Ruby feels her body arch toward this sudden realisation, a shudder that almost lifts her from the floor.
‘I’m afraid to be right,’ she says, holding out her arms to examine the tiny hairs standing up from her skin. ‘Because—can you imagine what that would mean?’
Something Josh had said to her that night at the secret bar comes back to her now. When they finally knew my name.
‘They’re not always monsters, Ruby. Sometimes they’re normal guys, who turn out to be capable of terrible things.’
It is a truth so small she almost missed it. So did I. But there it is. Half-hidden by the rocks and the dirt.
Just waiting to be found.
You mustn’t blame me for what happens next. Though I suppose some of you saw it coming. And maybe it is my fault. The way it all plays out. But I would never purposefully put Ruby in danger, please know that. I would have shown her this last, important detail in a different way if I could.
She can’t sleep. Lennie and Sue thought she should go to the police straight away.
‘In the morning, maybe,’ she’d said before she went home, thinking, hoping, the midnight hours might help her find the words she would need to make that call. Knowing Detective O’Byrne would need something more concrete than her instinct, her discomfort. But the words don’t come. Instead, her head is filled with half-finished conversations. Weeks, months, years of them, and Tom’s voice is the loudest now. Something—everything—is wrong with their interactions, this seems obvious now. Why did he … and why would he … and what was he … Ruby kicks off the bed covers in frustration. What is it that she’s missing here?
Tom knows something about Alice.
That’s what she returns to, time and again. The impossibility of it, and yet.
She was out here, taking her pictures.
It doesn’t make sense that he knows this. She is the one who found the body, she is the one who has spent night after night following breadcrumbs all over the city, piecing it all together. How can Tom be in possession of such an important detail that she herself did not know?
Fuck it.
This feels just like that other morning. The room too small, her thoughts too big. To Ruby, it almost feels like a dream as she gets up in the dark, puts on her running shoes. When she exits her apartment, makes her way toward Riverside Park, the streets are just as empty as that other morning. It’s not raining today, that is something different. But the stillness, the silence, her frustration, feel exactly the same. Checking her watch, Ruby calculates the sun will be up in half an hour. The sky is already changing colour, lifting up off her nose, and this emboldens her, lengthens her strides as she enters the park.
I can feel the adrenaline coursing through her now, the way it propels her toward the river, and I want to yell Stop! Find a way to turn her around. I would open up the sky, pour torrents of rain if I could. Crack the earth open, bring down the trees. But she keeps running, she can’t see me or hear me, and she cannot see what is waiting for her, down on those rocks. I speed between the river and the track she makes through the park, desperate to keep her away. There are other runners, cyclists, dotted around the park this early morning, and I try to rearrange them, move them into her path, but nothing works. Gusts of wind, branches bending; my panic is the lightest touch, and Ruby is moving too fast to feel it.
And then, mercifully, she stops. The sky is still dark, the river darker, and she stands, suspended high above the place where it happened. Knowing there are steps just ahead of her that will take her down to the water. She wonders: is this what Alice felt? Heading down to the river that morning? An inexplicable pull toward the water, a wilful ignorance of her own safety, because she had something she wanted, needed, to do.
What on earth were you doing in the park that morning?
Ruby takes the steps carefully, quietly. When she reaches the middle level of the park, she finally sees what I have been trying so desperately to keep her from: Tom Martin below her, standing on the rocks, shifting something from hand to trembling hand. He has come here every morning this week, always before the sun comes up. Planting his feet on either side of where he found me, closing his eyes. I’ve come here every morning, too. Observing his growing desire for Ruby, the mud brown of it, and wanting to scream. I whispered the words in his ear, that very first meeting. Willed him to speak them out loud.
A girl was murdered here.
I set that gull squawking, soured the wine. Put my hand over his lips when he kissed her, so she felt the brittle of my bones instead of his warm flesh. But it wasn’t enough to stop this.
It wasn’t enough to keep her away from him.
