The celebration of Sam’s christening continued around us. I could hear people laughing, and the startled hiss of bottles opening. Somewhere a voice began singing a song. It sounded like Rachel’s father, who tended to sing when he was in his cups. Frank was a lawyer, one of those hearty, hail-fellow-well-met types who liked to be the center of attention wherever he went, the kind who thought that he brightened up people’s lives by being loud and unintentionally intimidating. I had watched him in action at a wedding, forcing shy women to dance on the grounds that he was trying to take them out of their shells, even as they trembled awkwardly across the dance floor like newborn giraffes, casting longing glances back at their chairs. I supposed it could be said of him that he had a good heart, but unfortunately he didn’t have a sensitivity toward others to go with it. Aside from any concerns he might have had about his daughter, Frank seemed to regard my presence at such convivial events as a personal affront, as though at any moment I were going to burst into tears, or beat someone up, or otherwise rain on the parade that Frank was trying so hard to organize. We tried not to be alone together. To be honest, it wasn’t too difficult, as we both put our hearts into the effort.
Joan was the strong one in the marriage, and a soft word from her could usually make Frank take things down a notch. She was a kindergarten teacher, and an old-style liberal Democrat who took very personally the way the country had changed in recent years under both Republicans and Democrats. Unlike Frank, she rarely spoke about her worries for her daughter directly, at least not to me. Only occasionally, usually when we were leaving them at the end of another sometimes awkward, sometimes mildly pleasant visit, would she take me lightly by the hand, and whisper, “Look after her, won’t you?”
And I would assure her that I would take care of her daughter, even as I looked into her eyes and saw her desire to believe me collide with her fear that I would be unable to fulfill that promise. I wondered if, like the missing Alice, there was a taint upon me, a wound left by the past that would somehow always find a way to infect the present and the future. I had tried, in recent months, to discover a means of neutralizing the threat, mainly by declining offers of work that sounded like they could involve any serious form of risk, my recent evening with Jackie Garner being the honorable exception. The trouble was that any job that was worth doing necessitated risk of some kind, and so I was spending time on cases that were progressively sapping my will to live. I had tried to walk this path before, but I was not living with Rachel when I followed it, and I did not last long upon it before I found the lure of the dark woods impossible to ignore.
Now a woman had come to my door, and she had brought with her her own pain, and the misery of another. It was possible that a simple explanation would arise for her daughter’s disappearance. There was little merit in ignoring the realities of Alice’s existence: her life at the Point was dangerous in the extreme, and her habit made her more vulnerable still. The women who worked those streets disappeared regularly. Some were fleeing their pimps or other violent men. Some tried to leave the life before it consumed them entirely, sick of robbery and rape, but few of those women succeeded, and most trudged back to the alleys and the parking lots with their hopes of escape entirely gone. The women tried to look out for one another, and the pimps monitored their movements too, if only to protect their investments, but these were gestures and little more. If someone was determined to hurt one of these women, then he would succeed.
We brought Louis’s aunt into the kitchen and entrusted her to the care of one of Rachel’s relatives. Soon she was eating chicken and pasta and sipping lemonade in a comfortable chair in the living room. When Louis went to check on her a little later, he found her asleep, exhausted by all that she had tried to achieve for her daughter.
Walter Cole joined us. He knew something of Louis’s past and suspected more. He was more knowledgeable about Angel, as Angel had the kind of criminal record that merited a sizable file all to itself, although its details pertained to the relatively distant past. I had asked Louis if we could involve Walter, and he acquiesced, albeit reluctantly. Louis wasn’t the trusting kind, and he most certainly did not like involving the police in his affairs. Nevertheless, Walter, although retired, had connections with the NYPD that I no longer had, and was on better terms with serving officers than I was. Admittedly, that wasn’t difficult. There were those in the department who suspected that I had blood on my hands and would dearly have liked to call me to account for it. Cops on the street were less problematical for me, but Walter still had the respect of those higher up who might be in a position to offer assistance if it was needed.
