New Orleans, Louisiana — May 23, 1918
The grocery was closed for the night and Anni Lewis was glad of it.
She had been on her feet since five that morning, first taking the delivery from Caruso's boy who always came too early and expected conversation, then the long slow grind of the day itself — the regulars who lingered, the ones who haggled over things not worth haggling over, the flour sacks that needed moving from the back room because the humidity had gotten into the lower shelf again. By the time she turned the little painted sign from OPEN to CLOSED her back ached in a specific way she had stopped mentioning to anyone because there was nothing to be done about it. This was the life. You were tired at the end of it and then you slept and then you got up and did it again.
She locked the front door and stood for a moment with her forehead against the cool wood of it, just breathing. Outside the street was doing its evening thing — the clop of a horse somewhere, children being called in, the smell of someone's supper drifting through an open window. Red beans, she thought. And cornbread. Her stomach made itself known.
Jesse was already upstairs. She could hear him moving around, the familiar creak of his particular footstep, the thud of one boot coming off and then the other. Seventeen years and she could tell his footstep from any other man's in the world. She sometimes thought that would be the last thing she knew, when she was very old and going — the sound of Jesse moving around in the room above her.
She wiped down the counter, checked the lock on the till out of habit, and climbed the stairs.
He was sitting at the small table by the window with his collar loose and his sleeves rolled and a piece of cold bread in one hand and the paper in the other. The lamp on the table threw warm yellow light across his face and hands and made the room feel smaller than it was, more enclosed, the two of them in their little circle of light with the whole dark city going on outside the window. She stood in the doorway a moment and looked at him. He didn't notice. He was reading something that had creased his forehead.
"You left the back light on," he said without looking up.
"I always leave the back light on."
"Wastes the oil."
"Then buy more oil."
He turned a page. She crossed to the shelf and poured herself a glass of water from the jug and stood by the window drinking it. The street below was quieting down. An old man she didn't recognise was walking a dog that moved like it had somewhere important to be but had forgotten where. A couple stood under the awning of the pharmacy across the road, talking with their heads close together, the woman's hand on the man's arm. The air coming through the gap in the window smelled of river and turned earth and something floral she could never quite place, some vine or night-blooming thing that grew in the cracks of this particular neighbourhood. She had grown up six blocks from this spot and she still couldn't name it. Some things you just lived inside of without ever fully knowing them.
"There was a man," Jesse said.
She looked over at him. He'd set the paper down and was looking at his bread like he'd forgotten what it was for.
"What man?"
"This afternoon. While I was bringing the crates in from the alley. There was a man standing across the street." He paused. "Just standing there. Not waiting for anyone, not looking at anything in particular. Just — standing."
"What did he look like?"
"Heavy. Dark suit even in the heat. Hat pulled down low." Jesse finally took a bite of his bread and chewed it slowly. "I thought he was waiting for someone from the building next door. One of those things where you notice someone and then you forget about them because there's no reason not to. But I came back out maybe twenty minutes later and he was still there. Same spot. Same — stillness. Like he hadn't moved at all."
Anni looked back out the window. The couple under the pharmacy awning were gone now. The old man and his dog were gone. The street had emptied out the way streets do late in the evening, not gradually but all at once, as though someone had made a decision on behalf of the whole neighbourhood. There was nothing moving out there now. Just the lamplight on the cobblestones and the darkness between the lamps and the sound of something — music, faint and faraway, a cornet or a trumpet, someone playing slow and low somewhere deeper in the city.
"And then?" she said.
"And then I went back inside and when I came out again he was gone." Jesse shrugged one shoulder. "Nothing. Probably nothing. I don't know why I mentioned it."
She didn't say anything. She finished her water and set the glass down on the shelf and stood there with her hand resting on it, not quite ready to let go. The feeling she had was not fear exactly. It was more like the feeling you get when you've walked into a room and forgotten why you came — that sense of something just out of reach, something your mind is trying to tell you that your mind can't quite say out loud.
"Lock the back door," she said.
Jesse looked up. "It's locked."
"Check it anyway."
He looked at her for a moment with that particular expression of his, the one that meant he thought she was being foolish but had learned over seventeen years that saying so was rarely worth it. He set down his bread and his paper and got up and went downstairs. She heard his footsteps on the stairs, unhurried, the familiar creak of the lower landing, the rattle and click of the back door being tested. Then his feet coming back up, slower this time, the sound of a man who has done an unnecessary thing and is taking his time returning from it.
"Locked," he called, halfway up.
"Thank you," she said.
She went to bed.
What happened next did not announce itself. There was no sound of breaking, no splintering of wood, no crash of anything falling. Sometime in the deep hours after midnight — the city quiet now, the cornet long since silenced, even the river seeming to hold its breath — a chisel was applied to the back door panel of the Lewis grocery with a patience and a precision that spoke of practice. The wood gave without protest, the panel lifting clean from its housing and being set against the wall as carefully as you might set down something borrowed. The door swung inward. The thin yellow light from the back lamp Anni had left burning fell across the floor in a long rectangle, illuminating the familiar shapes of the back room — the empty crates, the shelf with its tins and jars, the axe propped beside the door where it always lived, where Jesse had propped it himself not three days ago after splitting a delivery crate that had warped in the wet.
He picked it up. Tested the weight of it in one hand. Set it back down and stood still for a long moment, listening. Nothing moved above him. He picked the axe up again and crossed the floor and climbed the stairs. The bedroom door was open. The lamp had been extinguished but the window let in enough of the city's ambient glow to see the shapes of the room — the dresser, the chair, the bed, and in the bed the two sleeping figures, one on each side, the way people sleep who have slept beside each other so long they no longer have to negotiate the arrangement.