And now I can feel Ruby shaking. Instinctively, she has backed up the steps, creating enough distance to allow her to run if Tom suddenly turns away from the river, sees her standing there watching him. He would have to scramble up over the rocks, climb over that metal rail, there might be enough time for her to escape if he sees her. Ruby makes these calculations in a split second. But her safety is far from assured, she knows this.
Fight. Flight. Freeze. What do we choose in these moments? Ruby is both rooted to the spot and ready to run. And something else, too, the thing that scares me most. A white-hot rage is boiling within her, flames replacing blood. She imagines barrelling down the stairs, engulfing this man. How dare you! she wants to scream. How dare you! There is no question now. She knows. The man who kissed her two days ago is the man who raped and murdered Alice Lee.
What was the last thing she said to him?
Thank you, Tom. I appreciate your concern.
What neither of us said, what none of us say: You took up all the space. I didn’t know how to say no and you never waited for my yes. I need you to leave me alone now. We swallow the words and the warning bells, so that we take on the doubt, dismiss what we know to be true. We demur, placate. Say just enough and smile just enough and let them touch us just enough, hoping the moment will pass.
When he climbed down onto the rocks, when he came up beside me in the splattering rain and said, ‘Nice spot, isn’t it,’ I wasn’t so much afraid as alert. Attuned to his interest in me and aware, immediately, that I would now be responsible for managing that interest. Knowing I would have to be careful with how I responded to his advances, that my reaction would determine whether he made to lodge himself next to me—or encourage him to turn and leave me alone, the only thing I wanted him to do. Here’s what I was thinking, just before he materialised out of the haze of rain. I was thinking about how freedom and safety are the same thing, really. It was just after five thirty in the morning and the air was vibrating and whistling around me. I had removed my parka, was using it as a kind of umbrella for the Leica, and my arms were bare, exposed. The smack of raindrops and the icy air on my skin was exhilarating. I was wide awake, watching the buildings on the other side of the Hudson wake up too, light after light coming on, flashes against the dark sky. Thinking about freedom and safety, how unfettered I had become. The thread pulling me back to Mr Jackson finally loose, if not quite severed entirely.
When my ex-lover had answered the phone earlier that morning, clearly foggy from sleep, I remained silent at first, listening to him say ‘Hello?’ over and over, until finally, I heard him exhale against my name.
‘Alice?’ He sounded weary. ‘Is that you?’
‘I’m sorry for taking your mom’s camera,’ I said in response, and I heard another sigh, before Mr Jackson asked me where I was calling from.
Glancing about my bedroom in Noah’s apartment, I observed my new life. Brochures for the photography school on the dresser, a blank set of post-it notes waiting for my pen. A book on common dog behaviours. Purple runners at the base of my bed, toes pointing toward the door. Outside, I heard a train-rumble of thunder, and through a peek of curtain I could see the hazy orange and blues of the stormy, pre-dawn sky.
‘Home,’ I answered, knowing this to be as true as anything I had ever said.
I waited se
conds, minutes for Mr Jackson to ask me if I was okay. I waited for him to press into my absence this past month, probe it, but instead he stayed silent. And I knew right there and then that he did not want to know where I was.
‘I have to go,’ I said finally. ‘I just wanted you to know I’m alive.’ His continued silence was a wave of truth, waiting to break all over me.
I hung up the call.
It was that stifling silence that pushed me out the door, into the early morning storm. I needed space, needed to stretch out after finally seeing how small he had tried to make me. All that time with Mr Jackson, I was only ever someone to control. He never gave me room to make mistakes, to discover who I was for myself. He needed me to behave in a way that suited him, and even more, in a way that preserved his idea of me. For a while, that had been enough love for me.
Not now.
