The Long Way Back To Warmth

The Tower Room

The tower room, when Deborah finally stood inside it, was worse than Ruth's description and more compelling than any of the photographs, both at once, in the way she'd come to expect from buildings that mattered.

The stairs up had been narrow and dark, a servant's stair rather than the grand front staircase, spiralling tight against the tower's curved outer wall, and twice Deborah had stopped to test a tread with her weight shifted carefully before committing her full self to it. An old habit that had saved her from a fall through rotted flooring on at least two prior jobs and that she had no intention of abandoning here, however impatient Ruth's flashlight, waving up ahead suggested she was to reach the top.

"Careful of the fourth from the top," Ruth called back. "It's got a soft spot on the left side."

"Noted," Deborah said, and stepped right.

The room at the top was octagonal, ringed with windows on all but two sides, and it would have been, in Josiah Ashworth's day, a spectacular place to stand a full turning view of the cove, the harbour beyond it, the open water past that, the kind of vantage point a shipping man would have paid specifically to have, so he could watch his own fortune sail in and out on the tide. Now, half the windows were boarded over with plywood gone soft and grey, and the section of roof Ruth had mentioned was simply gone, a ragged hole open to the sky, tarped over from outside but letting in, even so, a fine misting rain that had left the floorboards beneath it black and swollen and clearly, visibly, structurally compromised.

Deborah crossed to the damaged section slowly, feeling the floor with each step before trusting it, and crouched at the edge of the rot to look more closely. The floor joists beneath, where she could see them through the failed boards, told a clearer story than the previous engineer's report had, in her opinion, given them credit for. Water had gotten in that much was obvious, and had been obvious to everyone for two winters but the damage was localized. Ugly, yes, structurally frightening to someone without training, absolutely, but localized, and more importantly, the framing itself, the actual bones of the tower's construction, appeared from what she could see to be sound beyond the immediate rot zone, old-growth timber, dense-grained, dry and solid where the water hadn't reached it. She reached out and pressed a folding rule against one exposed joist, an old habit more than a precise measurement at this stage, and felt the particular unyielding firmness of wood that had not yet given up.

"This is not a demolition," she said, half to herself.

"That's what I hoped you'd say," Ruth said from the doorway, not quite hiding her relief. "But I need it in writing and I need it defensible, because the trust board has two members who want an excuse to write this whole wing off and put the money into the parts of the house that photograph better for the fundraising gala."

"Give me a week and I'll give you a report the board can't argue with," Deborah said, still crouched at the edge of the rotted floor, running the beam of her own flashlight along the underside of a rafter where it disappeared into shadow. "This tower's salvageable. The roof needs to come off properly and go back on right, and probably forty percent of this floor needs replacing, sistered joists where the originals are compromised, but the bones are good. Somebody built this to outlast the family that commissioned it, which is more than you can say for most of what goes up today."

"You sound like John," Ruth said. "That's almost exactly what he said about the boathouse roof, word for word, minus the joists."

Deborah straightened, brushing dust from her knees, and looked out through one of the unblocked windows at the view Josiah Ashworth had paid for the cove, silvered under the overcast sky, the boathouse a grey rectangle at the water's edge, and beyond it, barely visible, a figure moving along the half-collapsed dock with the unhurried economy of someone who had done the same task in the same place many hundreds of times before. Even at this distance there was something readable in the posture, a kind of careful, unwasted motion, the opposite of the frantic energy she associated, uncharitably, with people who talked more than they worked.

"I should go introduce myself," she said, more to the window than to Ruth.

"Probably wise," Ruth said. "Before he hears from someone else that there's a new specialist crawling around 'his' tower and decides he doesn't like you before he's met you. He's protective of this place. More than the job requires, honestly. I think it's, "Ruth stopped herself, visibly deciding the sentence wasn't hers to finish. "Well. You'll get the shape of it eventually, if you stay long enough. Everyone in Blackwater Cove has a story that's mostly water under a bridge nobody built. His is just closer to the surface than most."

