Dollar Ten a Pound

NIGHTCURVE — Season 31, Episode 6 Assembly cut. Never aired. Property of the network. Do not distribute.

COLD OPEN

[STUDIO. Anchor at desk. Behind him, a graphic: black river, white razor.]

HESTER LOWELL: Tonight on Nightcurve — a Vermont town where, in two hundred years, no one has ever drowned. A state investigator found dead in four inches of water. And a book of four thousand names that one prosecutor calls the most frightening thing anybody ever put in his hands. Here's Candace Anning.

[AERIAL. A New England town at dusk. The river black and slow through the middle of it. MUSIC: three cello notes, descending.]

ANNING (V.O.): Coldbrook, Vermont. Population eleven hundred. A church, a school, a hardware store that still sharpens skates.

[B-ROLL: storefront. Gold leaf on glass: IVERS & DAUGHTERS FINE LAUNDERING, EST. 1809.]

And on Mill Street, past the war memorial, a laundromat that has belonged to one family for two hundred and sixteen years.

[CHYRON: WHAT HAPPENED IN THE BASEMENT?]

The state came here once with a warrant. It left with a body, eleven hundred pages, and no charges.

I'm Candace Anning. This is Nightcurve.

ACT ONE

[EXT. MILL STREET. DAY. Rain.]

ANNING (V.O.): To understand Coldbrook, you have to understand what it doesn't have.

It doesn't have a flood plain, though it should. It doesn't have mold in the school. In two centuries of records — two centuries of a fast river and long winters and children who swim where they're told not to — Coldbrook has never lost a single person to drowning.

Not one.

[INTERVIEW. WENDELL PYNE, 78, retired plow operator. Kitchen, oilcloth, a scanner burbling.]

ANNING: Mr. Pyne, has your basement ever flooded?

PYNE: No.

ANNING: Not once?

PYNE: Not once.

ANNING: Does that strike you as unusual?

PYNE: (long pause) It strikes my brother-in-law in Hartsboro as unusual. He's had four.

ANNING: And what do you attribute that to?

PYNE: Ruth.

ANNING: Ruth Ivers. Who runs the laundromat.

PYNE: Who runs the laundromat. (He gets up and refills the kettle. He does not sit back down.)

ANNING (V.O.): We heard that name eleven times in two days. We heard it the way people say the name of a doctor, or a debt.

[PROD. NOTE — cut Pyne's "Ruth" answer? Reads folksy. We want ominous. Keithson would've sold this line with a pause and we don't have Keithson. — M.J.] [C.A.: Leave it in. — C.]

ACT TWO

[ARCHIVAL. Grainy news footage, 2003. Police tape. A basement stairwell.]

ANNING (V.O.): On the ninth of March, 2003, a state investigator named Paul Kessick went down the back stairs of the Ivers laundromat with a flashlight and a warrant.

He was forty-four. He had a wife, two daughters, and an open file on what the state believed was a decades-long insurance fraud: a town that never filed a water claim, and a family that took cash from every household in it, every month, for what the receipts called maintenance.

[CHYRON: PAUL KESSICK, 1958–2003]

He was found at six the next morning, face down, in four inches of standing water.

The basement drain was clear. The floor was level to within a quarter inch. There was no head wound, no toxicology, no sign that anyone had been on the stairs behind him.

The coroner ruled it accidental drowning.

[BEAT.]

The coroner was not wrong.

[INTERVIEW. MARION DUCHESNE, retired detective sergeant, Vermont State Police.]

DUCHESNE: I've worked eleven drownings. You learn what a drowning looks like. He drowned.

ANNING: In four inches of water.

DUCHESNE: In four inches of water.

ANNING: Sergeant, can a grown man drown in four inches of water?

DUCHESNE: A grown man can drown in a teaspoon of water, ma'am, if the water gets where it's going.

ANNING: And where was it going?

DUCHESNE: (does not answer)

ANNING (V.O.): The investigation lasted nineteen months. It produced eleven hundred pages, four search warrants, and no charges.

It also produced the ledger.

