New Orleans, Louisiana — June 6, 1918
The second article was smaller than the first.
Amy found it on page six, which told her everything she needed to know about how seriously the city was taking it. A single column, maybe two inches, tucked between a notice about streetcar delays on St. Charles Avenue and an advertisement for a summer tonic that promised relief from heat fatigue and low spirits. SECOND SLAYING IN FORTNIGHT. MAN FOUND DEAD ON DAUPHINE STREET. POLICE CONTINUE INVESTIGATIONS.
She read it standing at the kitchen counter still in her nightgown because she had come downstairs before Thomas left and taken the paper from the table before he could fold it and leave it for her the way he always did, and she had been standing here since, the paper in both hands, the kettle going cold behind her on the stove.
Philip Stans. Thirty one years old. A veteran, recently returned from France. Found in his apartment on Dauphine Street by his sister, who had come after he failed to appear for Sunday dinner. The police were investigating. No arrests had been made.
No arrests had been made.
She set the paper down and went to the shelf above the stove and got the pencil and found the envelope she had written on ten days ago, the one she had folded and put in her apron pocket and then moved to the shelf beside the flour tin where she kept things she wasn't ready to throw away. She unfolded it and smoothed it against the counter and read what she had written.
Upperline Street. Back door. Both attacked in bed. Nothing stolen.
She turned the envelope over and wrote on the other side.
Dauphine Street. Philip Stans. Veteran. Alone. Thursday June 6.
Then she went to the kitchen drawer where Thomas kept the things that didn't have another home — string, a spare key, a small folding ruler, three buttons that had come off various garments and been saved with good intentions — and found the city map he had bought when they first moved to Elmira Street and never used because Thomas had an instinctive sense of direction and Amy had grown up here and neither of them needed it. She unfolded it on the kitchen table, moving her breakfast things to one side, and found Upperline Street and put her finger on it. Then she found Dauphine Street and put another finger on it.
Six blocks.
She stared at the map. She moved her fingers apart and together and apart again as though the distance might change if she measured it differently. It didn't. Six blocks, give or take, between the place where Anni and Jesse Lewis had died in their bed and the place where Philip Stans had died in his.
She looked at her own street on the map. Elmira Street.
Four blocks from Dauphine. Ten from Upperline. Inside whatever shape was forming between those two points, if a shape was forming, if this was a shape and not just two terrible things that had happened in a city where terrible things happened.
Nothing stolen, she had written, both times, because both articles had mentioned it and it had kept snagging at her and she still couldn't let go of it. Robbery was the reason people broke into houses. Robbery or rage, and rage left a different kind of scene, a messier kind, the kind with overturned furniture and broken things. Both the Lewis house and wherever Philip Stans had lived had apparently been entered with such precision that the only evidence of entry was the back door. Entered and left again. Nothing taken. Nothing disturbed.
Nothing taken except the people.
Amy folded the map and put it in her apron pocket alongside the envelope and stood at the kitchen window drinking her cold tea, looking at the back of the house across the alley. The back door of that house was a Creole cottage door, the same as hers, the same as most doors on streets like this — old construction, deep-set panels, the kind that had been built the same way for fifty years because there was no reason to change what worked. The kind where the panels were set into the frame with simple joinery, held by the frame itself rather than by hardware, which meant that if you had a chisel and you knew what you were doing and you were patient about it—
She made herself stop.
She was a pregnant woman in her kitchen on a Thursday morning and she was frightening herself over two newspaper articles and a map. Thomas would tell her she was doing that thing she did, where she pulled on a thread until the whole garment came apart. Thomas was often right about that.
She thought about whether Thomas was right about it this time.
She decided he wasn't.
The police station on Royal Street smelled of tobacco and damp wool and something underneath both of those things that Amy decided not to think about too carefully. She had dressed properly before she came — not her best, but properly, the blue dress with the good collar, hair up, because she was eight months pregnant and walking into a police station alone and she understood without anyone having to explain it that the way she looked would determine the way she was treated, and she wanted to be treated like someone whose observations were worth writing down.
The desk sergeant was a broad man in his forties with a moustache and the permanent expression of someone who had been asked too many foolish questions for too many years and had stopped expecting the foolishness to end. He looked at Amy the way men in positions of minor authority often looked at her — with a kind of tolerant patience that was really just impatience wearing a suit.
