Eighteen

Awoman called Gavin a vulture once. She'd signed a bad mortgage and she was coming undone. He sensed her derangement as he came into her house, a tension in the air as in the hour before an electrical storm. She was pinch-faced and furious, sweating in her kitchen in a dress with an enormous flower pattern that reminded him of the curtains in his first apartment. He'd been working for Eilo for some weeks now and had decided that the people who'd done this to themselves were the angriest. The ones who were losing their houses because they'd already lost their jobs were despairing. The ones who were losing their houses because they hadn't understood their mortgages wanted to kill him.

   ". . . Just a bloodsucking leech," the woman said, at the end of an extended tirade.

   "A leech." Gavin was trying to keep his voice mild. "A moment ago you said I was a vulture."

   "I'm going to be homeless," she said, "and you're making money off me."

   He couldn't argue with this. The arguments Eilo had given him— You're performing a necessary service for a legitimate financial institution, if we don't do this someone else will, it was their responsibility to pay their mortgages and they didn't, etc.—seemed weak as he stood in this peach-and-blue kitchen on a cul-de-sac near his old high school. He looked down at the papers in his hands.

   "Perhaps," he said, "you were given bad advice when you signed the loan."

   "Perhaps," she said, "you should get the fuck out of my kitchen."

   "The next person after me will be a sheriff's deputy," he said. "I'm authorized to offer you—"

   "I don't want your cash-for-keys deal. I want the people who are doing this to me to go to prison for the rest of their unnatural lives." Her voice had risen. He saw movement in the doorway. A small child was staring at him. The child's eyes were very large and there seemed to be applesauce on his face.

   "I see," he said.

   "Including you," she said, although she was losing steam now. There were tears in her eyes. "People like you should probably just die in prison."

   "No one did this to you," Gavin said. "You did this to yourself." She was sputtering at him when he left. He drove four blocks, pulled over on a side street and spent some time staring at nothing, at pale stucco houses and close-cut lawns, each house its own kingdom with souls passing through. There were moments when he thought there might be something hidden in his job, some as-yet-ungrasped larger meaning amid all these people, their fear and their sadness and their disappearing homes, but mostly his work just made him dislike houses. These enormous anchors that people tied to their lives.

. . .

A  f e w  weeks after his arrival Gavin moved to Sebastian's empty downtown core. It was unclear to him how these streets had become so vacant, why everyone had decided that their fortunes lay on the perimeter, in an ever-expanding sprawl of split-level houses with screened-in back decks and kidney-shaped swimming pools and azaleas and snakes.

   "Snakes?" Eilo repeated, in the car on the way to his new apartment with all his worldly belongings in the backseat. She wanted to see his new place. She didn't understand why he was moving.

   "Pythons," Gavin said. "They just really bother me, ever since I did that story for the Star."

   "That makes no sense, Gavin. It's not like they're slithering all over the backyard."

   Pythons weren't the reason. He wanted to be back on concrete, in the company of neon lights. He'd found a one-bedroom apartment above a Laundromat. It was small, but it would be his, and the rent was cheap. The neighborhood was a lost section of grid in between a handful of squat glass office complexes and a mall. His street was barely two blocks long and all but deserted, a parallel row of low run-down buildings that ended in the mall's parking lot, but he felt no menace. This street was only empty, not dangerous. There was an open-all-night Chinese restaurant across from his apartment.

   They unloaded the car in the twilight. His worldly belongings didn't amount to much. Two boxes of new clothes, bedding that Eilo was giving him, the carry-on bag that he'd brought from New York.

   "You could stay with me for longer, you know," Eilo said.

   "I need my own place," he said. "I've been staying with you for weeks."

   "You're making good money. You could rent a perfectly nice house somewhere."

   "But I don't like houses," Gavin said. "I don't need that much space."

   It wasn't just that. It was all the obvious things, of course— he thought he'd feel better about his life if he were living less obviously off the charity of his sister— but it was also that he needed a private base of operations from which to conduct his investigation. All his thoughts were of Anna and the little girl.

Th e  m o r n i n g  sunlight was brilliant in the new apartment. What was strange was that he felt less alone here than he had in New York. He thought it was perhaps because Karen had never occupied these rooms, therefore her absence didn't fill them. He purchased some cheap furniture, a bed and a mattress, a desk. He filled the second page of his notebook with questions. Why does Daniel Smith dislike me? Where are Chloe and Anna? What does Sasha know? Who were Anna's friends in high school?

   It was almost like being a reporter again. He woke every morning thinking of his secret investigation, and it was the last thing he thought of before he went to sleep.