They picked their way back down the narrow stair, Deborah stepping right past the fourth tread from the top, Ruth nodding approval, and out through the wrecked main hall into a morning that had brightened without Deborah noticing, sun breaking weakly through cloud cover and turning the wild meadow lawn a colour somewhere between silver and gold. She left Ruth at the pickup, promising a preliminary report on the tower by the end of the week, and walked down the slope toward the boathouse alone, feeling the particular, unhurried curiosity that she reserved, usually, for buildings whose insides she hadn't seen yet.

The dock groaned under her weight as she stepped onto it, an honest, informative sound rather than an alarming one, old wood telling her exactly what it thought of the extra load, which was not much, but not nothing either and she made her way toward the boathouse with the same careful, testing steps she'd used on the tower stairs, some habits crossing over from job to job whether or not the job called for it.

The man inside, John Kessler, she assumed, though no one had formally confirmed it, was bent over a wooden hull propped on sawhorses, a small dinghy by the look of it, running a plane along one gunwale in long, even strokes that produced a curl of pale wood shaving with each pass, the kind of motion that spoke of thousands of prior repetitions, muscle memory so deep it had stopped requiring conscious thought. He did not look up when the dock announced her, or when her shadow fell across the boathouse threshold. He finished the stroke he was on, set the plane down with the deliberate care of a man who respected his tools, and only then turned to look at her, and Deborah had the distinct and slightly disorienting sense, meeting his eyes across the sawdust, floored boathouse, of a person taking her measure the way she'd been taking the measure of buildings all morning carefully, without hurry, withholding judgment until he'd actually seen what he was looking at.

"You'll be the timber woman," he said. His voice was quieter than she'd expected, and carried no particular warmth, but no hostility either, simply a flat, assessing register, the voice of someone who conserved words the way the house conserved heat, unwillingly and out of long habit. "Ruth said you'd come find me eventually."

"Deborah Paul," she said, and did not offer her hand, reading correctly, somehow, in the two seconds she'd had to observe him, that it would sit awkwardly between them, an unnecessary formality. "You're John."

"I am." He looked at her a moment longer, with something in his face, not quite a smile, but an easing, a small subtraction of guardedness shifted almost imperceptibly. "You went up in the tower already."

It wasn't a question, but she answered it as one anyway. "This morning, with Ruth."

"And?"

"And it's not a demolition," she said, echoing herself, and watched the words land on him with visible, unexpected effect his shoulders coming down half an inch, exactly the way her own had when Ruth laughed at her joke in the driveway that morning, the specific release of a person who had been braced, for longer than they'd admitted to themselves, for someone to tell them the opposite.

"Good," he said, and it was the first word he'd spoken to her that carried any real weight behind it. "Good. That's good." He seemed, briefly, at a loss for how to extend the thought, and turned instead back toward the dinghy on its sawhorses, running one broad hand along the plane's most recent pass as though checking its work, though Deborah suspected he already knew, with total certainty, exactly how smooth it had come out. "The last one wanted to gut it. Said the framing was compromised past saving. He was wrong, and I told him so, and it didn't matter because nobody listens to the boat guy about a house." A faint, dry note entered his voice on the last words, something that might, in a more talkative man, have been humour.

"I listen to people who know wood," Deborah said. "Regardless of what kind of vessel they usually keep it in."

That got something closer to an actual smile, brief, almost startled out of him, gone again almost as fast as it arrived, but real while it lasted, and Deborah found herself, standing in a stranger's boathouse three hundred and forty miles from every room that used to hold the shape of her old life, unexpectedly glad she'd walked down the hill.

"I've got coffee on," John said, nodding toward a battered percolator on a hot plate in the corner, the whole setup looking like it had been assembled sometime in the previous decade and simply never disassembled since. "It's not good. But it's hot, and you're going to want to sit down while I tell you what I actually know about that tower, because it's more than what's in any report Ruth's shown you, and none of it's going to make your job easier."

"I didn't come here for easy," Deborah said, and pulled a paint-spattered stool up to his workbench, and did not think about Daniel once for the better part of an hour, which she noted, again, with the same mixture of embarrassment and quiet relief as the night before, and did not examine too closely why the counting had started to feel less like a wound being tracked and more like a private kind of hope.