Fifteen

In his lost career at the New York Star Gavin had begun all his stories with a new page in his notebook, names and ideas and associations scrawled out into the margins. At the beginning of his second week in Sebastian he drove to an office-supply store and bought notebooks— he couldn't find the kind he liked best, but close enough— and wrote Anna across the top of a page. But where to begin? He had already spent some time trying to find Sasha, but had gotten nowhere. She wasn't in the telephone directory and seemed to be among the disconcerting population of people who don't exist on the Internet. He wrote Sasha buying baby clothes at mall? beneath Anna's name and The Lola Quartet below that. It was evening, the lights of the freeway streaming across the top of his window behind the reflection of the room. He considered for a moment but could think of no other leads, and he was distracted by the distant sounds of Eilo hitting her heavy bag.

   Eilo had a heavy bag rigged up in a spare bedroom. She'd had it professionally mounted. The room was otherwise unfurnished. There was only the punching bag hanging still in a corner, Eilo's boxing gloves lined up on the gray carpet below. At five in the morning she was in the punching room and at six she was at her desk. Eilo disappeared occasionally during the day and during these absences Gavin heard the muted sounds of her gloved fists hitting the bag wherever he went in the house, a distant percussion. Afterward she was calmer, more focused, and she returned to work until at least seven or eight in the evening, long past the point when Gavin had stopped even pretending to upload new home listings to the website and was reading the news on his laptop instead. Eventually one of them would say something about pizza or Chinese takeout, and a while later they would be sitting in the living room watching TV and eating off the coffee table. It seemed to Gavin that she liked having him there. She never went out in the evenings.

   "At a certain point all your friends are couples," she said, when he asked about this. "You move through the world in pairs. They had to pick one of us."

   "So they picked the guy who left their friend?"

   "Apparently his girlfriend's lovely." She smiled as if she'd told a joke, and he realized how rarely he saw her smile. In all of his memories she was serious and efficient: Eilo sitting by his hospital bed after the time he'd walked home from his miserable senior prom and gotten heatstroke, Eilo putting a Band-Aid on his knee when he'd fallen off his skateboard at age seven, Eilo buying him a jacket at the mall when he was ten. What all these memories had in common was the absence of his parents, but he'd always known where they were: his father was at the office or on a business trip, his mother at home watching television. Neither of them had ever displayed the slightest interest in his or Eilo's activities. He'd never understood why they'd bothered to have children.

   "When did you last see Mom and Dad?" he asked, sitting with Eilo on the living room floor that night. Eilo didn't own a table.

She finished her slice of pizza, considering the question.

"I don't know," she said. " Maybe a couple years ago?"

"I'm thinking about visiting them tomorrow."

   "Why would you want to do a thing like that?" Eilo stood swiftly and carried the empty pizza box to the kitchen.

   "I don't know," he said to her receding back. He did know. He was beginning an investigation and it had to start somewhere, but he didn't want to tell Eilo about it. He wanted something of his own. "It just seems like a kind thing to do."

Th e i r  p a r e n t s  lived in a development called Palm Venice, no more than a half-hour away by car. The neighborhood had been imagined in the late '50s as Florida's answer to its namesake, a tropical paradise where you might travel by boat to your neighbor's house for a barbecue, but the canals that ran behind everyone's back lawns connected eventually with the swamps and therefore now harbored a glittery-eyed population of giant lizards and snakes. Residents saw pythons swimming in the canals sometimes, undulating ribbons with teeth. The lizards, the Nile monitors, watched the human world from the edges of backyards. A local woman swore she'd seen an anaconda but no one believed her. Still, Gavin thought as he was parking the car, there was no reason why not. As he walked up the concrete path to the front door he was remembering walking with William Chandler, murky water up around their knees and his legs soaked with sweat beneath the hip waders, a thermos of ice water in his backpack. The cool of the thermos against his spine the only thing preventing him from fainting in the heat. These are ideal conditions for an anaconda, Chandler had said, you can quote me on that.

