"But that's different," he said. "Adults don't always change that much over a few years, but kids do."
Annie gave him an odd look. "How old do you think they look?"
"Fourteen, tops."
"Really? They look to be in their late teens, early twenties to me and they don't seem to change. I think of them as being more like the Aunts, or Lucius—"
"Instead of yourself," Rory finished, "who likes to reinvent herself every six months or so."
"Keeps me interesting."
Rory had to laugh. "The last thing you could be is boring."
Annie put a palm against her chest and affected a suitably humble expression.
"One tries," she said.
"So … late teens," Rory said.
"At least."
He regarded her for a long moment, just to reassure himself that she wasn't putting him on. There was humor in Annie's eyes, but no more than usual.
"I'm going to have to think about this," he said.
And give the girls a serious once-over, the next time he saw them because now he was remembering Lily's story and it was simply too close, too much of a coincidence. How could there be two pairs of raggedy wild girls in the city? Where that fell apart, though, was that Lily claimed the girls she'd seen had killed the man attacking her.
He gave Annie a thoughtful look. "Do you think they could be dangerous?"
"Who? The crow girls?"
He nodded.
"Push the right button," Annie said, "and anybody can be dangerous. Why do you ask?"
Rory shrugged. "I don't know. I'm still trying to get around them not being fourteen anymore and I never noticed." Finishing the last swallow of beer in his bottle, he stood up. "I'm going to call it a night. You up for doing some running around with Kerry tomorrow?"
"You're bailing?"
"No. I just thought it would be fun if we all went."
"Okay. But not too early."
"Gotcha."
"And Rory?"
He paused by the door.
"Don't always be thinking so much—you'll wear your brain out. Try letting things just happen once in a while without looking for hidden meanings."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Asshole," she said as he shut the door.
Rory started for the stairs, but paused outside Kerry's door. He wasn't sure what he was listening for. Maybe the piano. Maybe just to hear that there was really someone in there.
Don't think so much, he thought, repeating Annie's advice. Maybe she had a point there.
He started to turn away, then sensed he wasn't alone in the hallway anymore. Smelling a familiar scent of anise, he knew who it was. His gaze lifted past the stairs leading to the third floor to find Chloë leaning on the rail, looking down at him. Her dark frizzy hair was a halo of tiny curls around her face, lending her an odd look in the hall's low light. For a moment she was like a disembodied face, watching him from the heart of a tree. Or an animal, caught in a car's high beams.
"Everything all right with the new tenant?" she asked.
Rory nodded. "Except she was expecting the apartment to be furnished."
"Why would she think that?"
"I've no idea. Annie and I are going to help her get some stuff tomorrow."
"That's nice," Chloë said. "I think she'll need some friends to get her through these first few days on her own."
"On her own?"
Chloë shrugged. "You know. Big city, she doesn't know anybody, that sort of thing. It always takes some adjustment. And all things considered, she might need a little more time than you or I might in the same situation."
"Is there something special about Kerry?" he found himself asking.
Chloë regarded him for a long moment, an unreadable expression in those midnight eyes of hers.
"Everybody's special," she told him.
Rory nodded, waiting for more, but all Chloë did was lean on the railing and look down at him.
And everybody's a philosopher tonight, Rory thought as he finally turned away and continued on down to his own apartment.
6.
A mild panic took hold of Kerry as the door closed behind Rory and Annie.
No, she wanted to cry out after them. I've changed my mind. I don't want to be alone.
She forced herself to calm down. What was the problem? She'd been alone before. Except it hadn't been the same. In her old world there was always someone on call. Someone to ease the panic with a pill, or even a kind word. She still had pills to help her sleep. The small orange plastic container was at the bottom of her knapsack with a cotton ball stuffed inside to keep the pills from rattling against each other, a childproof cap she had trouble opening, typed instructions on a label glued to the side. Though she knew it was only her imagination, she could smell the faint medicinal smell of the pills from where she stood.
She'd never liked taking pills—not after the incident with the aspirin. Kind words worked better; being held, better still. That kind of medicine hadn't always been available in her old world, and here, it wasn't really available at all. It wasn't the kind of thing you asked of strangers and even if it was, she didn't know how to ask, what to say. If I start crying for no reason, could you just hold me? If I start shaking for no reason … if I get so scared that I can't seem to breathe …
She stared at the door for a moment longer before she finally made herself turn away. You can do it on your own, she told herself. Without pills or kind words. Just take it one day at a time, one moment at a time.
The ghosts of past failures wanted to argue with her, but she wouldn't let them. Instead she kept busy, hanging her two dresses and one jacket in the closet, folding the rest of her clothes and placing them on the shelf above, using the stool from the piano to stand on so that she could reach. Setting her valise at the back of the closet, she closed the door and glanced at the futon lying under the window. Rory had made up the bed for her, but she wasn't ready to lie down yet. Taking the pillow, she went back into the living room and put it on the club chair, then pulled the chair over to the window seat.
Now that she'd turned off the overhead in the bedroom, there wasn't much illumination in the apartment. What there was came from the light above the stove, a dim glow that seeped out the kitchen door. It was just enough to see by.
