New Orleans, Louisiana — September 1918
The Spanish flu came to Elmira Street on a Tuesday.
It came the way it came everywhere that autumn — without announcement, without the courtesy of a warning that might have allowed for preparation. One day Mrs. Arcand was sweeping her step with her forty years of accumulated authority over that particular square of pavement and the next day she was not, and the day after that her daughter put a notice in the window of the kind Amy had been seeing go up across the neighbourhood all month, hand-written on whatever paper was available, asking that visitors stay away.
Amy stayed away. She stood at her own window and looked at the notice in Mrs. Arcand's window and felt the particular helplessness of a person who understands a situation completely and can do nothing about it. The flu did not care about understanding. It moved through the city on its own logic, its own timetable, knocking on whatever doors it chose with a patience that reminded her, in her lowest moments at the kitchen table at three in the morning, of something she could not quite bring herself to name directly.
She named it anyway. She was not in the habit of not naming things.
Two things were moving through New Orleans. One of them had a pattern she was beginning to understand. The other had no pattern at all.
She wrote this on a new card and pinned it to the wall and stood looking at it for a while and then took it down because Thomas had started looking at the wall with an expression she didn't like — not the resigned acceptance of the first months but something more recent and more careful, the look of a man who has decided his wife is doing something he cannot stop and has begun instead to monitor it for signs of a particular kind of deterioration.
She was not deteriorating. She was thinking. There was a difference, and she had stopped trying to explain it.
Ella Vires came on the Thursday of the second week of September, unannounced, which Amy did not mind — she had told Ella, at the end of their first meeting, to come whenever she had something and not to bother with the formality of a letter, because letters took two days and two days was two days. Ella had taken this at its word.
She was carrying a paper bag and had the look of someone who had been walking fast for longer than was comfortable. Amy let her in and put the kettle on and took Judith out of the basket in the sitting room where she had been sleeping and brought her to the kitchen because Judith slept better with noise around her, which was either a good sign about her temperament or a consequence of having spent her first week of life in a house where her mother did not stop working and Amy preferred not to examine which.
Ella sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the wall. She looked at it the way she had looked at it every time she came — with the focused attention of someone checking whether anything had changed, cataloguing the additions and rearrangements since the last visit.
"You moved the Romano card," she said.
"I moved everything. I started again from the beginning." Amy set a cup in front of her and sat down. "Tell me."
Ella put the paper bag on the table and took out a folded newspaper — not the Times-Picayune but the States, the afternoon edition, folded to an inside page. She pushed it across the table.
Amy read it. Then she read it again.
It was a letter. Addressed to the editor of the States and apparently sent simultaneously to the Times-Picayune and the other city papers. The heading, which the editor had printed in full, was a single word: Hell.
She read it a third time, slowly, her finger moving along the lines.
The letter claimed to be from the killer himself. It was written in a style that was — she searched for the right word and found several and settled on — theatrical. Educated and theatrical, with a rhythm to it that suggested someone who had written it more than once before sending it, who had chosen the words carefully and with attention to the effect they would produce. It spoke of the writer as something beyond human — a spirit, a demon, a thing from the nether regions, beyond catching, beyond understanding. It spoke of New Orleans as a city that pleased him. And then, toward the end, it made a promise.
At twelve fifteen on the following Tuesday night, it said, he would pass over New Orleans. He would move through the city and wherever he found a home silent and dark he would do what he came to do. But wherever he found a home playing jazz — loud jazz, real jazz, any jazz — he would pass over. He would leave it untouched.
He was, the letter said, very fond of jazz music.
Amy set the paper down.
Ella was watching her. "The police think it's a hoax," she said. "That's what they told the papers. They said there's no way to verify—"
"It's not a hoax," Amy said.
"How do you know?"
Amy looked at the letter again. She looked at the rhythm of it, the construction of it, the particular combination of grandiosity and precision — the specific time, twelve fifteen, the specific condition, jazz music, the specific promise, a city-wide reprieve. A hoaxer wrote to feel important. This was written by someone who already felt important and wanted the city to participate in something he had already decided.
