What the gas company man pulled from the top of the ductwork, with a puff of gray dust and a long grunt of effort, was a brown paper grocery bag, folded over at the top and held with a rubber band. He set it on the workbench of my husband under the bare bulb, and we both looked at it. Then he opened it. Inside, loose and glinting, lay nine volt batteries, at least a dozen of them, together with a roll of masking tape and a strip of paper on which someone had written, in a childish round hand, the word Thursday.
I understood at once. The batteries had come from the detectors. Not just the one in the hall, but the ones in the bedrooms and the kitchen too, all removed and hidden together in a place where nobody would look. The man from the gas company, whose badge said Mr. Pruitt, looked at me over his glasses. He said, in a low voice, “Mrs. Kraus, I have been doing this work for thirty one years. This is the kind of thing I hope never to find. Please sit down.”
He told me what he saw. The exhaust pipe at the chimney had been pried half loose from its collar, and the scratches in the metal were bright and fresh, made with a screwdriver. A section of the flue had been stuffed with newspaper to slow the draft. Left alone through January, with the windows shut and the heat running high, the house would have slowly filled with a gas that neither tastes nor smells. He said it very quietly, as if the walls might hear. And perhaps they would, through the intercom.
A husband who wires every room of his house for sound may never guess that his wife will one day owe her life to a speaker he forgot to disconnect.
He called the police from the workbench, using my telephone, while I stood in the cold basement with my arms wrapped around myself. Two officers came. They photographed the pipe, the flue, the bag, and the batteries. They asked me to sit in the kitchen and wait. I made tea for all of us in the old copper kettle. It seemed the only sensible thing. The young woman officer thanked me and said that in her whole career, nobody had ever made her tea at a crime scene.
Lynn and Ted returned at four o clock from the grocery store. Ted saw the police cars in the drive and stopped on the walk. Lynn came up the steps first with a bag of oranges in each hand, and she saw me standing in the doorway, and she saw the officers behind me, and she dropped everything. The oranges rolled all down the steps. “Mother,” she said. “What is it? What has happened?” I looked at her face. It was perfectly white, and I knew in that moment that she had not known the whole plan.
Ted tried to run. He did not get far. An officer caught him at the corner, next to the mailbox, and brought him back in handcuffs. In the kitchen, with the tea going cold, he admitted nothing. But Lynn, sitting at the table with her head in her hands, began to speak.
She said that Ted had told her only that they would be moving soon, that he had a plan to get the money for a house of their own. She had suspected something wrong. She had not asked. “I did not want to know,” she said. “God forgive me, I did not want to know.”
The district attorney charged Ted with attempted murder and tampering with a safety device. He was convicted in the spring. Lynn was not charged, because the investigators agreed that she had not participated, but she was required to testify. She did so in a plain black dress, with her chin raised. I sat in the front row. When she stepped down from the witness stand, she looked at me across the room, and I nodded, once. It was the first time in months we had looked at each other plainly.
She lived with me through the summer, in her old room upstairs, and she went to a counselor twice a week. She was ashamed. She did not talk much. But one evening in August, I found her sitting at the kitchen table with the old intercom box in front of her. She had taken it off the wall. She was holding a screwdriver. “Mother,” she said, “may I?” I told her she could. She worked quietly, and I watched her small hands loosen the screws, one by one.
We put the box on a shelf in the living room, beside the photograph of Herbert. It no longer works. I have kept it, though, in the same way that people keep the relic of a saint. Whenever the house is very quiet, in the evening, I look at that beige box and say a few words aloud, and I always end the same way. Thank you, Herbert. You were proud of that wiring, and you had every right. Then I turn off the light.