When Enoch left, the breeze stirred the snow scattered on the floor, carrying it toward the back of the darkened hall. I followed the current. At the end of the hallway I found a door covered by just one board, held in place with loosely hammered nails. I popped them off and let myself in, looking for a pickled pinkie or a pot of ink and expecting to find anything but.
Here the windows were not boarded up. Gray airshaft light cast dim shadows across a two-room apartment crowded with far more furniture than it could hold. The walls were covered from baseboard to molding with photos of a family: a girl, a boy, a mother, a father, all with the same stooped shoulders, wiry hair, and eager smile. In the kitchen, a wobbly table was set for four. On the stove, a tall pot held the mummified remains of an unidentifiable stew. I had to wonder—even though I knew I would never find the answer—where had this family gone?
A square hole in the ceiling revealed a network of ducts and gears of uncertain purpose. I stared at them for some time, but they neither moved nor rattled, and at last they lost my attention.
There was a pen on the table and a stack of honey-colored sheets, thin as dragonfly wings and printed with blue ink as delicate as the evening sky. At the sight of that color, that unmistakable color, I felt dizzy and had to sit down. I almost called for Enoch before I remembered that I was trespassing and decided he did not deserve to witness any more of my brilliance today. But I would take one with me to rub in his face and force him to pay my bill.
Block letters in the top left corner identified the sheet as something called an R-913. Space was provided to write a subject’s name, address, age, physical description, occupation or trade, and estimated monthly income. The rest of the form was given over to a large blank space marked “Particulars.” I lifted one and felt something on the paper. Holding it to the limp light, I saw an italic lowercase r.
There was a pair of filing cabinets beneath the window. I wanted rather badly to know what was inside. They were locked, but that rarely stopped me. I picked them both and found them full to bursting with R-913s. I grabbed a file at random and found the story of Helen Byrd’s meeting with Clark Howe, a widower whose wife had been murdered by street thugs, and who said he would pay anything for a good answer to his children’s question: “Where is mommy now?”
He was a clerk in an Eastside shipping company who lived in the Lower West because a family apartment on the dignified side of the stem was more than he could afford. He felt his frugality got his wife killed, and he was more than willing to answer every question Helen had about his work, giving information about his company’s payroll, shipping schedule, and accounting system, all of which were recorded in mind-numbing detail under “Particulars.”
Here was the final response to the question I’d been asking everyone on the Westside: unquestionable proof that the Byrds were swindlers, set down in soft blue. I’d expected to feel satisfaction—at getting my answer, at proving that nobody in the city besides the woman upstairs was really worth a damn—but all I could taste was bile. I spit on the floor and pressed on.
Howe was an outlier. Most of Helen’s interview subjects were widows. An Eastsider whose childhood sweetheart drank poison three months after their wedding; an ancient woman from the Upper West whose husband had been dead for decades; one of my few neighbors on Washington Square, whose man had been found dead in the park when the first cold snap hit this year. From them Helen teased details of their husbands’ lives, recording everything that might be useful to a blackmailer and quite a bit that could not. I found a file for Stacey Tarbell, Father Lamb’s friend, and deep in the oldest cabinet, where the papers were dry to crumbling, I found a file for Anacostia Fall.
Did my hands tremble as I lifted the cover? It should have felt strange to touch such a relic, but that week my family’s past was closer than ever.
The notes on Ana were not recorded on an R-913, nor were they constrained by the tidiness of the newer files. They were written in a man’s clumsy hand, every letter capitalized, words wandering across unlined paper like a drunk working his way home: “anacostia fall, recent convert. pierrepont fall, dec. $2,000 asked and paid. af satisfied.”
Another note followed: “af to police. det. carr interr. bb. no evidence. no further trouble expected.”
That was all.
I climbed onto the decrepit table and took another look at the ducts. A thick canvas tube that ran straight down from the floor above hung just a little loose. I tugged on it. It stretched readily. I pressed my eye to it and saw nothing. As I turned away, I heard something whispering from inside it—my mother’s voice. I pushed my ear against it and heard every word that was said upstairs, as clear as the sky outside.
“I see your fiancé in the leaves,” said Bully, in a voice not quite his own.
