I went to my grandfather's house on Saturday morning, because it was the one place in the city where Marcus Hale had no key.I'd thought about that on the way. Everything at the firm passed through his hands in one way or another, the archive, the indexes, the retention schedule, the old files with their neat labels. Even what legal now held had been sorted by his people before it reached her. If Richard Cole had left anything behind that mentioned the man, it wouldn't be there. It would be in the library, among the books and the old furniture, in the house he had never let a stranger arrange.Bishop drove. He didn't speak for most of the journey, and I was grateful. The long gravel approach came up grey under a low sky, and the house stood at the end of it with its shutters half closed, as it had stood since the day I'd first come to it as a stranger.I let myself in with the key the lawyer had given me. The hall was cold and quiet. It smelled of beeswax and old paper. I had not expe

I read until the light went.Bishop had drawn the curtains back when the afternoon began to fail, and then, without a word, lit the lamp on the desk and set it at my elbow. Later he brought a tray from somewhere, a cup of tea I didn't touch, a plate I didn't look at. I heard him come and go. I did not look up.The first notebook took nearly two hours. It was not long. It was small and dense, written in a hand that grew smaller as it went, as if the writer were saving paper, or saving himself. I read it as one reads a letter from the dead, slowly, line by line, trying to hear the voice under the words.It wasn't what I'd expected.I had expected grief, and there was grief, though not in the way I'd imagined. It was held in, flattened, folded away between the lines like a pressed flower. What came through was something else. It was a mind at work. Calm and exact and tireless. The mind of a man who had decided that if he could do nothing else for his son, he could at least understand.--

Sophia came on Sunday morning with her sleeves already pushed to the elbow.I'd asked her the night before, on the telephone, in as few words as I could manage. I told her I'd found a drawer. I told her what was in it. I told her about the twelfth book, and the grey rain of capitals, and that I thought I could not read it alone. She'd been quiet for a moment, and then she'd said, *What time?*She stood now in the doorway of the room by the long table, with her coat over her arm and her hair pinned back tightly, looking at the notebook I'd laid open on the wood. Bishop had left it with me. The other eleven he had taken to be copied and sealed. This one, he'd said, I ought to keep within reach.She came and stood beside me, and for a long minute she didn't speak."Groups of five," she said."Yes.""No spaces between words. No punctuation." She leaned closer. "Whoever wrote this wanted to make certain no one could guess where a word began.""He was a careful man.""So I'm learning." She

I finished the seventh notebook on Monday, a little after dawn.I hadn't meant to read through the night. Sophia had gone home at midnight, reluctantly, with the half-decoded pages folded in her bag and a promise that she'd be back by eight. I'd sent Bishop away too, at ten, with the copies. I told myself I would only look at one more entry, the one I hadn't been able to bring myself to open the night before.*I have spoken to him today.*I'd stared at that line for the better part of a day. I'd carried it from room to room, in my head, the way you carry a stone. Nine years after the funeral, a man who had written nothing but private accounts of his silence had finally spoken. I had pictured it a hundred ways. A door slammed. A voice raised. A grandfather in a rage, with a drawer of proof under his hand, and a man across a table going white.It wasn't like that. It wasn't like that at all.I turned the page and read it, with the first grey light coming flat through the library windows