I’m about to return to my desk (Alyce is saying something sarcastic about “the end of an era,” etc.) when I notice the coffee mug. After a moment’s hesitation, acting purely on impulse, I stick a pencil through the mug handle. I pick it up with the pencil and carry it into the examination room.
“Whatcha doing?” Alyce calls.
“Just checking something,” I say.
I dust and lift a couple of prints from Margo’s ceramic cup. Next, I tape the prints to some index cards, then bring in the Cogan file—the unidentified prints on their crib. I compare the index card of Margo’s prints and the file prints of the crib.
WHEN I CALL Margo from the pay phone on the corner, it’s obvious that she doesn’t want to come see me. She’s busy with packing up her place. “Is this serious?” she asks.
I don’t answer. And I can hear her waiting, gauging exactly what this might be about.
“I can give you fifteen minutes,” she says.
I wait for her at a table at Kroner’s. After twenty-five minutes, I think she’s not going to show, but then the door jingles and she’s there, Fareed in a baby carrier on her chest. She looks around warily before she spots me.
“All right, Lena,” she says, sliding herself and the baby into the table. Her hair is bedraggled and loose and her eyes look puffy. “If this is about my letter of complaint, then I really don’t have—”
“It’s not.” I open the folder and slide it across the table to her. She won’t be able to read the prints without magnification; I just want to show her the documents. She sighs theatrically and unhooks Fareed, who’s starting to fuss. “Here,” she says, handing him over the table to me. “I can’t do anything when he’s like this.”
He’s heavy and warm—four months old now, I think—and at first he looks around anxiously for his mother. I’m a little frightened myself—this is one of possibly three times in my life that I’ve held a baby—and I try to cradle him in my arms. But he seems to want a more upright position instead, so he faces backward over my shoulder. He calms quickly, gurgling in my ear. I notice the soft presence of his head against mine and close my eyes for a moment.
“What is this? I can’t make heads or tails of any of this,” Margo says. But when I open my eyes, she isn’t looking at me or the folder; instead she gazes mournfully out the window. “Oh, never mind,” she says now. “I know what it is. You figured it out, of course. Big deal. It took you long enough.”
“I never would’ve imagined you would do something like that.”
“Except that you did then—you checked, didn’t you?” She puts up her hand and shakes her head. “No. I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing for me to do.” She looks at me directly, her expression bright and fierce. “I was desperate when I did it. I could’ve lost my job and they would’ve taken my babies away. I thought I could make them fire you, not me. I only thought about getting you in trouble—I never thought they’d start to use those prints as actual evidence. And I’m sure you can’t believe it, but that’s the truth.”
I rub Fareed’s back. “Couldn’t you have just settled for one set of prints? I mean, if you had to do this in the first place. Did you have to mark more than one crib?”
She throws up her hands. “I felt like I had to see it through, to make it look more convincing. I just snuck into the Evidence Room and touched the crib. And then that was so easy, I drove out to the other two houses.” She watches Fareed humming against my shoulder; she doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to reclaim him. “Anyway, I didn’t think you were doing enough to look into the case. You all seemed like you could care less. Alyce especially. No one even listens to what mothers think. We’re all supposed to be stupid.”
I’m about to try to defend myself when she says, “It doesn’t matter—you might as well go ahead and tell Frank. I’m out of a job as it is.”
I jiggle Fareed a little and he chortles; there’s a damp spot on my shoulder. “What do you mean? I thought you and—I thought you were moving to Atlanta or something.”
“Nah, none of that’s true. Rob is moving to Atlanta, but he’s taking his wife and kids. That’s just something I made up to piss off Alyce. Didn’t want her pity.” She rubs her eyes. “My own damn foolishness. Once they started talking about those prints like they were evidence, I knew I was gonna get caught. So I resigned. I was going to take the babies and move in with my mom in Albany.” She looks at me and smiles. “I can’t afford a lawyer.”
