The officers walked Winnie and Scott to the squad car parked in front of Scott’s building. Winnie glanced down the street and immediately saw Dora and Beta walking toward them, less than a block away. She and Beta locked eyes, but Winnie quickly turned and ducked into the car. There was nothing she could do to let her double know what was happening, and she didn’t want McPherson or Muldoon—especially Muldoon—to notice her looking at something and look that way themselves.
Winnie could only hope that Beta wouldn’t try to go looking for them. And for all she knew, Beta did try to follow them to the station, in some other world. But Winnie didn’t see a splinter. Even though she’d never thought the splinters were particularly useful—especially now that she realized she’d misinterpreted the splinter where she “met” James—she did feel blind without them. Would they ever come back?
It was Winnie’s first time in a cop car. Looking through the metal grating that separated the back seat from the front reminded her of being in the Faraday cage. She wondered if they would still be free to stage their experiment the next evening, and her chest went tight.
You are not trapped, Winnie told herself, and tried to take a full breath. You aren’t in trouble, and you are not a prisoner. You aren’t a prisoner because you haven’t done anything wrong.
But she knew that doing something wrong wasn’t the only way people wound up behind bars.
All those people in the internment camps—immigrants, like her. They hadn’t done anything wrong. They were prisoners all the same. Young. Old. Citizen or not. Being at war made people eager to pigeonhole enemies, then lock them up so they could feel safe.
Muldoon was in the passenger seat. She could see him watching her in the rearview mirror. Was he suspicious of her because she was acting suspicious?
Or was it because of her German last name?
The morgue was an unassuming brick building in midtown Manhattan—it wasn’t very large, so Winnie assumed the city must have several.
“Was the body found near here?” Winnie asked.
“No,” McPherson said, shaking his head. “Somebody at Riverside Park saw it floating in the Hudson. Lucky we even found him, with these weird tides.”
“Weird tides?” Winnie asked, although she dreaded the answer. Tides were caused by the gravitational pull of the moon. If her being there was interrupting normal gravitational forces somehow, that could affect the tides too.
“High tide has been real high lately—and totally off schedule. Don’t you read the paper?”
Winnie felt queasy. What had happened in the park had lasted only a few moments, and it had affected only the small area around her. Did this mean the effects of her being there were getting worse?
Muldoon shot his partner a look.
“Come on—it’s not like she’s a reporter,” McPherson said. “The kid was her friend. And the tides—well, that’s sure not a secret.”
Riverside Park was a block from Columbia’s campus. If James had died in the lab there, it would be an easy place to dispose of a body—although not the easiest.
Professor Hawthorn was the head of the physics department, a brilliant man with access to a whole campus of resources and—if his lavish home was any indication—near-limitless funds. If Hawthorn really was the one responsible for James’s death, the only reason his body had been found was because Hawthorn wanted it found. A body, Winnie thought, might raise fewer questions than a missing person.
“Don’t worry,” McPherson added, giving Scott a sympathetic look. “He wasn’t in the water long.”
It took Scott a few seconds to respond. It seemed like it was taking longer than usual for words to reach him, like he was underwater himself.
“Is that where he died?” Scott asked. “In the river?”
Muldoon raised an eyebrow. “What—was he a swimmer?”
“People don’t die in the Hudson—unless they jump,” his partner explained. “It’s just where they’re found.”
“So then how did he die?” Scott pressed.
“We aren’t sure yet,” McPherson said. “But we don’t think he jumped.”
They showed Winnie to a row of stiff chairs against the wall of the small lobby.
“Wait here.”
Winnie wanted to give Scott some last look of encouragement to lend him strength for the awful task to come, but he didn’t even glance at her before Muldoon and McPherson walked him past the receptionist, through a door, where Winnie couldn’t follow.
Winnie didn’t want to think about what Scott was doing on the other side of that door, or what a body might look like after it was pulled out of a river.
The hard wooden back of the waiting room chair bit into her own. It was an ugly room. Off-white walls, minty-green linoleum floor that evoked anything but freshness. It seemed like a poor choice to accompany death, but when she tried to think of a better color, she couldn’t. The building would be ugly no matter what. Death was an ugly thing.
Winnie didn’t know how to support Scott through this. Beta was the one who should be there, not her. Knowing Scott was suffering made her feel so helpless, and even though James had already been involved with Hawthorn before her trespass into this world, she felt a sick, guilty feeling surrounding his death, like it was another ripple of wrongness caused by her being there.
She had known James was missing back home, and it felt like carrying that knowledge with her had infected their world somehow. This was probably just the same ill ease and blame-seeking that accompanied any tragedy, but it was indisputable that Winnie’s presence here made any bad thing worse. Her being there was another worry that got piled on top of any other.
She really wanted to go home.
She wondered if she would ever get to.
It was late, but Winnie supposed the morgue never fully closed. A body might turn up at any hour.
Winnie was the only person in the waiting area besides the receptionist. She was a steely-haired, whippet-thin older woman whose stern face gave Winnie the impression that she had the necessary nerve to spend her nights alone in a building full of bodies.
“How long does it usually take?” Winnie asked. The receptionist looked up from her book and met the question with a blank stare. “Identifying a body, I mean,” she clarified.
It had been maybe forty-five minutes.
