Mercer set the statement form between them, the question already typed at the top: Who had access to the unpublished pages of The Hollow Men?
Vale read it twice. The interview room had no clock, only a dark window and a camera with a small red light. He could see his prison shirt reflected in the glass. The collar sat badly against his neck.
“You’ll want dates,” he said.
“I’ll take whatever you can support.” Mercer kept her pen on the table. “Start with the manuscript. Who handled it before publication?”
“My agent. My editor. The copy desk. The printer, presumably.”
“Names.”
He gave them. His first editor had been dead for years. His agent’s office had closed. The publisher had merged twice and moved its records to storage. Vale recited what he knew without looking at Mercer, watching the camera instead. Each answer sounded smaller once he said it aloud.
Mercer wrote down the names. “Did you keep a copy?”
“Several, at different stages. I destroyed some.”
“Some.”
“I never made an inventory.”
She waited. Vale disliked the patience. It made him want to supply an elegant answer just to stop the silence, and he knew she knew that.
“Where were the remaining copies?” she asked.
“At my house. One in the study, one in a box of papers. The publisher had a typescript.”
“Who could enter your study?”
“My housekeeper. My lawyer, once or twice. Friends.”
“Elias Rusk?”
Vale looked up. Mercer’s face stayed still. She had not asked the question by accident.
“I don’t know what he saw.”
“That isn’t what I asked.” She glanced down at her notes. “Could he enter your study?”
“Yes.”
The answer came out too quickly. Vale felt it settle between them, a small item placed on a scale.
“When?” Mercer asked.
“March 2005. He came to the house.”
“To take the brass key.”
“He removed it while I watched.”
“I have that account.” She turned a page. “Did he see the manuscript?”
Vale rubbed his thumb along a seam in the table. “There was a packet on the desk.”
Next
Mercer has Vale’s signed account, but can she find evidence that Elias kept or copied the six pages before she confronts him with it?
Mercer wrote nothing. That was worse than watching her write.
Vale had kept this memory filed under the key. Elias’s visit, the fireplace, the red cloth, the brass caught in the man’s hand. He had not separated the rest of the room from the moment. He remembered the packet now because Mercer had made him look at the desk rather than the key.
“Did you ask him to read the pages?” she said.
The red camera light held steady. Vale saw, with perfect irritation, the old packet’s squared edge and his own blue pencil tucked beneath it.
“Yes.”
Mercer looked up. “Tell me why.”
“It was a technical passage. I wanted to know whether it made sense.”
“Which passage?”
“The chair.”
“That was in the book.”
“Not in that form.” He pressed his hands flat to the table. “The draft was different.”
Mercer leaned forward a fraction. “Was it the draft version that matched the second scene?”
Vale’s mouth went dry. She had brought the right question to the room. Junie’s published discovery, Mercer’s careful reading, the case files he had avoided asking to see—all of them narrowed down to a few pages he had handed over because he wanted a practical man to tell him the writing worked.
“Yes,” he said. “It may have been.”
“May have been?”
“I remember the pages. I don’t remember every line.”
“Did you give them to Elias?”
“I placed them in front of him. I asked him to check the mechanism as I’d described it.”
“Did he take them away?”
“No. He read them there.”
“Did you see him put them back?”
Vale opened his mouth. He pictured the visit ending. Elias had taken the key. Vale had watched him leave. The packet had been moved; he could no longer remember whether it had gone back beneath the blue pencil, or whether he had gathered it after the door closed. He had never checked. The house had been full of papers and he had told himself the packet was one more ordinary thing.
“I can’t tell you,” he said.
Mercer’s pen stopped. “Could he have kept them?”
“He could have.”
“Could he have copied them?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever ask?”
“No.”
For a moment he heard the answer as she would put it in a report: Vale gave Rusk access; Vale did not verify the pages were returned; Vale did not ask whether copies were made. The sentences contained no adjective he could adjust.
“Why did you ask him to read them?” Mercer said.
“He knew the machinery.”
“That’s a reason to ask him about the machinery. Why give him the pages?”
Vale looked at the blue lines on the form. “Because I wanted the passage to be right.”
“That’s still the reason you gave me.”
He wanted to tell her that Elias had made the rooms and mechanisms comprehensible in a way no editor could. That he had wanted the approval of a man who understood what a chair could do to a body, and had taken that approval as a kind of expertise rather than a judgment of his own conduct. The explanation assembled itself too neatly. He left it unspoken.
“I wanted him to say it was convincing,” Vale said. “I didn’t care enough about what else I was showing him.”
Mercer let the admission stand. She did not soften her face or sharpen it. Her pen moved again.
“Six pages,” Vale said.
She paused. “You’re sure?”
“I remember counting them after I chose the section. Six pages, clipped together. The passage began with the chair’s crosspiece. It included the draft wording for the second method.”
“Did they have handwriting on them?”
“Blue pencil. A correction in the margin.” He could see the mark now, a blunt stroke beside the line he had later changed. “I don’t know whether that was the version he read.”
Mercer turned the form toward him. “I need you to distinguish what you remember from what you infer.”
“I remember giving him the pages. I remember the packet was on the desk. I remember him reading the section. I do not remember seeing him return all six.”
“And you can’t establish whether he copied them.”
“No.”
She slid him a pen. “Write that in your own words.”
Vale read the statement before he signed. The first version sounded cleaner than the memory. He crossed out “allowed Mr. Rusk to review a portion of the manuscript” and wrote “gave Elias Rusk six pages of an unpublished draft.” The phrasing was uglier and more exact.
His signature pressed through to the page beneath.
Mercer took the pages and checked that he had initialed the correction. “I’ll need any record of that visit. Letters, calendar, household notes. Your attorney can arrange access.”
“There won’t be a record.”
“Then I’ll check with the people who might have kept one.” She put the statement in her folder. “I’m not treating this as proof that Elias supplied the later material. It gives me a specific exchange to verify.”
Vale nearly thanked her for the distinction. He didn’t.
“What happens now?” he asked.
“I speak to the publisher about the manuscript inventory. I look for any surviving records from your house. Then I ask Elias what he remembers about those six pages.”
The name sounded different in Mercer’s mouth, stripped of the familiarity Vale had once given it. Vale watched her close the folder.
“You could have asked me this years ago,” he said.
“I didn’t know to ask.”
It was an answer, not an absolution. He felt the sting of wanting one anyway.
Mercer stood. Vale stayed seated until the officer at the door told him to rise. He followed the instruction, then watched Mercer leave with his corrected statement under her arm. She had the first account he had ever given that did not hide his hand behind a word like review.
In the corridor, Mercer stopped beside the duty desk and called her office. Vale could hear her through the open door.
“Get the publisher’s original inventory and any 2005 correspondence on the Vale papers,” she said. “I want the six-page passage identified before we ask Rusk about it.”
She paused to listen.
“No,” Mercer said. “We have a lead. We don’t have a source yet.”
The door closed behind her.
Vale looked down at the statement copy the officer had left him. The ink had dried. He had given Elias the pages because he wanted the work to be admired by someone who knew the difference between a convincing description and a working device. Now that same hunger sat in the record beside the date, the page count, and his name.