Maren sat back on her heels. Her wrist throbbed, a dull ache she had learned to ignore, and her heart beat hard against her ribs. She had expected rot. She had prepared herself for rot, for the simple, blameless failure of an old thing. She had not prepared herself for this.
"Someone sawed it," she said.
Soren was silent. He knelt beside her, his carpenter's eyes going to the cut the way her eyes had, and she watched his face change. Carpenters know wood the way she knew clocks, and he saw in one look what she had seen: the straight line, the fresh sawdust, the deliberate stop three-quarters through. A saw does not wander. A saw goes where a hand sends it.
"That is not rot," he said at last, his voice flat, the way a man's voice goes flat when he is angry and does not want to show it. "Rot does not cut straight."
"No," Maren said. "It does not."
They sat there in the grass, the lamp between them, the broken ladder at their knees, and the morning went on around them as if nothing had changed. A wagon passed on the street. A dog barked somewhere near the store. The creek ran its bright, indifferent course. Maren thought about the morning of the fall: the ladder under her feet, the rung giving way, the tilt of the world, Soren's arms. She had believed, until this moment, that it had been an accident. She had told herself it was an accident, and she had told Fallon, when he came to her room with his polite questions, that it was an accident, because accidents are blameless and blameless things do not frighten a town. But this was not blameless. Someone had stood in this tower, with a saw, and had cut three-quarters through a rung, and had left just enough wood to hold until a person's weight found it. Someone had wanted a fall. Someone had wanted, perhaps, exactly what had happened: a woman falling, a tower blamed, a petition signed.
She did not say Fallon's name. She would not say it, not yet, not on the evidence of a saw mark alone. Her father had taught her that a clockmaker does not guess. She guesses, and she is wrong, and the clock is ruined. She observes, and she waits, and the truth shows itself in the movement. So she observed, and she waited, and she said, very carefully, "Mr. Krogh, the rung and the ladder — will they be safe?"
Soren looked at her, and then at the ladder, and she saw understanding cross his face. "The rung has been in a drawer in my workshop since the day you fell, and the ladder has been behind the tower," he said. "I did not throw either away. I meant to burn the ladder for firewood, but I never got to it. No one has touched either."
"Good," Maren said. "Then no one can say we made this up. The rung is here. The saw marks are here. The sawdust is here. Whatever else happens, this is true."
Soren nodded, and then he did something Maren did not expect. He took his knife, and with great care, he cut a small, clean sliver from the uncut side of the rung, and he held it up to the light beside the sawn part, so that she could see the difference: the old gray rot on one side, the fresh yellow cut on the other. "For the record," he said, in his careful English. "So that when we show it, we can show both. The rot, and the cut. A man can argue with a story. He cannot argue with wood."
Maren felt a sudden, fierce affection for this man, this quiet Danish carpenter who kept records in a book no one read and who understood, without being told, that evidence must be shown whole, rot and cut together, or it is not evidence at all. She wanted to thank him, but her throat was tight, and so she only nodded, and he nodded back, and they wrapped the broken rung in a cloth, the way she wrapped a movement, and they carried it into the tower together, and set it on the table beside the clock parts, where it looked strange and out of place among the brass: a piece of pine, gray and yellow, that had nearly killed her.