“You’ll go back to the city tonight?” I asked Louis.
He nodded. “I want to find me that G-Mack.”
I hesitated before I spoke.
“I think you should wait.”
Louis’s head tilted slightly, and his right hand slapped lightly against the arm of his chair. He was a man of few unnecessary movements, and this pretty much qualified as an explosion of emotion.
“Why would you think that?” he said evenly.
“This is what I do,” I reminded him. “You go in there all fired up with your guns blazing, and everybody with even a passing concern for their own personal safety will disappear, whether they know you or not. If he gets away from you, we’ll need to tear the city apart to find him, and we’ll waste valuable time doing it. We know nothing about this guy. We need to change that before we go after him. You’re thinking about revenge for what he did to the woman in there. That can come later. What concerns us is her daughter. I want you to hold off.”
There was a risk involved in doing this. G-Mack now knew that someone was asking questions about Alice. Assuming that Martha was right, and something bad had befallen her, then the pimp had two options: he could sit tight, plead ignorance, and tell the women under him to do the same; or he could run. I just hoped that his nerve held until we got to him. My guess was that it would: he was new, since Louis knew nothing of him, and young; which meant that he was probably arrogant enough to consider himself a “playa” on the street. He had managed to establish some kind of operation at the Point. He would be reluctant to abandon it until it became absolutely necessary to do so.
There was a long silence as Louis considered his options.
“How long?” he said.
I looked to Walter.
“Twenty-four hours,” he said. “By then, I should have what you need.”
“Then we’ll move on him tomorrow night,” I said.
“We?” asked Louis.
“We,” I said.
He locked eyes with me.
“This is personal,” he said.
“I understand.”
“We need to be clear on that. You got your way of doing things, and I respect that, but your conscience got no part to play in this. You start doubting, I want you to walk away. That goes for everyone.”
His eyes flicked momentarily toward Walter. I could sense that Walter was about to respond, so I reached out and touched his arm, and he relaxed slightly. Walter would not involve himself in anything that violated his own strict moral code. Even without the badge, Walter was still a cop, and a good one. He had no need to justify himself to Louis.
Nothing more was said. We were done. I told Walter to use the office phone, and he began making some calls. Louis went to wake Martha so that he could bring her back to New York with him. Angel joined me at the front door.
“Does she know about you two?” I asked.
“I’ve never met her before,” said Angel. “Tell you the truth, I wasn’t even sure that the family existed. I figured someone bred him in a cage, then released him into the wild. But I think she’s smart. If she doesn’t know now, she’ll guess soon enough. Then we’ll see.”
We watched as Rachel walked two of her friends to their car. She was beautiful. I loved the way that she carried herself, her poise, her grace. I felt something tear inside me, like a weakness in a wall that slowly begins to expand, threatening the strength and stability of the whole.
“She won’t like it,” said Angel.
“I owe Louis,” I replied.
Angel almost laughed. “You got no debt to him, or to me. Maybe you feel like you do, but we don’t see it that way. You have a family now. You have a woman who loves you, and a daughter who depends on you. Don’t screw it up.”
“I don’t intend to. I know what I have.”
“Then why are you doing this?”
What could I tell him? That I wanted to do this, that I needed to do this? It was part of the reason, I knew. Maybe also, in some low, hidden part of myself, I wanted to force them away, to hasten what I saw as an inevitable end.
But there was one more element, one that I could not explain to Angel, or to Rachel, or even to myself. I felt it as soon as I saw the cab moving along the road, drawing slowly closer and closer to the house. I felt it as I watched the woman step onto the gravel in our drive. I felt it as she told her story, trying to hold back the tears but desperate not to show weakness in front of strangers.