I tuck my nose in above Fareed’s tiny ear for a moment, try to listen to his thoughts. Then I lift him, feet dangling, and hand him back to Margo. My chest feels cool and empty. “Sarian has to know that print detail isn’t authentic. They think they’ll find the killer by matching those prints.”
Margo stands, jostling Fareed, who begins fussing. “I’ll tell him myself.”
I rest my chin on my hand and look up at her.
“I’m sorry I did it, Lena,” she says. “I am. I didn’t mean anything personal against you. I always liked you the best of all of them, you know? Well. And maybe I was a little jealous of you too.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
She rests Fareed on her hip and pushes back her hair with the other hand. “I always thought you were so lucky—not knowing what you came from. Not having to deal with it. You can just walk around . . .”—she lifts her fingers—“sort of invisible.”
I stay and sip my cold coffee after they leave. I watch them back out of the parking lot, Fareed’s head turned as if he were able to see me through the glass as they pull away.
THAT DAY, A CURT memo from Cummings’s office goes out to the entire Lab that the crib fingerprints will no longer be considered a salient piece of evidence in the Blanket Killer case. Up and down the fourth floor, there are water cooler meetings and whispering speculation among forensics staff as to why the prints were pulled.
CHAPTER 45
IN MARCH, THE SKY SHATTERS FIRST INTO SLEET, THEN STEELY RAIN, and the ground softens to slush, washing away all the tracks and trails, all the records of where people have been.
A new blood workup shows that there are lower levels of the dye metal traces—cadmium, chrome, lead, arsenic—in my body, but they remain present in “significant” amounts and, according to the Poison Control Center lab, they are likely to remain with me for a long time. A density scan reveals that, at least for the moment, the poisons haven’t damaged my bones.
Smoking under the eaves of the building, the Lab workers hunch together in the damp cold, their coats sparkling with rain. It seems as if the sky itself has started to thaw—the air the color of pale steel—and flecks of ice and rain patter on the buildings.
There are no new leads. And not enough time for any of us in the Lab to feel easy, not enough to imagine the world as a more or less safe and reasonable place. The past month has felt like a waiting period—no new cribs have come into Evidence, no new SIDS cases have been reported. I let myself consider what it would be like if the Blanket Killer case were never resolved. It seems nearly possible. If only we knew the murderer was gone forever. “Sometimes they are,” Celeste Southard tells me. “They commit their terrible crimes and then they vanish. And forensics personnel have to learn how to live with some open questions in their lives.”
One night, Keller sits beside me on the bed and we talk about living in other places, about moving someplace warm. About sunlight. We fall asleep, his breath in my ear, traveling down my spinal cord, his arm resting across my ribs. It’s the most contact I seem to be able to tolerate—my recovery is maddeningly slow. Once, I half-wake in the night and feel his lips on my forehead. I slip out of the bed without waking him, I think, and head down the hall, to the guest room.
FOUR WEEKS AFTER I walked out of the hospital, Frank sends around a memo announcing his impending retirement in June. I come home from the Lab, drop onto the couch, and st
are at the blank TV. After a few minutes of this, I make a decision and ask Keller if he’ll come with me back to the St. James Apartments.
I’m embarrassed for him to see the way I’d been living—the barren living room and lilts of cobwebs drifting from the corners. But if he thinks the place is creepy he doesn’t say so. He stands in the big living room windows, going on about how lucky Frank is—how great it would be to retire and see the world. I ignore him and start packing.
I consider taking the mirror in the bedroom—it’s clear and narrow, tarnished at its edges, as if it’s begun to lose its reflecting properties. I leave it on the wall.
Something must’ve happened to you, Lena, Dr. Southard once said to me, so that you began to sort of process things differently. You see the world differently.
She said: What if you weren’t raised by apes?
