New Orleans, Louisiana — March 10, 1919
The letter had said Tuesday.
It had come and gone and the city had played its music and exhaled and gone back to its ordinary life the way cities do, with the particular relief of people who have been frightened and then not harmed and who take this as permission to stop being frightened. The flu was still moving through the parishes. The war had ended in November and the boys were coming home again, different this time, quieter, with the specific emptiness of people who have seen something that used not to be seeable. New Orleans wore the winter the way it always wore winter — grudgingly, the cold never quite cold enough to be taken seriously, the city too accustomed to heat to know what to do with anything less than it.
Amy had been waiting since August.
She had the journalist's notes — Thomas's school friend's brother, a thin nervous man named Arceneaux who had covered the 1911 attacks for the States and who had met Amy in the library on Prytania Street in October with a folder of his original research and the look of a man who had been waiting seven years for someone to ask him about it. He had given her everything. Names, dates, addresses, the detective's notes he had somehow acquired and kept, the description from the surviving victim in 1911 — a woman who had lived alone on Dorgon Street and had been found by her neighbour and had told police she had woken to a dark figure standing over her and had screamed and he had gone.
He had gone because she screamed.
He had gone because Amy screamed.
She had added this to the wall and stood looking at it for a long time. Both times, a woman screaming had sent him out the door. Which told her something about him — something about the kind of attention he wanted and the kind he didn't, something about the difference between being seen on his own terms and being exposed on someone else's. He wanted to be looked at. He did not want to be heard.
The name from the 1911 file was not a name she could do anything with directly. A suspect, never charged, released for lack of evidence. A man with a record of burglary and a history of violence and a known address in 1911 that had been a boarding house on Burgundy Street and was now, seven years later, a different boarding house with different occupants and no memory of anyone by that name.
She had the name. She did not have the man.
She had been looking for the man since October and it was now March and she had not found him and she had begun to think about what it meant that she had not found him — whether he had left the city, whether he was dead, whether she was wrong about the 1911 connection and the whole architecture of her understanding was built on a false floor.
She had been thinking about this on the night of March the tenth when Emma Vasent knocked on her door at half past eleven.
She almost didn't answer.
Judith was finally asleep after a difficult evening — she had been cutting her first tooth, which had produced a level of sustained unhappiness from a person so small that it seemed disproportionate — and Thomas was in bed and Amy had been on the verge of following him for the first time before midnight in longer than she could remember, standing in the kitchen doorway looking at the dark kitchen and the wall of papers and thinking that perhaps just for tonight she could let it be.
The knock was soft. Hesitant. Not the knock of someone delivering ordinary news at an ordinary hour.
She answered it.
Emma Vasent was standing on the front step in her coat, no hat, her dark hair loose and damp from the mist that had been coming off the river all evening. She was holding her own elbows. Her face in the light from the hallway was the face of someone who had just come through something and hadn't yet had time to understand what it was — the blankness of very recent shock, the skin too pale and the eyes too still and the whole person somehow not quite arrived yet at where they were standing.
Amy had seen this face before. She had seen it in the mirror, the morning after August fifth.
She stepped back from the door.
"Come in," she said. "Come inside right now."
Emma Vasent was twenty nine years old and had lived on Rendon Street with her husband Oliver for three years. Amy knew her the way you know people in a neighbourhood where the streets are close and the lives overlap at the edges — she knew her face, knew her by name, had spoken to her perhaps a dozen times in the way of neighbours who have never found the occasion to become more than that. She was a contained, self-possessed woman who had always struck Amy as someone who knew her own mind and had organised her life accordingly.
She was not contained now. She sat at Amy's kitchen table and shook. Not violently — she was holding it down, holding it in with everything she had — but Amy could see it in her hands where she had them flat on the table, the slight continuous tremor of a body that had been running on something other than ordinary resources and was beginning to understand that those resources were not unlimited.
Amy made tea. She did it the way you do things for people in shock — slowly, visibly, each action deliberate, here is the cup and here is the kettle and here is the sound of ordinary things happening in an ordinary kitchen because ordinary things are still happening and you are still here and the world is still organised the way it was.
She set the cup in front of Emma and sat down and waited.
"He came tonight," Emma said. Her voice was very flat. "He came through the back door. Oliver was—" she stopped. Picked up the cup. Set it down without drinking. "Oliver was in the sitting room. He heard something and he went to look and he—" she stopped again. "There was so much blood, Amy. I didn't know a person had that much blood."
Amy kept her face still. "Is Oliver alive?"
"Yes. I think—" Emma's voice fractured slightly and then steadied. "Yes. The doctor is with him. Mrs. Pelletier from next door is with them. I didn't know where else to go." She looked at Amy with an expression that was almost apologetic. "I knew you would understand what had happened."
"I understand," Amy said.
"He was in the bedroom," Emma said. "When I heard Oliver shout I ran downstairs and he was already going — out the back, through the kitchen — I saw him. Just for a moment. The door was still swinging." She was still looking at Amy. "He had blood on him. Oliver's blood. And he just — walked out. Like it was nothing. Like it was the most ordinary thing in the world."