For a few minutes she sat in the chair and looked past the vague image of her reflection on the windowpane, out into what she could see of the dark backyard of the house. The huge elm took up most of her view. There was a whole dangerous world out there, she thought, but she was safe from it for now. And there'd be good things out there, too. There had to be.
Before a mood could take hold, she hoisted up her knapsack and began to take a few things out of it. A dozen paperbacks were put in alphabetical order on one side of the window seat. Two slim hardcovers joined them, set together on one side of the smaller books. In front of them she placed a small brass candlestick, unwrapped a candle, and put it in place. It would be nice to light it, she thought, but she didn't have any matches. On the other side of the window seat she put two small plush toys. Dog, so worn and battered it was hard to make out his canine shape anymore, but she knew who he was. And Cowslip, a faded yellow monkey in a tiny crocheted pink wool dress. Neither was taller than the length of her hand. Last she brought out a small, framed black-and-white photograph.
She stared at the older woman in the picture, memory filling in the colors that the camera hadn't captured: the dark red hair, hardly touched by the grays of age. Blue eyes, like cornflowers in a grainfield. And the dress, also blue, but faded from the sun and a hundred washes. The weatherworn yellows of the porch on which she sat. The field of wildflowers that could only be glimpsed in the photograph, but ran on for miles in her mind's eye, if not in the reality of when the picture had been taken. The soft brown tint of the woman's complexion was missing, too, but Kerry had only to look into a mirror to find it.
She'd inherited her grandmother's looks, a genetic blueprint that had
somehow bypassed her mother. But then she'd inherited Nettie's spirit as well—an old-fashioned, sweet-natured simplicity that had also skipped a generation. It wasn't that Nettie had lacked in either intelligence or wit. She'd simply considered a preoccupation with looks and social standing a poor substitute for looking after the well-being of others and the land that sustained them. She'd preferred creative expression to small talk and the disguised spite that masqueraded as gossip. The thing that Kerry remembered most about her was how she seemed connected to something deep and mysterious. And wonderful.
"We've got an old blood," Kerry remembered her saying once. It had been one of the last times she'd been able to stay with her grandmother—"the senile old fool," as Kerry's mother called her. "We've been walking this land for a long time. You can see it in our eyes and our skin."
"You mean, like Indian blood?" Kerry had asked, intrigued.
"Sure, we can call it that."
"What's it do?"
Nettie smiled. "I remember telling your mother the same thing, for all that the coloring passed her by. 'What's it good for?' she wanted to know.
" 'What's it good for?' I said. 'It's not good or bad, it just is.'
"She looked at me and shook her head. 'I don't want it,' she told me and I remember thinking, that's a good thing because who knows what you'd do with it." Her grandmother had regarded Kerry for a long moment then and asked, "Do you have any idea what I'm talking about, sweetheart?"
Kerry, eleven years old at the time, could only shake her head. "Sort of, I guess, but … no," she'd had to admit. "Not really."
"That's okay. We've got plenty of time."
Only there hadn't been. Kerry's parents had moved to Long Beach that August, taking her with them, of course, and she'd never seen her grandmother again. They hadn't even come back for her funeral.
Kerry sighed and set the photograph up in the middle of the window seat. Nettie, she'd later come to realize, had been a true eccentric. Artist, regional writer, environmentalist—all things that her daughter, Kerry's mother, couldn't or wouldn't understand. Kerry knew that her life would have been so different if she'd been brought up by her grandmother. In her grandmother's world, she would have been normal.
"I've got to hand it to you," a too-familiar voice suddenly said, startling her out of her reverie.
It came from somewhere near the piano, but Kerry refused to turn and look. Please, she thought, trying to still the rapid tattoo of her pulse. Just go away.
"I didn't think you had it in you, but you proved me wrong. This feels like a good place—a nice old building, lots of history, and close to some pretty funky parts of town. More like the kind of place I'd pick."
Kerry sat with a stiff back and looked out at the shadowy bulk of the elm tree on the other side of the windowpane. That was real, she told herself. The elm. This house. The chair underneath her. The voice wasn't. She was only hearing it again because she'd been thinking about Nettie, about what-might-have-beens. This was just another what-might-have-been.
"Please, Kerry. Don't tune me out. Don't let them win."
The initial cheeriness was gone from the voice now. A sadness had crept into it, a familiar wistfulness that tore at Kerry's heart. She swallowed thickly, wanting to turn now, but not daring to. She'd worked too hard to give in at this point.
"They're the ones that lied to you," the voice tried. "Not me. I'd never lie to you. Why won't you believe me anymore?"
Because you're impossible, Kerry wanted to say, but answering was part of believing and she didn't dare believe. Think of something else, she told herself. Think of—
She heard movement. The rustle of cloth, a creak on the floorboards. She held her breath. The cover for the keys was lifted and then there was the sound of the piano. Rachmaninoff. One of the Études-Tableaux. She listened to the familiar music, nodding her head in time, until she realized what she was doing.
"Don't!" she cried then.
The music stopped in midbar.
"Just … just leave me alone," Kerry said.