[B-ROLL: evidence photograph. A bound book the size of a paving stone, water-swollen, the spine repaired in five different centuries of thread.]

Seized from the counter of the laundromat, in plain sight, where it had apparently sat since the Madison administration. Four thousand one hundred and six names, entered by hand, in nine distinct hands. Some names carry a date. Some carry a note — set the cuff, third rinse, carried damp through April. Beside a few, a small pencil cross.

Every living soul in Coldbrook is in that book. So is every dead one.

[INTERVIEW. GERALD TAPP, former Windham County State's Attorney.]

ANNING: You've called this the most frightening document you've ever been handed.

TAPP: I have.

ANNING: Because you believed it was a list of victims.

TAPP: That's what I believed in 2003, yes.

ANNING: And now?

TAPP: (asks for water. It is brought. He does not drink it.) Now I think I had it exactly backwards, and I'd rather not say how.

ANNING: You declined to charge Ruth Ivers.

TAPP: I did.

ANNING: Why?

TAPP: Ms. Anning, I've got a house in Brattleboro with a dirt cellar and I have never once had to run a pump. (He stands. He is still miked.) I'd like that on the record and I'd like to be done now.

ACT THREE

[INT. IVERS & DAUGHTERS. DAY. Fluorescent hum. Eleven machines. A woman folding.]

ANNING (V.O.): Ruth Ivers is seventy-one. She has run this laundromat since she was nineteen, as her mother did, and her mother's mother, back to a woman named Prudence who came up the valley in 1809 with a mangle in a cart.

She agreed to speak to us on the condition that she could keep folding.

ANNING: Mrs. Ivers, what do the people of Coldbrook pay you for?

RUTH: Wash and fold. Dollar ten a pound.

ANNING: They pay you monthly. Households that don't do laundry here. Households with their own machines.

RUTH: Then they're paying for the other thing.

ANNING: What's the other thing?

RUTH: (folds a towel in three) Keeping the damp off.

ANNING: Off their houses.

RUTH: Off them.

ANNING (V.O.): It went like that for two hours. Every question came back sounding like a laundry answer, and every laundry answer sounded, on the tape, like something else.

[TAPE 11 — TRANSCRIPT, PARTIAL]

ANNING: Do you consider what you do to be a religion?

RUTH: No.

ANNING: A trade?

RUTH: A trade.

ANNING: People in this town believe you keep their basements dry.

RUTH: People in this town are correct.

ANNING: Mrs. Ivers, that isn't possible.

RUTH: (looks at the camera for the first time) No.

ANNING (V.O.): I want to be careful here.

I had walked in from the rain. My sleeve was soaked to the elbow — you can see it in the wide shot, dark to the elbow, the cuff hanging. At 4:51 p.m. Ruth Ivers reached across the folding table, took my wrist without asking, and ran two fingers down the outside of my forearm the way you'd strip water off a windowpane.

[TAPE 11 — 4:51:16 — CAMERA A. Audio: a sound like a page turning.]

CAMERAMAN (O.C.): (quietly) Huh.

ANNING (V.O.): There is a simple explanation for what happened to my sleeve.

I have not found it.

[PROD. NOTE — sleeve continuity unusable, can't cut around it. Reshoot the whole sit-down? — M.J.] [C.A.: No. — C.]

ACT FOUR

[INT. BACK ROOM. NIGHT. The ledger, released from evidence in 2019, open on a card table.]

ANNING (V.O.): On our last night in Coldbrook, Ruth Ivers let us photograph the book.

She turned the pages herself. She would not let me touch them, and she would not let anyone read one aloud, and when our sound tech started muttering names under his breath she took the book off the table and held it against her chest like a child until he stopped.

ANNING: Why can't we read them out loud?

RUTH: Because that's how you give it back.

ANNING: Give what back?

RUTH: What I took off them. (She sets the book down.) Everything I ever pulled out of a person has to go somewhere, Miss Anning. It goes in me until I can wring it into the river on a Tuesday. If you say a page out loud you hand it all back at once, in the room, and it comes to whoever's standing there.

ANNING: Is that what Paul Kessick did?