“It takes as long as it takes,” the receptionist answered with a shrug, but not unkindly. “There’s paperwork. And questions, sometimes. Depending on the situation.”
Winnie was pretty confident that this was a situation that demanded questions.
There was a creak and then the shush of the building’s revolving door being pushed open as someone entered the building. Winnie glanced over out of idle curiosity and saw Professor Hawthorn striding toward the reception desk. The heels of his dress shoes clicked sharply against the waxed floor. To Winnie, they sounded like certain doom.
“I’m here to identify a body,” he said.
Hawthorn was so confident—and dressed with such class—that Winnie could swear the receptionist actually sat up straighter.
“Certainly, sir, but usually—”
“I was told the officers in charge of the case are already here. Detective McPherson and Lieutenant Muldoon. Page them, please.”
The receptionist nodded and picked up the phone. “I have a—”
“Professor Seymour Hawthorn.”
“—Professor Seymour Hawthorn here. Could you send McPherson and Muldoon up for him when they’re finished?”
Hawthorn hadn’t noticed Winnie sitting there. She supposed some girl sitting in a morgue’s waiting room was beneath his notice. But it would seem suspicious if he noticed her there later and she hadn’t said anything, Winnie thought with resignation. Which meant that she would have to approach him. At least she didn’t have to worry about trying to act “normal.” There could be no normal under circumstances so awful.
Winnie stood and took a few steps toward the reception desk. “Hello, Professor Hawthorn,” she said quietly.
He turned to look at her, a flicker of irritation at being approached was there and then gone like a bird ruffling its feathers. “Hello, Miss—?”
Shit.
Hawthorn didn’t know her.
It hadn’t occurred to Winnie that in this world, they might not have met—she had never even bothered to ask.
Winnie felt a flash of terror and immediately tried to mask it. She had been so sure, with Beta’s father and Scott both working for Nightingale, that Hawthorn would have been introduced to Beta at some point, or at least seen her. Now she was stuck.
Winnie had put herself in the exact scenario she feared.
“Winnie Schulde,” she said. It seemed too risky to lie about that now—the police could come out and call her “Miss Schulde” at any moment. “Heinrich Schulde’s daughter.”
“Ah,” he said, and shook her hand. “I’m so sorry, but have we met?”
On second thought, Winnie didn’t know enough about her double’s life to flesh out an honest response, so there was no choice but to try to bluff her way through it.
“Um, not exactly.” Winnie tried to think of believable circumstances for why she would recognize him, but he wouldn’t recognize her. “I—Scott took me to a lecture once,” Winnie said. She knew the department hosted a monthly lecture series. It seemed at least conceivable that Beta would join Scott for one. “He pointed you out to me.”
Hawthorn frowned, and Winnie could see that there was something about her story that didn’t add up for him, but she couldn’t imagine what—she couldn’t have been vaguer.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you,” Hawthorn said, shaking her hand. “Although I wish it were under better circumstances.”
There seemed to an unspoken question to this—What are you doing here? Winnie was thankful that this, at least, she had an answer for.
“I was with Scott when the police came. I guess they weren’t able to reach you? They came to get him to—to see if it’s James.”
“Scott’s in there with them now?” Hawthorn seemed agitated by this news, although he quickly tried to conceal it. “He shouldn’t have to see his friend like that,” Hawthorn explained hastily. “I would have saved him that if I could.”
Winnie wondered what it was about James’s body that Hawthorn didn’t want Scott to see.
She wanted to hiss “You did this!” She wanted to shove him against the wall. She wanted him to be afraid of her like she was afraid of him.
“It’s good you came,” Winnie said. “The police will have questions for you, I imagine. Considering the experiments.”
It wasn’t all she wanted to say, but still, Winnie felt immense satisfaction in the implication—I know you did it, and the police will too.
Hawthorn reached a hand toward her face and—too quick for her to process what was happening and move away—tucked a piece of Winnie’s hair back behind her ear, letting his thumb brush across her cheekbone. Winnie shivered in revulsion.
“You’re a child,” he said. “You don’t understand anything.”
Just then the door swung open, and Muldoon and McPherson escorted a pale Scott out to the lobby. If Scott was alarmed to see Winnie out there chatting with the head of Project Nightingale, he didn’t show it. His expression didn’t show much, in fact, but this didn’t surprise her. That was grief. It blunted everything.
“Professor Hawthorn?” McPherson asked.
Hawthorn nodded, and the two shook hands.
“Mr. Hamilton here has already given us a positive ID on James Oswald. We tried to get in touch earlier—”
“Yes, yes,” Hawthorn said impatiently. “I was at a trustee meeting for the Metropolitan Opera. I called the station as soon as I got home.”
Winnie caught Muldoon rolling his eyes at the receptionist—a look that said we get it, you’re rich—and was glad that she wasn’t the only person the detective seemed to take an immediate dislike to.
“We appreciate that,” McPherson said. “There’s nothing more for us to do here, but if you don’t mind accompanying us back to the station, we do have some questions.”
Annoyance flashed across Hawthorn’s face, and Winnie once again had the sense that Scott identifying James’s body was interfering with Hawthorn’s plans somehow, but he said, “Of course.”
“You’ll be all right getting home?” McPherson asked.
Scott didn’t seem to even hear the question, so Winnie nodded hastily and said, “Yes. We’ll be okay.”
Okay?
That wasn’t remotely the word for their situation.