A dead woman looked out from the laptop resting on Alice Fine’s kitchen table. The woman’s skin was waxen against the metal slab. Thin shoulders, thick hair. She stared with sightless black eyes.
Alice spooned cereal into her mouth and scrolled for details. Jane Doe Anaho, 367UFNV, had been found naked in a patch of remote high desert, miles from the nearest town, named for the island wildlife refuge nearby. Discovered by hikers.
Couple of stoned kids who’ll never hike again.
Alice studied the photo. Juanita Doe, maybe. They didn’t know. They might never know. Race Unk. Unknown. Everything Unk. at the moment. That was the basic point with UIDs. They were unidentified.
The doorbell rang. Alice’s attention rose slowly from the depths of open tabs. She was supposed to meet some of the other Doe Pages volunteers for lunch—another level of unknown, one she wasn’t sure she was ready for—and had resorted to old study habits, cramming for an exam. It was easy to get lost in the Does, to lose time.
She reached for her cell phone. When she moved in a couple of months ago, her dad had immediately installed one of those systems that sent live video from her door to an app. Just a precaution, with all the weirdos out there. She’d met more than her fair share.
On the app, the woman in the back apartment peered into the doorbell camera. Her long gray hair had been scraped back from her face, creating a grimace that showed a crooked incisor. “Miss Fine? Is this . . . ? Can you hear me? I just need a minute of your time.”
A classic line for someone who expected to have the door slammed in her face, if she could get it to open in the first place.
“I’m busy, Patricia.” Patricia? Was that even the right name? Patricia Gussin, or something like it on the mailboxes near the back door. Alice wasn’t as curious about her neighbors as they were about her.
“We’re getting an action together on these new security cameras.”
No sense of irony as she peered into Alice’s security camera. There was no “we,” no association, no association board. Only Patricia and her tinfoil-hat petitions, her keen sense for when others did as they pleased. Her emails to Rajul were legend, all caps lock and exclamation points. Rajul held no post. He had only lived in the building longer than anyone else.
Alice looked back at the dead woman, impatient for her.
“Miss Fine?”
Alice pocketed her phone and went to the door. Patricia, hearing the peephole cover open, looked up from the hallway carpet, her face stretched feral in the fish-eye. She held a clipboard. “Are you there?”
Alice opened the door to the chain. “What about the cameras?”
“Well, to begin with, if the cameras are for our security, why do they only point toward the front doors? I caught someone trying to jimmy the back door only last week.”
A good point. Alice only used the back door to take out garbage and hadn’t noticed. “Is the petition to place cameras at the back?”
Patricia’s eyes widened. “My God, no. Are you—” She gestured at Alice with the clipboard. “Surely you’re joking.”
“You said someone was trying to break in—”
“No one seems to know where the video feed goes. They shouldn’t be allowed to monitor our movements in this way.”
“They who?” Alice didn’t mind the security cameras. In point of fact, she liked them. Against her hip her cell phone buzzed. It made a pleasant little growl, rnn, whenever she got a new text.
“What was that noise?” Patricia’s eyes darted overhead toward the nearest camera. She had a large, stretched freckle at her jawline.
I bet she doesn’t know that’s there. “Just my phone,” Alice said.
“I would never carry a tracking device around on my person willingly. You’re doing their job for them—”
“Them who? Honestly, I need to go. I’ll be late to work.”
“I thought you worked for your dad.” Patricia peered over Alice’s shoulder, as though she expected him to be there.
For a privacy nut, she was nosy enough. “Just . . . catch me this weekend. I have to go.” She closed the door against Patricia’s last protests, closed the peephole cover, and returned to her computer and Jane. She had started to think of the dead woman as her Jane.
She raised her mug, stone cold, to her lips and then put it down. She was actually late, not excuse-late. And it didn’t matter that her dad owned the company. She was supposed to set an example. A good example, instead of the kind she often was.
ON THE DRIVE, she decided to cancel on the Does meet-up. By the time she pulled into the lot down the block from the site and squeezed next to Jimmy’s sleek BMW, she had changed her mind back. She’d never minded not keeping up with old friends from school, busy with her mom’s care, then wedding plans. Now her mother’s dress hung on her closet door like something out of Dickens, and she spent her time online with the Does. She should attend the lunch, meet some of the other volunteers in person.
Alice hurried along the fence. Above, the crane swung. She could hear a concrete mixer or two churning under that. At the gate she shaded her eyes, noted the crew up on the second deck, and waved when Gus called out a good-morning. The six-story elevator shaft at the corner of the structure-in-progress served as sentry, a ticking clock. They were at least a week behind, summer winding down around them.
The problem was, no one had the right enthusiasm for it. It was too much a letdown from their last project, a thirty-seven-story ’scraper downtown, a beacon of the south Loop, a real stunner. On this suburban garage the crew was leaner. Decimated, really, the friendships among the crew still reshaping themselves around absence. Among the crew, it seemed to Alice, everyone put in their time, heads down, hearts not into it. They had built their cathedral, their once-in-a-lifetime. From here on out, they were just putting down bricks.
She yanked open the trailer door. The air-conditioning had been set low enough to store meat. She was the meat. In the back alcove of the trailer, her dad swiveled in the chair he and JimBig King used, phone to ear, eyes narrowed.