"He's done this before," she said. "Not the letter — the calculation. Every time he enters a house he's already decided everything. He's already worked it out. He knows which panel to take. He knows which side of the bed. He knows how long he has." She tapped the letter. "This is the same. He's worked it out. He knows the city will do it — play the music, keep the lights on — and he knows that one night of the city playing music doesn't cost him anything because he wasn't planning to go out that night anyway."
Ella stared at her. "You think it's real."
"I think it's real and I think he's clever and I think the police are going to spend the next week telling everyone it's a hoax right up until Tuesday night when every house in New Orleans has its lights on and its windows open and someone playing piano, because nobody is going to take the chance that it isn't." Amy looked at the letter one more time. "And I think he knew that. I think he knew exactly what would happen when he sent it."
Ella was quiet for a moment. Outside the kitchen window the street went about its afternoon. Judith made a small sound in her basket and didn't wake.
"What do we do?" Ella said.
Amy picked up her pencil. "We think about who he is," she said. "The letter tells us things. Educated — look at the construction of it. Organised. Has time. Has somewhere to be that isn't here on Tuesday night, otherwise the letter doesn't work as a strategy." She wrote as she spoke, the words going onto a new card. "He's not working class. Or if he is, he's educated beyond his work. He reads. He writes. He's thought about himself — about what he is — and he's decided he's something other than human, which means he's been doing this long enough to have constructed an entire—"
She stopped.
Ella leaned forward. "What?"
"Long enough," Amy said again, more slowly. She was looking at the wall, at the map, at the pins and the string. "He's been doing this long enough to have a — a sense of himself. An identity around it. That doesn't happen after two or three attacks. That's something a person builds over time." She looked at the first pin on the map. The Lewis house. "The Lewis murders weren't his first."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"Then where are the others?" Ella said.
Amy looked at the map. She looked at it for a long time.
"That's what we need to find out," she said.
She went to the library on Prytania Street the following morning with Judith in the carrier and a list of dates in her notebook going back five years, because five years felt like long enough and also felt like potentially not long enough, and she sat at the reading table in the archive room for three hours going through back editions of the Times-Picayune until Judith got hungry and made her feelings known and the librarian, a small precise woman named Miss Fontenot who had been sending pointed looks in their direction for the better part of an hour, finally said something.
She came back the next day without Judith, having left her with Thomas's sister who lived on Magazine Street and who had been offering to take her for precisely this kind of occasion and who did not ask too many questions about what the occasion was.
She found what she was looking for on the second day, in editions from 1911.
Two attacks. A grocer and his wife on Dorgon Street. Same entry — back door, panel removed. Same method. Both had survived, barely, and the case had been investigated and gone cold within the month. 1911. Seven years ago.
She sat with the microfilm in front of her and felt the thing she felt when a piece of the picture locked into place — not satisfaction, not quite, but the particular cold clarity of understanding something you almost wish you hadn't.
He had been doing this for at least seven years.
He had been doing it before the Lewis house, before Philip Stans, before her own kitchen. He had been practicing. Getting better. And then he had stopped — or appeared to stop, or moved somewhere else — and then in May of 1918 he had come back.
Or he had never left.
She wrote everything down. She folded the notes and put them in her coat pocket and went out into the September heat and stood on the steps of the library and looked at the street.
Somewhere in this city a man had been doing this for seven years and nobody had connected the points because nobody had been looking at the points together. The 1911 attacks had been handled by different officers than the 1918 attacks. Different years, different detectives, different files sitting in different drawers in different offices, nobody's job to open all the drawers at once and lay everything out on a table and look at it whole.
Nobody's job but hers.
The Tuesday of the letter came on a warm clear night, the sky above New Orleans deeply dark and full of stars, the air for once moving enough to feel like relief. Amy sat on the front step of the house on Elmira Street with Judith in her arms and listened to the city.
She had never heard anything like it.
From every direction — from the houses on Elmira Street and the houses beyond them and the streets beyond those, from the bars and the cafes and the dance halls and the parlours of people who had no piano but had found one for the night or had a family member who could play the harmonica or the fiddle or who simply stood in their doorways and sang — from everywhere and all at once the city was making music. Jazz bleeding through every open window, off every lit porch, bouncing between the buildings and filling the streets and rising into the warm dark air.
