What You Owe Me

Chapter five: Pay In Kind

By morning, gray light lay across the clinic bed, and a man stood by the door who did not trust a word Jonah said.

Nora's head of security was broad through the shoulders, with a gray crew cut and a face that had decided to dislike Jonah before it entered the room. He listened with his arms crossed while Nora told him everything. The clock. The three days. The way Jonah had read her hand like a bill.

When she finished, he did not look at her. He looked at Jonah.

"Last night this man was dead," he said. "This morning he knows your private business. Miss Kessler, that isn't a miracle. That's a setup."

"I'm only telling you what he said."

"He's a parolee who went into the water at the Danforth pier. Whose party do you think sent him?" The chief jerked his head toward the corridor. "Let me walk him off the property. I'll put him in a cab myself."

Jonah sat up slowly against the pillow. "Ask me something."

The chief's eyes narrowed. "Like what?"

"Anything she hasn't told you."

The chief gave a short, humorless laugh. "Fine. Go ahead. Prove it."

Jonah did not look at the chief. He looked at the knot over Nora's heart.

"The lender is called the House. The interest is four percent a month, compounding. She signed two years ago, on the ninth of March, a little after eleven at night. You were not in the room, and she has never told you any of it."

Nobody spoke. Nora had put her hand over her mouth. Down the corridor a cart rattled past and faded away.

The chief opened his mouth, then closed it again.

"There's more," Jonah said quietly, and he lifted the tally stick from the blanket. "I don't know how it works. But the rules came to me when I woke up, the way you remember how to tie a shoe. A debt can be paid by someone else. But the payment is taken in kind."

"In kind," Nora repeated.

"Not money. Something of equal weight, taken from the one who pays."

"Taken from you." Her voice was careful. "What would it take?"

"I don't know. The cost isn't mine to choose. The stick decides."

"Then don't do it," the chief said at once.

"Miss Kessler pulled me out of the harbor." Jonah closed his hand around the wood. "I can't stand owing her."

"You don't owe me anything," Nora said.

"I see it right here." He tapped his chest. She followed his finger to empty air, and he did not try to explain. "It's real to me."

The chief stepped forward. "Miss Kessler, do not let him."

Nora looked at Jonah for a long time. He knew what she was thinking about. A harbor pilot named Aldo, and a woman in a house who could not remember being married.

"How much can you pay?" she asked.

"Not all of it. About a third. The stick tells me where the limit is."

"And in three days?"

"The rest is still there. But it buys time."

She drew a breath. "Do it."

Jonah took her hand. With the other he held the tally stick an inch from the knot over her heart, close enough that the black cord seemed to lean toward it.

The wood grew warm. Then hot.

One. Two. Three.

He felt the weight pass into him, slow and heavy, like water moving into dry cloth. Somewhere in the middle of it, a small door in him swung open and something went out of it. He could not see what. He kept his eyes on the knot.

Seven. Eight. Nine.

The black cord began to slacken. It loosened around her ribs one turn at a time and grew longer, trailing across the blanket like a rope let out from a ship. The little clock in the knot stuttered. Its numbers rolled over each other and settled.

Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

The stick cooled in his hand.

"It says thirty days," Jonah whispered.

Nora gasped. For the first time in months she drew a full breath, and the sound of it was almost a sob. Then Jonah saw the pale ring.

"Your wrist."

She turned her arm over. Around it, pressed into her skin, was a band of white like the mark of a bracelet worn too tight. She stared at it. "I thought it was from my watch."

As they watched, color flooded back into the ring, and it faded until nothing was left.

The chief took a step back and sat down in the nearest chair, as if someone had cut his legs out from under him.

That was when the floor tilted under Jonah. He heard Nora say his name. He heard it again, far away, as if from the bottom of a well. Then the room went dark.

When he came around, the window had turned gold with late light. The chief was gone. Nora sat in the chair with her coat across her knees.

Jonah lay with his eyes closed and did what he always did when he needed to steady himself. He reached for the memory that had carried him through six winters in Crane Hill. His mother at her sewing machine, bent over a hem, humming something with no tune.

It was not there.

He remembered her. That was the strange part. He remembered her face, the crease between her eyebrows, the way she bit thread instead of cutting it. He remembered the shape of her hands. He remembered the words she used to say.

But the sound was gone.

He strained for it. He reached for the hum, and then for her laugh, and then for the way she said his name. Nothing came. Where her voice had been there was only a smooth silence, like a shelf that had been wiped clean.

Then a voice did answer. It was gentle and patient. It was reading him a letter, and it said that winter was coming early, and that he should be patient, because Corinne was waiting.

It was Corinne's voice. It was the only one he had left.

His throat closed.

"Mr. Pruitt." Nora leaned forward. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine." It was the first lie he had told in a long time.

She looked at him a moment longer, then let it go. "You bought me thirty days," she said. "Tell me what you want in return."

Jonah opened his eyes. "My mother died four years ago. I found out yesterday. The Danforths kept her from me." He kept his voice flat. "I want her ashes. And I want a lawyer who isn't afraid of them."

"Done," Nora said. "Both."

She reached over to straighten the blanket, and her eyes fell on his right hand. The stick lay in his open palm, black and notched along one edge.

She went very still.

The color left her face as it had in the night, only faster this time. Her fingers stopped an inch from the wood.

"My father has said one word since his stroke," she whispered. "Just one."

She lifted her eyes to his.

"Pruitt."