W h o  h a d Anna been close to in high school? No one, it seemed, when he examined his memories. Almost everyone had liked her but she had had no close friends. Why hadn't he realized this at the time? He was trying to take notes on the people in her life one evening in the apartment, but his pen was stalled after her half-sister's name. Her friends had been a shifty, druggy crowd whom she'd mostly abandoned by the time he had known her, derelicts from her old school. He didn't know any of their names. She'd been nominally involved in the Drama program after she'd transferred to his school, but only to the extent that she was a stagehand in their productions and helped out with costumes and sets. If she'd had Drama friends, he didn't remember them. She'd been on the outskirts of the music scene, but only because she'd been dating him. She wasn't really interested in the kind of music that was being played at the school. She'd spent time with the quartet and with their occasional singer, Taylor.

   He found himself reaching for the phone almost without meaning to. His fingertips still retained the memory of Karen's cell number, the pattern on the keypad.

   "It's me," he said.

   "It's you." Karen's voice was neutral. "How are you, Gavin?"

   "I moved back to Florida," he said. "I lost my job."

   "Yeah, I saw that story about you." Her voice softened then, as if she'd seen him wince. "I'm sorry. That's probably the last thing you want to talk about."

   "It's okay," he said. "I don't even know why I did it." There was a moment of silence.

   "You blew up your career," she said, "and you don't know why?"

   "It was difficult after you left," he said. "You know it wasn't what I wanted." She was silent. "And then something happened, I found out I had a—" But children were a terrible topic—"I got some news," he said, floundering. "I was horribly distracted. I think I lost my mind a little bit."

   She had nothing to say to this.

   "But anyway," he said, "how have you been?"

   "I'm okay." She was quiet for a moment. "Florida," she said. "I thought you hated hot weather."

"I didn't have anywhere else to go."

   "You always said you'd move to Chicago," she said, "if you ever got tired of New York."

   " Maybe I'll go there someday. I've been saving money. You remember that weekend we spent there?" The memory had ambushed him that morning in the shower. It had been spring and the trees were blooming. They'd bought pretzels from a street vendor and looked at the animals in Lincoln Park Zoo. They'd had a picnic and Karen had fallen asleep on the grass in Hyde Park.

   "It was a nice weekend," she said. "Listen, Gavin, I have to get back to work. I'd love to talk longer, but . . ."

   "You got a new job? Congratulations." She'd been an administrative assistant at Lehman Brothers until the day the firm collapsed.

   "I'm a temporary night-shift proofreader," she said. "It barely qualifies as employment. Goodnight, Gavin."

   " Good night," he said. He disconnected and held the phone in his hands for a moment. The apartment was silent except for the air conditioner, the soft hum of the fridge.

   Gavin went downstairs to the quiet street. The Laundromat below his apartment was alight, dryers spinning, a woman folding laundry. He drove to the house where Anna and Sasha's mother had lived, but now the name on the mailbox was Sabharwal and there were small unfamiliar children playing in the front yard, throwing a Frisbee that shone white in the gathering darkness.

G a v i n  l e t  a few days slide past in the heat. The temperature was soaring and he found it difficult to be outside. It was almost a pleasure to lose himself in work. The foreclosures were endless. He had as many houses to inspect as he could handle. But he couldn't stop thinking about Anna or the child, an obsessive worry that tugged him out of sleep at night, so the investigation continued. He found Taylor after a half-hour of online stalking, called her and drove at her invitation to a gated community in a section of town that he thought might not have existed when he'd lived here before. He waited ten minutes in his car for his turn with the security guard, who was taking his time interrogating a contractor in a pickup truck.

   Inside the gates of the subdivision the streets curved around a park, and Taylor's house was on one of the outer loops. It was pink with gardens all around it, a fountain out front. When he cut the engine the quiet was almost complete. He got out of the car and stood for a moment listening to the falling water. The windows of the house reflected the sky and dark palm fronds.

   "I'm sorry I'm late," he said, when she opened the door. "The gates—" he made a vague gesture back toward the entrance, but she only smiled at him blankly. "I had to wait forever to get through," he said. "The security guard."

