The Ninth Window

The ferry eased into the harbor like something that had always belonged there and remembered how to arrive. Nora stood on the deck with the dust of the city still on her coat and the faint smell of her father’s tobacco in her mouth—more memory than scent—and watched Brimwell unfold along the shoreline: the slate roofs blunt against a gray sky, the low line of warehouses, the narrow street that hugged the water. She had not been back in nearly a decade. Every return felt like lifting the lid on a box that had been shut with a different set of reasons each time. This time, she told herself, it was final. There were papers to settle, a workshop to clear, a small life’s worth of objects to catalogue and dispose of.

She told herself other things as well. That she would not let the old ache guide her. That she would not look for him. That a catalog could be as neat as any closure. It turned out to be easier to say those things than to live them. The town had a way of rearranging the very angles of memory. Streets that had been wide when she was small now seemed compact; alleys she’d played in felt narrower and more deliberate. People rounded corners with the practiced economy of a place that had decided how much of itself to show.

Her father’s workshop sat behind a narrow row of houses, half-hidden, its windows like tired eyes. It smelled of oil and cedar and the slow, steady oxidation of old metal; the bench had the familiar scars of work, a pale ring where his coffee cup always sat. Nora ran her fingers over the same plane where he had sanded the driftwood mobiles he made for tourists, and for a minute the movement of her hand was simply that—an old, reflexive thing—until she found, tucked beneath a splintered plank, the envelope she had come to expect. It was smaller than she remembered, the handwriting on the flap her father’s slanted script, the paper brittle. Inside there were bills (already paid, neatly accounted for), a note about a stalled insurance claim, and one photograph that made her stomach drop.

The photograph was of the row of houses opposite the workshop, taken from the precise angle she had just noted. Someone had circled, in faded pencil, the Ninth window. There was also something else: a tiny, dark smudge on the sill. For a breath she thought the stain was an old leaf. Then she recognized the shape. It was a brass whistle, dull with tarnish but unmistakable in its stamped outline. She had not seen one like that outside of the box Daniel kept under his bed when they were children—small, with a notch on the rim, meant for games that had not been entirely innocent. The sight of it tightened something inside her that had been loose for years. Her father had died and left her tasks; the town had left her a photograph that insisted she look at one frame and nowhere else.

She took the photo out into the street. The house fronts were modest and fussy with paint, each sill holding collections of shells or chipped glass, stray plates, a single chair or two. The Ninth window, she could see now, was different. It seemed to change more than the others: an extra jug here one day, a stack of letters the next, sometimes a pale scarf hung across the glass. Nothing ostentatious—only small, private arrangements—but there was a rhythm to them that made Nora’s chest beat faster. Whoever arranged those objects did it with intention. Whoever noticed them noticed in return.

A woman on the step of the bakery looked up and offered Nora a guarded smile. "You’ve come back early this time," she said. The voice fit the face like an old coat. "You Nora Hale?"

Hannah Rivers, Nora remembered—thin-lipped, quick-eyed, the municipal clerk with a memory for files and a fondness for exact times. She had been the kind of presence that collected facts and withheld judgment; she was also, Nora had learned over the years, the most dangerous sort of ally because she knew where paper crossed into politics.

Hannah came down from the baker’s step and studied the photograph herself, eyes narrowing. Her fingers brushed the brass whistle in the photo without comment. "You shouldn’t be poking at that," she said, but the tone was not entirely admonitory. There was something under her words like an invitation wrapped in caution. "Not yet."

Nora’s mouth went dry. "Why not?"

Hannah hesitated. "Because things look like one thing across the street and mean another. People have reasons to keep their windows tidy. They also have reasons to keep things out of sight. You’re better off starting with what’s inside the house than what’s on the sill."

It was a strange, exact warning. The kind of thing that sounded innocuous until you had nowhere else to put it. Nora folded the photograph back into the envelope as if it were fragile in her hands and realized, absurdly, that she felt watched—by a town, and by a memory that had taken up residence in the Ninth window. She had come to settle accounts, and now she carried a new, immediate question: why had his whistle been there, where anyone could see it?