His parents had purchased their house after Gavin and Eilo had

left home. He'd been here twice before, and he sometimes thought of it as a mausoleum. It was cool and almost silent, five thousand square feet of pale walls and white carpets. He hadn't seen his mother in some time. She was somewhat wider than he remembered when she opened the door.

   "Oh!" she said. "Gavin! Sweetheart. It's nice to see you again."

   "You too," he said. He wasn't sure what to do next, so he hugged her. It was awkward. She exuded a complicated medley of scents: expensive face creams, perfumed lotions and cleansers and fabric softeners, a note of lemon in her hair. But mostly wine, a barely perceptible sweet staleness on her skin.

   "Are you just passing through on business?"

   "I'm not passing through. I'm living with Eilo."

   "You live with Eilo and Mike?"

   It wasn't his story to tell, but it seemed impossible not to now. "They've broken up. Eilo and Mike aren't together anymore."

   " Close the door," she said. "You're letting in the heat."

   They stood for a moment looking at one other. He tried, as he always had, to read the expression on her face. She had the warm but oddly blank half-smile she wore in most of his memories.

   "Well, come in!" she said, too loudly. "Come in! How long have you been back in Florida?"

   "A few weeks." He was following her into the kitchen.

   " Would you like a Coke?"

   "Just water, thanks. Or orange soda if you have it." But she wasn't listening, she was setting a Coca-Cola and a glass of ice before him, turning back to the fridge for a half-empty pitcher of sangria. He watched her in silence.

   "It's the most refreshing thing this time of year," she said. She was pouring herself a glass.

"You drink that stuff all year."

   "Are we going to get nasty about drinking again? It's natural," she said. "It's fermented grapes and fruit pieces. Vitamin C. You need to loosen up a little. Well, cheers," she said.

   "Cheers." Gavin picked an ice cube out of his Coke, let it melt on his tongue while he watched her. "How have you been?" he asked, around the ice.

   "Oh, just fine," she said. "Just fine indeed. Enjoying life in the sunshine state."

   "But what've you been doing?" He knew what his mother did— she watched television, she shopped, she drank too much, she went for manicures and got her hair done and ate dinner either alone in front of the television or at expensive restaurants with her friends, she passed out on the sofa— and he wasn't sure why he was pressing the point, except that the house made him somehow claustrophobic despite its vastness and being with her always made him desperate for substance. Tell me something real, he wanted to scream at her sometimes, tell me anything at all, but as always she managed to deflect him.

   "Why would I be doing anything out of the ordinary?" she asked.

   "I don't know what the ordinary is," he said. "I haven't seen you in a while."

   "Two or three years," she said agreeably. "You came down for that one Christmas."

   "I think that was five years ago," Gavin said.

   "Five," she said. A flicker of uncertainty crossed her face. " Really?"

   "Is Dad home?"

   "He's on a business trip."

   " Where did he go this time?"

   "New York," she said.

   This hit Gavin harder than he would have expected. How often in

these past ten years had his father come to New York City without telling him? How many times had they passed within blocks of one another, how frequently had his plane passed over Gavin's apartment? When Gavin had stood by the window in the New York Star newsroom in the mornings, sipping his coffee and looking down at the teeming masses of humanity forty-three stories below, how many times had his father been among those dark specks on the sidewalk?

   "Excuse me a moment," Gavin said. He left her sipping sangria in the kitchen and set off down the hall in the direction of the closest bathroom, where he splashed cold water on his face and contemplated climbing out the window. It wouldn't be difficult. He was on the first floor. The frosted-glass window was open just a crack and the outside world with its grass and leaves and flowers looked like freedom to him. On his way back he veered into the dining room. It had an underused emptiness that reminded him of unpopular museum halls and pristine Park Avenue lobbies. There were stiff-backed upholstered chairs that no one ever sat in, a glass table with space for fourteen.

   His mother's collection of glass and crystal figurines occupied most of an oak cabinet along one wall. He opened the cabinet door and let his eyes play over the cherubs and the tilt-headed cats until he found a glass dog of indeterminate breed with very large eyes and a tiny stick at its feet. He extracted it carefully and carried it back to her.

   "Mom," he said, "where did you get this one?"