Sorry, she mouthed, and hurried behind her desk. Five minutes late. Who else got the stink eye for five minutes? Seven, tops.
“Well, that’s just not going to cut it,” he said. He’d spoken into his phone, but she sensed it was meant for her, too.
Alice stowed her backpack and started her computer. Under his audience, she put effort into miming the efficiency that came so naturally to him. They were nothing alike. Where he was compact and controlled, quick, decisive, she was expansive, long-limbed. She took up space, more than women were supposed to. More than her mother, obviously, who hadn’t passed down her fine bone structure, her petite debutante’s body—only her tendency toward migraine. The family joke had always been that Alice was a throwback to her great-uncles on the Fine side, all tall and lanky, with nicknames like “Slim” and “Stretch.” Sometimes her dad called her that, “Stretch,” when he was in the mood.
He wasn’t in the mood this morning.
“Well?” He held his hand over the phone mouthpiece. He was a former cop, intolerant of unanswered questions and unassigned guilt.
“Sorry,” she said. “My neighbor—”
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Rnn. Rnn, rnn. She reached for it and turned it off. “Sorry.”
“Is that more of that John Doe nonsense? Don’t bring it in here.”
Her dad turned in the chair. From here she could see the scar at his jaw, a bad nick from a barber when he was young. Cataloguing the scratches and dents of people was a habit she’d picked up from her short time with the Does, so she supposed she couldn’t help it anymore, bringing it into their lives. He thought it was morbid, and maybe he was right. Scars, tattoos. Crooked teeth, badly healed fractures. She was imagining the corpses they would become, the abandoned bones.
“I truly don’t understand why you got involved with that.” His back to her.
“You know why.” She’d been trying to explain it for two months. She wasn’t playing Sherlock on social media. She had a purpose. “Like, why did you want to become a police officer? You wanted to do something to help people—”
“Living people.”
“It’s for the living, Dad.”
The people featured on the Pages were almost always dead, half the profiles for unidentified remains, and half dedicated to missing persons, most of the cases at least a decade cold. They could only hope for a match between a found body and a lost person. A match was the holy grail—to bring an end to a mystery and give closure for some weary family.
Don and Jenn, who ran the Doe Pages, called the long wait open-ended grief, like a sentence without punctuation, a story half told.
Grief was open-ended, though, wasn’t it? All grief, if it could be called grief at all.
“Can’t you do something else?” he said. “Stir the pot at a soup kitchen?”
“You know I can’t cook.” She subsisted on takeout, foraging meals in her own kitchen like a rodent. “This is the thing I can do.” Maybe. She hadn’t been that helpful yet, and the work was meticulous, taxing. Thankless.
“Are you going to tell me what held you up?”
Oh. “Nothing.” She didn’t want to get into Patricia, the petitions. He’d gotten her the apartment through a friend, someone owed a favor, a good deal, a nice place, but he’d have rather she stayed at home forever. She certainly couldn’t admit to being late because of Jane Doe Anaho. “Traffic. Sorry.”
She’d been apologizing a lot lately. He’d been short-tempered, ever since—
“Has Matt been in here again?” he said. Right on cue.
“No.” She could feel herself blushing. “Not that I know of.”
He spun in his chair, nodded toward the floor.
Alice leaned forward over her desk. Perfectly shaped boot prints led from the door to her desk, then toward the trailer’s bathroom.
The fucking dust.
It paid to be Harrison Fine’s daughter, to be granted the easiest job in the world and a salary she didn’t earn. So little was asked. She kept the filing, answered the phones, paid vendors and payroll. Her priority task, though, was keeping the construction dust at bay inside the trailer, where visiting clients and investors seemed to expect the pristine business environment of a bank. But the guys on the crew sometimes scammed coffee or used the trailer’s toilet instead of the Porta-Johns. How much did it matter, when no one was due for a visit?
Alice reached for her desk calendar, remembering as she did that they actually were expecting a visit. Uncle Jim was back from his impromptu vacation today, and he had to lead some stakeholders on a site tour, a regrets visit to pass out the excuses and apologies. He’d probably bring them inside at some point to sign paperwork and jolly them into good moods, just shoot the shit for a while. Jim King was a terrific shooter of shit, and so was her dad, Jim’s right hand. And left, Uncle Jim always said when he had the opportunity, though it was for laughs. Everyone knew JimBig—as he was called by almost everyone—ran the show, and that Jim Junior, Jimmy, was the heir. Jimmy, who ran around the sites getting the cuffs of his suit pants dirty, so that everyone knew he was destined for better things. Harrison Fine? Harris Fine was simply the one who got things done, and, when there was something to do, so was Alice. In this way, they were exactly alike.
She got up from her desk and went to the closet in the back. Pulling out the mop, she caught a wink from her dad.
“Sorry,” he said. “With Big gone, I’ve been— You know why I worry. I just want you to be safe.”
“I do,” she said. “I am.” It was a balm. She’d skip the meet-up this time.
She sidled up to him and reached around his neck for a hug. He squeezed her arm while she breathed in his scent. Shaving cream, coffee, cinder block. It paid to be Harris Fine’s daughter. It always had.
Then she took the mop and got down to business, even if business, this time and so often, was only dust.