She could see lights in every house on the street. Every window. Nobody had darkened anything. Nobody had gone to bed. The whole of Elmira Street was sitting up, lights blazing, music coming from the Thibodeaux house three doors down where someone was playing the piano with more enthusiasm than skill and from the Marchetti house across the road where two of the Marchetti boys were on the front porch with a trumpet and a washboard, and from further off, from the whole surrounding neighbourhood, the sound of an entire city that had decided together, in the absence of anything else it could do, to make noise.
Amy held Judith and listened.
She thought about the letter. About the man who had written it, sitting somewhere in this city — inside this sound, inside this music that he had made happen, that was filling the night because of him — and she thought about what it meant that he had done this. That he had wanted this. Not just the attacks, not just the houses and the panels and the axes. He had wanted the city to know him. To respond to him. He had sent a letter signed with the word Hell because he wanted New Orleans to look up from its ordinary life and see him, just for a moment, the way she had seen him in the kitchen doorway.
He wanted me to see him.
She had said it to Thomas the morning after and she had believed it and she believed it still, and now she sat on the front step with her daughter in her arms and the city playing jazz all around her and understood that it was the same thing. He had wanted them all to see him. To know he was there.
Which meant he was watching.
She looked down the street, at the lit windows and the open doors and the people on their steps. She looked at the faces she knew and the faces she didn't, at the people who had come out to listen and the people who had stayed inside behind their lit windows, and she looked for someone who was not listening to the music. Someone who was watching the people who were listening.
The street was too full. Too many faces, too much movement, the music too loud and the night too warm and everywhere too much of everything to see clearly.
She held Judith and watched and the city played on around her until past two in the morning when people finally began to go inside, one by one, the music dying down piece by piece, the lights going out slowly, and New Orleans exhaling at last the held breath of the whole strange night.
He had not struck.
She had not seen him.
She had not expected to. Not really. But she had looked.
The next morning she added a new line to the centre card on the wall, the one she had pinned at the beginning when she came home from the hospital, the one that said He wanted me to see him.
She wrote underneath it: He wanted the whole city to see him.
And underneath that, smaller, the thing she had been turning over since she sat on the step: He is still here.
Thomas read it over her shoulder in the morning. He didn't say anything. He went and made the coffee and came back and set a cup beside her and stood looking at the wall for a while.
"The 1911 attacks," he said.
"Yes."
"You think it's the same person."
"I think it's the same method and the same neighbourhood and the same nothing taken and yes. I think it's the same person."
Thomas drank his coffee. He was quiet for long enough that Amy turned to look at him. He was still looking at the wall, at the map, at all of it — the three months of it, the whole accumulated shape of what she had built in his kitchen while his back was turned and while she was supposed to be resting and while she was in the hospital and while she was feeding their daughter in the middle of the night.
"What do you need?" he said.
She looked at him.
"To find him," he said. "What do you need that you don't have."
She turned back to the wall.
"A name," she said. "I have everything else. I have where he's been and when and how and I have what he looks like and I have seven years of it and I have the letter." She paused. "I need someone who knew him in 1911. Someone who was there then and is still here now and remembers."
Thomas nodded slowly. "I know someone at the States," he said. "A journalist. He covered the 1911 attacks. I went to school with his brother."
Amy looked at him.
"You didn't mention that," she said.
"You didn't ask," he said, which was technically true and which she decided, in the interest of getting what she needed, not to pursue.
"Can you arrange a meeting?"
"I'll write to him today."
She turned back to the wall. She looked at all of it — the whole shape of it, everything she had gathered and organised and reorganised over three months, all the string and the cards and the map and the dates going back to 1911 — and felt the thing she always felt when a problem was beginning to resolve. Not the resolution itself but the sensation just before it, the feeling of all the separate pieces beginning to turn toward each other.
She was close.
She was closer than she had ever been.
And somewhere in the city, she knew, so was he.