   "I don't understand," she said, although not unkindly, so he started from the beginning again and said, " Sorry I'm late," which seemed to reset the conversation. In her immaculate blue-and-white kitchen she poured lemonade over ice and talked about her life. A year in a music program at a school he'd never heard of, a shift in priorities that led to a BA in finance and then to a job at a bank, a marriage—"Todd's at a conference in Miami, otherwise he'd be here"—unrealized dreams of traveling the world—"I always thought I'd see everything, but then I had kids, so, you know"—and the kids, yes, Amy and Jaden, twins, at their summer day camp this afternoon. Gavin had never gone to camp as a kid— his pediatrician had suggested that a boy who made repeated visits to the ER with heat exhaustion was perhaps not ideally suited to outdoor summer activities in Florida— and he found himself imagining what it might be like. Lakes and sunlight, bright water. It would be nice to get out of the suburbs, he thought. There was so much green here, such riotous growth, but nothing close to true wilderness. When was the last time he'd been away from a city, from a suburb, from clipped lawns and cement? He was thinking about the time he'd gone camping with Karen in upstate New York, the perfect quiet in the morning, a bird gliding over a lake, the smell of tent fabric in sunlight. He realized that Taylor was still talking. He had been looking at her and smiling and nodding as his thoughts wandered. She was still beautiful. The same blue eyes and cascading blond hair, the same smile. He found himself wondering idly if she might want to sleep with him. She was talking about her garden now, and had been for a while. His gaze drifted to the microwave clock. She'd been talking about herself for a little under an hour.

   "Well," she said finally, "it's just so great to catch up with you. How's your life been?"

   This was a competition, he realized. She'd presented him with a gorgeous life and now she wanted to hold his life up to the light and compare. He thought about the photograph of himself on the front page of the New York Star and briefly considered spinning something halfway plausible, I am a famous reporter taking some time off to write a book on Florida's exotic wildlife problem, but he didn't want to lie anymore and he knew he wasn't famous so much as disgraced.

   "Well," he said, "I went to Columbia. I was a reporter at the New York Star. I met a girl and we were going to get married, but then she had a miscarriage in the second trimester and she didn't want to be with me anymore after that. I lost my job and moved back to Florida. I'm selling real estate with my sister."

   "Oh," Taylor said. She was looking at him a little desperately, her half-smile slipping. She wanted lightness, he realized. She wanted to be saved by a self-deprecating one-liner that might keep things moving. She'd told him nothing very serious about herself. If her life had held the slightest trace of sorrow or any disappointments deeper than her postponed ambition to travel the world, she'd kept it out of the narrative. He was acutely aware of the soft hum of central air conditioning, the far-off drone of a lawnmower.

   "But anyway," he said, "do you still keep up with anyone from high school?"

   "Oh, I do." She smiled to thank him for the conversational rescue and then launched a twenty-minute monologue concerning people whom Gavin hadn't thought of in a decade, trips she'd taken with her high school girlfriends, gossip about people he barely remembered, the last reunion she'd been to. Kind of a sad affair actually, just fifty or so people standing around under streamers in the high school gymnasium—

   "Was Anna Montgomery there?" Gavin asked. "You two were in the same grade, weren't you?"

   "Anna? Your high school girlfriend? No. I mean yes, we were in the same year, but she wasn't there at the reunion. You know, I haven't seen her in so long," she said.

   "Do you remember the last time you saw her?"

   "Hoping to rekindle the flame?" Taylor widened her eyes as she said this, and Gavin understood for the first time that she was killingly bored.

   "We were close," he said, "and I just wanted to find out what'd become of her. It's like she disappeared from the face of the earth."

   "You should maybe ask Daniel about her," Taylor said.

   " Really. Why Daniel?"

   "It's probably nothing. But do you remember the Lola Quartet's last concert?"

   "Behind the school," Gavin said. "We were playing on the back of your father's pickup truck."

   "Yes," she said. "Exactly. I have such vivid memories of that concert, I guess because it was the last one. Do you know, I haven't sung 'Bei Mir Bist Du Schön' since that night? And it was one of my favorite songs. But anyway, that was the last time I saw her. We were playing that song and I remember you took off in the middle of it, just ran into the woods like you were going to be sick or something. We didn't know what the matter was but we were winding down anyway, that was our last song of the night. It was something like two o'clock in the morning, and I remember I saw Anna there. I noticed because she hadn't been there before, it was like she'd just stepped out of the woods, and I thought it was weird for her to come so late in the evening when everything was done, but I was talking to my boyfriend at the time— you remember Brian? That guy who did the penguin imitations?"

   Gavin didn't remember Brian or his penguin imitations. He nodded anyway.

   "I was talking to him, so I didn't talk to Anna when I saw her. But I remember I looked up a while later," she said, "and she was walking around the side of the school with Daniel, and he was carrying his instrument and she was carrying a duffel bag. I thought it was strange for them to be going off together. I mean she was your girlfriend, not his. But there'd been all this talk about her and I thought, you know, we're all friends anyway so it's probably nothing. But then I remembered it later because when school started up again in September she wasn't there, and it occurred to me that that had been the last time I'd seen her, disappearing with Daniel that night. I never saw her again."

   "What kind of talk?" Gavin asked.

   "What?"

   "You said there'd been all this talk about her. What kind of talk had there been?"

   Taylor looked away from him and stood up. "Oh, you know how high school was," she said. "We were all just bored suburban kids telling vicious rumors about each other."

