New Orleans, Louisiana — May 24, 1918
The bread had gone cold before she remembered to eat it.
Amy Clark had been sitting at the kitchen table since half past seven, which was when Thomas left for work and the house became hers again in that particular way it did every evening — not empty exactly, more like exhaled, the way a room feels when the last person who needed something from you has finally gone. She loved Thomas. She was also, after eight months of pregnancy and the long claustrophobic heat of a New Orleans summer, profoundly tired of being looked at with that expression he had developed, the one that was equal parts tenderness and anxiety and that made her feel like something fragile left out in uncertain weather.
She was not fragile. She was pregnant. There was a difference, and she had stopped trying to explain it.
The newspaper was on the table where Thomas had left it, folded to the front page the way he always left it, as though she might want to start from the beginning rather than find her own way in. She had ignored it while she made her breakfast and ignored it while she ate the first half of it and was still ignoring it now, watching the street through the kitchen window instead, the ordinary morning life of Elmira Street assembling itself the way it did every day — the Thibodeaux boy on his bicycle, old Mrs. Arcand sweeping her step with the focused intensity of someone who had been sweeping that same step for forty years and intended to sweep it for forty more. A dog sleeping in a patch of early sun outside the hardware store across the road, its legs moving slightly as though it were running somewhere in a dream.
She reached for the newspaper.
The Lewis murders were not the headline. That surprised her, though she supposed it shouldn't have — the war had a way of making everything else feel like a footnote, all the local tragedies shuffled to the inside pages while the larger tragedy ate the front. The headline was about the Western Front. Below it, something about the flu spreading through the lower parishes. And then, tucked below the fold on the right hand side in the small dense print they reserved for city news that was important but not important enough, four short paragraphs under the heading: GROCER AND WIFE SLAIN ON UPPERLINE STREET. KILLER AT LARGE.
She read it once quickly and then went back and read it again slowly.
Anni and Jesse Lewis. Found by a family member in the early hours of Thursday morning. Throats cut. The husband had survived the initial attack but died shortly after being discovered. The wife had not survived at all. Police were investigating and had several lines of inquiry they were pursuing. No arrests had been made. Anyone with information was encouraged to come forward.
Four paragraphs. Shorter than the advertisement for tooth powder beside it.
Amy sat with the paper in her hands and read it a third time, not because the words had changed but because her mind kept snagging on something and she couldn't work out what it was. She knew the Lewis grocery. Not well — she had been in there twice, maybe three times, buying flour on occasions when she'd run short and didn't want to make the longer walk to Dufour's on Magazine Street. She remembered Anni Lewis as a compact, efficient woman who moved around the shop with the particular economy of someone who had arranged every inch of it herself and knew exactly where everything was. She remembered Jesse as quieter, working in the back mostly, emerging to carry things. Ordinary people. Ordinary life. And then someone had come through the back door in the night and—
She set the paper down.
The back door.
She looked at her own back door. It was closed, the morning light coming through the gap at the bottom in a thin bright line. Thomas had left through it, the way he always did, heading down the alley behind the terrace to cut across to the streetcar stop on Annunciation. She had heard it close behind him and heard the click of the latch and had not thought about it since.
She thought about it now.
The article had not mentioned how the killer had entered. Four paragraphs were not enough for how. But something in the back of her mind had already supplied the answer, some piece of neighbourhood conversation she had half heard and half forgotten, the kind of information that travels between houses on a street before it ever makes the papers. Something about a door. A panel.
Amy pressed her palm flat against the table and looked at the back door and thought about a man who came through it while you slept.
The baby moved. A slow rolling movement, not a kick, more like a shift of weight, the particular submarine heaviness of a body adjusting itself inside another body. She put her hand on her stomach automatically, the way you touch a bruise to check if it still hurts, the way you reach for things that are yours.
It's fine, she thought. We are fine. We are on Elmira Street and it is eight in the morning and it is fine.
She got up and checked the back door lock anyway.
It was locked, the bolt thrown, the latch secure. She stood with her hand on it for a moment, feeling the solidity of the wood, the cold brass of the fittings, and told herself that this was enough. It had always been enough. There was no reason in the world it should not continue to be enough.
She went back to the table and looked at the article again. Several lines of inquiry. No arrests.
Four paragraphs and no arrests and whatever lines of inquiry the police of New Orleans were currently pursuing, she had the strong and specific feeling — the kind of feeling she had learned over thirty years not to dismiss — that none of those lines led anywhere useful.
She looked around the kitchen for something to write with.
There was a pencil on the shelf above the stove, the one she used for the grocery lists. She found a piece of paper — the back of an envelope Thomas had opened and left on the counter — and smoothed it out and wrote down everything the article had told her, which was not much, and then sat looking at what she had written.
Upperline Street, she wrote. Back door. Both attacked in bed. Nothing stolen.
Nothing stolen.
She underlined it twice.
That was the thing that had been snagging at her. Not the brutality of it — the city had brutality, everyone who lived here long enough knew that — but the absence of motive that the four brief paragraphs implied without quite saying. No robbery. No apparent reason. Just two people in their beds in the house they had lived in for years and then, between one breath and the next, not.
Amy folded the envelope and put it in her apron pocket and picked up her cold bread and finished it standing at the window, looking out at Elmira Street going about its ordinary morning business in the ordinary morning sun.
The dog outside the hardware store had stopped dreaming. It lay still now, fully asleep, its flank rising and falling in the heat.
Thomas would be home after midnight. He always was, on the late shifts. The house would be hers until then, quiet and locked, the way it was every night, the two of them in their separate orbits until he came through the back door and she heard his footsteps and could sleep properly.
She looked at the back door again.
She looked at it for a long time.