The Forgotten Hours(26)

The sound of him clearing his throat came over the line, and she held the phone away from her ear.

“It’s, um, well, it’s in pretty good order here,” she continued. “Have you been back?”

“What are you doing up there? Your mum send you?”

“No, actually, not Mum.” A little nauseated, Katie ground the cigarette out against the stones and noticed that the light in the bleached-out sky above the fir trees was already beginning to fade. It had gotten late. “I’m cleaning it up a bit. Dad’s, um, you know he’s getting out soon, right? In a few weeks, actually.”

“No, sunshine, I was not aware of that.” Another guttural throat clearing. “And for the life of me, I can’t see what that has to do with Eagle Lake.”

“Mum said he could stay here. Just for a bit, until he gets back on track.” She rooted around in her back pocket for the business card she’d found.

“Back on track, eh?” Grumpy repeated.

She decided to ignore whatever it was that he was implying. “So anyway. I found a bunch of stuff from years ago. There’s a card here, a business card. From some guy, in London, Hugo Montague or something? No, Montefiore. I’m wondering if you know anything about it.”

“Not sure, dear. I’m afraid I don’t remember things sometimes.” Grumpy sounded uneasy, and she thought of how her family had always insisted on marching ahead, never looking back, impatient with too much navel-gazing. Was it a British thing, or had her father played his role in it too?

“It’s just, with Dad getting out, you know . . .” She tried again. “It’s all beginning to kind of come back.”

“I lost my stomach for it,” her grandfather said. “As soon as your friend, that child, took the stand. For me it was all over right then and there.”

“You mean Lulu?” Katie asked.

“No, no—Lulu, I missed her testimony,” he explained. “And your mother didn’t hear it either. Charlie wasn’t allowed in—something about being called as a witness.”

“I don’t understand. Which friend are you talking about?”

“The one who saw them, the two of them. That boy you spent the summer with.”

Her back stiffened. “You mean Jack? He, what—he saw my father with Lulu?”

“Yes, that’s right, Jack. Handsome bloke. So tall. Was he already over six feet then? Awfully nervous, poor fellow. But, dear, I don’t see how any of this is in the least bit helpful. Your father was convicted. Guilty or not is rather beside the point now, isn’t it?”

Everything around her seemed unsteady and fragile in light of this news—the incredible news that Jack had been involved in this whole mess in a tangible way. Now the letters she’d just read made more sense to her; he had testified at the trial! His testimony may well have affected the outcome, and somehow she had never known this. She tried to swallow over the hard lump in her throat. It couldn’t be true that he had seen anything—she remembered that night. There had been nothing to see, nothing.

“It’s not beside the point to me,” she said to her grandfather.

“Don’t be so romantic. These things are never black and white. You must know that,” he said, his voice scratchy, and then he coughed so loudly and in such a prolonged way she had to hold the phone away from her ear again.

“You all right, Grumpy?” she asked, standing very still. “You don’t sound very good.”

“I’ve seen better days, sunshine,” he said.





12

The phone in her apartment remained unplugged, and as she left to meet up with Zev for an early drink, she decided not to plug it back in, even though it was Sunday. She sat sipping a cocktail and talking about work-related disaster stories, noting out of the corner of her eye that the hands of the clock above the bar were steadily inching forward. Dread rose inside her until it reached her throat, but still she sat there, forcing herself to wait it out. To let the minutes tick by. To make him wait. Right up until six—which was when she would need to jump on the subway in order to make it back in time to get her father’s call—she thought she might change her mind and head back, as she always did. But as the longer hand inched toward the twelve and she did not get up to leave, Zev became more and more garrulous, as though somehow realizing he was on borrowed time. He was telling her about his first year teaching at Vassar, when he was twenty-six. He’d been a waiter in New York for three years and had a bad breakup with a girl he’d met in London at design school. “The world’s worst waiter,” he said, twisting his beer glass in his fingers, leaving damp circles on the wooden table. “Twice I spilled an actual meal on someone. But—I don’t know why—I always got great tips.”

“It’s the eyes,” Katie said.

“Well, they did not help me with the teaching. Those kids were so bored, looking at me with these blank stares, waiting for something. As though I could light the fire for them. So I did it, literally. Burned the homework and made them work with the paper, the wood, soot, yes?” He grinned at her. “They were very confused, but it worked. Shook them up.”

They laughed, and when he ordered another drink, she did not say no. She was drinking something called the Shitkicker—one of those artisan gin cocktails that took ten minutes to prepare—and it was delicious. The clock ticked, time shifted and flickered uncertainly, and just like that she missed her weekly call.