Of the memories I tote around from childhood, few are more pleasant than mornings out with my mother. She loved the green spaces of the city and she patrolled them like an expert, recognizing each tree or wildflower as surely as she would an old school friend. Nothing made her happier than to find a bit of nature in a surprising place, whether a lovingly planted window box or an abandoned lot whose neighbors had converted it into a vegetable garden.
“No matter how much rubble they pile on this island,” she told me once as we walked the narrow path of a pocket park, “green fights back.”
Winter did not slow her. Even in thick snow, we went for our walks, tramping across empty avenues in homemade snowshoes and as many coats as we owned. We threw snowballs, snapped icicles, and stood beneath the awnings of the rich, watching New York drown. Of all the countless tragedies of 1914, one that stung was that Mary Fall did not live to see nature triumphant over the Westside. When the trees of Washington Square blotted out the sun, all I could think was how deeply she would have loved the shade.
That day’s sky was a fragile blue. The breeze stung with the taste of snow. A long track of untouched powder ran down Thompson Street. We walked alongside it, single file, in a narrow, clumsily hacked path. Until that morning, I’d found the ice oppressive. Today, it was as beautiful as anything my embellished childhood memories could provide.
I stepped carefully down the icy pavement. When I looked up, Mary was half a block ahead.
“Quick quick, Miss Carr!” she called. “Don’t make me tell you again.”
My impulse was to snap that I was walking as fast as I pleased. I don’t let people—even clients—talk to me like that, but she was not just anyone, and so I said nothing.
When I caught up, she was peering into an empty lot where the earth had swallowed a collapsed building. Broken walls lay in a heap, half underground, rising out of the snow like a mammoth’s carcass.
“What’s this wreckage?” she said.
“When the Westside grew into its own, the earth shifted. Some buildings came tumbling down.”
“What was here before?”
“I don’t know. A factory, I think. Men’s hats, maybe, or trousers.”
“Were there people inside when it fell?”
“Those are questions I try not to ask. Not exactly tiny, you know.”
She pursed her lips at the ruined structure for a few long seconds, like she was trying to find a way to raise it back up through sheer force of will.
Finally, I said what I assumed we were both thinking: “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It is?”
“Not the building, not just that—the whole Westside. The fresh powder. The ice on the trees. Spring is my season, but a sight like this makes me admire the cold.”
She shook her head, hoisted her skirt, and started across the street.
“A city should clean up its messes,” she said. I hurried to keep up.
“But don’t you find it beautiful?”
“Oh, perhaps. Beautiful like the bottom of the sea, beautiful as a frozen corpse. I see that untouched snow, and all I know is that no children have played there. It is a vision of hell.”
My good mood crumbled like ash flicked from the end of a cigarette. We walked on, and I kept the guided tour to myself. A window blocked by dead vines hid an Italian restaurant where Virgil and I sometimes lunched before the fence went up. A slab of bare concrete, free of snow due to some invisible heat source, was once a florist’s that my mother and I walked to on Sunday afternoons. And of course, a few blocks behind lay the ruined clubhouse of the One-Eyed Cats. All these memories were precious, but on this cold, still morning, I saw them as Mary did: wreathed in death.
We reached Houston Street, where the pines of the Thicket towered over the pavement. I waited for Mary to be impressed, but she didn’t even notice. Instead, she simply marched right in, without any fear at all. I had to call her back and force her to follow my lead. As I picked my way over the sidewalk’s winding remains, I sensed her straining behind me, an overeager filly pushing against her bridle, and I felt almost powerless to hold her back.
Above our heads, pines groaned in the gentle wind, dragging their branches across each other as steadily as a ship creaking on open water. Somewhere ahead of us, shrouded by the morning dark, a body waited in the snow.
“Being out in the city,” I said, “does it bring anything back?”
“Such as?”
“Your fiancé, your family, your life?”
“If I remembered anything useful, don’t you think I would have shared? Everything is a complete blank. It’s embarrassing, honestly. Even basic facts escape me. For instance, what’s the year?”
“1922.”
“Who’s the president?”
“A nonentity.”
“The mayor?”
“Worse.”
“What is the economic situation? Are we at war? What troubles face the city? Where are hemlines falling? How are we wearing our hair?”