   "Oh," she said, "you and Eilo gave me that for my birthday one year. It was the summer after you graduated high school, right before you went north."

   He looked at the dog in his hand, but there was no spark of recognition. He'd hoped the glass dog might jump-start his memory, but he couldn't remember buying it, and he certainly couldn't remember Sasha in a shopping mall with a bag full of baby clothes. His mother's birthday was in late August. He would have been days or at most a week or two from departure. She was pouring herself another glass of sangria. She looked up at him and they both knew what he was going to say. He delayed for a moment but his next line was inevitable. He knew his part in the script.

   "I thought you were going to cut down a bit," he said, as gently as possible. "That last time I saw you."

   "Christmas. That was the last time I saw you, wasn't it?" She sipped the sangria and then set it down on the countertop with exaggerated care. "Christmas is a very stressful time. You would be a better person if you were a little more compassionate, I think." She had never been a kind drunk.

   "I thought we'd agreed not to talk about that Christmas," Gavin said. He had come down with Karen against his strenuous objections. Karen had insisted, she thought it was strange that they'd lived together for two years and she'd never met his parents, she didn't seem to believe him when he told her what his parents were like. He'd tried to explain what ghosts they were, how uninterested they were in their children. But Karen's parents loved her, she had only ever had good holidays, she didn't understand. They'd come down to Florida and stayed at a hotel— an extravagance, Karen thought, because she couldn't imagine visiting family for Christmas and not staying with them, but Gavin had to draw the line somewhere— and Gavin's mother had lapsed into incoherence and finally passed out at the table near the end of Christmas dinner.

   "Well," Gavin's mother said, "you brought it up, darling, didn't you?"

   "I should go," Gavin said.

   "So soon," she said. She was looking past him at the screened glass doors to the flower garden. He turned, but no one was there. His reflection imposed over a chaos of leaves and flowers. "You won't stay for dinner?" She was trying, it seemed to him, but her heart wasn't in it, and when he thought about it neither was his.

   "It was nice to see you," he said. "Give Dad my regards."

   He left her there in the living room and let himself out into the sunlight. The glass dog was in his pocket. He drove past the turn for Eilo's house and continued on to the police station.

"

I d o n ' t  u n d e r s t a n d , "  the desk clerk at the 33rd Precinct said. "You're saying your kid's missing?"

   "I'm saying I have no idea where she is and I'm afraid she's in trouble," Gavin had been having some difficulty explaining the situation. "We've been over this twice. I don't know how to explain it differently."

   "I don't know either," the desk clerk said, "but please, help me out here. The kid's missing, but you said you've never met her before?"

   "She might be fine," he said. "I told you, she might be with her mother."

   "But you've never met the kid?"

   "Gavin?" The voice was familiar. A passing detective, an overweight man in an enormous gray suit, had stopped by the counter. He was entirely bald, his shaved head shiny under the fluorescent lights, and he was intensely familiar but it took Gavin a moment to place him. " Gavin Sasaki," the detective said.

   "Daniel?" The sight was disorienting. The Daniel Smith he remembered was a skinny kid with an Afro and wire-framed glasses, high-top sneakers in Day-Glo colors, t-shirts for bands no one had ever heard of and retro ties. It was impossible to reconcile him with this large slump-shouldered figure standing by the counter in the 33rd Precinct. "You're with the police?"

   "I am." Daniel glanced at the desk clerk, who gave him a meaningful look. "Come back to my office," he said, and Gavin followed him back into the depths of the police station, to a small gray room with no windows, a plastic chair on either side of a table that seemed to be bolted to the floor.

   "Your office?"

   "I don't have an office. I use the interrogation room when I want a little privacy." Daniel closed the door and settled into the chair across from him. "So I'm walking by the front desk," he said, "on my way out to get a sandwich, and I'm thinking to myself, Isn't that Gavin Sasaki? The trumpet player? So I come a bit closer, and I swear I hear something about a missing kid. We got a missing kid on our hands here, Gavin?"