"Mrs—?" he said.
"Clark. Amy Clark. Elmira Street." She placed both hands on the counter, which was high enough that she had to reach up slightly, which she disliked. "I want to speak to whoever is leading the investigation into the murders on Upperline Street and Dauphine Street."
The sergeant's expression shifted very slightly toward something she recognised as professional courtesy extended to the visibly pregnant. "Those are two separate investigations, Mrs. Clark."
"I don't think they are," she said.
He looked at her for a moment. Then he picked up a pencil and a pad of paper in the manner of a man who has decided to go through the motions of something he does not expect to amount to anything. "What makes you say that?"
She put the envelope on the counter. Then the map, unfolded, with her two marks on it. The sergeant looked at them. He did not pick them up.
"They're six blocks apart," Amy said. "Same method of entry. Same time of night. Nothing stolen from either property." She paused. "I live four blocks from Dauphine Street. My back door is the same construction as both of those houses."
The sergeant looked at her notes and then at her and then at her stomach, in a way that she found she had to actively resist responding to.
"Mrs. Clark," he said, in the tone people used when they were about to explain something simple to someone they had decided was not very bright, "we are aware of both incidents. Our detectives are pursuing several lines of—"
"Are the same detectives pursuing both lines?"
A pause. "I'm not at liberty to—"
"Because if they're being handled separately," Amy said, "then nobody is looking at the space between them. And I think the space between them is where the answer is."
The sergeant put his pencil down. He looked at her with a slightly different expression now — not respect exactly, but the recalibration of someone who has underestimated the nature of what's in front of him and is adjusting.
"Leave your details," he said, "and someone will be in touch if your information is relevant to the investigation."
Amy looked at him.
"I'd like my notes back," she said.
He slid the envelope and the map back across the counter. She took them, folded the map, put both in her pocket, and turned and walked back out into the heat of Royal Street, which hit her like a wall after the dim interior of the station and made her stop on the top step and breathe for a moment, one hand on the railing, the other on her stomach.
The baby kicked. A proper kick this time, sharp and deliberate, the kind that felt like a response to something.
I know, she thought. I know.
She bought a new envelope at the stationer's on the way home and a packet of index cards and a ball of red string she wasn't entirely sure what she was going to do with yet. She bought a second copy of that morning's paper and the previous week's editions that Mr. Broussard still had behind the counter. She bought a pot of paste and a pair of scissors, which she already had at home but which she had decided she wanted a second pair of.
Thomas would ask what she was doing.
She was going to have to think about what to tell him.
At home she cleared the kitchen shelf of everything except the flour and the salt and began laying things out in a way that made sense to her, the way she had always worked through problems — visibly, spatially, where she could see everything at once and move it around until it told her something. The map went up first, fixed to the wall with a tack from the kitchen drawer. Then the articles, cut out and pasted to the index cards. Upperline Street. Dauphine Street. Dates. Times. What was known and what was not known.
She stood back and looked at it.
Two deaths. Six blocks. Same door. Nothing taken.
She picked up the red string and cut a length of it and pinned one end to Upperline Street on the map and the other end to Dauphine Street and stepped back again.
There was a shape here. She could feel it even if she couldn't see it yet. The shape of something that had happened twice and was therefore not yet finished, that had a pattern to it even if the pattern wasn't clear, that was moving through the city in a direction she hadn't yet determined.
She put her hand on the map, flat-palmed, covering the distance between the two pins.
Somewhere in that distance a man with a chisel was choosing his next door.
She looked at her own back door.
Then she turned back to the map and picked up her pencil and began to write down everything she knew, which was not enough, and everything she suspected, which was more than the police had been willing to listen to, and everything she intended to find out, which was everything.
Thomas came home at quarter past midnight and found the kitchen reorganised and his wife asleep at the table with her head on her arms and a pencil still in her hand, and the wall above the shelf covered in paper and string and handwriting and a map of the city with two red pins in it.
He stood in the kitchen doorway for a long time looking at it.
Then he covered her shoulders with his jacket and went to bed and did not say anything, because he had been married to Amy Clark for six years and he had learned, the hard way and more than once, that there were things she had decided to do that it was simply not worth trying to undecide for her.