She peppered me with those questions and more. I didn’t bother answering. She didn’t seem to care.
“This must be how a soldier feels,” she said, “trying to clench a fist on an arm that’s been hacked away. I reach for knowledge that I know is there and find nothing. I feel stupid, helpless. It makes me want to scream.”
I was starting to feel the same.
The street split. To the right was sun, space, and a route that seemed to lead back to Houston. The left-hand path pointed straight into the close-packed trees. Judy and Enoch had gone right, I remembered, following some invisible markings until the path doubled back toward the Electric Church. I turned that way, but Mary did not budge.
“Don’t be foolish, Miss Carr,” she said, then smiled. “That’s back the way we came.”
“I know how it looks, but—”
“We’re going left. Quick quick.”
I didn’t move. Neither did she.
“You’re cross, aren’t you?” she said. “Hurt that I wasn’t more impressed with the awful specter of that sunken hat factory.”
“It’s not that,” I lied. “You hired me. You should trust my expertise.”
“I didn’t engage you to get me lost in the woods.”
“I came this way a few days ago. You don’t even remember the president’s name. Please, I beg you, listen to me.”
She smiled gently, as one smiles at a harmless lunatic, and placed a hand on my shoulder.
“I will listen to you, Miss Carr, of course I will. As soon as you find something worthwhile to say.”
Before I caught my breath, she turned left into the darkness, and once again it was all I could do to keep pace. The path was overgrown and rotten with switchbacks, and it took us an hour to cover ground we should have crossed in ten minutes. Nevertheless, I got us to the Electric Church, and refrained from strangling Mary as she boasted about her shortcut.
I leaned on the cold stone threshold of the church, trying to disguise how hard I was breathing. From here, thank god, we could not see the corpse behind the altar. I stood in front of her, ever so slightly, trying to discourage a jaunt across the snow.
“Does this bring anything back?” I said.
“I was here. It was night. I remember being surprised by the cold.”
“What else?”
“My memory is empty. It’s like the morning after drinking far, far too much champagne. I know I must have laughed, danced, sung, but I don’t remember a thing. I lived a whole life before I came here, and none of it survives. That’s a kind of death, isn’t it?”
That was not a question I was prepared to answer at the moment.
“I do steady business helping people retrace steps taken while blacked out on bad liquor,” I said instead. “Close your eyes. Forget I’m here. Tell me what you see.”
“Oh, absolutely not,” she said, her eyes wide open. “I’m not the type for spiritualist rubbish. Let’s just have a look around.”
She nudged me aside and leapt down into the snow, where she clapped her hands and laughed.
“What is it?” I said.
“Jump down and see for yourself, Miss Detective.”
I loved her, but if she called me Miss Detective one more time, I wasn’t sure I could keep from murdering her, just a bit.
She offered her hand. I hopped down and saw footsteps faintly preserved from two days before. Judy’s tracks went halfway down the lot before doubling back. Mine went all the way to the corpse.
“I’ve heard rumors there are criminals, bootleggers, who move illicit goods through these woods,” I said. “This could be their trail. That’s a good reason, I think, for us to keep moving. Those are not men we want to surprise.”
Instead, she knelt over the footsteps, running her gloved fingertip along the shallow imprint in the snow. She chuckled like a child enjoying a puzzle. I couldn’t believe she was having so much fun.
“I don’t think we’ve any men to worry about,” she said. “These are women’s boots. Two different pairs.”
“Very astute,” I said, understanding for the first time why people find detectives so annoying.
“I’m not going to have to worry about paying your bill if I keep doing your job for you,” she said. “You’ll be paying me!”
She stomped for the altar, and I remembered the blood frozen to the gash in the dead man’s skull like congealed fat. I could not let her find him. I could not let his death stain her miraculous return, but she was nearly there.
“We have to stop!” I shouted.
“Why?”
“Because there’s nothing here. This is a waste of time. This is—”
“Fun!”
“Stop walking now, or—”
“Calm down, Miss Carr. You’re verging on a tantrum. You will find that sort of behavior has no effect on me.”
I knew from bitter experience that she was right. I felt an unsettling desire to kick her in the back of the knee and send her face-first into the snow. I took a few long breaths, fixed a smile to my face, and pretended we weren’t arguing at all.