Freedom then, would be escaping this containment, once and for all. And that’s when my heart slowed, and the world expanded. Stepping into the park, unafraid. Propelled toward the water, my new, giddy freedom a hand at my back. Passing the wood-chipped dog runs where I would bring the puppies on the next fine day, and the empty sports fields turned to mud that would teem with people in the summer. Turning my face to the rain, then away from it just as quickly, as water stung my cheeks. Feeling the crisp preparation in the air, before lightning once again zagged across the sky and thunder echoed in its wake. Knowing I was as wild as this storm, as full of potential. To capture this would be to give that photography school my self-portrait. Show them the artist I intended to be.
And then the stranger was climbing down over the rocks, coming toward me. Staring at my bare arms, pointing his extinguished cigarette at me, asking if I had a light. It must have been the way I shook my head slightly, or how I turned my attention back to the Leica. My last clear thought, staring through that small viewfinder, was how much lightning bolts reminded me of blood vessels. Veins branching out across the sky.
And then it was him, not the lightning, that split me in two.
Though she’ll never trust these memories after, when she looks down at him now, Ruby sees everything Tom Martin did to me that morning, catches the blinding red of it, flashing across his body. I’m not even sure how it happens. The way she can suddenly view the world from my perspective. There I am, climbing down onto the rocks to get closer to the water, liking the way it reflects the lightning, mirrors the sky. There I am, peering through my viewfinder, framing the world, thinking it is mine for the taking. And there I am, startled, when I sense someone is behind me on the pathway, his eyes a gleam in the dark. Ruby can see every grotesque, electric pulse of him as he approaches me, and more than that—to my absolute horror—she can suddenly feel everything I felt that morning.
As if what happened to me is happening to her, too.
‘Hello there,’ he says, and I think at first that I am going to be okay. He looks normal, this man, in his neat shirt and regular shoes. An insomniac like me, I presume, or a storm chaser, someone more comfortable out in the rain than tucked up in bed. No need to be scared, I tell myself, but I am, all the same, when he climbs over the railing, too, takes his time to come up beside me.
‘Got a light?’ he asks, holding out his half-smoked cigarette, and this time I catch it. The way his voice is far too measured, careful. As if he is barely restraining himself.
‘No,’ I say, squaring my shoulders. Hoping this makes me look stronger than I am. Never let them see that you’re afraid—I read that once, and I do my best to fool him, standing there with my camera between us. I’ve had near misses before, felt danger as a pulse in my throat, and for a while there, as he tries to make conversation about the weather, my camera, what it is I’m doing out here all alone, I think this is going to be one of those times. I keep my answers short, polite, buying myself minutes until the sun comes up. But then he tells me I’m beautiful, says, ‘Do you like to fuck,’ and I know, deep in my bones, that this is not going to be a near miss. When he commands me to smile, when he comes at me with all his smug determination, I acquiesce. Thinking, one last time, that I know what to do here. That I can survive this, if I just play it his way.
Like I said. It surprised me. At the end. The way I had no chance. How swiftly it happened when Tom Martin ended my life.
Ruby sees, feels everything that happened to me, and then she turns and runs, nausea rising in her, replacing her fear. So that when she reaches the safety of the upper levels of the park, she doubles over and heaves, vomiting up everything she has witnessed.
There was just enough time, before she fled, for her to hear a splash, the unmistakable sound of something being thrown into the river.
It is a detail she will remember better this time.
I think she’s hurt. I don’t know if I should go to her. Should I go to her … Tell me what I need to do.
For weeks Ruby has worried that she let me down. Though she never said it to herself, or out loud, she wondered if she could have done something—anything—differently that morning. If she hadn’t got lost or slipped on the rail, or if she’d paid more attention to her surroundings in those minutes before, when she was more worried about the rain. Was there some moment she missed, some way she could have changed things?
All this time, Ruby has been searching for absolution. For a way to say sorry for arriving too late, for not being able to get to the girl, or to whoever came before her, in time. Her obsession with the murder, with me, was her apology.
‘Truly, you did everything right, Ruby.’
That’s what Officer Jennings said after she found me. Today, when she picks up her phone with shaking hands and dials the number on the card Detective O’Byrne gave her that terrible morning, weeks and a lifetime ago, Ruby finally believes it.