She was gone. Alice was gone, and wherever she now was she would never walk through this world as she once did. I couldn’t say how I knew it, any more than Martha could explain her sense that her daughter was at risk to begin with. This woman, filled with courage and love, was brought here for a reason. There was a connection, and it would not be denied. I had learned this from bitter experience. The troubles of others that found their way to my door were meant for my intervention and could not be ignored.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just know that it has to be done.”
∗ ∗ ∗
Gradually, most of the guests slipped away. They seemed to take with them whatever gaiety they had brought, leaving none behind in our house. Rachel’s parents, as well as her sister, were staying the night with us. Walter and Lee were due to spend a couple of days with us too, but Martha’s visit had caused the abandonment of that plan, and they were already on their way home so that Walter could talk to cops in person if necessary.
I was clearing up outside when Frank Wolfe cornered me. He was taller than I, and bulkier. He’d played football in high school, and there were colleges sufficiently impressed by him to consider offering him a scholarship, but Vietnam intervened. Frank didn’t even wait for the draft. He was a man who believed in duty and responsibility. Joan was already pregnant when he left, although neither of them knew it at the time. His son, Curtis, was born while he was “in country,” and a daughter followed two years later. Frank won some medals, but he never spoke about how he came by them. When Curtis, who had become a deputy with the county sheriff’s office, was killed during a bank raid, he didn’t disintegrate or descend into self-pity the way some men might have done but instead held his family close to him, binding them to him so that they would have him to lean upon, so that they would not fall. There was much that was admirable about Frank Wolfe, but we were too dissimilar ever to manage more than a few civil words to each other.
Frank had a beer in his hand, but he wasn’t drunk. I had heard him talking to his wife earlier, and they had witnessed Martha’s arrival and the conclave that resulted. I figured Frank had subsequently slowed down on the booze, either of his own volition or at his wife’s instigation.
I picked up some paper plates and threw them into the garbage bag, still amazed that the weather was mild enough to allow guests to find their way outside, and relieved that I had cleared the lawn of snow a day earlier. Frank watched me but didn’t move to lend a hand.
“Everything okay, Frank?” I said.
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
There was no point in brushing him off. He hadn’t become a good lawyer by lacking persistence. I finished clearing the plates from the garden table, tied up the garbage bag, and went to work on the empty bottles with a new bag. They made a satisfying clink as they hit the bottom.
“I’m doing my best, Frank,” I said softly. I didn’t want to have this discussion with him, not now and not ever, but it was upon us.
“With respect, I don’t think you are. You got duties now, responsibilities.”
I smiled, despite myself. There were those two words again. They defined Frank Wolfe. He would probably have them inscribed on his gravestone.
“I know that.”
“So you got to live up to them.”
He tried to emphasize his point by waggling the beer bottle at me. It diminished him, somehow, making him appear less like a concerned father and more like a garrulous drunk.
“Listen, this thing you do, it’s got Rachel worried. It’s always got her worried, and it’s put her at risk. You don’t put the people you love at risk. A man just doesn’t do that.”
Frank was trying his best to be reasonable with me, but he was already getting under my skin, maybe because all that he was saying was true.
“Look, there are other ways that you can use the skills you have,” he said. “I’m not saying give up on it entirely. I got contacts. I do a lot of work with insurance companies, and they’re always looking for good investigators. It pays well: better than what you earn now, that’s for sure. I can ask around, make some calls.”
I found myself hurling the bottles into the bag with more force. I took a deep breath to rein myself in, and tried to drop the next one as gently as I could.
“I appreciate the offer, Frank, but I don’t want to work as an insurance investigator.”
Frank had run out of “reasonable,” so he was forced to uncork something a little more potent. His voice rose.
“Well, you sure as hell can’t keep doing what you do now. What the hell is wrong with you? Can’t you see what’s happening? You want the same thing to happen a—”
He stopped abruptly, but it was too late. It was out now. It lay, black and bloody, on the grass between us. I was suddenly very, very tired. The energy drained from my body, and I dropped the sack of bottles on the ground. I leaned against the table and lowered my head. There was a shard of sharp wood against the palm of my right hand. I pressed down steadily upon it, and felt skin and flesh give way beneath the pressure.
