years ago." He appeared in the doorway, wiping his hands on a rag. "She paid in cash and counted it twice. Then she asked me if I was courting, and when I said no, she said good, I'd only make a mess of it."
"That sounds like her."
"Couldn't say. That's all she ever said to me."
He wouldn't take a cup of tea until he'd seen the wall. I suppose I should have expected that.
He stood on the landing with his hands in his back pockets and studied it the way I'd studied the ledgers. He pressed the mortar with his thumb. He crouched and looked along the line of the bricks toward the light.
"Somebody wanted that shut properly," he said. "Double course, see? Two layers. Lime mortar, nicely struck. Your Mr. Finch knew his trade." He peered into the gap where the missing brick should be. "This one never went in. Look at the edges. They're clean. He left a hole on purpose."
"Why would anyone leave a hole?"
"Air, maybe. Stops the damp." He straightened. "Or so something could go through it."
We both looked at the gap. The pale stripe of light lay across his boots.
"I could have it down in a morning," he said. "If you ever wanted."
"I don't."
"All right."
"It's the one thing she asked me."
"I said all right." He picked up his toolbag. "Number's on the van. I'm only two valleys over."
The twenty pounds never stopped.
I followed it through 1970 and 1975, through the change to decimal money, through the eighties when the ink went from blue to black. Twenty pounds became thirty, then fifty. But it never missed a month, and it always went to M.H., 4 Mill Row. Fifty-one years of it.
The last ledger lay open on the desk where she must have left it. The final entries were in a hand so unsteady I had to tilt the page to the window.
The payment to M.H., on the first of last month. A bill from the chemist. And underneath, the last thing my grandmother ever wrote in her books, three days before Mr. Pruett found her.
Iris will come. M. says S. will not. Let one of them be braver than I was.
I read it over and over. Outside, the afternoon had turned the colour of pewter. I got up to put on the lamp and stopped at the window instead.
A woman was standing at my front gate.
She wore a long green coat, buttoned to the throat, and she was looking up at the house. Not at the front door. At the top floor, at the square of red brick where a window used to be.
By the time I got the front door open, the lane was empty. Walter Finch's roses nodded in the wind.
On the gatepost, someone had left a single yellow rose with its stem wrapped in a strip of blue thread.