“They just look like wet leaves to me,” said Mary.
“I see a violent man.”
“Herbert was as gentle as a lamb, but he was a soldier.”
“A soldier he may have been, but he never wore an army uniform.”
“What do you mean?”
The bravado she had shown across the street was gone. Mary sounded disarmed, even honest. It worried me. She was not that good an actor.
“He was a brawler,” said Bully. “A soldier of the Westside. A skull-cracker. A thug.”
“That is not my Herbert.”
“And his name was not Herbert, either.”
No. The brawler Bully described could only be one man—my dear departed brute of a father, Virgil Carr.
“He wants to speak to you,” said Bully.
“It isn’t possible.”
“He wants to tell you to stop lying to me. He wants you to hear how he died.”
The gears above my head spun to life. Wind rushed through the tubes, and from upstairs came an awful, inhuman scream. I wondered how Bully did it. Was there a pedal under the table? A switch hidden inside the arm of his chair? It was a classic medium’s trick, and it stunned Mary into the kind of silence I did not think her capable of. “I don’t believe that was his voice,” said Mary, after some time.
“Why not?”
“Because you are a fraud.”
“How could you say that, when you came here on the same road as me?”
“And what road was that?”
“Do you really not remember? When I saw you at the church . . .”
“Tell me what we were doing there.”
“I’m not the fraud here. You came to ask my comfort, but you lied. There is no Herbert. You do not grieve. It’s fine. I don’t care about your motives. But if you won’t be honest with me—”
In the hallway, the boards groaned. The apartment door opened. I let the tube drop from my ear. A polite man gasped in horror at the sight of me teetering on the kitchen table, gorging on his family’s secrets.
“Miss Carr,” whispered Enoch. “You mustn’t be here.”
“And yet, I am.” I hopped down. “What the hell is an R-913?”
“Pardon?”
“What are they, Enoch? Who designed them? Who printed them? Who filled them out? Was it you?”
“I have no idea.”
“But you knew about this room. A place to listen while Helen comforted her widows. A place to keep their secrets.”
“I assure you, Miss Carr, I was only looking for you. I wanted to apologize. I followed your footprints down the hallway. I have never been here before.”
“Keep your mouth shut if you’re just going to lie.” I threw a file at him. He caught it as the papers fell to the floor. While he picked them up, I stuffed my bag with as many files as would fit and pushed past him. I was halfway out the door when I heard him start to cry.
“What is it?” I said, wishing I didn’t care.
“That blue. That blue.”
“I thought that might be the one. So where did it come from?”
He didn’t answer. He just pressed the paper to his face like he was trying to draw the color into his lungs, and I tried to take comfort that I’d at least made a convert to the church of tiny mysteries. They are powerful things indeed. I might have questioned him further—to see if he was lying about the room, the ink, the eavesdropping apparatus—but before I could think of any clever questions, my mother began to scream.
I rattled down the hall and up the stairs as fast as the sagging wood allowed. I burst into the long, mostly empty room. The gulls scattered out the missing windows. The scream echoed off the walls.
Forty feet away—too far for me to reach, too far for me to do anything but watch and howl—Bully Byrd had his hands around my mother’s throat. He pressed her into the arm of the chair, his awful bulk crushing her lungs as his hands twisted her neck.
I took a step. Mary got her arm free.
I took another. She reached blindly for the table.
I took one more. She got two fingers through the handle of the teapot and smashed it into Bully’s head.
As cold as it was in that room, the tea couldn’t have been hot, but a faceful of china is enough to make any man pause. He clawed at his eyes, blood-infused tea streaming across his skull, and fell to his knees. Mary kicked until he was down. She reached for a shard of china and was about to bury it in his neck when I dragged her away.
“Let me!” she said.
I saw no point in letting my mother, who had never hurt anyone in her first life, become a killer so soon into her second one. I pointed at the doorway, where Enoch stood frozen, as white as the china clutched in Mary’s hand. I didn’t think he would let me breeze past him a second time.
“We’ve outstayed our welcome,” I said.