   "No, it's not— look, she wasn't abducted, it's nothing like that. I just don't know where she is and I'm worried about her. Like I was saying to your colleague, I think she might be in trouble and I don't know how to find her. She could be with her mother."

   "With her mother? But you've got, what, joint custody? Visitation rights?"

   "It's not that. I've never met the kid."

   Daniel held up his hand. "Back up," he said. "You've never met your daughter?"

   "Okay, look, let me start at the beginning."

   "Please do."

   "You remember my high school girlfriend, Anna? Used to hang out with us when we were in the quartet together?" A faint sense of absurdity: he couldn't shake the notion that he was being interrogated by a bass player. Difficult to think of Daniel as a cop. "She just dropped out and vanished at the end of the eleventh grade. I heard some rumor about how she'd gone to Georgia to live with an aunt. But then recently I found out that there's a kid in Sebastian, a ten-year-old girl with Anna's last name. She looks like me."

   Daniel had gone still.

   "And I just— I don't know if going to the police is the right way to do this." Gavin paused but Daniel only stared at him, a hard unreadable gaze, so he continued, foundering now, "As I was saying to your colleague, I have no idea how to go about finding her. She could be with her mother. I'm just afraid she's—"

   "You went to New York," Daniel said. An unpleasant smile was pulling at his mouth. " Right after we graduated high school."

   "Yeah, I did. I got into Columbia."

   "My most recent ex-wife's from New York," Daniel said. "She introduced me to the New York Star a while back. I still read it online sometimes when I can't sleep. It's no Times, as I'm sure you were painfully aware for the duration of your career there, but it's actually not a bad publication, all in all. Bit of a fabulist, aren't you?"

   "Daniel, I—"

   "Look, Gavin, it's nice to see you again. But seeing as how you lost your last job because you invent people, I'm having a little trouble with this phantom-kid story."

   "She exists," Gavin said. He had realized, too late, that Daniel didn't like him, but he couldn't think of a reason. It made no sense— hadn't they always been friendly? He was trying to recall if they'd had a falling-out all those years ago. He couldn't remember one. "Don't you remember when Anna left town? This was just after we graduated high school, right before I went to New York. I think she was pregnant with my kid."

   "You lose your job, life's not going so good, you get a little confused. It's a stress response. Look, I see it pretty often. I'm not entirely unsympathetic, but the thing is, I don't have a whole lot of time for this kind of thing. You know how fucked up this place is now? Nothing like when we were kids. We grew up in paradise, Gavin, comparatively speaking."

   "It never felt like paradise to me."

   "That's just because you got heatstroke every ten minutes. Place was pretty nice for everyone else. Look, I got this case on my desk now, I shouldn't be telling you this—" he folded his hands together on the table—"a thirteen-year-old trades her baby brother for a bag of Oxycontin and then runs away from home. Unbelievable, right? And yes, we got the baby back, but this is what we're dealing with down here. So listen, great to see you, and I hope you've been keeping up the trumpet—" he was standing now—"but all I ask, Gavin, is that you not waste my time with your invisible people."

   "Daniel, she's not some figment—"

   "You know, there's something my dad used to say to me, Gavin. He said, 'You start telling lies, son, no one ever believes you after that. It's like diving into a lake, and your clothes are never dry again.' So you're telling me this story about a phantom kid, but the thing is, Gavin, your clothes are all wet." He opened the door to the room. Gavin was at a loss for words, a little shaky, still trying to reconcile this man with the scrawny kid who'd played bass beside him in high school, trying to understand. "You've already done a swan dive, as far as I'm concerned."

H e  c r o s s e d  out the question mark after Sasha buying baby clothes at the mall in his notebook, and set the stolen glass dog on the windowsill. It was the only adornment in the square white room. He liked the way the light struck it. Under The Lola Quartet he wrote the names of the members besides him— Daniel Smith (bass), Sasha Lyon (drums), Jack Baranovsky (piano/saxophone)—considered a moment, and went to the kitchen to search for a phone book.

   There were ten Baranovskys in the city of Sebastian and none of them were Jack, but he remembered Jack's childhood address and found it in the directory, the third Baranovsky from the top. He called Jack's mother. Jack still lived in Sebastian, she told him. She gave him an address on Mortimer Street.