   Did he know how high school was? He knew he should, but his memories of those years were for the most part hazy. He remembered small details. The clean waxed-floor scent of the corridors, a band teacher named Mr. Winters raising his baton with pure joy in his eyes, the way sunlight angled through the windows of a particular classroom in the afternoons, Daniel and Sasha and Jack all around him with their instruments and Anna listening somewhere off to the side, long hours in the van driving to music competitions, the pine-scented-disinfectant smell of the locker rooms, a red pencil case with a zipper. "Like what?" he asked. "What were the rumors you remember?"

   She was refilling their glasses.

   "Just, you know, unkind things . . ."

   "Come on, Taylor, I can take it. What were they saying about her?"

   "They said— you know, it's stupid, just stupid rumors— they said she was . . . well, they said she was seeing people. They said it was a bit of a crowded field there right before she left school, toward the end." She returned the lemonade pitcher to the fridge. "I'm sorry. It's nasty. I know it's not true."

   "How would you know that?"

   "Well, it's just— I guess I should say I hope it's not true. I don't like that kind of thing. They said she was sleeping around, and then the story was that she'd gone to live with her aunt in Georgia, but there was this crazy rumor that she'd left school because she was pregnant and had a miscarriage, or sometimes the rumor was that she'd had a baby and was still living in Florida, just one or two towns over. You know, just rumors. Crazy stuff."

   "What about Anna's sister?" Gavin asked. "You ever see Sasha around?"

   "Never," Taylor said. "I don't know what happened to her."

   He left her house soon after that—"We should do this again," they told one another without conviction— and drove out of the closed streets of the subdivision, past the security guard and out into the larger world. It was five o'clock. He drove to the police station and parked his car within view of the front door— the station shared parking with a mall and an auto-body shop, so he felt reasonably inconspicuous— and waited until Daniel appeared in the station doorway around six.

   Daniel didn't move quickly. He was slow, distracted, jingling the change in his pockets and staring at the pavement. He looked up when Gavin said his name.

   "You're so persistent," Daniel said. "I admire that about you."

   "Daniel, I need to talk to you."

   "I don't really have a lot to say to you, Gavin. I don't think we know each other very well." Daniel had resumed his slow progress across the parking lot. "High school was a very long time ago."

   "Daniel—" He was almost dancing at Daniel's side, so agitated that he couldn't be still. "Daniel, every time I ask anyone about Anna, they tell me to talk to you."

   " Really."

   "Daniel, I know she had a baby. I think the baby was mine."

   "That's none of my business," Daniel said, "and again, that was really quite a while ago, wasn't it?" He swatted at a drip of sweat on his forehead. "Why don't you drop it, Gavin?"

   "Because I think she's my kid," Gavin said. "I want to find her and make sure she's okay."

   "And make sure she's okay?" They'd reached Daniel's car, a gray Jeep with a dented fender and rust on the side. "If you'd been paying more attention ten years ago—"

   "I want to do the right thing. I'm trying to do something good here."

   Daniel looked at him for a moment.

   "This is just a shot at redemption for you," he said. "You don't even know the kid. You fucked up your life in New York and you feel like a failure, so now you want to do something good."

   "So the kid exists," Gavin said. " Thank you for confirming that."

   "Now that we've established your superb interrogative skills, I'd appreciate it tremendously if you'd step away from my car."

   "Can you please just tell me where Anna is? That's all I want to know."

   "This isn't something you want to be involved in." Daniel was getting into the Jeep. "I don't want to see you again. Are we clear?"

   Gavin stepped back, stung, and Daniel closed the Jeep door.

   "I've known you since the first grade," Gavin said. "All I want is to talk to you for a minute."

   "If you knew more, you'd thank me," Daniel said. "Can you just forget about this? All of it? I'm giving you a gift here."

   He left Gavin standing alone in the heat of the parking lot. Gavin thought for a moment about whether he could forget about it, but found that he couldn't.

T h e  n e x t  afternoon at five o'clock Gavin was waiting in the parking lot outside the police station again, but this time he stayed in his car. He had bought pizza and orange soda, and the pizza had given the car a stale pepperoni smell that he knew was going to linger. He had to keep the engine running, because without the air conditioner the car heated quickly and he was afraid he'd black out if it got too hot. He'd run out of orange soda and was debating whether to make a run for another bottle when Daniel emerged from the police station. Daniel crossed the parking lot to his Jeep, and Gavin eased his car out of the lot behind him.

H e  h a d  two jobs after that. There was the job he did for Eilo, the eight or nine hours he spent at her service. Driving to visit and photograph houses, negotiating with the residents of foreclosed homes, writing up property descriptions at his desk. Eilo liked his work. He neither enjoyed nor particularly disliked the occupation. He wanted only to reach the evening, when the real work began. His secret investigation, the story he was tracking, the focused hours spent waiting for Daniel to appear in the doorway of the police station.