The voice made no reply. The only sound in the room was Kerry's own breathing and the last echo of the unfinished music, hushed and fading. She couldn't stop herself. She had to turn. But there was no one by the piano now.
When would it stop? she asked as she faced the window once more. She burrowed deeper into the corner of the chair and clutched the pillow. When would it finally stop?
She had to take one of her pills before she was finally able to go to bed and actually fall sleep.
7.
The county jail was an imposing, squat stone structure overlooking the Kickaha River just north of where Lee Street crossed MacNeil in Upper Foxville. Seventy years ago it had been on the outskirts of the city proper, but through the postwar years it had slowly been enfolded into the city until eventually it was surrounded by thriving factories and tenements. There was talk at one point of closing it down, relocating someplace where it wouldn't be in such close proximity to law-abiding, taxpaying citizens. But those same citizens fought the millions in tax dollars that the move would cost, and over time the neighborhood degenerated.
Now the jail stood on the western border of the Tombs, an old horror of a building, still set apart from the surrounding architecture by its tall stone walls, topped with barbed wire. These days it was differentiated more because it was the only legally occupied building in a no-man's-land of squatters and transients, rather than by the character of its inmates.
"That is one ugly building," Anita said as she pulled the cab up near the curb on the far side of the street from the gatehouse. When Hank didn't respond, she turned to where he sat on the passenger's side. "Bringing back memories?"
Hank nodded. "But they're old ones."
He was turned out in a white shirt and tie, dark blue suit, hair combed back, carrying a briefcase that held a copy of Sandy Dunlop's file. Anybody that might have known him from the old days would have had trouble recognizing him.
Anita looked out the window again. "Do you want me to wait for you?"
"I don't know how long this'll take," Hank said. "I'll call if I need a ride."
Marty had phoned ahead, so they were expecting him at the gate. One of the guards took him across the yard and handed him off to another at the front door. A familiar empty feeling settled in the pit of his stomach as the massive door closed behind him, but his face remained impassive. This was temporary, he told himself. Anytime he wanted, he could step out of here.
He was walked through a metal detector, someone went through his briefcase, and then he was left waiting in a small room furnished with only a wooden table and two chairs. There was an ashtray on the table, aluminum painted a sickly pink and so small he doubted it would hold more than three butts at a time. He laid the briefcase in front of him on the table and sat down, patient, using the time to distance himself from the familiar weight of the building as it pressed in on him.
A few minutes later the door opened and a guard brought Sandy Dunlop into the room.
"Thank you, officer," Hank said.
The guard gave him a friendly nod, then left. He was no more an officer than Hank was, but it didn't hurt to stroke the ego. The way Hank saw it, nobody became a prison guard or a traffic warden because it was a calling. They were in it because it was the only way they could feel empowered.
Sandy stood behind her chair, hands on the back, looking at him. She had a bruise under her left eye that looked about three, maybe four days old. Without makeup, her features were plain, almost washed out. Her blonde hair was showing dark roots and hung limply to her shoulders. The assets that had got her the job at Pussy's weren't evident, hidden under baggy trousers and an oversized sweatshirt. Hank knew the drill. When you were the new kid on the block, you didn't want to attract the wrong kind of attention from your cellmates. You went for tough first, fought if you had to, and you packaged yourself in something unappealing so that maybe no one would get the wrong idea in the first place.
&nb
sp; "So how're they treating you?" Hank asked.
"I don't know you," she said.
"I work for Marty." Hank stood up and offered his hand. "I'm Joey Bennett."
She didn't shake, but she sat down. Hank took a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket and slid them across the table to her. She hesitated a long beat, then took one, nodding her thanks when Hank lit it for her. Taking a long drag, she gave him a crooked smile and pushed the pack back toward him.
"Keep them," he said.
"Thanks." She regarded him through a veil of smoke. "So what do you do for Marty?"
"Find things."
She nodded, tipped the end of her cigarette into the ashtray. "What're you looking for today?"
"What've you got?" he said.
Again the crooked smile. Another drag on the cigarette.
"More trouble than I know what to do with," she said.
She was good at tough. If Marty could get her off, maybe she'd come through this okay.
"Why don't you walk me through what happened," he said.
"I've been through this, like, a million times already."
"But not with me. Humor me. I'm here to help."
She studied him for a long moment. "Okay. Where do you want me to start?"
"How about the last time you saw Ronnie."
Without thinking, she lifted a hand, touched the bruise under her eye.
"Ronnie do that?"
"Any bad thing that ever happened to me in the last two years came from that sorry piece of shit."
"He can't do anything to you anymore."
She made a small motion with her hand, trailing smoke. "What do you call being here?"
Hank nodded. "So the last time you saw him?"
"I was getting ready to go to work—you know where I work?"
"Strip joint."
"Yeah, except I was working the tables." She took out another cigarette, lit it from the butt of the first. "Anyway …"
Her story played out pretty much the way Marty had told it. There was more detail, more commentary on all the "assholes" in her life, from Ellis through to the D.A.'s prosecutor—"Talk about being uptight. That man desperately needs a night of serious hard-core"—but essentially, it was the same.
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