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“We’re all finished up, ma’am,” the mover says, rocking a little nervously on his heels as he loiters in the entrance to the room. The mover’s voice slopes gentle at the edges, like Ben’s had. He has a kind smile. Marta glances briefly at Nana, sat silent and unmoving in the chair across from her. Marta’s been keeping out of their way while they work; that, and it’s easier to bear in here, the thought of their hands making simple work of Harlan. She doesn’t want to watch him be put neatly away in boxes.
“Thank you,” Marta replies, and goes to inspect the debris.
Grief is in the silence, her mother says. Marta’s ears practically sing with it as she stands in the middle of the office, her arms wrapped around herself, scanning the half-empty shelves. The archivist had been so gentle with her, over the phone. Marta hadn’t been sure they’d want anything at all; Harlan hadn’t even gone to college, let alone Harvard. But they were close by, and the website had said they were open to donations.
They’d called her back almost instantly. They hadn’t wanted the books, the hundreds of big thick leather-bound volumes that lined every spare inch of shelf in the house. They wanted papers, drafts, correspondence. Marta had told their movers to start in the office; there’s more of that kind in the study, still waiting to be gathered and segmented and packed, but she’d balked at the offer to have their people clear it out too. That millstone is hers and no-one else’s. She’d tried once already, on a day when she’d been bouncing around the cavernous house all by herself, but three pages of Harlan’s spiky, elegant cursive had been enough to make her eyes go hot and her hands start to shake.
Marta had felt so guilty later, trying to explain. There’s more, she tried to say, I just –
“It’s okay,” the archivist, Marion, had replied, her voice agonizingly kind. “Take your time.”
They’re sending some dealer out of Boston to pore over the antiques. For all Marta knows, it could all be worth as much as the house or as little as the mud on her shoes. She supposes Marion will request what she thinks the archive can care for, and Marta will have to find a home for everything else. All this ersatz ephemera built up over a lifetime. It’s how she’d felt, the first few times she’d been here, like just another decorative curiosity to brighten up the place. Linda had always been so scathing of them, constantly irritated by her father’s ability to acquire new and kitschier tchotchkes. Marta learnt a handful of nonsense words from Linda’s rants, thingamajig and doohickey and gewgaw. She’d conspiratorially taught Harlan a few back later, chuchería and cosita and artilugio. He’d titled his next book An Obsolete Contraption and dedicated it specifically to Linda.
Skirting the now-bare desk, Marta sits on the window seat and watches the movers packing the final few boxes into their van. Bruiser, the soppy Alsatian, pads dolefully around his master’s room for a moment before he comes to rest his head on her thigh. Marta runs her fingers across the top of his brow, tracking with her thumb the way the fur runs from coarse to smooth and back again.
Meg might want some of it, she decides. She’d always been looking at something when Marta came into the room, examining a picture or flicking through a book or playing with one of the gadgets. Even as she thinks it, Marta’s phone chirrups into life. She looks down at the screen uneasily, staring at Meg’s name with a strange feeling like cold fingers pressed at the top of her spine. What are the odds; sat here in Harlan’s office, thinking about Meg, and up she pops on the phone. Harlan would chide her for inventing ghosts.
“Hey,” Marta says. “I was just thinking about you.”
“Seriously?” Marta can hear the amusement in her voice. “I was wondering how it went with the movers.”
“They’re just packing up,” Marta replies, watching through the window as they slam the rear door of their van shut. “There wasn’t that much to do.”
Meg sighs. “Please let me help you with the study. I hate the idea of you alone in there going through his stuff.”
Marta smiles humorlessly. “Your uncle said the same thing,” she replies, and glances over at the desk, at the creaky leather chair she’d been sat in when she’d told Walt her intention to give away his papers. Harlan’s words are what’s left of him: words and memories, he’d sometimes say. That’s what we leave behind. She’d just wanted to find some way to honor that outside of the realm of print.
It doesn’t matter one bit to Walt what’s written in his father’s will. As far as he’s concerned, Harlan Thrombey’s authorial legacy is his, and that includes everything that’s currently being loaded into the grubby-looking van. He hadn’t taken it well when she’d decided to give even that small part of it away; he’d actually threatened to hold them up like a highwayman en route.