Amy thought about the hallway on St. Claude Avenue. The way Ella had described him turning from the doorway. Not running. Walking.
"Oliver," she said carefully. "What happened to Oliver."
Emma's hands tightened on the cup. "He hit him with the axe. Our axe, from the back porch." She said it the way you say a fact that you have already repeated several times to several people and that has not yet become real through repetition. "His shoulder. And his — the side of his head. He's alive. The doctor said he's alive." She paused. "Our neighbour," she said. "Mr. Dufour. He was there tonight — he'd come round for supper, he was still there when it happened — he was in the kitchen when—" she stopped. She put both hands flat on the table. "He didn't survive," she said. "Mr. Dufour. He was in the wrong place and he—" her voice went completely flat, emptied out. "He's dead."
The kitchen was very quiet.
Amy looked at her hands on the table. She thought about Mr. Dufour, whom she did not know, who had gone to supper at a friend's house and had ended up in the wrong room at the wrong time because that was the nature of this — there was no right time, no safe room, no logic to who ended up in the path of it and who didn't.
"I'm so sorry," she said.
Emma nodded. She was looking at the wall. At the map and the cards and the string. She had been in this kitchen before — twice, in the autumn, when Amy had talked to her about the attacks, asked her to think about whether she had seen anything unusual near her house, whether any doors or windows had seemed tampered with. Emma had been polite and attentive and slightly removed from it in the way people are removed from dangers that haven't yet arrived at their specific address.
She was not removed from it now.
"You've been looking for him," Emma said.
"Yes."
"Do you know who he is?"
"I have a name from the 1911 case. I haven't been able to find him."
Emma was quiet for a moment. She was still looking at the wall, at the map, at the red string running between the pins. "I saw his hands," she said. "When he was going through the kitchen. Large hands. Very pale."
Amy felt something move through her. "Katherine Vires said the same thing," she said quietly. "Large hands. Pale. No effort with the axe."
Emma nodded slowly. "No effort," she agreed. She said it like a person confirming something they already knew and had been hoping not to confirm. "He carried it like it weighed nothing."
They sat with that for a moment.
"Oliver will want to know," Emma said. "When he's better. He'll want to know you're still looking."
"I'm still looking," Amy said.
Emma finally drank her tea. She drank half of it in one go and set the cup down and sat back in the chair and looked at the ceiling and let out a slow breath that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than her lungs.
"I want to help," she said. "Whatever you're doing. When Oliver is better and things are — I want to help."
"I know," Amy said. "You will."
She walked Emma back to Rendon Street at half past midnight, Judith strapped against her chest because she would not leave her and because the night was mild enough and because she had decided, sometime in the past seven months, that she was not going to spend the rest of her life arranging her movements around the fact that someone was out there. He had been in her kitchen. He had stood over her while she slept. He had done his worst and she was still here, still walking the streets of her city at midnight if she chose to, still looking.
The doctor was still at the house on Rendon Street. Oliver was conscious, which the doctor said was a good sign, which Amy understood to mean it was better than the alternative while not yet meaning everything was fine. He was in the bedroom upstairs and Emma went up to him and Amy stood in the hallway for a moment and looked at the kitchen through the open door.
The back door was standing open, the night air coming through it. The axe was on the floor where it had fallen or been dropped. The panel of the back door had been removed and was leaning against the wall with the particular neatness that she had read about in the police reports and seen in her own kitchen and that still, every time, produced in her the same cold feeling — the neatness of someone for whom this was routine. For whom this was simply the way you entered a house.
She looked at the panel leaning against the wall.
She looked at the axe on the floor.
She looked at the back door standing open on the dark alley behind Rendon Street.
Then she went home.
She did not sleep. She sat at the kitchen table with the lamp turned up and her notebook open and wrote down everything Emma had told her, every detail, the hands and the blood and the walking and the open door. She wrote down Mr. Dufour's name and the fact of him, the simple terrible fact of a man who had been in the wrong room.
She looked at the name from the 1911 file, written on the card she had pinned in the bottom right corner of the wall where she could always see it.
Joseph Mumfre.
She had been looking for Joseph Mumfre since October. She had been to the Burgundy Street boarding house and two others that Arceneaux's notes mentioned. She had written to the city records office and received nothing useful. She had asked Thomas's journalist friend to ask around, quietly, among the people who covered crime and knew the names that the police knew.
Nothing.
A man who had existed in 1911 with a known address and a criminal record and a detective's suspicion that hadn't quite become a charge, and then had apparently ceased to exist. Or had become someone the city had stopped noticing. Or had been here the whole time, moving through the back streets, going in through the back doors, and nobody looking at the right things at the right time had put it together.
Until now.
She looked at the name.
Then she picked up her pencil and wrote underneath it, in the careful deliberate way she wrote things she intended to act on:
Find him before he finds the next door.
She underlined it twice.
Outside, New Orleans breathed its slow dark breath, the river moving somewhere beyond the houses, the streets empty and quiet, the whole city asleep under the March sky, trusting in the locks on its doors.
She looked at the map. The pins. The string.
She was so close she could feel it.