“What’s the matter?” she said, a sinister twinkle in her eye. “Have I hurt your feelings? Injured your professional pride? How would you rather we spend the morning?”
“There’s a library in the Upper West. I want to—”
“No one ever solved anything lounging around a library. Try again when you think of something better. For now . . .”
She crossed the last few feet of open snow. She rested her hands on the altar and let out a shriek. I closed my eyes and saw every inch of that frozen corpse.
“What is it?” I said.
“There was a man.”
“Was?”
“When I came to, there was a man here! A man, running across the snow.”
She leaned on the altar, surveying the scene. Her eyes flicked back and forth, trying to see everything, almost like they were dancing. The cold had put strawberry red into her lips. She was so beautiful when she was getting an idea.
“What did he look like?” I said, afraid I already knew the answer.
“He had no hat, no winter coat. He was a big man—not fat, exactly, but large. And he wore—I can’t believe I forgot this!—he wore a white suit. The moonlight shone off it like a pearl.”
I walked away from the altar. The snow crunched beneath Mary’s boots. Now it was her turn to keep up.
“Miss Carr!” she called, singing my name as joyfully as a Christmas carol. “Don’t think you can fool me.”
She grabbed my wrist. Her touch was gentle. Her smile was infectious.
“You know that man, don’t you?” she said.
“I have an inkling.”
“Then he must have something to do with what brought me here, what erased my mind.”
“I’m believing that more and more.”
“We’ll have to speak to him.”
She wrapped her arm in mine and led me away from the church, away from the snow, back the way we came. Holding on to her was like gripping a helium balloon.
“There’s no chance of confining you to a library while I pay him a visit, is there?” I said.
“I’d tunnel out or burn it down.”
“Then we’ll go together.”
“I knew having a detective would come in handy. What’s his name?”
“You have to know—this may be dangerous.”
“Spectacular.”
“I have a plan, but it calls for subtlety.”
“Subtlety is my trademark.”
I let that slide. “And you must—you must!—promise to do everything I say.”
She mumbled something that may have been yes and may have been no. It was the best assurance I was going to get. If nothing else, while we left the Thicket, she let me lead the way. I had failed to keep her away from the Byrds, but for the moment, I felt the sting of that failure faintly. Mary was happy, and there was nothing in the world as sweet as that.
We emerged onto Houston Street, where the sun was bright, if not warm. Behind us, the body stayed buried, its questions unanswered for now.
As we walked uptown, I told Mary what I knew of the Byrds, and we hacked together a sort of plan. By phrasing everything so that it seemed my ideas were coming from her, I was able to convince her to do things my way. We worked our way to Carmine Street, where a banner stretched from sidewalk to sidewalk, its four-foot-high red letters telling all who passed of “Bully Byrd’s Spectacular Electric Resurrection: Tomorrow Night at the Flat.” From afar, it looked impressive. Up close, I saw it had been painted on stitched-together bedsheets. Still, the lettering was tidy. Enoch was a professional.
“They’re really promising to bring fifty people back from the dead?” Mary said.
“That’s the pitch.”
“That might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Or it might not be, of course. My memory is not to be trusted.” When I didn’t respond, she stopped to smirk. “Please don’t tell me you believe they can do it.”
“I didn’t.”
“What changed?”
“I woke up this morning and saw the sun shining bright on the Westside, and anything seemed possible.”
“Hogwash.”
“Or maybe I’m growing optimistic in my old age,” I said. “Now remember—this calls for understatement. Recall Hamlet’s advice to the players.”
“And what was that, exactly?”
“Remember your lines and don’t act like an idiot.”
A trio of huffingly inefficient moving women was taking up space in the main room of the Byrds’ banquet hall, dismantling the muddle of religious iconography that decorated the walls and dragging it, in bits and pieces, outside. Enoch tagged along after them, waving a scrap of notepaper like it was holy writ, begging them not to break anything. Judy, hammer in hand and nails clenched between her lips, repaired the smashed office door. On the stage, Ruth sat cross-legged, her scarf hiked up to permit the smoking of a cigarette, saying nothing and seeing everything. The brazier was gone, and I saw no sign of the fireproof bag.
“Everything must be in proper condition when it reaches the Flat,” Enoch said, but no one heard him, because that was when Mary made her entrance.