   Gavin recognized himself in the evenings— a newspaperman, a private investigator, a man who chased stories and sought out clues— but he didn't recognize Daniel. It was almost inconceivable that this was the same Daniel he'd known all his life until he'd left for New York. He wouldn't have imagined that a person could change so completely, but then, he didn't recognize Jack either.

   Daniel always came out of the police station with slumped shoulders, walking slowly with his hands in his pockets. He had an air of perpetual distraction, lost to the world, which made it easy to trail him undetected. He seemed to work six days a week. On two of those days he went to the elementary school, where he picked up his four children. They swarmed all around him, a very small set of twins and two a little bigger. They showed him drawings they'd made and ribbons for accomplishments, papers with stars on them that caught the light from a distance, and in those moments Daniel was a changed man. He smiled, he touched their hair and said things that made them giggle, he inspected every ribbon and drawing. He drove them to his home— a house that looked from the outside to be too small for four children— in a new part of the suburbs that at first Gavin didn't know very well, a section that seemed to have radiated outward from the blank epicenter of a golf course.

   Divorced, Gavin decided. Because on the other days Daniel took a different route and drove home alone, avoided the vicinity of the elementary school even though driving near the school would have been faster, parked his car in the driveway and walked to the front door without looking up from his feet. A light went on in one room on the ground floor. All the other windows stayed dark. Some time later dinner arrived, usually in a pizza delivery car. Gavin always parked down the street behind another vehicle, cut his engine and opened the window. He sat alone in his car, watching and waiting, sometimes falling asleep.

   He was frightening himself.

T h e  p r o b l e m  was that Gavin wasn't really sure what he was looking for, or whether he'd recognize it if he saw it. Daniel's routine was absolute. It wasn't that Gavin was necessarily expecting Anna or the child to simply appear at Daniel's house, if Anna was even in Florida, if Anna was still alive, if the child hadn't vanished into the hell of a homeless shelter. He was looking for something more subtle, a sign of some kind, but he couldn't imagine what it would look like or if he might have missed it a dozen times already. He brought his beloved 1973 Yashica and took photographs of Daniel leaving the police station, photographs of Daniel's house and of the pizza-delivery guy, but he didn't know what he was documenting aside from Daniel's apparently unremarkable life. He was tired from the late nights, and frustrated. In the office with Eilo he drank cup after cup of coffee until his heart raced.

   There was more work than they could handle, a new foreclosure or two every day. She was talking about hiring more people. She had a gardener working for her now, a quiet man named Carlos who mowed lawns and planted flowers in front of the houses they were trying to sell. Sometimes instead of going to the police station to follow Daniel home he stayed at Eilo's house and they ate dinner together picnic-style on the living room floor, the way they had when he'd first come down reeling from New York.

   "What do you do with yourself in the evenings?" she asked.

   "Not much," he said. "Read, watch TV, do crossword puzzles. Drive around." He'd considered telling her about the search for Anna and the little girl, but there was something he liked about having one part of his life that was only his. He'd lost so much in New York and had been left with so little.

   On a Friday afternoon he drove back to Mortimer Street. It was one of those golden-light afternoons when the suburbs are at their most beautiful. The air dense with humidity and the heat like a diving bell, sound muffled within. Gavin rang the doorbell. No one came to the door. He stood for a while on the cracked front step before he remembered Jack's tent in the backyard.

   He walked around the side of the house, pushing through overgrown bushes that he couldn't identify, dark waxy leaves and bright flowers. An airplane droned in the sky overhead. He stepped out into the yard, grass up to his knees.

   Gavin heard his name, but it was a moment before he saw Jack. He was sitting alone under an orange tree in a white plastic lawn chair, a bottle of Gatorade in his hand. There was a book open on his lap.

"You came back," Jack said.

   "Of course I did." There were two other plastic chairs in the shade of the orange tree. He sat in the one closest to Jack. "Were you working today?"

   Jack was wearing what looked like a uniform, a red polo shirt and black trousers. He was covered in dust. "My friend's got a company," he said. "I help rip carpets out."

   "That sounds difficult."

   "It's okay. It pays enough to get by." Jack didn't seem to want to talk about it.

   "What are you reading?"

   Jack passed him the book. Django Reinhardt: A Life. It was dog-eared and battered, small tears along the bottom of the dust jacket. Gavin opened the front cover and read the inscription: To my beloved son Liam on the occasion of his high school graduation with love and congratulations.—G.

   "I wonder who Liam was," Gavin said. He'd found similar inscriptions in books he'd bought used.

