The road over Vesper Dam was twenty-two feet wide and had a guardrail along the downstream side that was newer than the road. I noticed that. I did not think anything of it, because a rail is not a fact until you know what it was for.
I knew the width before I got to it, because I had written it in a report eleven months earlier from a desk in Harrisburg, using a photograph somebody else had taken. The report had recommended removal. The recommendation had come back with a note asking for nine days on site, and the nine days were mine.
I drove across at fifteen miles an hour with both hands on the wheel.
Reservoir on my right, thirty-one inches down, the color of a coin that had been in a pocket too long. On my left, the drop, forty feet of it, and at the bottom of it, roofs. The dam was a quarter mile long. Two hundred feet of concrete at the south end where the spillway was, and the rest of it earth and rock fill, and the state had painted a yellow line down the middle of the road on top in 1974 and had not been back to look at it since.
Halfway across, the line went out from under my tire and did not come back for eight feet. There was a crack under it, tarred over, the tar gone gray, grass up through the tar in three places.
Then the road bent, dropped, and I was in Kettler’s Bend.
The center of the town was nine buildings and a flagpole. The gas station had a sign that said FULL SERVE in letters that used to be red, and two pumps with the hoses cut off at the base so nobody would try. The fire hall had a meat raffle sign in the window for a year I could not read. The flag was up. Somebody still raised it.
I passed a house with a truck in the yard and a man sitting in the truck doing nothing. He watched me the whole length of the street.
He rolled the window down.
“Looking for somebody?”
“The hotel.”
“Up the hill.” He looked at my car, then at the plates, then at me. “State?”
“Yes.”
He rolled the window up.
The Bend Hotel stood on the only rise in the Bend, three stories of brick under white paint, six windows across the top. Two of them were lit.
I parked, got out, and stood with my hand on the roof for a second. The air smelled like wet leaves and diesel. Somewhere downhill a machine was running. A pump, maybe. I could not place where the sound was coming from, and after a while I stopped trying.
The woman behind the counter was the first thing in this town that looked load-bearing. She had a cardigan buttoned wrong, the second button in the third hole, and she did not fix it.
She reached under the counter and set a key on the wood between us. The tag was a piece of polished wood with a 2 burned into it, deep, done with a nail and a flame. Years of handling had blackened the number and polished everything around it.
“Room two?” she said.
“Two.”
She turned the register around. Paper register, pen on a string, the string gone yellow. The last entry above the blank line was dated the eleventh of September.
I signed. She read it upside down. Then she read it right side up. Then she looked at my face for longer than the name was worth.
“Your mother stayed in that room,” she said.
I put the pen down on the string.
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“You can have the one across the hall. Better bed.”
“Two’s fine.”
“Two it is.” She wrote something small in the margin of the page, and I watched her write it, and it was not a room number.
“Twelve a night. Cash or the state pays.”
“The state.”
“Then it’s fourteen.” She went back to the register. “How long.”
“The report’s due the third of October.”
Her pen stopped in the middle of a word. Then it finished the word.
“That’s nine days,” she said.
“I’m aware.”
“People don’t usually stay nine days.”
“I’m not people, I’m a form.” It came out flatter than I meant it. “Sorry. It’s a long drive.”
“Eunice,” she said. “Ballard. I’m the hotel.”
“Nell Acker.”
“I know.”
· · ·
The stairs were narrow and the carpet on them had been replaced at some point by somebody who did not measure first. My bag caught on the turn. I got it loose and kept going.
Before I unpacked, I took the tape out of my case and went back into the hall.
There was a line on the hall wall. A band, darker than the paint around it, running from the door frame of room 2 to the top of the stairs and then down the stairs, following the grade.
I had seen that band before. It was in the 1998 inspection file, on page nine, in a black and white photograph with a man’s boot standing against the wall for scale. The note under the photograph gave the top of the band at the boot’s ankle: twenty-seven inches.
I hooked the tape on the floor at the door frame and read the top edge, then the bottom edge.
Thirty-one. And twenty-six.