   "Perhaps it'll be good for him to see you," she said.

   It took him some time to find Jack's house. It was in one of the oldest parts of the suburbs, a run-down district near Sebastian's empty downtown core. The streets here were set in a grid, small houses crowded together behind unmown lawns. The end-of-afternoon light cast the street in a beautiful glow but the disintegration was obvious. There were rooftops with tarps over them, camping trailers parked in driveways with children sitting on their steps. Gavin slowed the car, counting off numbers.

   The house at 1196 Mortimer was set back from the street on a weed-choked lot, the front lawn half– taken over by exuberant palm fronds. There were broken bottles in the weeds by the driveway. The cement steps and the walkway were cracked. He rang the doorbell and waited for what seemed like a long time. The neighborhood was quiet. He heard cicadas and crickets and frogs, distant voices, a car. The smell of a barbecue in someone's yard. There was a flutter of movement in a curtained window across the street.

   The girl who opened the door was young, perhaps thirteen years old. There was something unkempt about her, neglected, glassy eyes and unbrushed hair. She needed a bath. She was very pretty, but she had the look of a girl for whom beauty had been a mixed blessing.

   "Hello," he said. "Is Jack Baranovsky here?"

   It seemed to take a moment for the question to travel through the air between them. When it reached her she blinked and nodded slowly.

   "Can I come in? He's a friend of mine."

   The delay was shorter this time. "Okay," she said. She stepped aside, and when he walked in he almost gagged. The smell of the house was mold, mostly, but also someone had spilled beer on a carpet. The air was still and hot.

   "Do you know where Jack is?"

   "There," she said. She made a vague motion toward the back of the house.

   The room he found at the end of the hallway was a kitchen, but it also seemed to be serving as a living room and a library. An overstuffed sofa took up half the room, books stacked precariously on the grimy linoleum all around it. The countertop by the stove was a mess of takeout containers, flies moving lazily above them. But here at least was a little more air, a sliding glass door open to an overgrown backyard.

   The man reading on the sofa looked up, and for a moment Gavin didn't recognize him. He was unshaven and his eyes were red. He badly needed a haircut. His clothes hung off him, and Gavin understood why his mother had sounded so sad on the phone.

   "Jack."

   "Hello," Jack said. He put his book down. There was no recognition in his eyes, but the sight of a man he didn't recognize in his kitchen didn't seem to trouble him.

   " Gavin Sasaki. High school. The Lola Quartet."

   "Oh, wow. Gavin." His face lit up like a child's. "Hey, sit down. I don't get that many visitors. It's so nice of you to come."

   "Hey, of course." There was a shifting movement of cockroaches along the edges of the room. "I'm back in Florida for a while, thought I'd look you up. How've you been?"

   "Oh, I'm good," Jack said. He was beaming. "I'm good, you know, just staying with a friend for a while."

   "So you don't live here?"

   Jack gestured through the sliding glass door, and for the first time Gavin noticed the tent out back. It was on a raised cement platform under an orange tree.

   "Nah, it's my friend Laila's house. I'm just camping here for a while," Jack said. "I always really liked camping, you know?"

   "I didn't know that. Jack, who's that girl who answered the door?"

   "Oh, that's Grace," Jack said. "She's Laila's little sister or her stepsister or something. I think she's just here for the summer." He blinked very slowly. "How are you doing? You doing okay?"

   "No," Gavin said. "Not really." The Jack he remembered, the Jack who'd leaned on the band-room door frame and flirted with every girl passing by in the hallway, seemed very far from here.

   "Well, I'm sorry to hear that." Jack really did sound sorry. "Things get bad sometimes."

   "Are all these books yours?"

   "All of them," Jack said. Gavin knelt to examine the stacks. Mostly jazz history, a few musicians' memoirs, a lot of Whitney Balliett. American Singers, New York Jazz Notes, Django Reinhardt: A Life in Music.

   "It's a good collection." Jack was beaming when Gavin looked up. "Do you still have that synesthesia thing you used to talk about in high school? You still see music?"