Frank shook his head. His mouth opened, then closed again without uttering a word. He was not a man given to apologies. Anyway, why should a man apologize for telling the truth? He was right. Everything that he had said was right.
And the terrible thing was that Frank and I were closer in spirit than he realized: we had both buried children, and both of us feared more than anything else a repetition of that act. Had I chosen to do so, I could have spoken at that moment. I could have told him about Jennifer, about the sight of the small white coffin disappearing beneath the first clods of earth, about organizing her clothes and her shoes so that they could be passed on to children still living, about the appalling sense of absence that followed, of the gaping holes in my being that could never be filled, of how I could not walk down a street without being reminded of her by every passing child. And Frank would have understood, because in every young man fulfilling his duty he saw his absent son, and in that brief truce some of the tension between us might have been erased forever.
But I did not speak. I was retreating from them all, and the old resentments were coming to the fore. A guilty man, confronted by the self-righteousness of others, will plead bitter innocence or find a way to turn his guilt upon his accusers.
“Go to your family, Frank,” I told him. “We’re done here.”
And I gathered up the garbage and left him in the evening darkness.
Rachel was in the kitchen when I returned, making coffee for her parents and trying to clean up some of the mess left on the table. I started to help her. It was the first time we had been alone since we had returned from the church. Rachel’s mother came in to offer help, but Rachel told her that we could take care of it. Her mother tried to insist.
“Mom, we’re fine,” said Rachel, and there was an edge to her voice that caused Joan to beat a hasty retreat, pausing only to give me a look that was equal parts sympathy and blame.
Rachel used the blade of a knife to begin scraping the food from a plate into the trash can. The plate had a dark blue pattern upon its rim, although it wouldn’t have it for much longer if Rachel continued to scratch at it.
“So, what’s going on?” she asked. She didn’t look at me as she spoke.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“What does that mean?”
“You were kind of hard on Angel and Louis today, weren’t you? You hardly spoke a word to them while they were here. In fact, you’ve hardly spoken a word to me.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t spent the afternoon cloistered in your office, we might have found time to speak.”
It was a fair criticism, although we had been in the office for less than an hour.
“I’m sorry. Something came up.”
Rachel slammed the plate down on the edge of the sink. A small blue chip flew from the rim and was lost on the floor.
“What do you mean, ‘something came up’? It’s your daughter’s fucking christening!”
The voices in the living room went quiet. When the conversation picked up again, it sounded muted and strained.
I moved toward her.
“Rach—” I began.
She raised her hands and backed away.
I couldn’t move. My hands felt awkward and useless. I didn’t know what to do with them. I settled for putting them behind my back and leaning against the wall. It was as close as I could come to a gesture of surrender without raising them above my head or exposing my neck to the blade. I didn’t want to fight with Rachel. It was all too fragile. The slightest misstep, and we would be surrounded by the fragments and shards of our relationship. I felt my right hand stick to the wall. When I looked down there was blood upon it, left by the splinter cut.
“What did that woman want?” said Rachel. Her head was down, loose strands of hair falling over her cheeks and eyes. I wanted to see her face clearly. I wanted to push back her hair and touch her warm skin. Like this, her features hidden, she reminded me too much of another.
“She’s Louis’s aunt. Her daughter has gone missing in New York. I think she came to Louis as a last resort.”
“Did he ask you for help?”
“No, I offered to help.”
“What does she do, her daughter?”
“She was a street prostitute, and an addict. Her disappearance won’t be a priority for the cops, so someone else will have to look for her.”
Rachel ran her hands through her hair in frustration. This time, she did not try to stop me as I moved to hold her. Instead, she allowed me to press her head gently to my chest.
“It will just take a couple of days,” I said. “Walter has made some calls. We have a lead on her pimp. It may be that she’s safe somewhere, or in hiding. Sometimes women in the life drop out for a time. You know that.”
