“With time.” He stopped and gazed through the mesh fencing at a stand of tomatoes. The powerful odor of their ripeness made Jahns’ stomach grumble.
“We were really hyped up to make a bust at the time,” Marnes said quietly. “Holston was a mess during all of this. He was wiring me every night for an update. I’ve never seen him want to take someone down so bad. Like he really needed it, you know?” He wrapped his fingers in the protective grate and stared past the vegetables as if into the years gone by. “Looking back, it’s almost like he knew something was up with Allison. Like he saw the madness coming.” Marnes turned to Jahns. “Do you remember what it was like before she cleaned? It had been so long. Everyone was on edge.”
Jahns had long since stopped smiling. She stood close to Marnes. He turned back to the plants, watched a worker snip off a red ripe tomato and place it in her basket.
“I think Holston wanted to let the air out of the silo, you know? I think he wanted to come down and investigate the thefts himself. Kept wiring me every day for reports like a life depended on it.”
“I’m sorry to bring it up,” Jahns said, resting a hand on his shoulder.
Marnes turned and looked at the back of her hand. His bottom lip was visible below his mustache. Jahns could picture him kissing her hand. She pulled it away.
“It’s fine,” he said. “Without all that baggage, I guess it is pretty funny.” He turned and continued down the hallway.
“Did they ever figure out how it got in here?”
“Up the stairwell,” Marnes said. “Had to be. Though I heard one person suggest that a child could’ve stolen one to keep as a pet and then released it up here.”
Jahns laughed. She couldn’t help herself. “One rabbit,” she said, “confounding the greatest lawman of our time and making off with a year’s salary of greens.”
Marnes shook his head and chuckled a little. “Not the greatest,” he said. “That was never me.” He peered down the hallway and cleared his throat, and Jahns knew perfectly well who he was thinking of.
After a large and satisfying dinner, they retired a level down to the guest rooms. Jahns had a suspicion that extra pains had been taken to accommodate them. Every room was packed, many of them double and triple booked. And since the cleaning had been scheduled well before this last-minute interview adventure of theirs, she suspected rooms had been bumped around to make space. The fact that they had given them separate rooms, the mayor’s with two beds, made it worse. It wasn’t just the waste, it was the arrangement. Jahns was hoping to be more…
And Marnes must’ve felt the same way. Since it was still hours before bedtime, and they were both buzzing from a fine meal and strong wine, he asked her to his small room so they could chat while the gardens settled down.
His room was tastefully cozy, with only a single twin bed, but nicely appointed. The upper gardens were one of just a dozen large private enterprises. All the expenses for their stay would be covered by her office’s travel budget, and that money and the fares of the other travelers helped to afford finer things, like nice sheets from the looms and a mattress that didn’t squeak.
Jahns sat on the foot of the bed. Marnes took off his holster, placed it on the dresser, and plopped onto a changing bench just a few feet away. While she kicked off her boots and rubbed her sore feet, he went on and on about the food, the waste of separate rooms, brushing his mustache down with his hand as he spoke.
Jahns worked her thumbs into the soreness in her heels. “I feel like I’m going to need a week of rest at the bottom before we start the climb up,” she said during a pause.
“It’s not all that bad,” Marnes told her. “You watch. You’ll be sore in the morning, but once you start moving, you’ll find that you’re stronger than you were today. And it’s the same on the way up. You just lean into each step, and before you know it, you’re home.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“Besides, we’ll do it in four days instead of two. Just think of it as an adventure.”
“Trust me,” Jahns said. “I already am.”
They sat quietly for a while, Jahns resting back on the pillows, Marnes staring off into space. She was surprised to find how calming and natural it was, just being in a room, alone, with him. The talk wasn’t necessary. They could just
“You don’t take a priest, do you?” Marnes finally asked.
“No.” She shook her head. “Do you?”
“I haven’t. But I’ve been thinking about it.”
“Holston?”
“Partly.” He leaned forward and rubbed his hands down his thighs like he was squeezing the soreness out of them. “I’d like to hear where they think his soul has gone.”
“It’s still with us,” Jahns said. “That’s what they’d say, anyway.”
“What do you believe?”
“Me?” She leaned up from the pillows and rested on one elbow, watching him watch her. “I don’t know, really. I keep too busy to think about it.”
“Do you think Donald’s soul is still here with us?”
Jahns felt a shiver. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had uttered his name.
“He’s been gone more years than he was ever my husband,” she said. “I’ve been married more to his ghost than to him.”
“That don’t seem like the right thing to say.”
Jahns looked down at the bed, the world a little blurry. “I don’t think he’d mind. And yes, he’s still with me. He motivates me every day to be a good person. I feel him watching me all the time.”
“Me too,” Marnes said.
Jahns looked up and saw that he was staring at her.
“Do you think he’d want you to be happy? In all things, I mean?” He stopped rubbing his legs and sat there, hands on his knees, until he had to look away.
“You were his best friend,” Jahns said. “What do you think he’d want?”
He rubbed his face, glanced toward the closed door as a squealing kid thundered down the hallway. “I reckon he only ever wanted you to be happy. That’s why he was the man for you.”
Jahns wiped at her eyes while he wasn’t looking and peered curiously down at her wet fingers.
“It’s getting late,” she said. She slid to the edge of the small bed and reached down for her boots. Her bag and stick were waiting for her by the door. “And I think you’re right. I think I’ll be a little sore in the morning, but I think I’ll feel stronger, eventually.”
5
On the second and final day of their descent into the down deep, the novel gradually became the habitual. The clank and thrum of the great spiral staircase found a rhythm. Jahns was able to lose herself in her thoughts, daydreaming so serenely that she would glance up at the floor number, seventy-two, eighty-four, and wonder where a dozen landings went. The kink in her left knee was even soothed away, whether by the numbness of fatigue or an actual return to health, she didn’t know. She took to using the walking stick less, finding it only held up her pace as it often slipped between the treads and got caught there. With it tucked under her arm, it felt more useful. Like another bone in her skeleton, holding her together.
When they passed the ninetieth floor, with the stench of fertilizer and the pigs and other animals that produced this useful waste, Jahns pressed on, skipping the tour and lunch she’d planned, thinking only briefly of the small rabbit that somehow had escaped from another farm, made it twenty floors up without being spotted, and ate its fill for three weeks while it confounded half a silo.
Technically, they were already in the down deep when they reached ninety-seven. The bottom third. But even though the silo was mathematically divided into three sections of forty-eight floors each, her brain didn’t work that way. Floor one hundred was a better demarcation. It was a milestone. She counted the floors down until they