RUTH: (a very long time) He had a flashlight in his teeth and he was reading to himself the way men do. He got eleven names into page one thirty-one.

ANNING: And you were where?

RUTH: Upstairs. I heard the fourth name. I got there for the last one. (beat) Four inches, they said. I don't know how they measured it. It was up my legs like a spring melt and it went down that drain like it had somewhere to be, and then it was four inches, and he was in it.

ANNING (V.O.): I have been a reporter for nineteen years. I have never in my life failed to ask the next question.

I did not ask the next question.

I asked her to turn to page eleven thirty-one.

[TAPE 17 — CAMERA A — 11:48 P.M.]

ANNING (V.O.): Under 1979, in the fourth column, there is a name that has been scraped out with a razor. Not crossed. Scraped — the paper worked at until it went thin as gauze, so that the lamp shows through it in the shape of the letters that used to be there.

Six letters. Then five.

[TAPE 17 — 11:49:02]

ANNING: Whose name was that.

RUTH: You know whose name that is.

ANNING: (inaudible)

RUTH: Say it or don't, Nell. You've been standing in my shop for three days with a false name on your jacket and a camera crew for a chaperone, and I have folded every towel in this building twice waiting on you.

[PROD. NOTE — ???? — M.J.]

ANNING (V.O.): My mother did not disown me in 1979. That is the story I have told at dinner parties for twenty-two years, and told well, and told with the exact rueful shrug that makes people stop asking.

What she did was take a razor to a page.

RUTH: Everybody in this town is on a page. Every soul in Coldbrook, and their children, and their children. You're the only one I ever took off.

ANNING: Why?

RUTH: Because a name in the book is a name I keep. And a name I keep is a girl who stays. (She closes the ledger.) You were seventeen and you had a bus schedule in your coat and you thought I couldn't read it through the wool. I could. I can read a bus schedule through a barn door. (beat) So I let you go.

ANNING: You let me go.

RUTH: I made you the only person in this county nobody's holding. Twenty-two years, no one has kept one ounce of damp off you. Everything that's ever come at you came all the way in. (She puts her hand flat on the cover.) And you went and got yourself a good life anyway, and a nice haircut, and you came back here with lights to prove your mother is a murderer.

ANNING: (inaudible)

RUTH: No. Don't. You did the only thing I ever managed to give anybody. You wanted a thing and you got it.

[SILENCE ON TAPE — 41 SECONDS.]

ANNING: Put it back.

RUTH: It'll cost you the rest of your life in this town.

ANNING: Put it back.

RUTH: (sound of a drawer, a pen) You always did want two things at once.

[TAPE 17 ENDS.]

TAPE 18 — CAMERA A — UNUSABLE. WATER DAMAGE. TAPE 18 — CAMERA B — UNUSABLE. WATER DAMAGE. TAPE 19 — UNUSABLE. WATER DAMAGE.

[FIELD LOG, 11/09: Cases were dry. Van was dry. Room was dry. Everything else in the bag is fine, including the paper. — D. Murph, sound.]

MEMORANDUM — STANDARDS & PRACTICES

Re: NIGHTCURVE, ep. 3106, "Dollar Ten a Pound." Episode is killed. Correspondent failed to disclose a first-degree familial relationship to the principal subject and has appeared on this network since 2004 under a professional name. Footage embargoed. Correspondent's resignation accepted 11/12, effective immediately. Hester Lowell will introduce a repackaged Keithson piece in the slot. Do not confirm to affiliates that a Coldbrook segment existed.

ANNING (V.O.): [recovered from Camera A, final eleven seconds, audio only]

There's a version of this where I tell you my mother killed a man in a basement, and it's true, and it is the smallest true thing about her.

Coldbrook is going to be here after me. The river still wants its old channel back and it is very patient and somebody has to stand in the middle of Mill Street on a Tuesday and take it. It's a trade. Dollar ten a pound.

I'm going to need you to run the tape one more time, and then I'm going to need you to go home.

This is Nell Ivers, reporting from Coldbrook.

[END OF RECOVERABLE MATERIAL.]