She marched through the doorway and threw her infuriatingly slight form across a pile of orange Bibles heaped on the floor.
“Herbert!” she cried, loud enough that the movers stopped moving and Ruth uncrossed her legs. Mary rolled onto her back, looking like a petulant cockroach, and cried to the heavens: “Herbert—come back to me!”
Ruth hopped down from the stage and offered Mary a hand.
“That finger ever turn up?” I said.
“I thought my sister told you to quit looking for it,” said Ruth.
“She did, but—do you really not care what happened to it?”
“Excuse me?”
“Someone broke into your church and stole your holiest relic, and you’re all willing to just let that go?”
She ashed her cigarette at me. I shook my head.
“I simply cannot understand the pious,” I said.
“No, you can’t.”
“Doesn’t matter. That’s not why I’m here.” I gestured at Mary. “My cousin Mary.”
“Why on earth do you look so proud?”
I tried to beam just a little bit brighter as I said, “She’s visiting from the Upper West.”
“And I’m utterly savaged by grief,” said Mary.
“As I’m sure you can see. Her fiancé—”
“Herbert! Dearest Herbert!”
“Was killed by the Germans at Belleau Wood.”
“And each night I see him in my dreams, begging me to bring him home. I am told you have this power. I will do anything—pay anything—for you to bring him back.”
Mary pulled out her bulging pocketbook, which we’d fattened with a shredded copy of the Sentinel, and waved it over her head in a gesture, I am certain, that no human being had ever made. Ruth smiled, puzzled at the eccentricity.
“It is true that the electric resurrection is at hand,” said Ruth. “But not this instant.”
“Tomorrow night we raise fifty from the dead,” said Enoch, with sickening pride.
“I cannot wait so long,” said Mary.
“Miracles cannot be rushed,” said Ruth.
“It’s my fault, then,” I said. “I told her you could help.”
“I’m sure there’s something we can do to tide her over,” said Enoch.
“I’ve spoken to widows who received comfort from your mother. If you can’t offer a miracle, a shoulder to cry on could suffice.”
“My mother is at the Flat supervising construction of the stage,” said Ruth, “and I am a preacher, not a healer. My shoulders carry the weight of the ministry. They are not built for crying on.”
I took Mary’s hand. Tears swept down her face. Enoch was so distressed, he looked ready to dissolve. Even Ruth seemed moved, in her way. Despite Mary’s hysterics, it had gone the way I wanted. It was time for my only important line.
“If you can’t help us,” I said, “perhaps your father can.”
Ruth and Enoch shared a look. What it meant, I could not say, but I did notice that across the room, the hammering stopped. The hammer dangled at Judy’s hip as she waited to see what happened.
“Papa is resting,” said Enoch. “The ordeal . . .”
“I know,” I said. “Of course I know, but if he knew one of his faithful was carrying so much pain, perhaps he could—”
“No,” said Ruth, like a steel shutter falling into place. “Tomorrow night, Papa will perform the greatest miracle since Christ walked out of his tomb. He cannot be bothered with matters so trivial.”
“Tragic though they may be,” said Enoch. He took a pair of bright blue tickets from his coat pocket and pressed them into my hands. “Perhaps this will salve the wound. Premium tickets to tomorrow night’s ceremony, for a reserved section right at the foot of the stage.”
“Thank you,” said Mary.
“We’ll see you there tomorrow night,” I said. I turned to the exit. Mary did not. She was simply terrible at following cues.
“I’m not leaving until I see Bully Byrd,” she said.
“He is in no state to speak,” said Ruth.
“I don’t care.”
“Mary,” I said, unsure how to rein her in, “I’m sure we’ll get everything we need tomorrow at the Flat.”
“I cannot wait!” she shouted. “They talk of helping widows? I envy widows. A widow has status. A widow may grieve. A girl who has lost her fiancé is nothing but alone.”
It was far from what we had planned. Mary’s improvisation made me want to take her by the neck and drag her out by force, but even through my rage I had to admit that it was the best acting she had done all day.
Enoch looked like he wished he could vanish into the floor. Ruth stood tall, considering the simplest way to expel this madwoman from her church. Judy joined her siblings to present a united front.
“Please,” I said. “You must excuse my cousin. She’s had such a hard time.”