“That’s not how I mean it, though,” Meg replies.
Bruiser huffs petulantly against Marta’s leg, staring up at her with his big, baleful brown eyes, as if to admonish her for her uncharitable thoughts. “I know,” Marta says. “I will think about it, I promise.”
It’s a drizzly, gray November day when Meg’s car pulls up outside. Marta watches from the upstairs window, a small burst of relief blossoming in her chest when she sees Meg climb out of the car and look around, then greet the dogs with hugs and fusses. She’s suddenly, overwhelmingly glad that she’d caved in, that she’d let Meg cajole her into this.
Meg pulls her into a tight hug as soon as she’s at arm’s length. “Fuck, it’s freezing.”
Marta smiles. “I’ll go make us some coffee.”
They catch up at the kitchen table. Marta’s always preferred it to the more stately reception rooms, not least because it was the place the family would only visit as an absolute last resort. Harlan used to read his proofs aloud to her here, fresh from the publisher, red-inked fountain pen in hand to pick up his own mistakes.
Marta had sat with him diligently, but she rarely commented on his writing unless directly asked. It was a long time before she knew for certain that he had noticed, though she knew him well enough by then to suspect that he had. “You can say that you hate it, you know,” Harlan had said one morning when an unusually long silence had passed, Marta doodling absently on an uncrumpled page she’d rescued from the trash.
“I don’t hate it,” she’d replied. Harlan had looked unconvinced, almost angry, as if he couldn’t stand the thought of her obscuring the truth while knowing she found it impossible. “I don’t,” she’d said again. “Why do you always write about such awful things?”
“I write detective novels,” Harlan had replied, arching an eyebrow and somehow still looking fond. “It comes with the territory.”
“It doesn’t have to,” Marta had quietly insisted. “They could have more love in them. More hope.”
There’s a brown splash in one corner from when Harlan had gestured particularly vigorously and knocked over his coffee. Marta runs her fingers around the familiar shape of it as the coffee machine hums and whirs. “I think it’s really good of you, to try and find homes for all this stuff,” Meg says, dolloping cream into her mug. “I feel like most people would just chuck it in the trash.”
“Did Harlan promise you anything?” Marta asks.
“He threatened me with that horse painting I told you about,” Meg says darkly, and she shudders at the thought of it. Marta hasn’t seen the painting in question herself; apparently it used to hang on the upper landing, peering balefully out at the world with two bright white eyes. It had given Meg nightmares until Harlan had taken it down, a few weeks before her twelfth birthday.
“I worry about that girl,” Harlan had once said. “Perhaps we coddle her. Perhaps she needs to toughen up.”
“She’s been through a lot,” Marta had replied. “I think she’ll be fine.”
Harlan’s grimace had looked like a raised portcullis. “God forbid she takes after Joni,” he had muttered sourly.
Marta had sighed, and thrown him a very stern look over the brim of her hardback. “We can’t help who our mothers are,” she had chided him. He hadn’t raised it again after that.
“You should take anything you want,” Marta says absently. “Anything at all.”
They’re interrupted by the jangle of the doorbell; Marta starts in her seat. Meg’s expression is instantly twisted with concern. “Do you want me to go?” Meg asks.
Marta shakes her head. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s probably just a package.”
Meg smiles reassuringly, as if in agreement. “I’ll go say hi to Nana,” she replies.
It is a package, of a kind. Lieutenant Elliott stands on the doorstep, looking apologetic and guilty and clutching a brown paper bag. There’s a familiar little lurch of fear in Marta’s stomach the moment she sees him, the one she’s never been able to shake since Harlan picked up the knife. It still hasn’t quite sunk in, the understanding that she’s been forgiven, that in the eyes of many there’s nothing even to forgive.
“Lieutenant,” Marta says with a smile once she opens the door. “Is there a problem?”
“Not as such,” he admits, stamping his feet against the cold but shaking his head when she gestures for him to come inside. “I’m delivering these personally by way of an apology,” he continues, handing over the bag. “What with the attack on the lab, we assumed they’d been lost in transit.”
Marta lets her fingers close around the bag, surprised by its lightness. “Do you want a coffee? We just made a fresh pot.”
Elliott touches the brim of his hat. “No thank you, ma’am. Apologies again.”