Slowly, her arms reached around my back and held me.
“Was,” she whispered.
“What?”
“You said ‘was.’ She was a prostitute.”
“It’s just the way that I phrased it.”
Her head moved against me in denial of the lie.
“No, it’s not. You know, don’t you? I don’t understand how you can tell, but I think you just know when there’s no hope. How can you carry that with you? How can you take the strain of that knowledge?”
I said nothing.
“I’m frightened,” she said. “That’s why I didn’t talk to Angel and Louis after the christening. I’m frightened of what they represent. When we spoke about them being godfathers to Sam, before she was born, it was like, well, it was like it was a joke. Not that I didn’t want them to do it, or that I didn’t mean it when I agreed, but it seemed like no harm could come of it. But today, when I saw them there, I didn’t want them to have anything to do with her, not in that way, and at the same time I know that each of them, without a second thought, would lay down his life to save Sam. They’d do the same for you, or for me. It’s just ...I feel that they bring . . .”
“Trouble?” I said.
“Yes,” she whispered. “They don’t mean to, but they do. It follows them.”
Then I asked the question that I had been afraid to ask.
“And do you think that it follows me too?”
I loved her for her answer, even as another fissure appeared in all that we had.
“Yes,” she said. “I think those in need find you, but with them come those who cause misery and hurt.”
Her arms gripped me tighter, and her nails dug sharply into my back.
“And I love you for the fact that it pains you to turn away. I love you for wanting to help them, and I’ve seen the way you’ve been these last weeks. I’ve seen you after you walked away from someone you thought you could help.”
She was talking about Ellis Chambers from Camden, who had approached me a week earlier about his son. Neil Chambers was involved with some men in Kansas City, and they had their hooks pretty deep in him. Ellis couldn’t afford to buy him out of his trouble, so somebody was going to have to intervene on Neil’s behalf. It was a muscle job, but taking it would have separated me from Sam and Rachel, and would also have involved a degree of risk. Neil Chambers’s creditors were not the kind of individuals who took kindly to being told how to run their affairs, and they were not sophisticated in their methods of intimidation and punishment. In addition, Kansas City was way off my turf, and I told Ellis that he might find the men involved were more amenable to some local intervention than the involvement of a stranger. I made some inquiries, and passed on some names to him, but I could see that he was disappointed. For better or worse, I’d gained a reputation as a “go-to” guy. Ellis had expected more than a referral. Somewhere inside, I also believed that he deserved more.
“You did it for me, and for Sam,” said Rachel, “but I could tell the effort that it caused you. You see, that’s the thing of it: whichever way you turn, there will be pain for you. I just didn’t know how much longer you could keep turning away from those who reached out to you. I guess now I know. It ended today.”
“Rachel, she’s family to Louis. What else could I do?”
She smiled sadly.
“If it hadn’t been her, it would have been someone else. You know that.”
I kissed the top of her head. She smelled of our child.
“Your dad tried to talk to me outside.”
“I bet you both enjoyed that.”
“It was great. We’re considering going on vacation together.”
I kissed her again.
“What about us?” I asked. “Are we okay?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I love you, but I don’t know.”
With that she released me, and left me alone in the kitchen. I heard her climb the stairs, and there came the creak of the door to the bedroom where Sam lay sleeping. I knew that she was looking down upon her, listening to her breathe, watching over her so that no harm would come to her.
∗ ∗ ∗
That night, I heard the voice of the Other calling from beneath our window, but I did not go to the glass. And behind her words I discerned a chorus of voices, whispering and weeping. I covered my ears against them and squeezed my eyes tightly closed. In time, sleep came, and I dreamed of a leafless gray tree, its sharp branches curving inward, thick with thorns, and within the prison that they formed brown mourning doves fluttered and cried, a low whistling rising from their wings as they struggled, and blood upon their feathers where the thorns had pierced their flesh. And I slept as a new name was carved upon my heart.