Enoch ran our way. Behind us, there was a window. Outside the window, there was an oak. Mary didn’t complain as we accepted the tree’s invitation, leaping off the rotted windowsill and into its stiff embrace. Before Enoch reached the window, we were gone.
The sidewalk was slick. Mary’s breath came in sharp bursts as she stalked across it. Beneath her loosening scarf, red streaked across her neck.
We turned onto Seventh Avenue, where a clump of people gathered around a long table, waiting for soup. On the other side, two of Van Alen’s guardsmen dished out bowls of something thin and beige. As the people grumbled that the servings were getting lighter, I forced Mary onto a bench.
“Why are we stopping?” she said.
“Because you’re wheezing.”
“Not half as bad as you.”
“What happened back there?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I don’t care.”
I sat beside her. I knew I should take her hand, put my arm around her shoulder, but her anger was infectious. I couldn’t feel anything else.
“He attacked me,” she said.
“Why?”
“Do men need a reason?”
“I heard your conversation. You had quite a rapport.”
“You were eavesdropping?”
“Of course I was! What else is a detective for? He knew you. He said you’d traveled together. What did he mean?”
Her eyes were red. Her fists were clenched. I did not want to see my mother cry.
“Don’t you wish I knew that?” she said. “He knew more about me than I do.”
“And he knew your fiancé, too. Not Herbert. The real one.”
She took off her glove and rubbed the spot where her ring should have been.
“I should have asked him the man’s name,” she said. “Where he comes from. Where he is. And the ring, too. A friendly psychic could be quite helpful—except, of course, that every word was an obvious lie. What else did you hear?”
“Nothing. My attention was elsewhere. What happened next?”
“He said, ‘I won’t have you ruining this for me,’ and that’s when he pounced. Lucky for me, I’ve always been handy with a teapot.”
“Silver spoons, too.”
She gave a small smile. “And what were you doing while I was wasting time getting strangled?”
That morning, it had seemed easier to let Mary wallow in her amnesia. But if Bully Byrd knew her, if they had returned from death together, it was worth seeing what we could drag up from the depths. That was what I told myself, anyway. In truth, I was too cold and too tired to stand another minute of her looking at me with eyes empty of love.
“Have you ever heard of a woman named Anacostia Fall?” I said, expecting the words to explode her amnesia like a cigarette popping a balloon.
“That’s a perfectly ridiculous name. Where did you hear it?”
I tossed the oldest of the Byrds’ files into her lap. She read what little it contained.
“Does that bring anything back?” I said.
“Should it?”
“Anacostia and Pierrepont could be related to you. They could be your parents.”
“Maybe.”
A squirrel, dizzy with hunger or some invisible illness, struggled to leap from the ice to the nearest tree. Mary stared at it. I stared at her.
“How hard are you trying to remember?” I said.
“Not hard enough to satisfy you, I suppose?”
“You gave me a case. Asked me to find your past. This is an intriguing lead, and you don’t seem to care.”
Her hands curled tight around the ancient file. A sneer bloomed.
“I’ve been trying,” she said. “Every second since I came to in that blighted church, I’ve been scrambling for some detail of who I am. Every building we pass, every face I see, I ask myself, ‘Have I been there? Have I known them?,’ but it’s like nothing in this city has any connection to me. I feel like my brain is rotting from the inside out, and I am terrified that it will never be whole again. If you haven’t noticed that, either I’m a better actress than you seem to think, or you’re not much of a detective.”
“I’m sorry. I doubt. It’s my job.”
She prodded the file. The first line made her cackle.
“This is dated 1887,” she said. “Just how old do you think I am?”
May 5, 1867, to June 7, 1903. Just a hair over thirty-six. A final birthday party, a picnic in Washington Square. Cold chicken and potato salad and a mother I thought I would have forever.
“Thirty-five,” I said. “Thirty-six?”
She prodded her skin, scowling.
“It’s possible. I’d have guessed a touch younger, but then I’ve always been generous with myself. Thirty-six? Then yes, it’s conceivable old Pierrepont and Anacostia—those names!—are my parents, but the file doesn’t mention them having a one-year-old.”
“It doesn’t mention much of anything.”