Noah was right. New York really is made for second chances.
TWENTY-THREE
IT BEGINS. THEY GET HIS DNA FROM A CIGARETTE BUTT flicked onto the rocks, right where he left me that morning. It matches the traces of his identity found all over my body. Before he left that crass genetic fingerprint behind, investigators watched as Tom Martin kept returning, over and over, to the crime scene. When Ruby made the call, when she reported Tom’s comment about ‘pictures’ and what she’d seen and heard down by the water, she hadn’t known Camera lens was fourth on Detective O’Byrne’s list of blunt force weapons, underneath the word Torch, but above Wrench and Hammer. Circled in red pen over and over, after Noah asked if they’d found the Leica—the only thing, along with the purple sneakers and jacket, my benefactor could say for sure was missing from my room. Camera lens. A weapon of opportunity. This fit Detective O’Byrne’s profile of the man they were looking for. An anger-retaliatory type, someone impulsive with his rage. The excessive force used, the way the body was left face down, subjugated. Every offender leaves a series of clues about himself, and Detective O’Byrne had known the motivation of the man who killed Alice Lee from the moment he saw the placement of the young girl’s body on the rocks.
Ruby’s call was metal up his spine, bringing him to his feet. It wasn’t enough to bring Tom in, but O’Byrne was a patient man. The detective immediately had his team of undercover officers position themselves down at the river each day, a small parade of inconspicuous investigators jogging, stretching, sitting in the sun, eyes flicking when the tall, blond man returned again and again to the river. Watching as he leaned over the railings, stared out across the water. At the same time, detectives canvassed every camera store, every pawn shop in the vicinity. Showing an image of Tom Martin, asking, ‘Have you seen this man? Have you seen this man?’ over and over, looking for the proof they needed in a manner so direct that people stuttered over their No’s, wondering what would happen to the poor store owner or cashier who might say yes. One or two guessed this was all to do with the dead girl, the pretty one in the news, though they never said my name out loud, reluctant to find themselves caught up in something they had absolutely nothing to do with. Not this
time around.
That same week, at O’Byrne’s request, they searched the river. Calculated shifting tides and weather patterns, and the days since Ruby saw Tom down on the rocks and heard him throw something into the water. The current gives up its secrets eventually. Messages in bottles show up on foreign shores a hundred years after being tossed into the sea. The Hudson River connects to the Atlantic Ocean, shares the same roiling water, feels the same pull of the moon. And so, they find it one night, in the brackish muck. Offered up by the tides, handed over. A Summar 50mm screw mount lens. Nickel-plated steel. Specks of my blood like rust in the grooves of the aperture ring. Turns out the past sticks to whatever it touches. You cannot simply wash it away.
Detective O’Byrne is quiet, thoughtful, as they inch closer to the unequivocal proof they need. He is certain they will not find the camera itself; this is a man who would like to preserve his souvenirs. Which leads O’Byrne to the matter of the photographs. Pictures, as Tom called them. That slip up of his was deliberate in its way. Men like this eventually give themselves away, they betray their own secrets, because they so desperately want to stay at the centre of things. Narcissism makes a person careless, no matter how clever they might be. If Tom held onto the camera, had it hidden somewhere, the undeveloped film must have been calling to him. Not knowing what was on that roll, especially when the body remained unidentified so long, would have a man like that burning up. Those pictures, whatever they might reveal, would be the ultimate proof of his achievement. Only he would know who the girl was. He could own every part of her now.
By O’Byrne’s calculation, Tom Martin would have been less likely to get the film developed once his victim was publicly identified, once that Jane Doe sketch was replaced with real life images of Alice Lee. Impulsivity has its limits, so they’d be looking for activity soon after the crime, and somewhere outside the city. These men might be careless, but in O’Byrne’s experience, they were seldom openly stupid.
Before You Knew My Name Page 24