I stroll through the rooms of my old apartment with a cardboard packing box, but there’s little I want to take. My clothes look dank and drab, stuffed into the closet. Mildew has sprung up, scaling the walls and dotting my sheets. In the end, I take just a few things—my old teakettle, some clean T-shirts and jeans, my wool coat. I start to unplug the answering machine that Charlie gave me, but then I change my mind about that as well. All my possessions fit into a brown grocery bag. Keller strolls around with his hands in his pockets, examining the crown molding, the speckled marble in the bathroom, the grand ruin of the place. “I can’t believe you actually lived here,” he says. I see it through his eyes—the scavenged furniture, my existence like a castaway on a wrecked ship. “I liked it,” I say. “It suited me.” I show him the window where I saw a cross drawn through the soot. At the right angle, it seems possible to detect its outline.
“Yeah.” Keller looks around slowly. “But it’s good you’re leaving.” He hoists the bag of possessions and I follow him to the door. I turn back for just a moment, gazing into that place, the rooms wide and empty as a sigh—I might never have lived here at all.
CHAPTER 46
THAT EVENING, I FEEL FATIGUE IN THE GRAIN OF MY BLOOD, IN the air itself. I linger in the door of the guest room. Every night, Keller has slept beside me on the floor—more sentry than lover. But tonight there’s a new question in the air: I’ve evacuated my old apartment, but it isn’t clear if I’m moving in with Keller. “We don’t have to call it moving in,” he says. “We can say it’s a trial balloon, maybe. A test run.”
“For what?” I ask.
“For something more.”
We leave the conversation there. Since the poisoning. I breathe less deeply, move more slowly, guarding myself (perhaps more than I absolutely need to) against pain.
“Just come back to our room,” he murmurs. “I like it better when you’re in there. It doesn’t have to mean anything.” His skin has a sepia cast under the hallway lights. For a moment, it seems almost as if he’s angry—or suffering—a brooding animal pain. When Keller leans toward me, pupils dilated in the low light, I step back.
“Jeez. Right,” he says quickly, lifting his hands as if to show he’s unarmed.
I don’t say anything. Lately, my cough has subsided, and the other day when Bruno Pollard hugged me again, welcoming me back to work, there were only quick, bearable twinges in my joints. But I hold myself back from Keller. I kiss him good night high on the side of his face, then linger there, despite myself, so I feel him exhale in my hair, his palms grazing the fine hairs of my forearms. Then I retreat to the guest room.
I have exhausting dreams of being lost, of dissolving in snow. I dream I’m trying to call Carole on the phone but the call won’t go through. My dreams have a thick, fluid weight. Toward dawn, I dream that my ape mother comes to my bed; we drift in the amber light. Before me I see the back of a woman’s head. I put my hand on her shoulder and turn her toward me, but instead of a face, it’s the back of her head again.
I shift between waking and sleeping all night. And I’m somewhere in that glinting light of a lost dream when I surface into consciousness. I gaze around at the unfamiliar room filling with new light. A thud at the window makes me jump: I look up and see a Siamese cat lurking along the window frame outside, fur flattening against the pane. He pulls up his features into a hard meow I can hear through the glass, glaring and so outraged I’m startled into a laugh.
I swing my legs out of bed so I’m facing the blank wall to the right. There’s a sort of moving screen of tree shadows cast against the wall. The motion distracts me for a moment as I watch the branches shake with the wind, complicated as a thicket. And slowly—in the middle of a yawn—I perceive an immobile center to the shadows. Inside the cross-hatching of tree limbs is the shadow of a person.
Someone is standing outside the window.
It’s dim inside the bedroom and I’m not sure if the person is standing close enough to see in. Without thinking, I slide from the side of the bed onto the floor, hiding myself from view. I wait for my pulse to subside as I consider that I might be hiding from the mail carrier or the paperboy, or any one of dozens of neighbors and their children. Stretched out on my side, feeling half foolish, I allow myself a glance over the edge of the bed, but the window’s empty. I look back at the wall, but the shadow has changed, now all is in movement—branches and twigs.
I dress quickly.
AS I PASS through the doorway, the front of the house is to my left. I look into Keller’s bedroom as I pass. The door is wide open and he’s in there, lying on his bed, asleep and fully clothed. His breath is regular with a soft, purling snore. A slim book of essays—Emerson—is cracked open facedown beside him, and his reading light is still on, transparent in the gray morning. I wonder if he’d been waiting for me.
