The Last Voice on the Reel

Lydia set the reel on the dining-room table as if it were a small animal that might bite. The machine had been polished recently, though the brass screws were green with age. Outside, the lake lay under the first gray of morning, its surface unbroken except where insects touched it and vanished.

“Before we listen,” she said, “someone should tell me why the library floor is covered in pieces of paper.”

No one answered. Art stood nearest the doorway, his hands empty and his face composed into an expression of injured innocence. It was an expression he had perfected in workshops, whenever a student accused him of stealing from life.

“I found the papers there,” he said. “They were already torn.”

“By whom?”

“I assumed by you.”

Lydia looked at him for a long moment. “You assume too much for a failed novelist.”

“Failed is unnecessarily specific.”

Nell saw the tremor in his right hand. He had been in the library. That much was certain. But the strips of paper scattered there were not pages from his manuscript. They were narrow, yellowed pieces of a legal pad, each carrying a line in Daniel’s cramped handwriting. Nell recognized the script from the first reel. She had seen Daniel write those words thirty years earlier, leaning over the desk in her father’s study.

She had also seen Tom leave the library five minutes before the power returned.

Tom had no explanation ready. He leaned against the mantel with his arms folded, polished and patient, as though waiting for a reporter to finish asking an unimportant question.

“Play it,” he said.

Lydia threaded the tape. The machine gave a dry mechanical click, then began to turn. Static filled the room. Somewhere beneath it, water moved against wood.

Daniel’s voice emerged thinly, younger than any of them remembered.

“—not going to give it back. You can tell your father I won’t. He knows what he did.”

A chair scraped. Nell felt the room tighten around her.

Then her own voice: seventeen years old, furious and frightened. “You don’t understand what happens if he finds out.”

“I understand exactly. He took the money, and he made my mother sign the paper.”

“What money?” Suzie whispered.

The tape hissed. A second set of footsteps approached over the dock. Daniel said something too softly to understand. Then another boy’s voice came through, older and smoother than Daniel’s, though not yet changed by adulthood.