“No.” She squeezed my hand, and life felt easy again. “So what do you think the Byrds gave Anacostia for her two thousand dollars?”
“I know a woman who might have an idea.”
She smoothed her skirt and tightened her scarf until the bruising skin did not show. She stood, clapped her hands, and smiled anew.
“Well! Which way do we walk?” she said, striding away before I could answer. It had never occurred to me how false her cheer could be. I wondered how often it had been so in my childhood, and what it had concealed. I wondered what else it was hiding now.
In the quarantine ward at St. Vincent’s, the coal had run out. Beneath her paper saints, Stacey Tarbell was a mass of blankets, coats, and scarves. Her eyes peered out, bloodshot and aching. Her breath steamed through cracks in the cloth. I leaned close, trying to smile and hoping the result was friendly instead of terrifying.
“You lied to me before,” I said. She nodded. “You lied to the father, too, but that doesn’t matter now. I understand why.”
“Mrs. Byrd told me that if I said anything, her prayers wouldn’t work, and Tom would be turned away at the gates of heaven. I couldn’t take the chance.”
Mary, who was crouched in the corner perusing Stacey’s R-913, scoffed. I gave her a nasty look that she didn’t notice at all.
“How much did you pay Helen Byrd?” I said.
“Please don’t ask me that.”
“You told me she prayed with you, that she talked. Sang hymns. You made her out to be a saint.”
“She helped me. What does it matter how?”
A cough rattled down the hallway, where it was joined by two or three more, a little orchestra of ill health.
“You told her quite a lot about your husband’s work,” said Mary. I winced at the venom in her voice. This woman had already been abused by me for reasons that had nothing to do with her. She did not deserve another interrogation.
“Did I?” said Stacey.
“How the foreman pushed the riveters to work higher than they wanted, in bad weather, sixty, seventy hours a week.”
“She asked how he died. What else was I to say?”
Snow oozed from a crack in the thin, frosted window. The walls were bumpy with frozen condensation.
“Why are you still here?” I said.
“The guards told us it would be safe.”
“And when was the last time you saw the guards?”
“Four days. Since then, no coal, no food. Two of us left, night before last, to go for help, to make them come back. We’ve heard nothing since.”
On the wall, beside the saints, a 1920 calendar topped by a faded drawing of green, green hills and blue, blue water.
“You were going to go away,” I said. “Back to Ireland.”
“That’s what everyone in this hallway is dreaming of.”
“You were going soon.” I took Tarbell’s thrice-gloved hands. Her cheeks were chapped. The blue in her eyes was nearly gone. “You signed over your life insurance money, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“All of it?”
“It was the only way.”
“And what did Helen give you in return?”
“Nothing.”
“Pardon?”
“I mean—she took the money. That was the gift. When I met with her, she saw how sad I was, how lonely. She read the leaves and told me why. Tom’s spirit was caught between heaven and earth. That money, cursed blood money, was weighing it down. I brought it to her, and she wrapped it in a little sack, and we burned it. The fire died and Tom was free and so was I.”
“You believed that?” said Mary.
“Please,” I said. “Be gentle.”
“There’s no sense being gentle with fools. You fell for that idiotic lie?”
“How could it be a lie?” said Stacey. She stood, defiant. Some of her layers fell away. Holding up the fabric, she raised her arms, as thin as curtain rods. “What other reason could there be for the sleepless nights, the nausea, the weight on my heart? Tom needed my help. I did what I had to.”
“For being that stupid, you deserve to lose everything. You deserve to freeze.”
I could not believe my mother would talk that way. I could not believe that anyone would talk that way, in fact, but Stacey took no offense. She fell onto her bed, exhausted from the effort of standing, and with infinite patience, she whispered, “You’re young. You never lost anyone. You don’t know.”
Mary crossed the little room to continue the attack. I pushed her back.
“Get out of here,” I said. “We’ve learned everything we came for.”
Mary stomped out. I helped Stacey back upright and leaned her against the wall. I wanted to do more, but my bag held no money, no food, no fuel.
“I wish there was something I could give you,” I said.
“What else do I desire? Those I love are safe in heaven. Someday, if you’re lucky, you’ll say the same.”