“You have no idea,” said Mary. “None of you have any idea. If Bully Byrd can help me, I will not leave until he’s been given the chance.”
“We have so much work to do,” said Ruth. “If you don’t leave us to it, we’ll have to compel you.”
“Please don’t make me compel you,” said Judy, thwacking her hammer against her empty palm. Mary shoved her in the chest, broke through the Byrds’ rank, and strode across the floor. I followed, walking backward, hands outstretched, ready to protect Mary if the Byrds charged. They advanced, first at a walk and then at a run as Mary pounded on the recently repaired door.
“Wake up, Bully!” she said. “You’re not dead anymore. You’ve got work to do.”
“Papa is sleeping,” said Enoch. He charged at Mary, and I caught him by the waist and held him firm, glad it wasn’t his sisters I had to fight. He shoved and clawed feebly, and I tightened my grip as Judy stepped closer, shaking her head and preparing to do what we had driven her to. She raised the hammer and Mary kept banging—kept banging until the door swung open, and Bully Byrd entered the room.
He was sober and awake, his cheeks shaved close and hair scrubbed clean. He was bigger than I’d realized—he filled the doorway—and the white suit clung to him like a second skin. He was handsome, if you were the sort of woman attracted to tree trunks, and it occurred to me for the first time that he was the youngest Byrd there—younger than his children by a decade or more.
Of course he was, I thought. Bully was thirty-five when he died, and death is a wonderful preservative. Stranger than that, I realized, was that I had begun to think of this man as Bully, and the three apologetic misfits who stared at him as his children, just as they said.
“I’m so sorry, Papa,” said Enoch, eyes fixed on his father’s shoes.
“It isn’t his fault,” said Mary, as sweet as you’d expect from a well-heeled young woman talking to a preacher. “I’m mad with grief.”
“I heard,” said Bully, his voice as smooth and deep as the Hudson. He stared down at me, and I wondered if he knew that he’d seen me in his dreams.
“You can go back to sleep,” said Judy.
“They’re leaving,” said Ruth, glaring at me. “Aren’t you?”
“No,” I said. “We’re not. My cousin is hurting. You are people of God, and if you’d rather sleep than help a woman in need, your god must be ashamed.”
Laughter rumbled out of Bully’s chest. He clapped me on the shoulder, and it was all I could do not to fall down. Mary stared at me with unmasked pride. It filled me with a warmth I hadn’t known since summer died.
“I don’t know that I can stop you hurting,” said Bully, “but I’ll do whatever God permits. Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”
I started for the office, but Bully did not step aside.
“That room’s not fit for a dog,” he said. “Helen’s got a place for these little chats, hasn’t she?”
“Across the street,” said Enoch, unsure.
“Perfect.”
“I’ll help you over.”
“I can cross a damn street by myself,” said Bully. “But come if you want, old man. Can’t see as you’re doing anything worthwhile here.”
Mary and I followed him out, with Enoch bringing up the rear. The moving women got back to work. Judy and Ruth stood in the middle of their church, lighting cigarettes and staring at us with hate or pity or a cold blend of both.
Across the street was a creamy stone tenement with boards over the first-floor windows and broken glass where the rest were meant to be. In place of the front door, strips of fabric hung across the threshold, twisting in the slow westerly wind. Enoch held the curtains aside and welcomed us into the entryway, which was lit by a pair of candle stumps burning low. Boards blocked off the apartment doors. A slightly questionable set of stairs led us to the second floor. At the second-floor landing, the building disappeared.
Westside real estate is so unpredictable.
The outer walls were still there, but the four floors above our heads were gone, leaving a space as vast and empty as Grand Central Terminal. Wind twisted through broken windows. Far away, a pair of gulls screeched beneath the pressed tin roof. At the end of the long, gray room, two chairs flanked a table that held a tea service, waiting for the widows of Helen Byrd.
“Well!” said Mary. “What an unusual room.”
“I don’t know why she uses it,” said Bully. “Must be hell to heat. Come on, let’s sit down.”
We started walking, and he set his paw on my shoulder.
“Not you,” he said. “It’s a private talk she wants, and private it’s gonna be.”
“Anything you say to my cousin, you can say to me.”
“Your choice,” he said to Mary. “We talk alone or I go back to sleep.”
