Room Six

By eight the next morning, Imogen had the brass key in her pocket and a warrant folded inside her coat.

The fog had come in thick during the night. It pressed against the windows of the station and turned the harbor lamps into pale, wavering coins. Chief Ferro read the warrant twice, though there was nothing difficult in it. The Trawl Street boarding house had stood empty since Jonas Pell’s death. The current owner had no objection to a police search, provided the police did not break anything they meant to leave behind.

“Bring Sera?” Ferro asked.

“She knows the room.”

“She also knows how to make herself look wrong.”

“She has been doing that without help.” Imogen put the warrant away. “If Pell left something there, I want her to tell me what belongs to him before I decide what it means.”

Ferro’s mouth tightened. “You keep giving her opportunities to explain.”

“I keep giving the evidence opportunities to disagree.”

He looked toward the evidence room, where Quill’s memorandum waited beside Pell’s records and the brass tag marked Room 6. “And if it doesn’t?”

“Then I’ll stop defending her.”

It was the answer he wanted, or close enough. He signed the release papers and told her to take Officer Vale with them. Imogen did not argue. She had learned that a second chance was not the same thing as being trusted.

Sera was waiting in the holding room, though she had not been charged. She sat beneath the high window with her hands folded, her hair pinned back badly, as if she had done it without a mirror.

“You found the room,” she said.

“Not yet.”

“But you’re going there.”

“I am.”

Sera stood. “Then I’m coming.”

“You were not invited.”

“You said yesterday the plate belonged in evidence. If the room belongs in evidence too, I want to see it before you tell me what it proves.”

Officer Vale glanced at Imogen. He was young enough to believe authority was a substance that could be measured. Imogen had once believed that herself.

“Stay beside me,” she told Sera. “Touch nothing unless I tell you.”

Sera’s expression suggested she considered this a poor bargain, but she nodded.

Orlin Shaw met them at the Trawl Street boarding house with a ring of municipal keys and a face made sharper by the cold. The house had been built over the tide line, three stories of dark brick and salt-whitened windows. A sign above the entrance had once read MEREWETHER LODGINGS. The first two letters had fallen away.

“Pell paid his dues through the year he died,” Orlin said as he led them inside. “Afterward, the room stayed locked. No one wanted it. People said the pipes knocked at night.”

“Did they?” Imogen asked.

“People say many things when rent is overdue.”

The keeper, a narrow woman named Tavia Rusk, watched from behind the front desk. She had given Orlin permission to enter but none of them her welcome.

“Quill came here?” Imogen asked.

“Everyone came here,” Rusk said. “Quill came less often than the fishermen and more often than the police.”

“When?”

“After Pell lost his hand. Sometimes with papers. Sometimes without.”

“Did he have a key to Room 6?”

Rusk studied Sera. “He had whatever key he wanted.”

It was not an answer, but it was the first one that morning which had not been prepared for a file.

Room 6 was at the end of the second-floor corridor. The door bore a small brass plate, dull with age. The lock resisted Orlin’s master key, then yielded with a dry click.

Dust lay over the floorboards except for a narrow disturbance near the washstand. Imogen crouched beside it. Someone had dragged the washstand out from the wall recently. The marks were faint, but the dust had gathered in their edges instead of across them.

“Recent?” Sera asked.

“Within months,” Imogen said.

Officer Vale moved toward the bed. “Could be the keeper.”

Rusk, from the doorway, said, “I haven’t been in since the funeral.”

Sera crossed to the washstand and stopped before touching it. “That wasn’t there before.”

“What wasn’t?”

“The scratch.” She pointed to the lower drawer. A pale line ran around its keyhole, cutting through old varnish.

Imogen took out the brass key. It was a small, plain thing, the teeth darkened with tarnish. She held it near the lock without inserting it.

Sera’s gaze fixed on her hand. “That is what was in the box.”

“Were you ever in this room?”

“No.”

“But you knew the washstand had not been there?”

“Pell showed it to me once.” Her voice changed by a fraction. “In 1946. He said there was a place to hide things where no one looked because they assumed the furniture was too ugly to matter.”

Imogen looked at her. “You remember that now?”

“I remember more when I’m not being asked whether I killed someone.”

It was an unfair answer, and Sera knew it. She looked away first.

Imogen inserted the key.

The drawer opened.

Inside lay a black oilcloth packet, a rusted spoon, and three folded sheets of paper. Nothing had been hidden beneath them. Nothing had been pushed behind the drawer. The arrangement was so exact that Imogen felt, rather than saw, the hand that had set it down.

She put on gloves and unfolded the first sheet.

The writing was cramped and slanted. Orlin leaned over her shoulder, then straightened.

“Pell’s,” he said. “I’ve seen his signature on launch permits. This is his hand.”

The page was headed APRIL 19, 1946.

*The girl did not steal from Bell’s. She took the blue envelope because Quill told her there was proof inside. Quill brought her to the back room and said she would be returned when she understood what she owed. She did not understand. She was nineteen.*

Below that, the writing continued.

*I took her out by the rear door. She had no money and no coat. Quill said I would answer for it. I told him a man cannot own a debt he invented.*

Sera’s breath left her quietly.

Imogen read the next line twice.

*If the girl comes back, do not let Quill speak first. He will make the town remember only the part that suits him.*

There was no signature. The sheet ended there.

The second page was a receipt from Quill, dated three days later, for “transport and discretion.” The amount had been crossed out. The third was a later note, written in a different hand, stating that Pell had refused to sign a declaration that Sera had been returned to a guardian.

It was almost enough.

That was the trouble.

Imogen turned the papers over. The undersides were clean. The oilcloth smelled faintly of cedar and, beneath that, the sweet chemical tang of recent preservation. Pell’s writing might be genuine. The pages might be genuine. But someone had put them here for discovery, and the key had been kept in Quill’s schoolroom for that purpose—or had been made to seem so.

Sera read the first page over Imogen’s arm. “He wrote it down.”

“He wrote some of it.”

“He knew.”

“Yes.”

“Then it saves me.”

Imogen folded the page carefully. “It gives you a witness who is dead, a statement without a signature, and a receipt that places Quill at the center of the arrangement. It does not explain the money in your room. It does not explain the memorandum. It does not explain how the murderer entered or left the study.”

Sera’s face closed. “You found what you wanted and still won’t use it.”

“I will use all of it.”

“Against Quill?”

“Against the story.”

A floorboard creaked in the corridor.

Orlin stepped outside, then called back. “Detective.”

Imogen joined him. At the far end of the hall, the window stood open a finger’s width. Fog had dampened the sill, but beneath it was a fresh black smear, as if someone had brushed the frame with an oily glove.

Sera came to the doorway. “Was that there before?”

Imogen looked at the smear, then at the packet in her gloved hand.

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t.”

The room had not merely kept Pell’s record. It had been waiting for them to find it.

Imogen closed the window and sealed the packet. Then she gave the brass key to Officer Vale for logging.

“Take Sera back to the station,” she said. “I’m going to see Petra Vance.”

Sera’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“Because someone wanted me to believe Pell wrote the last word.”

“And if he didn’t?”

Imogen looked once more at Room 6, at the disturbed dust and the clean paper laid inside an old drawer.

“Then I want to know who finished his sentence.”