Ella

New Orleans, Louisiana — August 12, 1918

The Vires house on St. Claude Avenue smelled of candles and something underneath candles — something sweet and wrong that Amy recognised from her grandmother's house, from the particular rooms in her grandmother's house that she had been steered away from as a child without explanation and had understood later, as an adult, for what they were.

Someone was dying inside.

She stood on the front step with Judith strapped against her chest in the length of cotton she had fashioned into a carrier because the pram was too unwieldy for the streetcar and she had not been willing to wait for Thomas to drive her, and knocked a second time. The street behind her was quiet in the midmorning heat. A dog slept in a doorway across the road. Somewhere distant a church bell was counting out eleven.

The door opened.

The young woman who answered it was perhaps nineteen, dark haired, with the particular look of someone who had not slept properly in several days — not tired exactly, past tired, operating on something thinner and less reliable than tiredness. She was wearing a house dress that had been put on in a hurry and her eyes when they found Amy's face were the eyes of someone who had been expecting bad news for long enough that they had started seeing it in everything.

"Miss Vires," Amy said. "My name is Amy Clark. I live on Elmira Street. I wrote to you."

The girl — Ella, the younger one, the one who had seen him — looked at her for a moment. Then she looked at Judith, asleep against Amy's chest. Then she stepped back from the door.

"Come in," she said.

The letter had taken Amy four drafts to get right.

The first draft had been too formal and the second too familiar and the third too long, which was a problem she had with letters generally — the tendency to explain everything when a door opened, to fill the space with justification before anyone had asked for it. The fourth draft was nine lines. She had explained who she was and what had happened to her and that she believed the same person was responsible for what had happened to Benjamin Vires, and that she would very much like to speak with Ella and Katherine if they were willing, and that she understood completely if they were not.

Ella had written back in two lines. Come Tuesday morning. Ella Vires.

She had not mentioned Katherine.

The sitting room was dim, the curtains mostly drawn against the heat. There were flowers on every surface — brought by neighbours, Amy understood, the ritual offering of people who wanted to do something and had nothing useful to do — and they were at various stages of dying, some fresh and some wilting and some already gone to dry brown at the edges in the heat. A rosary hung over the back of one of the chairs. On the mantelpiece a photograph of a man in his fifties, square faced and dark eyed, unsmiling in the formal way of people who had been told to be still for a camera and had taken the instruction very seriously.

Benjamin Vires. She looked at his face for a moment. He had the look of a man who had expected his life to go a certain way and had not been wrong about it until very recently.

"He's been unconscious since Thursday," Ella said from behind her. "The doctor says—" she stopped. Started again. "The doctor says it's a matter of time."

"I'm sorry," Amy said.

Ella sat down in the chair nearest the window, the one that caught the thin line of light coming through the gap in the curtains. She had her hands in her lap and she was looking at them with the focused attention of someone who has chosen a thing to look at and is committed to it.

"You said in your letter it was the same person," she said.

"I believe so. Yes."

"The police don't believe so."

Amy sat down across from her. Judith shifted against her chest, made a small sound, settled again. "No," she said. "They don't."

"They told Katherine that Uncle Benjamin's case was being looked at separately. That there was no evidence of a connection." Ella's jaw tightened slightly. "They said it as though that was reassuring."

"It isn't."

"No." Ella looked up from her hands. She had very direct eyes, Amy noticed. The kind of eyes that had always looked directly at things and had recently looked at something that had made them wish, briefly, that they hadn't. "What do you want to know?"

Amy had her notebook in her coat pocket. She took it out but didn't open it yet.

"Tell me what you saw," she said. "Everything. Not the version you told the police — I've read that. The real version. What you actually remember."

Ella looked at her for a moment.

"How do you know there's a different version?"

"Because the version people tell the police is always the version they think the police want. The cleaned-up version. The one that makes sense in the order it happened and doesn't include the parts that are hard to explain." Amy held her gaze. "I'm not the police. I don't need it to make sense."

Something shifted in Ella's face. Not relief exactly — she was too tired for relief — but the slight easing of a person who has been holding something at a particular angle for a long time and has been told they can put it down.

"I was asleep," she said. "My room is at the end of the hall. Uncle Benjamin's room is in the middle, between mine and Katherine's." She paused. "I woke up and I didn't know why. There was no sound. I lay there for a moment and thought about going back to sleep and then I got up. I don't know why I got up. I just — did."

Amy wrote this down. Woke without reason. No sound.

"I went into the hall. The door to Uncle Benjamin's room was open. It's always closed at night — he closes it himself, he's always done that, he doesn't like — he doesn't like to hear the street." She caught herself on the present tense. Moved past it. "The door was open and the lamp wasn't lit but there was light from the window, the gas lamp on the street outside, and I could see—"

She stopped.

The room was very quiet. Judith breathed against Amy's chest, in and out, perfectly even.

"He was at the door," Ella said. "Not in the room anymore. Coming out of the room, into the hallway. I was at the end of the hall and he was at the middle of it and he—" she stopped again. "He stopped when he saw me. We just — looked at each other. For a moment. And then he turned and went to the back of the house and I heard the door and he was gone."

Amy's pencil had not moved for the last thirty seconds. She made herself write. Saw him in hallway. He stopped. Looked at her.

"How long?" she said. "When he stopped. How long did he stand there?"