   "Liam? My roommate from college. You just missed him, actually." Jack took the book back from Gavin and set it on the grass by his lawn chair. "He used to do this thing," Jack said, "back in music school. It was pretty funny, he'd be drunk or whatever, and he'd say—" Jack raised his Gatorade bottle and dropped his voice—" 'My name is Liam Deval, and I am going to be famous.' "

   "Wait," Gavin said, "Liam Deval? The guitarist? I used to listen to him play in New York."

   "Yeah, he was up there for a long time. Always meant to visit him there." Jack's gaze was distant. Aside from his disastrous foray into South Carolina, Jack had never left the state of Florida.

   "But he's here now?"

"Yeah, he's visiting Anna," Jack said.

"What?"

   "I didn't— I'm sorry," Jack said, "I'm sorry, I always screw up." He was reaching into his pocket. Gavin looked away while he measured three pills into his hand.

   "Did you just say Liam Deval's in Florida because of Anna?"

   "I can't talk about it," Jack said. "I can't talk about Anna. I promised I wouldn't."

   "Promised who?"

   "Deval," Jack said. He looked like he wanted to cry. "Forget I said anything."

   "It's okay," Gavin said. "It's okay. We won't talk about Anna."

   Jack nodded. He was looking at his feet.

   "But maybe you could tell me about Deval," Gavin said. "I really love his music."

   "Yeah, he's good. Really good. I mean, I was sort of good. I maybe had something. But Deval, he had the music." Jack smiled. "He was trying to be Django Reinhardt. And you know what? He might be as good as Reinhardt was."

   "Where's he staying? I'd love to meet him."

   "I don't know," Jack said. "A hotel somewhere, I guess. Oh wait, wait, he told me." Jack rested his head on the back of the chair and stared into space. He was still for so long that Gavin glanced up to see what he was looking at. The leaves of the orange tree were brilliant green against the hazy sky. "The Decker," Jack said.

   "The Decker?"

   "It was something like that. The Dracker, or the Decker, or something."

   "He say if he was coming back?" The heat was making Gavin's head swim. He wanted to lie down.

   "No," Jack said, "but I hope he comes back. He said he was going to go visit Daniel."

   "Of course he was."

   "Did you just say something?"

   "Nothing. Hey, is he playing anywhere while he's here?"

   "Sure," Jack said. "He's got a gig at the Lemon Club."

T h e  L e m o n  Club had been open for thirty years and in high school Gavin had gone there a few times, trying to be sophisticated, trying to grasp hold of something that he might use to pull himself up toward adulthood, but he could never find it and as a teenager he'd felt uneasy there, pitifully young, out of his depth and unable to swim. The Lemon Club was a stop on the way to Miami and he'd seen a few big names there. The one he remembered best was a trumpet player, Bert Johnston. He'd brought Anna there in his last year of high school. They'd sat together at a round table just big enough for his Pepsi and her ginger ale— he wished he could order wine for both of them but didn't want to risk being laughed at by the bartender in front of her— and they listened to Bert Johnston's trumpet wail and sing. When Anna reached for his hand he didn't notice, only realized later that her hand was in his and he couldn't remember how it had ended up there. It was too warm in the club, the air conditioner laboring and spitting water over the door, and normally this would have bothered him but that night he was transfixed, that night things were becoming clearer. He was watching Bert Johnston and realizing that he wasn't going to be a musician. It wasn't an unpleasant revelation, just an understanding that his life was going to go in one direction and not another.

"I'll never be that good," he told Anna later, not upset, just stating

the fact, but she mistook his tone and tried to console him. The thought of the practice it would take to be a professional musician made him weary. He was reading a lot of noir and wearing a fedora, and he'd already developed backup plans. If he couldn't be a jazz musician he was going to be a newspaperman. If he couldn't be a newspaperman he was going to be a private detective.

   The Lemon Club was already a little decrepit in his memories, but it had declined further since then and now the strip-mall parking lot was cracked and had a small palm tree growing out of the middle of it. Most of the other tenants were gone, sections of the mall boarded up. The only other tenants were an off-track betting parlor, an evangelical church and a pizza place with a torn awning.

   In his memories the interior was glamorous, but all night places are cheaper-looking in daylight and with the curtains opened the light picked up the grit in the upholstery, the swimming galaxies of dust motes in the air.

   "Help you?" the bartender asked, and Gavin realized he was the only customer. The bartender wasn't the sullen-looking old man Gavin remembered. He was young and blond and looked somehow like a lifeguard.

   "I was hoping to see the listings for the next couple months," Gavin said. "I heard a jazz guitarist I like might be coming through town." He realized that it was stupid to say "jazz" in that sentence— it was after all a club devoted to this and no other kind of music— but the new bartender was more forgiving than the old bartender had been and didn't even smirk or tell him to get lost, just produced a photocopy of a calendar from behind the bar and scanned it for a moment before he passed it to Gavin.

