Part Eight: What Vera Called
She had a phone — one of those older models that still made calls as a primary function rather than an incidental one, which somehow fit the room and the ring and the archive behind the old lock. She sat at the desk in the document room and made two calls, both of them quiet, both of them with the specific concentrated shorthand of someone speaking to people with whom a shared history made full sentences unnecessary.
Thomas sat with Lena in the corridor outside the room and listened to the muffled sound of Vera’s voice and not the words, and he looked at the girl, who was looking at the locket in her hands.
“Can I see the photograph?” he asked.
She held it out to him.
The photograph was small and faded — the fading of time and of close-keeping, the specific degradation of an image that has been looked at very often. A young woman, perhaps twenty, holding a newborn. The young woman’s face was turned slightly toward the baby rather than the camera, which meant that her expression was not the posed expression of a formal photograph but the unguarded expression of someone looking at a thing they love.
Even faded, even at this scale, even turned away: you could see the resemblance. The jaw. The way she held her head.
He looked at Lena.
“She’s beautiful,” he said, handing the locket back. “Your mother.”
Lena looked at the photograph the way she had looked at the paper with her name on it: the long, considering look of a child taking in something important. “I know,” she said. “I look like her a little.”
“More than a little,” he said.
Vera came out of the room. “I’ve spoken to someone who knows the current landscape,” she said. “The people who were looking for Mira — the original interest was a family named Croft. Private, not state. The patriarch is dead. His son continued the matter for some years and then—” she paused “—and then apparently it was taken up by a third party who acquired certain interests from the Croft estate.” She looked at Lena. “They are not acting from personal motivation. They are acting from what they consider a financial interest.”
“Your mother was involved in something,” Thomas said to Lena. Not a question.
“Before,” Vera said. “Before she came to us. The Croft family had been her — they had claimed, through mechanisms I will not explain to a child, a form of ownership over her that was not legal but that had practical force. She ran. Running was the bravest thing she had ever done.” She looked at the locket. “She clearly passed the bravery on.”
“Where is she?” Thomas asked. “Do you know yet?”
“Not yet. But I know people who can find out.” She sat down on the corridor chair with the specific motion of someone who is tired in a deep way and has been managing the tiredness for some time. “There are things I should have done when she ran. I was—” she stopped. “My husband had just died. I was not—” another stop. “The capacity for things that require courage diminishes when you are also grieving. I did not do what I should have done. I let them disperse and I went quiet and I told myself it was enough.”
“It wasn’t,” Thomas said. Not cruelly. Simply.
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t.” She looked at the girl. “She sent you to me so I would have a reason to stop being quiet.”
Lena looked at her steadily. “She said you were the only one who knew everything. She said you were the one who could fix it.”
“She had more faith in me than I have earned,” Vera said.
“She kept the ring for seventeen years,” Thomas said. “She must have had reasons.”
