New Orleans, Louisiana — July 14, 1918
She woke at three in the morning with her back screaming and the baby sitting on something it shouldn't have been sitting on and the particular awareness, immediate and total, that she had fallen asleep at the kitchen table again.
She straightened up slowly, one hand braced on the table, and sat there for a moment in the dark letting her spine remember what it was supposed to be doing. The kitchen was dark except for the low burn of the lamp she had left on, which Thomas had not turned off when he came home, which meant he had come home and seen her and left her there and gone to bed, which meant tomorrow morning was going to be a particular kind of conversation she did not have the energy to anticipate right now.
The wall in front of her was covered in paper.
She had been adding to it for three weeks. The original two cards — Upperline Street, Dauphine Street — had been joined by everything she had been able to find in back editions of the Times-Picayune, cross referenced against the city directory she had borrowed from the library on Prytania Street without quite intending to keep it as long as she had. The red string had been joined by blue string and then by plain brown string when she ran out of the other colours, and the map had been re-pinned twice when she realised her original scale was wrong.
It was, she knew, the kind of thing that looked different depending on who was looking at it. To her it was organised. To Thomas it was something he had been coming home to every night for three weeks and not saying enough about, which was its own kind of saying something.
She got up carefully and went to the back door and checked the bolt, which she did every night before bed and apparently also at three in the morning when she woke with her back aching and her mind already running. It was bolted. She stood with her hand on it and listened to the house, to the street beyond the house, to the alley. Nothing. The city doing its deep-night breathing. A cat somewhere, briefly, and then not.
She went back to the table and sat and looked at the wall.
She had been to the police station twice more since the first time.
The second visit she had asked specifically for the detective assigned to the Dauphine Street murder and had been told he was unavailable and could she leave her details, which she had already left once and which had produced no contact of any kind in the intervening ten days. She left them again. On the way out she had stopped at the desk and asked, as casually as she could manage, whether the Upperline Street and Dauphine Street cases had been assigned to the same investigator.
The desk sergeant — a different one this time, younger, with the look of someone who had not yet learned to be professionally unhelpful — had said that he didn't think so, no, they were being handled by different officers, and had then visibly realised he perhaps shouldn't have said that and straightened up and told her someone would be in touch.
Nobody had been in touch.
The third visit she had brought Thomas, because she had decided that arriving with a husband might change the quality of the attention she received, which it had, marginally, in the way that made her want to put her fist through something. A different detective this time, older, with a careful face that gave nothing away. He had looked at her wall of notes, which she had photographed in a manner of speaking by copying everything onto a single large sheet of paper and folding it to bring with her. He had looked at it for a long time and asked several questions that were good questions, which had given her hope, and then he had thanked her for coming in and told her they would look into it.
That had been eight days ago.
This morning, page four of the Times-Picayune, below the fold:
POLICE ANNOUNCE NO NEW LEADS IN UPPERLINE STREET MURDERS. DAUPHINE STREET INVESTIGATION ONGOING.
Two separate sentences. Two separate investigations. Six blocks apart and nobody joining the string between them except a pregnant woman at a kitchen table in the middle of the night.
She pulled the lamp closer and picked up her pencil.
What she had established, through three weeks of newspaper archives and city directories and two conversations with neighbours that she had engineered to seem casual and probably hadn't, was this:
The Lewis grocery occupied the corner of Upperline and Magnolia. An old building, Creole cottage construction, the back door facing the alley that ran behind Magnolia Street. The door was original to the building, which meant it was at minimum thirty years old, which meant the panels were set in the old way, with simple groove joinery, no screws, held by the weight and pressure of the frame.
Philip Stans had rented an apartment above a tailor's shop on Dauphine Street. The building was older than the Lewis grocery. Same construction. Same back door style. She had walked past it on a Tuesday afternoon and looked at it from the alley and felt her stomach turn at how easy it looked, just standing there looking at it, to see which panel would give.
Her own back door was the same.
She had spent an evening studying it from the inside with a lamp held close, running her fingers along the panel edges, feeling where the wood had dried and pulled slightly away from the groove in the summer heat. The bottom left panel, specifically, had a gap you could fit a thumbnail into. She had mentioned this to Thomas and he had said he would look at it on the weekend and had not yet looked at it on any weekend, and she had decided that if he hadn't done it by Friday she was going to do it herself.
She wrote this down. Check bottom left panel. Friday if T hasn't.