Ella thought about it. "Long enough," she said. "Long enough that I had time to understand what I was seeing. Long enough that I could see—" she pressed her lips together. "He wasn't frightened. That's the part I keep coming back to. Most people, if you catch them somewhere they shouldn't be, they run immediately or they say something or they — react. He just stopped and looked at me. Like he was deciding something. Like he had all the time in the world to decide it."

Not frightened. Stopped and looked. Decided something.

"And then he left," Amy said.

"And then he left."

"What did he look like."

"Dark. Heavy, I mean — broad through the shoulders. A dark suit. A hat, pulled down." She paused. "I couldn't see his face. The light was behind him."

Amy looked at what she had written. Then she looked up. "That's the same thing I saw," she said. "In my kitchen. The hat. The build. The—" she chose the word carefully "—the stillness."

Ella looked at her properly for the first time. "He was in your house."

"August fifth."

"That's—" Ella did the arithmetic. "Five days before Uncle Benjamin."

"Yes."

"And you survived."

"Yes."

Ella looked at her for a long time. Then she looked at Judith, still sleeping, one small fist curled under her chin.

"He was in the same room as her," Ella said. It wasn't a question.

"She wasn't born yet," Amy said. "But yes."

The room held that for a moment.

"Katherine won't talk about it," Ella said abruptly. "What she saw. She says she didn't see anything — she was behind me in the hallway, she came out of her room after I did, and she says she didn't see him clearly and she doesn't want to—" Ella stopped. "She wants to bury Uncle Benjamin and then she wants to move. She has a cousin in Baton Rouge."

"And you?"

Ella looked at her hands again. "I keep seeing him standing in the hallway," she said. "The way he looked at me. The way he just — decided to leave." She paused. "I keep thinking about what it means that he decided. That it was a choice. That he could have — and he didn't. And I don't know if that makes it better or worse."

"Worse," Amy said, without thinking about it.

Ella looked up.

"Because it means he's in control," Amy said. "The whole time. He's always in control." She held Ella's gaze. "That's why the police can't find him. They're looking for someone out of control. Someone who leaves a mess, makes noise, runs. He doesn't run. You said it yourself — he stood in your hallway and decided. He does that every time." She paused. "Which means he can be understood. And if he can be understood he can be found."

Ella looked at her for a long moment.

"You really believe that," she said.

"I have to," Amy said.

It was the most honest thing she had said to anyone since August fifth, including Thomas.

She was putting her notebook away when the door opened and Katherine Vires came in from the hallway, still in her coat, a basket over one arm. She stopped when she saw Amy.

She was older than Ella by five years and it showed in the way she held herself — a composed, considered stillness that was the opposite of Ella's wound-tight exhaustion. She looked at Amy the way competent people look at unexpected visitors — without alarm but without welcome.

"Mrs. Clark," she said. She set the basket down. "Ella told me you were coming."

"Thank you for allowing it."

Katherine looked at Judith. Her expression did something complicated and then settled back into composure. "How old?"

"A week."

"And you're here." It wasn't quite disapproval. It was something more like assessment.

"I'm here," Amy agreed.

Katherine sat down in the remaining chair, the one beside the mantelpiece, beneath the photograph of her uncle. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at Amy with an expression that reminded Amy, unexpectedly, of the desk sergeant on Royal Street — not dismissive, but waiting to be convinced of something it had already decided not to be convinced of.

"Ella thinks you can find him," Katherine said.

"I think we can find him."

"You mean the police."

"I mean us," Amy said. "The police are looking in the wrong direction. Or not looking at all." She paused. "You saw him."

"I didn't see anything," Katherine said. "I've told the police—"

"I know what you told the police." Amy kept her voice level. "I'm asking what you saw."

Katherine's jaw tightened. She looked at the photograph of her uncle for a moment, at the formal unsmiling face of him, and something moved across her expression that she didn't try to hide — grief, clean and direct, the kind that hasn't had time to go complicated yet.

"His hands," she said finally. "I saw his hands. He was at the end of the hallway when I came out of my room and Ella was between us and I couldn't see anything except—" she stopped. "He had large hands. Pale. He was holding the axe in one hand and it wasn't — he wasn't holding it the way you'd hold something heavy. It wasn't an effort. He was just — holding it."

Amy wrote it down. Large hands. Pale. No effort with the axe. Physically strong.

"Thank you," she said.

Katherine looked at her. "Don't thank me," she said. "Just find him."

Amy took the streetcar home in the midday heat with Judith asleep against her chest and her notebook full of new handwriting and the feeling she always got when a picture was beginning to resolve — not satisfaction, nothing as comfortable as that, but the sharp particular alertness of a pattern beginning to declare itself.

Large hands. Pale. Broad. Dark suit. Hat pulled low. No haste. No fear. A man who stood in hallways and made decisions and used other people's axes as though they belonged to him because, in those moments, everything did.

She looked out the streetcar window at the streets going past. The ordinary city. The ordinary people on the ordinary pavements going about their ordinary afternoons, not knowing that somewhere among them a man with large pale hands was going about his.

She held Judith a little tighter.

She got home and went straight to the kitchen and added three new cards to the wall and stood back and looked at everything and tried to see the shape of it whole.

She was getting closer.

She didn't know yet that he wasn't finished.