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.

“Give me the envelope, Danny.”

Tom’s face altered. Not much. A slight withdrawal around the mouth, as if he had been struck somewhere private.

Daniel laughed once. “You heard her. She doesn’t want anyone to know.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Why? You’re the one who said it could buy your way out.”

The reel snapped into silence.

Mara was the first to speak. “Tom.”

“I was seventeen,” he said.

“So was Nell.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“No one said you did.”

“But you’re thinking it.”

Lydia reached for the machine, but Nell caught her wrist. “There’s more.”

“There is,” Lydia said. “But not on this reel.”

The words seemed to drain the room of air. From the library came the soft fall of another piece of paper. Art turned toward it.

Suzie opened Daniel’s letter at last. She had kept it folded inside the pocket of her cardigan, though she had changed cardigans three times since arriving. The envelope had been resealed with transparent tape. Her fingers shook only once.

“Daniel wrote this the day before,” she said. “He gave it to me at breakfast.”

“Why did you never open it?” Mara asked.

Suzie looked at her. “I did.”

It was the first deliberate cruelty Suzie had offered all summer, and it landed cleanly.

She read from the page. “‘Suzie, if anything happens, the envelope is not the important thing. The important thing is that Nell knows where the ledger is. She told me she would make her father return it. If she doesn’t, Tom says he can use it. I don’t know which of them is worse.’”

Nell rose so quickly that her chair struck the wall.

“That is not all,” Suzie said. “‘Mara saw us at the dock. Art knows about the recordings. Don’t let them turn me into a story.’”

Art closed his eyes.

The library door stood open. Nell crossed toward it, with the others behind her. The torn slips of paper lay in a rough circle on the floor. Among them was a fragment bearing Daniel’s words: THE SECOND REEL IS IN—

The rest had been torn away.

Tom stooped and picked up another piece. “This is what you were destroying?” Nell asked.

“I was trying to read it.”

“You tore it.”

“It was already damaged.”

“By whom?”

Tom looked at Lydia. For the first time since they had returned, his charm failed him entirely.

“Your aunt,” he said. “She found me here and told me the ledger had been removed years ago. She said the tape was the only thing left. I wanted to know who had it.”

Lydia’s expression did not move. “The ledger was burned.”

“By my father?” Nell asked.

“No,” Lydia said. “By you.”

The accusation did not sound like an accusation. That made it worse.

Nell remembered the summer in fragments: the envelope in her hand, Daniel’s wet hair, Tom waiting at the end of the dock, her father’s study smelling of dust and pipe smoke. She remembered taking the ledger from Daniel. She remembered telling him she would fix it. She did not remember the water.

From the dining room, the tape machine clicked again. Though Lydia had stopped it, the reel continued turning for one final revolution. A voice breathed through the static—Daniel’s, or perhaps someone speaking after him.

“Nell, if you’re hearing this, ask who pushed me.”

Then, beneath it, a second voice whispered a name.

The house swallowed the sound before any of them could be sure whose name it was.