He went to Jesse's side first.
The razor was his own, brought with him, not borrowed like the axe. He worked quickly. Jesse made a sound that was not quite a sound and his hands moved in the way hands move when the body is trying to do something the mind no longer has the capacity to direct, and then his hands were still. The blood was immediate and considerable and very dark in the low light. It soaked into the pillow and ran along the crease of the sheet and found the edge of the mattress and began its slow drip onto the floorboards.
Anni woke.
Not all the way, not at first — she surfaced from sleep the way you do when something has disturbed you but you don't yet know what, the mind still mostly under, the body still heavy. She turned toward Jesse out of simple habit, the seventeen-year habit of reaching for him when something woke her in the night, and her hand found the wet sheet and she came fully awake all at once with her hand in it and her mouth already open.
She saw him standing at the foot of the bed.
Later — much later, when she was not alive to be asked — people would want to know what she had seen. What he looked like. Whether she had recognised him. But there was nothing to recognise. There was only the shape of a man in the dark, broad through the shoulders, utterly still, and the axe in his hand that caught a thin line of light from the window and held it.
She had time to understand what was happening. That was the cruelty of it. She had enough time to understand everything and to know that there was nothing she could do and to open her mouth, and then the razor moved and the understanding ended.
He took his time after that. Changed his clothes in the dark, folding what he had worn with a neatness that would baffle every investigator who came after, leaving the folded pile on the chair beside the window as though it were laundry set out for the morning. He moved through the room and took nothing. Not the small stack of bills on the nightstand. Not the watch Jesse had left on the dresser, the good one, silver-cased, worth more than most people in this neighbourhood earned in a month. Not the thin gold ring on Anni's finger that she had worn since the second year of their marriage when Jesse had finally saved enough to replace the plain band they'd used at the ceremony.
He wanted none of it.
Downstairs he set the door panel back against its frame and stepped out into the alley and took a piece of chalk from his coat pocket and walked to the front of the building and bent down over the pavement and wrote something in letters careful enough to be read and then straightened up and walked away down the middle of the empty street with his hands in his pockets and the axe left behind him where he'd found it.
The city was quiet and dark and beautiful the way it always was at this hour. He walked through it and it did not notice him.
Thursday morning Anni's brother-in-law came to help open the grocery the way he always did, because Thursday was delivery day and Jesse always needed an extra pair of hands for the morning rush. He came at quarter past six. He let himself in through the front with his key, the same key he'd had for three years, and called up the stairs the way he always did — *Anni, Jesse, I'm here* — and got no answer and thought nothing of it because sometimes they slept through his arrival and he'd learned to start the coffee himself and wait.
He started the coffee.
He waited.
At half past six he called up again and the silence this time had a quality to it that was different from ordinary silence. He couldn't have explained it if he'd been asked. It was the silence of a house where something had changed. He put down his cup and went up the stairs.
Anni was gone. There was no other way to put it. What was on the bed was not Anni in any sense that mattered.
Jesse was not gone. Not yet.
He was breathing when her brother-in-law found him, shallow and uneven, one arm hanging off the side of the bed, his fingers just touching the floor. His eyes were closed. He had not regained consciousness and he would not regain consciousness and somewhere in whatever was left of him he was perhaps already past the point of knowing any of this, but his body had not finished yet. He lived for eleven more minutes. His brother-in-law held his hand and said his name and Jesse did not respond in any way to either. His hand was already cold. When the eleven minutes were up his chest simply stopped and that was the end of Jesse Lewis, who had been forty-two years old, who had run the grocery on this corner for nine years, who had folded his newspaper and checked the back door lock and gone to bed the same as always.
The police came. Then more police. Then a man with a camera. They moved through the apartment with the practiced efficiency of people who have seen this before and know what they are looking for, and they found several things that interested them and one thing that would interest them for a very long time without ever producing an answer.
They found the bloody clothes, folded on the chair.
They found the axe, back in its place beside the back door, wiped down.
They found the door panel, removed with a precision that impressed the officer who examined it, leaning neatly against the wall beside the frame.
They found the razor in the grass of the neighbouring property, half hidden in the roots of a sprawling hydrangea, and traced it within a day to a brother who owned a barber shop on Camp Street and had removed it from his shop two days prior to have a nick seen to, and they spent the better part of two days convinced they had their man before the brother's alibi held and they let him go.
They found no footprints. No witnesses. No motive that made sense. The money on the nightstand had not been touched. The silver watch on the dresser had not been touched. The gold ring on Anni's finger had not been touched. Robbery they ruled out before the bodies were cold.
What remained when you ruled out robbery was a question nobody in that apartment was equipped to answer.
By the evening edition the story was in the Times-Picayune, three inches on the fourth page, beneath a story about the war and above an advertisement for tooth powder. By the following morning it had been bumped further back. The city had other concerns. The Spanish flu was moving through the parishes like weather. Boys were still coming home from Europe with parts of themselves missing that didn't show. It was summer and it was hot and the city was tired in ways that went deeper than sleep could fix.
The Lewis grocery reopened under new management within a fortnight. The door was rehung. The chalk message on the pavement — *Mrs. Lewis will sit up tonight* — had washed away in the first rain, the letters spreading and thinning until they were just pale shadow on wet stone, and then nothing at all.
Life went on. It tends to.
Nobody came back. Nothing further happened on that block or near it. The neighbourhood settled back into itself the way water settles after you've dropped something into it — disturbed for a moment, then smooth again, then as though nothing had ever broken the surface.
Summer deepened. The heat sat on the city like a hand.
For a while, nothing happened at all.
For a while.