The band was five inches tall. I checked it again. Then I turned the tape around and checked it a third time. That is not a check. That is what you do when you do not like an answer.
The top edge had been at twenty-seven in 1998. It was at thirty-one now.
Four inches.
Four inches over a hundred and eighty acres is not a rounding error. It is a number with consequences, and in my line of work a number with consequences has a form behind it, and the form gets filed, and the filing gets a stamp. I had read every document Pennsylvania had on Vesper Dam before I got in the car. There was no stamp for four inches.
I wrote it in the notebook.
9/25 — hall stain, rm 2 door to stair head. Top 31″, bottom 26″. 1998 file: top 27″. Delta +4″. No permit. No record of a gate change. Ask.
Then I went into room 2.
The floor was narrow oak, old, cupped at the seams, and in the middle of the room, roughly where a rug would have gone if the room had ever had one, there was a rectangle about four feet by six where the wood was paler than the wood around it.
The edges were dead straight and the corners square, nothing like the wandering margin a spill makes when it finds a low board.
I got down and put my thumbnail in the seam at the near corner. Dry. I ran the flat of my hand across the pale part. Dry, and a little cooler than the floor outside it, which in a building this old means nothing.
I wrote that down too, because the alternative was writing down what I actually thought, and what I actually thought was that somebody had mopped this floor and had stopped at a line.
Nobody mops a floor and stops at a line.
Something in the room smelled like the inside of a drawer. Cedar, maybe, or just old wood that had been shut up. I stood in the middle of it for a while trying to decide whether I had smelled it before, and then I put it out of my head, because a smell is not evidence and I had nine days.
I unpacked the case. Boots by the door. Two pens, one of them out of ink. The 1998 file. The 1958 plat I had pulled from the county archive in a folder that still had the archive’s rubber band around it, brown and brittle. The tape measure went on the nightstand, next to the lamp.
Downstairs, the front room was dark except for one lamp on the counter. Eunice had a ledger open and was adding a column of numbers by hand. She wrote a total at the bottom, then added that total to another total on the facing page.
“Do you have a mop,” I said. “I tracked mud up the stairs.”
“Don’t mop that floor.”
“Sorry?”
“Room two. Don’t mop it.” She did not look up. “It doesn’t help.”
I had asked about the stairs.
I waited. She turned the page and started a new column.
“Is there something wrong with the floor,” I said.
“Nothing wrong with it.” She closed the ledger. “You can mop it in the morning, if it bothers you. The water won’t be there in the morning.”
She went back to her numbers, and I stood there in the doorway with mud on my boots and a tape measure in my hand, and after a while I understood that the conversation was over and had been over for some time.
“Mrs. Ballard,” I said. “I’m the one who writes the report they decide from. Whether it stays or whether they take it out. That’s what the nine days are for.”
The pen kept moving.
“I know what you are,” she said. “You look just like her.”
“I need the township’s file on the nineteen sixty-two gate log,” I said. “It’s supposed to be at the township building.”
“Township’s been shut seven years.”
“Then who has the file?”
“Nobody’s had it.” She capped her pen. “You want to know what happened here, you ask somebody who was on a roof.”
“Were you on a roof?”
“I was on a roof.”
A truck went by on the road below, slow, and did not stop, and the sound of it went away east toward the dam.
· · ·
I went up. At the top of the stairs I stopped and put my hand flat on the top edge of the band, at thirty-one inches, and left it there until my arm got tired. The paint was cool. The band under my palm did not feel any different from the paint beside it. It never does.
Then I went into room 2. The key turned the wrong way twice before it caught.
I did not go to bed right away. I sat on the edge of it with the plat open on my knees.
The reservoir had been surveyed in the spring of that year, before the gates were closed, before anybody knew they would be closed early, and the survey had drawn the pool at full elevation in blue and the ground under it in brown, and the brown had been hatched out to the new line.
I counted the buildings inside the line.
Forty-one.
Forty-one houses. A hundred and eighty acres. Four inches.
I turned the lamp off and lay down with my boots by the door.