And on the second page, in the column of advertisements, under a heavy black heading, was a notice she had never seen.
She read it once, standing at the workbench with the clock parts bright beside her. Then she read it again, slower, because her first reading had felt like a mistake, and her second reading felt like something worse than a mistake. The notice was short. Fallon's advertisements were always short. He believed in few words and large type.
"TO BE SOLD," it said. "The lot on which the town-hall tower now stands, in the center of Fox Creek, suitable for a printing house and offices. Possession to follow the removal of the present structure. Inquiries to the proprietor of the Gazette."
Maren stood there with the paper in her hands, and the tower room went very quiet around her. The clock ticked on behind the wall, steady as a pulse, and she could hear Soren moving on the staging above her, and a wagon passing in the street below. But inside her own head there was a silence that had nothing to do with sound.
Fallon had advertised the tower lot for sale four days before she fell.
Not after the fall, when he could claim the accident had shown him the danger. Not after the petition, when he could claim the town had asked him to act. Before. Before she climbed. Before the rung broke. Before Soren caught her in his arms and her wrist twisted under her and the whole town learned her name. Before any of it, Fallon had already put the lot up for sale, and had already written, in his own printed words, that possession would follow "the removal of the present structure."
The removal. Not the repair. Not the question of whether the tower could be saved. The removal, stated as if it were already decided, as if the tower were already gone, as if the town had already agreed to something it had never been asked.
Maren's first feeling was not triumph. She had expected, if she ever found proof of anything, that she would feel triumph, or at least a sharp satisfaction. What she felt instead was a cold, clean anger, the kind that does not shout and does not shake, but settles in the chest and makes the hands very steady. She thought of the ladder. She thought of the rung that had broken under her foot, and of the fresh saw marks she had found on it with Soren, marks that had nothing to do with age or rot. She thought of the weeks since, of Fallon's editorials calling the tower a danger, of the petition going from door to door, of the town being told, day after day, that the only safe thing to do was to tear the tower down. And she understood, all at once and completely, that the fall had not changed Fallon's mind about anything. The fall had only given him the argument he had already been waiting to use.
"Soren," she said.
Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, too level, too careful. Soren came down from the staging at once, wiping his hands on his trousers, and he saw her face before he saw the paper.
"What is it?" he said.
She held the paper out to him, holding it by the edges the way you hold something that might tear. He took it, and he read the date first, because he was a careful man, and then he read the notice, and she watched his face change the way a sky changes before weather: not all at once, but in a darkening she could follow, line by line.
He read it a second time. Then he set the paper down on the bench, very gently, as if it were something that could break, and he put his hands flat on the bench on either side of it, and he did not speak for a long moment.
"He had it printed before," he said at last. "Before you ever climbed."
"Four days before," Maren said. "I counted."
Soren nodded slowly. He was looking at the notice, not at her, and his jaw was set the way it set when he was judging a piece of timber and finding it wanting.
"So the tower was never the question," he said. "The lot was the question. The tower was only in the way."