She looked at the map. Two red pins. The string between them. She had drawn a rough circle around both pins, the radius of which she had calculated by asking herself how far a person might reasonably walk at night without attracting attention — far enough to not be local, close enough to know the streets. The circle took in eleven blocks. Inside those eleven blocks, based on the city directory and her own knowledge of the neighbourhood, there were approximately forty houses with the same back door construction as the Lewis grocery and the Dauphine Street building.
Forty houses.
She looked at her own address on the map. Elmira Street sat inside the circle with room to spare.
Thomas came downstairs at seven to find her still at the table. She heard him on the stairs and straightened up and moved her papers into a slightly less alarming configuration, which she knew was pointless because Thomas was not fooled by configurations.
He stood in the kitchen doorway in his shirt and braces and looked at her and then at the wall and then at her again.
"Did you sleep at all," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
"Some. I woke up early."
"Amy."
"I'm fine, Thomas."
"You're eight and a half months pregnant and you've been up since—" he looked at the lamp, at the low level of the oil "—since before midnight by the look of it."
"I woke up and I couldn't get back to sleep. It's not unusual at this stage." This was true. The books she had borrowed from Mrs. Tureaud next door, the ones Mrs. Tureaud had pressed on her with the particular enthusiasm of someone who had been through it four times and wanted company in the knowledge, said disrupted sleep in late pregnancy was completely normal and expected. She had not mentioned this to Thomas because she had found that mentioning the books tended to lead to a conversation about rest that she didn't want to have.
Thomas came into the kitchen and filled the kettle and put it on the stove and stood with his back to her for a moment. She watched him. She knew this posture. He was deciding something.
"The detective hasn't called," he said.
"No."
"It's been—"
"Eight days. I know."
He turned around. His face had the look it got when he was going to say something careful. She had always been able to tell when Thomas was being careful because he got very still, like a man walking on ice who has decided that stillness is the safest policy.
"I think," he said, "that you should let them do their job."
Amy looked at him.
"I think," she said, "that they aren't doing it."
"You don't know that."
"I know they have two separate detectives on two murders that are the same murder, committed by the same person, six blocks apart. I know that because the desk sergeant told me, accidentally, and because if they were treating it as one case there would have been some kind of public statement by now and there hasn't been." She paused. "I know that there are approximately forty houses within a reasonable radius that have the same back door construction as both victims' properties and that nobody from the police department has knocked on a single door on this street to ask whether anyone has noticed anything unusual about their back door."
The kettle began to hiss.
Thomas looked at her for a long moment. The kettle got louder.
"You're going to have a baby in three weeks," he said.
"I'm aware of that."
"Amy—"
"Thomas. I know you're worried. I understand why you're worried. But I am sitting at this table in this kitchen and I am not running anywhere or doing anything that could hurt me or the baby. I am reading newspapers and making notes." She met his eyes. "Someone is moving through this neighbourhood at night with a chisel and an axe and the police have divided it between two men who aren't talking to each other. Someone needs to be paying attention."
The kettle boiled.
Thomas made the tea. He set a cup in front of her without saying anything and sat down across the table and wrapped both hands around his own cup and looked at the wall.
After a long time he said, "The bottom left panel."
"Yes."
"I'll fix it tonight."
"Thank you."
He drank his tea. She drank hers. Outside the kitchen window Elmira Street was waking up, the Thibodeaux boy on his bicycle again, old Mrs. Arcand beginning her daily consultation with her front step. The ordinary machinery of the morning turning itself over and starting up, the way it did, the way it always did, regardless of what was or wasn't happening in the streets behind the streets.
Amy turned back to her wall.
She picked up her pencil and drew a slow careful line on the map from the first red pin to the second and kept drawing, past Dauphine, past her own street, in the direction the line was pointing.
It pointed toward the river.
She looked at that for a while without writing anything down.
Three weeks later, on the night of August the second, Thomas came home from his late shift at quarter past midnight and came through the back door the way he always did and called her name up the stairs and got no answer.
He found her in the sitting room, asleep on the sofa with her notes on the floor beside her and one hand resting on her stomach, which was moving.
He stood there.
The back door, which he had fixed three weeks ago and checked every night since, had been bolted from the inside when he came home. He had had to use his key on the front.
He stood there looking at his wife asleep on the sofa with her hand on her moving stomach and felt something shift in him that he didn't have a name for — relief and dread arriving at the same moment in the same breath, the way good and terrible news sometimes comes from the same direction.
He picked her notes up from the floor carefully, not reading them, not looking at what was written on them, and set them on the table. Then he turned off the lamp on the side table and sat down in the chair across from her in the dark and listened to the house and the street and did not go to sleep for a very long time.