I open the front door to a shock of cold, look up and down the empty street, the neighborhood quiet and still on an early Saturday morning.
I shut the door and head to the rear of the house. Just past the guest room there’s a workroom with a back door. Keller’s workroom is lined with shelves of paints, saws, wrenches, and nails. It smells of sawdust and minerals.
The back door sticks at first, but gives when I push with my hip and arm. The snowy yard behind the house shows a fair amount of foot traffic—the neighbor’s three little boys regularly cut through on their way to school. And I can see Keller’s heavy-soled tread between the house and the woodshed out back. Through process of elimination, I pick out the unidentifiable tracks in the snow: freshly made, they move in an arc around the side of the house, pausing at the windows, and crossing the backyard. I step into Keller’s high rubber boots by the back door and slip on an old parka hanging from a hook by the paints, then I descend the three back steps into the snow.
Whoever made these tracks was reckless or bold—or they’d underestimated me. I follow the narrow-toed prints out of the other tracks crisscrossing the yard, and into the yard of the house behind Keller’s. From there, the tracks skirt the house, then emerge onto another sidewalk. I follow them across a street and field, losing the prints in shoveled or trampled places, picking them back up again—distinctive, crepe-soled boots with narrow, tapering toes. It helps not to think about who I might be tracking, but simply to let the trail itself lead me, like following the ridges of a fingertip. The long, innocent neighborhoods stretch before me, their rooftops and porches mounded with snow, so quiet I can hear the sounds of an engine idling, a child’s voice, rising on drafts of air, possibly from blocks away. Overhead, there’s the distant rumble of a jet. The air smells low and warm with chimney smoke.
I’ve crossed several streets before I realize that my subject has shifted direction and started moving back toward Keller’s house again. The tracks look increasingly crisp and then, several blocks ahead of me, I spot someone walking, her back to me—a stern upright profile in a full-length coat—very familiar. She walks, head down, hands in pockets, moving very slowly, almost languidly.
I stop, waiti
ng inside the shadow of one of the neighborhood houses, undecided about what to do next, when I see her change course again, veering back in the other direction. My only thought is that whoever this person is, she must not get away. As she begins cutting across another yard, I move forward to intercept her. As I do, she turns to look at me—a tall woman with long white and grayish black hair and marine-blue eyes—and I realize that I know her. She wears an old-fashioned nubbly wool coat with round bone buttons, a round collar, and matching gray gloves and scarf that look hand-knitted. A canvas tote bag hangs from the crook of her elbow.
When she spots me, she hesitates, but then her face opens into a warm smile. The nervous contraction of my body begins to relax as I realize I’ve been tracking the woman who took care of me in the hospital. “Hello, Lena,” she says as we close the gap between us. She smells like lavender sachet. “Do you remember me?”
“Oh yes, yes, sure I remember,” I say, my voice thin with embarrassment, certain she’ll realize that I’ve been wandering around after her. “My neighbor—from the hospital—Opal. How are you?”
“I’m just fine, dear,” she says and laughs—her laugh makes a silvery puff in the air. She says, “I was actually coming to check on you. And I brought you a little present.” She holds up a miniature shopping bag. A sprightly purple ribbon is tied to its plastic handles and the bag is tufted with crisp purple tissue paper. “I wanted to leave it on the doorstep, but then I got all turned around and wasn’t certain which house was yours.” It has a pearly luster like a seashell. “Tah-dah.”
Trying to cover the awkwardness of the moment, I invite her back to the house. At first I think she’ll decline, but then she nods and says, “Well, I suppose I wouldn’t mind a little sit-down.”
“MY GOODNESS,” Opal says as we enter the house. “You’re actually looking much better, aren’t you?” She smiles: her teeth are dim and a little crooked. “Very healthy! You’ve really got your color back, don’t you?” She pushes the door shut behind us. “Chilly out there.”
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