“Miss Carr can wait with Enoch in the stairs. There are things I have to say that only a man of God should hear.”
Mary gave me a nod that was supposed to be reassuring, but that just made me want to scream.
“Before I go, Bulrush, a question,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“It’s a warm summer evening in Central Park. The sun plummets to the horizon. What’s your favorite place to watch it set?”
“That’s a stupid question.”
“My specialty.”
“Miss Carr,” said Enoch, sweating more than a healthy man should, “this is really not the time.”
“He’s right,” said Mary. “Go downstairs.”
“I’d love to, but I have an obligation to a client. So what is it? The Harlem Meer? The Kinderberg? The Green?”
“None of them. A sunset’s overrated. I’d turn my back and watch the eastern sky. I’m no poet, but there’s a color you get that time of day that you know came straight from God’s own brush. That good enough?”
Before I could answer, Enoch grabbed me by the elbow and marched me down the stairs.
“That’s a stupendous answer,” I said. “Could you have planned that with him? If it was anyone else, I’d say no, but you do think of everything.”
He just about shoved me off the bottom step. I was grinning when my feet hit the floor.
“My father is engaged in work that will rewrite history,” he said, smoothing his hair. “You must not pester him with trivialities.”
“That blue wasn’t trivial when you had me running up and down the whole goddamned Eastside looking for it.”
“I’m no longer concerned with three-color printing.”
“So I’m fired from that case, too, am I?”
“These are questions of life and death. You are not qualified.”
“Why am I the only person in this city who understands that life and death are nothing next to a missing finger or the right shade of ink? When someone like your father points at the heavens, it’s just to distract everyone else from the fact that everything that matters is right here.”
“So you admit he’s my father.”
He allowed himself the faintest smile. He’d taken the point. I tried to steady my breathing. I’d let my anger show, and that meant I was no longer in control.
“You want to get metaphysical,” I said. “Fine. Have you raised anyone else from the dead this week, or was it just him?”
“You ask the strangest questions, Miss Carr. It’s a delight.”
“Your father just did a Lazarus act. I don’t think it’s my questions that are strange. So let’s try another one: Why isn’t Bully sleeping at home?”
“Excuse me?”
“I happen to know he passed last night drunk on bad gin, curled up in a shivering ball in your church’s back room. Why?”
His cheeks turned red, and he shook a little bit. He looked as angry as I’d ever seen him, which still wasn’t that angry.
“How do you know that?” he said.
“I’m a detective. I’m terribly clever. Why wasn’t he nestled in the bosom of his family? Is it because he’s an actor? Or is there something more sinister going on?”
“I will say this as plainly as I can. My father, whom I lost when I was a boy, is back from the dead. Why would I question a miracle?”
“Because you’re smart enough to know better, which means you’re either lying, or you’re trying like hell not to see the truth.”
He peeled a strip of gray off the wall. When he looked back at me, his cheeks were porcelain and all was cheer.
“I will state plainly that you are no longer engaged by my family on any business,” he said, “metaphysical or otherwise. Forget the finger. Forget the ink.”
“So if I happen to stumble on the truth of who set the fire that killed Abner, you wouldn’t care to know?”
A sharp breath. “Abner’s death was a tragedy, but it was one of his own making. He chose his life, and that meant he chose his death as well.”
“Why not just bring him home? When you’re dragging those fifty lost souls back from death, why not throw out a line for your poor misguided brother as well?”
Enoch opened his hands and raised his eyes, a sweet hopeful look on his face. I wasn’t sure if his gaze was directed at his father or his god.
“I don’t pretend to understand how this works,” he said. “I’m just a printer and a servant of the Lord. It all depends on how tomorrow night goes. Bully believes he can prop open the gates to death. If he’s right—and I know in my heart he can never be wrong—the fifty will only be the beginning. Thousands, millions will follow.”
“And that’s supposed to be progress?”
“What do you mean?”
“Ever consider that we’re better off letting the dead stay buried?”
“As I said, Miss Carr, when it comes to cosmic questions, you’re out of your depth. Are you all right waiting for your cousin here? I have quite a bit of work back at the church.”
I let him go. I’d hate for him to know it, but two minutes of spiritual debate really was all I could stand. I had smaller matters to attend to.