第3章 第6節 録音を信じるな
Trust No Recording
That night Nora could not sleep, and moved through her like cold water.
She trusted Gabriel, yet she had trusted her father too.
If the old were lying, she thought, he would lie exactly like this.
Kind, patient, always one tape ahead of every question she asked.
She returned to the station while he slept in the back room.
Working quietly, she opened the drawers where the station logs were kept.
The logbooks smelled of dust and salt and forty years of ink.
She found the year of her mother's death and turned the pages.
There, on the night Marion was said to have drowned, was a single line.
"Call placed to E. — 11:40 p.m.," written in Gabriel's careful hand.
E, she thought. Edwin. On the very night her mother disappeared.
If Gabriel had warned Edwin, then everything after was a .
The rescued tapes, the tears, the whispered warnings in the dark.
Perhaps he had spent twenty years guarding a secret he himself had sold.
Nora sat on the cold floor with the open on her knees.
Believing him had felt like the first safe thing in this whole town.
Now that safety cracked, and the cracks ran in every direction.
If she were wrong to trust him, who was left in Saltmere to trust?
She thought of Sam, bought and paid for, yet warning her still.
She thought of her father, a liar who had lied to keep her breathing.
Maybe truth in this place always arrived wearing the coat of a lie.
The ticked, and somewhere in the back room Gabriel turned in his sleep.
She closed the but kept one finger inside, marking the page.
In the morning, she decided, she would ask him, and watch his eyes.