   "I think you maybe mean Deval?" he said. "Only guitarist I see here."

   The calendar read Deval & Morelli, but Morelli's name had been crossed out.

   "Can I keep this?" Gavin asked. The bartender nodded. Deval was scheduled to play in three nights. Gavin went to Jack's house every day after work and sat with him in the backyard under the orange tree, but Liam Deval didn't appear and Jack revealed nothing except his interest in jazz history and the extent of his pill addiction.

   On Friday Gavin bought a dark red shirt with gray pinstripes, drove to the Lemon Club an hour before the set and established himself at a small table in the darkest corner, farthest from the stage. He wanted to be invisible. Only a few other people were here at this hour— a couple sitting at a table by the stage, a man at the end of the bar with a tattoo of a goldfish on his neck. Gavin ordered a pint of Guinness. He'd brought his notebook with him, as if he really were either a newspaperman or a detective. His new shirt had cufflinks and he caught himself fiddling with them as he waited.

   The club filled slowly. A bass player made his way between the tables and began tuning his instrument. He was followed a few minutes later by a drummer, but there was no sign of Deval. A saxophonist had appeared— a saxophonist? With Deval, who so far as Gavin knew only ever played with Morelli, a bassist, sometimes a drummer?—and he was talking to the bass player while the drummer assembled his kit. At nine twenty the bartender came to the stage and tapped lightly on a microphone. There'd been a substitution, he said. Liam Deval had had to remain in New York at the last minute, a family emergency, but fortunately the great Chicago saxophonist Pedro Lang— who looked too young to be called the great anything, in Gavin's opinion— was in town a day early for his show tomorrow night and had graciously agreed to bless them with his presence two nights in a row and so without further ado, etc., and applause filled the room while Gavin finished his beer.

   He thought about leaving but it was nice to be out in the evening for once, away from the quiet of his apartment with the television and the recorded music and his notes, not waiting in his car outside Daniel's house like a stalker. The saxophone player really was great, mesmerizing actually. Everyone who'd arrived to hear Deval stayed to watch him except for the man at the end of the bar whom Gavin had noticed when he came in, who settled up with the bartender and left just before the music began.

I n  t h e  morning Gavin sat at his desk in Eilo's rec room looking at yellow-pages listings of local motels with names similar to Decker or Dracker, run-down places by highways— Cable TV! Jacuzzi in Penthouse Suite!—and trying to ignore his headache. The saxophonist had been good and it was a pleasure to lose himself in music, to sit alone without having to talk to anyone. There was a span of time when he'd thought of nothing but the sound.

   The Draker Motel had purchased a square ad with a minuscule photograph in the middle of it, so small that it could have been almost any motel anywhere. He looked it up on the Internet and was momentarily dazzled by the website's flashing red text— Cable TV!!! Convenient Location!!!—and a picture of a small white dog that he supposed must belong to the owner. Convenient to what? He looked it up on a map. It was, he supposed, convenient to the interstate.

   He drove to a part of the suburbs that was close up against the edge of the wilderness, although it had occurred to Gavin that what he thought of as wilderness might just be a band of wildly lush greenery with another suburb approaching undetected from the other side, like two teams of miners tunneling toward one another under the earth. The streets out here were wide and industrial, self-storage facilities, a junkyard. The Draker Motel stood at the end of an almost-deserted cul-de-sac, two stories of stucco with a balcony running along the second floor.

   Gavin stayed in his car for a moment looking out at the heat waves shimmering over the parking lot, put on his fedora and ventured out. The motel office was a small wood-paneled room with tiny palm trees running up and down the wallpaper, an air conditioner rattling in the window. The girl behind the counter looked no older than fifteen.

   "You have a nice website," he said. "I liked the picture of the dog."

   "Thanks," the girl said warily.

   "I'm looking for a guest, a friend of mine. Do you have a Liam Deval staying here?"

   "I'm not supposed to say the names of guests," she said.

   He opened his wallet and laid three twenties on the counter. "If you're not allowed to say," he said, "maybe I could just take a quick glance at your computer?"

   She glanced over her shoulder, slipped the money into her pocket.

   "I might get in trouble," she said.

   He laid another twenty on the counter. "But do you think anyone would notice? It'd only take me a minute."

   She bit her lip.

   " Maybe you were in the back," he said. "You didn't hear me come in."

   She swiveled the computer monitor so he could see it and pushed the keyboard and mouse toward him, took the money and vanished behind a beaded curtain. He wasn't familiar with the software, but it didn't seem complicated. It was possible to bring up a list of guests' names with a few keystrokes. Liam Deval's name wasn't in the registry.