I wrapped her blankets tight and left, not knowing how to say goodbye.
Mary was halfway down the hallway, waiting by the stairs, not looking my way. I didn’t care. The true audience of our scene with Stacey Tarbell was leaning by her door. Max Schmittberger, rising star of the Sentinel city room, wore a soiled hat and an indefensibly plaid coat. His moustache was thinner than when we last met, his face fatter, but he still wore the ravenous expression of a man whose hunger for attention could never be sated.
“You heard it?” I said.
“I heard it.”
“And Mary gave you the R-913s.”
“Every one.”
We walked away from Stacey’s room, passing cell after cell that held men and women exactly as desperate as her. Teeth chattered like hail falling on pavement. The coughs grew worse. Max tucked the files under his arm.
“This is quite a haul,” he said. “I got dirt in here on the biggest construction firm on the Eastside, a shipping outfit, the cops in the auto squad, and basically the whole BRT.”
“That’s all incidental. What matters is how it was collected.”
“Hardly. A holy woman bilking widows out of their life insurance money? On the Westside? Could see a few inches on page four.”
“A holy woman whose husband just came back from the dead, who plans to bring fifty lost Westsiders back to life tomorrow night at the Flat.”
“And that’s juicy stuff . . . if it pans out. But I tell Gish that, I can hear him saying, ‘This is an honest paper, Max. Keep that Westside rot out of my office.’ So until then, I’ll focus on the goods,” he said, holding up the files.
I stopped, and took a step toward him. He backed into the icy wall. It was good to know he was still afraid of me. I snatched the files out of his hands.
“Hey!”
“You’ll print it,” I said. “The Byrds are criminals, and you’re going to make the bastards pay.”
“Tell you what. I’ll go to that resurrection shindig tomorrow night. Get a little Westside color, maybe get us closer to page one. And hell, if he does start bringing people back from the dead, that smells like a Pulitzer Prize.”
With a quickness I didn’t expect, he grabbed the files back and busted out of there. I watched Max bound up the stairs, feet light with dreams of all the awards he would never win. I thought of the people behind me staring down another frozen night. I took Mary by the hand.
“What now?” she said, and didn’t wait for my answer. “You simply must get me over to the Eastside. I want to dig through the Hall of Records—see what I can find about myself. Maybe that will shake my memory loose.”
I didn’t answer. I just pulled, and we walked up the stairs. I was fed up with being cold. I was taking us home.
I filled the fireplace past the point of safety, prodded in the match, and watched the paper burn. My hands were as cold as sepulchral marble. Even if I plunged them into the growing fire, it would take an hour before they felt warm.
Mary marched past the window, her coat off and her shoulders bare, showing an infuriating indifference to the cold. I remembered why I had been trying to keep her out of this room. While we were here, the urge to call her Mother was far too strong.
“You were hell on that old woman,” I said.
“She lied to us. She lied to herself. Why be gentle?”
“Because she’s hurting.”
“That’s exactly the kind of stupidity that lets hucksters like the Byrds flourish. It should be stamped out.”
“I’ve never seen you looking so cruel.”
“You haven’t known me very long.” She leaned on the windowsill. A sly smile danced onto her face. “Don’t try fooling me, Miss Carr. You’re not clever enough. You think I’m lying about—well about what?”
“I don’t think you’re lying. But to forget your age, your city, your family . . . I’ve never read of such an extreme case of amnesia.”
“Then something fairly extreme must have happened to me.” She smiled broader, shaking her head as sharply as the movement of the branches outside. I was probably the only person in the city who might recognize how angry she was. “At any moment, I’m torn between desires to sob, sleep, and scream. Instead, I’ve kept moving, trusting that if I don’t let my smile drop, something will start to make sense. So far, it hasn’t. Now I’ve just been throttled by a madman and the only friend I’ve made in the entire city tells me she thinks I’m lying. What else would you have me do?”
The streaks on her neck were turning purple, like night coming on fast. I had rarely felt like such a nitwit.
I wanted to trust her. But it was a wide room, and there was no way to close the gap. I was trying to find the strength to take the first step when the window exploded. Glass rained down on Mary. Her blood stained the floor.