   " Still the brightest thing in the room," Jack said.

   "I always wished I could see it too." Gavin stood, but standing over Jack was a little awkward, so he sat on an arm of the sofa. "Jack, can I ask you something?"

   "Sure, sure. Ask me about anything except college. I don't like talking about college very much."

   "Do you remember that night when we played the concert behind the school?"

   Jack blinked, concentrating. "Why? What concert?"

   "I was just thinking about it the other day. It was the last performance we did. We played 'Bei Mir Bist Du Schön' twice and Taylor was singing."

   " 'Bei Mir Bist Du Schön.' " Jack sounded doubtful. "I think I remember that one."

   "We used to win competitions with that song," Gavin said. "But this concert, we were playing on the back of Taylor's dad's pickup truck. We drove it onto school grounds and parked behind the gym, used it as a stage."

   "But how would we all fit in the bed of a pickup truck? Me, you, Sasha, Daniel, the double bass, the drum kit?"

   Gavin was silent. He couldn't remember how they'd all fit. It seemed improbable in retrospect.

   "I mean, the drums alone," Jack said. "Drum kits are kind of big."

   "Okay, so maybe it wasn't in the back of a pickup truck," Gavin said, "maybe I'm remembering wrong, but it was definitely behind the school in the unbelievable heat. And then Anna came up to the edge of where the swing kids were dancing and threw a paper airplane, and—"

   "A paper airplane?"

   "My point is, Anna came to the concert that night," Gavin said. "You remember her? My high school girlfriend?"

   "Sure. Short blond hair, real pretty."

   "Well, she was pretty, but her hair was long and dark. That was the last time I saw her. Do you know what happened to her? Back then, or after high school?"

   Jack shrugged and looked away. His smile was gone. He was fum bling in his pocket. "Hey," he said, "you don't mind, do you? I've got this back problem." He held up an unlabeled bottle of pills.

   "Go ahead," Gavin said. Jack swallowed three without water. " Sorry about your back."

   "Yeah, well. The pills help."

   "I need to know," Gavin said. "I really need to know where she is. I know you and her were friendly, I mean, we were all friendly, I just thought maybe you'd kept in touch. I wondered if you ever saw her again after that concert."

   Jack leaned back against the sofa cushions. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment before he spoke. "You should ask Daniel about all this, Gavin."

   "Daniel as in Daniel Smith? The bass player who turned into an asshole cop?"

   "He helps me out sometimes," Jack said. "You shouldn't call him that. He's nice." His eyes were drifting shut.

   "Jack! Jack, wake up."

   Jack's eyelids fluttered open.

   "Sorry," he said. "Nodding off when there's company. Way to be a bad host, right?"

   "It's okay," Gavin said. "When was the last time you saw Anna?"

   "I dunno. While back." Jack's eyes were closing again. "Few years ago."

   "How about Chloe?"

   " Sweet kid," Jack murmured.

   "Jack," Gavin said, but it was hopeless. Jack was snoring softly. Gavin stood and checked his clothing for cockroaches. Out in the darkened hallway the girl was standing where he'd left her. Her eyes were closed and she was leaning against the wall, her forehead pressed to the edge of the door frame. He remembered a fairy tale he'd read as a kid, or perhaps Eilo had read it to him— a story about a castle in the middle of a labyrinth of thorns, everyone sleeping for a century inside. There was something eerie about the drugged silence of the house, a spellbound stillness that made him want to run. Gavin held his cell phone near the girl's face and took her picture. She startled awake at the digital click of the shutter and stared at him, blinking. He closed the door, went back to his car and drove as quickly as possible away from there.

   In his room at Eilo's house he sat on his mattress with the notebook on his lap. He wrote Has met Chloe and Pills under Jack's name.

   Gavin put the notebook down and went to the window. The squalor of the house and the tent in the backyard weren't things he wanted to think about. He'd always liked Sasha and Daniel but Jack was the one he'd felt closest to. Gavin wore fedoras and read noir and watched Chinatown over and over again and Jack understood, Jack was in the wrong decade too, Jack was going to be a jazzman. There had been long stoned hours in Jack's basement after school, listening to jazz and talking about how things used to be, how things were going to be, talking about anywhere other than the stultifying present.