   He went through the list again. There was a D. Reinhardt in room

18. Gavin left the tiny chilled office with its palm-tree-print curtains

and laboring air conditioner, followed the numbers down a line of closed doors. The heat was staggering. This side of the hotel was exposed to the full glare of sunlight, the stucco hot to the touch.

   He knocked on the door of room 18 and the curtains in the window flickered, but too briefly and too slightly to make out a face.

   "Who is it?" The voice came through the window, which he saw now was open just a crack.

   "My name's Gavin Sasaki," he said to the curtains. "I'm looking for Liam Deval."

   "I don't know you, Gavin," the man said. "Why are you here?"

   The heat was making Gavin dizzy. "It's about Anna Montgomery," he said. "May I come in?"

   "I have to make a phone call first," the man said. Was this Liam Deval's voice? He couldn't tell. Deval hadn't talked much at Barbès and everyone sounds different behind a microphone. " Could you wait out there for a moment?"

   "Of course," Gavin said.

   He had been waiting outside for no more than a few minutes when the old fear began to come over him. It was a hundred degrees, heat radiating from the cement and from the building's exterior wall. He was already sweating. Cars shimmered in the parking lot. The angle of the sun was such that the second-floor balcony cast no shade. He glanced at his watch, turned his back on the sun and closed his eyes. Thinking of ice cubes, of orange sherbet, of snow. When he opened his eyes again it seemed to him that a long time had passed so he called out toward the window, "Hello, could I possibly come in?" but there was no answer. He wondered if he was being watched, if Deval— if that voice was Deval, if his instinct that the D. Reinhardt in the hotel log and Deval were the same person was correct and the man in the room wasn't just some malevolent stranger— was still on the phone.

   Gavin was too hot for his fedora, so he took it off. He leaned forward, let his forehead rest on the stucco between the window and the door. He was going to get sick from staying out in the sun like this but the least he could do was wait, wasn't it, with Anna and Chloe perhaps so close? The thought of being a father. It seemed possible that they might be in the motel room, mere feet from him on the other side of the wall. It seemed to him that he'd been waiting for a very long time. He wanted to look at his watch again, but it seemed like too much effort to raise his arm. His thoughts drifted. He could help them in some way, do the right thing. He had a job, he could contribute, maybe even go to Chloe's school plays. Maybe they'd all eat dinner together sometimes, a sort of provisional family. He'd wanted his own family for as long as he could remember. He was having some trouble staying upright. His fedora, he realized, had fallen from his hand.

   "Please!" he called again, toward the window.

   "You're going to have to wait," the voice said. A note of panic. "I can't reach anyone."

   "Who are you calling? Daniel?"

   "How do you know Daniel?"

   "How do I know him? I don't know." Gavin was aware that he was mumbling. He couldn't think of how to explain how he knew Daniel; the whole mundane history of elementary school and high school, first grade field trips to museums and seventh grade parties in basements and the jazz quartet seemed like too much to explain all of a sudden. "It's been a long time." He was having trouble concentrating. "Listen," he said, louder now, "I'm not going to give up. I'll stay here all night. I'm going to keep chasing Anna and Chloe forever if I have to."

   "Forever?" the man's voice was almost squeaky now. "Are there others with you?"

   "What? No, I'm alone," Gavin said. "I'm alone." It wouldn't be so bad to take a short nap, would it, just to drift off for a moment or two? He felt too sick to open his eyes. How long had he been out here? He was seized by a sudden chill. What was strange was that the wall of the motel was softening. He was sinking into it.

   There was a sound as if from a long way off, and he realized that the door had opened beside him. Gavin stood upright with tremendous difficulty. His legs were like water.

   The man's voice was nervous. "Why did you come here?"

   Gavin was so dizzy now that he could no longer see. A blinding wash of swimming dots over his vision, a haze.

   "I'm here for Anna," he said. The open doorway was all cold air and black shadow, a sanctuary— he forced himself to move and lurched forward, trying to get inside before he blacked out.

   "Hold it right there!" the man called out, from somewhere farther back in the room. "Don't come any closer! I don't know who you are!"

   But Gavin knew only that he had to get inside, into the cool. He kept moving.

   "Stop," the man cried, "oh God, please," but Gavin didn't. He heard a dull sound but didn't immediately understand what it had to do with the sudden pain singing out from his left arm, his rapidly numbing hand. He fell to his knees.

   "I think I have heatstroke," he mumbled, to no one in particular. He fell forward then and closed his eyes, soft carpet. His shirt was wet and he was impossibly tired. It seemed like a good moment to sleep, and he drifted off into a confused dream about New York City, Sasha, the pleasant chaos of the Star newsroom, a trumpet.