Marta puts the bag on the kitchen table, right next to the brown spot. She knows what’s inside without even looking; she’d caught a hint of it as she’d moved through the house, the smell of Harlan’s cologne and the darker, earthier tang of blood. She leans up against the counter and crosses her arms tightly, trying to find her way back to her composure before Meg returns. She can’t be that successful; Meg gets one look at her and makes a beeline for her, her hand resting gently on Marta’s forearm.
“What is it?” Meg asks. “Is something wrong?”
Marta gestures towards the bag. “It’s Harlan’s things,” she says, her voice hoarse. “From – from the morgue.”
Meg looks back over at the innocuous little crumpled thing sat in the middle of the table. “Fuck,” she replies. “That’s heavy.”
Marta watches in silence as Meg lays the contents out across the table with reverence, the neatly-folded clothes and the miscellany that had accumulated in Harlan’s pockets through the day. She only pauses when she reaches a small black-bound notebook, thumbing at the leather cover without opening it, as if the action of reading it would be sacrosanct.
“It’s his commonplace book,” Marta hears herself say, as if from another room.
Meg glances at her. “His what?”
Marta clears her throat. “That’s what he called them,” she replies, shrugging a little. There’s a big box of them up in the study, filled with Harlan’s thoughts. Marta remembers the first time she learnt about the habit, how she thought it was a kind of antiquated affectation, but it hadn’t been long before she started to keep one of her own. Nothing as serious or erudite as Harlan’s; just offhand, gentle notes to her future self, a place to collect the small things that made her smile.
“We don’t have to do this today,” Meg says quietly. Marta wonders what she must look like to provoke the expression on Meg’s face, that intense doe-eyed concern.
Marta shakes her head. “I want to,” she insists. “I do.”
When they reach the uppermost landing, Marta stops feeling so brave. She lingers at the foot of the staircase before drifting away to the left, hoping it seems like she’s considering what’s left in the bedroom when really she can’t face mounting the steps. Meg had skipped up them so easily.
Marta’s eyes drift over the stolid bedframe, the thick heavy wood with its twirling, intricate carving, the slanted ceiling and its riotous wallpaper. It isn’t a room she knows well. She could probably count on one hand the number of times she’d arrived at the house to find Harlan still in bed, even though it was well within her remit to help him get up in the morning.
“I am in a foul mood today, Miss Cabrera,” Harlan had snapped out as his opening line on one such rare occasion. “And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Marta, well-versed in Harlan’s fits of pique by that point, had shrugged and gone to make them coffee. He was sulking like a surly toddler by the time she came up with the tray, its traditional two mugs accompanied by a stack of her mother’s very own Torticas de Morón in the hopes that they might tempt him out of his bad mood. She’d been stashing them in the kitchen for a rainy day.
“Aren’t you going to ask what’s wrong?” Harlan had grumbled as she set the tray down and divested its load, watching the plate of cookies like a hawk as she doled out his morning meds.
Marta had carefully hidden her smile. “You said I couldn’t help,” she had pointed out, settling down on the gloriously comfortable leather armchair.
“That blasted boy has blown half his inheritance in Atlantic City over the weekend,” Harlan had replied sourly, almost as if she’d not spoken. “Yes, again.”
“You could refuse to pay,” she had replied.
“I tried that once before,” he had said darkly. His following sigh had been lengthy and sincerely pained, his face stricken momentarily with a very genuine sorrow. “Where did I go so wrong with them?”
“Harlan,” Marta had chided, her voice kind. “You gave them everything any child could ever ask for. And besides, Walter is an adult now with a child of his own. He did this, not you. It was his choice.”
Harlan had harrumphed and let the topic drift away, Marta remembers; and he’d eaten all the cookies to boot. It reminds her of what she’d said to Ben when they first met, that above all what Harlan needed was companionship, a friend. If nothing else, she knows she gave him that. Words and memories, Marta thinks. Never mind the house and its innumerable nicknacks; she’s beginning to think that they are Harlan’s most precious gift to her of all.
“Marta?” Meg calls down from above. “Are you okay?”
Marta smiles, pulls the bedroom door shut behind her as she goes. “Yes,” she says, her foot finding the first step. “Let’s begin.”