   Gavin's room was at the back of the house, facing the freeway. On the far side of the yard pylons rose up with dark shadows beneath them, cars passing in a blur of light high above. How could he have let Jack slip away so completely? The traffic was no more than two hundred yards from him, but with the windows closed the room was silent. There were evenings when he didn't understand the world at all.

 
"Y o u ' r e  c e r t a i n  you don't know where they went?" he asked Eilo that night. " Chloe and that woman she was with?" They were eating Thai food out of takeout containers.

   "I drove by the house two days after I took the photograph," Eilo said. "They were gone already."

   "No forwarding address?"

   " These people don't always leave forwarding addresses," Eilo said. "They used to, before the economy tanked, but sometimes now they just disappear."

   "I've been thinking about trying to find them," Gavin said.

   "Good luck," Eilo said. "I wouldn't know where to begin. Have you thought of hiring a private investigator?"

   I want to be the private investigator. He couldn't bring himself to tell her this. "I'll look into it," he said.

In t h e morning Gavin returned to the police station.

   "I'm surprised to see you again," Daniel said. He had kept Gavin waiting for an hour. His fingers tapped almost silently on the side of his coffee cup, a nervous flicker. "Aren't you hot? Wearing a fedora in this heat?"

   "It's a summer fedora," Gavin said.

   "And here some of us make do with baseball caps."

   "I went to visit our multitalented piano and saxophone player yesterday," Gavin said. "You remember Jack? He speaks highly of you."

   Daniel sighed and his face softened a little. "Sure," he said, "I try to keep an eye on him. He's been arrested a couple times."

   "I asked him about Anna," Gavin said, "and he said to ask you."

   "Me? Why would I know anything about your high school girlfriend?"

   "Well, she hung out with us at school, with the quartet. We were all friends."

   "I don't know that you were much of a friend to her. Was there some reason you wanted to see me, Gavin, or is this strictly a social call?"

   "What do you mean by that comment? How was I not a friend to her?"

   "I'm pretty busy," Daniel said. "You know, doing police work and stuff. I'm going to get back to work now."

   "Okay, look, the main reason I came is, Jack's staying in this house on Mortimer Street—"

   "Eleven ninety-six Mortimer," Daniel said. "I've been there. Lovely home, isn't it?"

   "A girl answered the door when I knocked. No older than thirteen or fourteen, maybe twelve, stoned out of her mind. Jack said she was his roommate's sister or her stepsister or something, just staying there for a while. I came to see you because I thought maybe she was a runaway."

   Daniel took a slow sip of coffee. "I'm getting the strangest sense of déjà vu," he said. "Have you talked to a shrink about these phantom girls you've been seeing?"

   "I knew you wouldn't believe me. I took her picture." He passed Daniel his cell phone and Daniel studied the image for a moment. The phone looked very small in his hand. "Her name's Grace."

   "Wait here," Daniel said. He pushed himself up on the edge of the table and left the room. Gavin waited alone in the interrogation room for twenty minutes, listening to the hum of central air conditioning and staring at the fine cracks in the paint on the opposite wall until Daniel returned.

   "Thanks for the photo," Daniel said. He was awkward now, looking away. "The tip might be useful to us."

   "A runaway's got to be worth a couple of questions, right?"

   "Gavin—"

"Two minutes of your time."

"Fine," Daniel said. "A couple of questions."

"Do you know what happened to Anna after high school?"

   "She left town after the eleventh grade and went to live with her aunt in Georgia. I thought everyone knew that."

   "You know what's funny? She was my girlfriend for two years and we spent half our waking hours together, and she never so much as mentioned that aunt in Georgia."

   "I've really got an awful lot of work to do," Daniel said. He opened the door.

   "You said two questions."

   "Thanks for stopping by, Gavin."

   "My cell phone?"

   "See, now there's your second question. It's at the front desk."

   Gavin walked back out into the heat with his fedora in his hands.