Emma

New Orleans, Louisiana — March 1919

Oliver Durby lived.

He lived the way people live after something has tried very hard to end them — slowly, stubbornly, with a quality of determination that had nothing to do with will and everything to do with the simple animal refusal of a body that has not finished yet. He was in bed for three weeks with his shoulder bound and the left side of his head wrapped in bandaging that the doctor changed every other day and that Emma changed on the days in between with a focused precision that Amy recognised as the thing people do when they need to be useful and this is the useful thing available to them.

Amy visited on the Wednesday of the first week, and the Monday of the second, and brought food both times because food was the other thing people do and because Emma had the look of someone who had stopped eating properly and was not going to mention it. She sat at the kitchen table on Rendon Street and watched Emma move around the kitchen and thought about the night Emma had appeared on her doorstep, the blankness of her face in the hallway light, and thought about how much had changed in Emma in three weeks and how much had not changed and which of those things was more worrying.

The back door had been repaired. New panel, new joinery, a bolt added at the top and the bottom that had not been there before. Emma had done it herself, or rather had stood in the kitchen directing the carpenter who came to do it, watching every cut and fitting with an attention the carpenter had found, he told his wife later that evening, somewhat unnerving. The bolt at the top was heavy iron. The bolt at the bottom was heavier.

"He can still chisel it," Amy said, the first time she saw it.

"I know," Emma said. "But it'll take him longer."

Amy thought about that. About what it meant to live in a house where the calculation had shifted from this cannot happen to this will take him longer. She thought about her own back door on Elmira Street, which Thomas had fitted with a new bolt in August and which she checked every night before she went to sleep and again when she woke in the night and sometimes in the middle of the afternoon for no reason except that checking it was the thing her hands knew how to do now when her mind was somewhere difficult.

She thought about all the doors in all the houses in the neighbourhood with their old panels and their simple latches and the people behind them sleeping in good faith.

She thought about Joseph Mumfre.

The thing about looking for a person who does not want to be found, Amy had learned over the past months, is that you cannot look for them directly. You cannot go to the place they were last known to be and expect them to still be there, because a person who has been nearly charged with murder and released and has continued anyway is a person who understands the value of not being in the place they were last known to be. You have to look for the shape they leave in other things. The impression of them in the world around them.

She had been doing this since October. She had the boarding house on Burgundy Street, which had told her nothing. She had two other addresses from Arceneaux's file, both of which had been dead ends. She had the criminal record — burglary, 1907, a charge of attempted intimidation in 1909, the suspicion in 1911 that had not become a charge — which told her the shape of him in the official record but not where the official record ended and the actual man began.

What she had not yet tried, because she had not known how to try it without Thomas asking questions she didn't want to answer, was the neighbourhood itself.

This city was not large in the way that mattered. It was not large in the way of human knowledge — of who knew who, of who had grown up on which street, of who remembered which face from which year. New Orleans held its people close, held its history close, layered everything on top of everything else until the past was never quite past and the people who had been here long enough knew things about each other that the official record had never thought to write down.

She needed someone who had been here long enough.

She thought of Arceneaux, the journalist. She thought of the detective from the 1911 file, whose name she had and whose current whereabouts she did not. She thought of the 1911 survivor on Dorgon Street, the woman who had screamed and sent him out the door, whose name was in the file as Mrs. Edith Carver and whose current address she did not have but whose name was in the city directory if she was still here and still living under her own name.

She went to the library and found the city directory and found Edith Carver on Ursulines Avenue and wrote the address in her notebook and went home and wrote a letter.

Edith Carver was sixty one years old and had the manner of a woman who had been formidable at forty and had not seen any reason to stop. She lived in a narrow house on Ursulines Avenue that was immaculately kept in the way of someone who has been keeping things immaculate for so long that anything less would feel like a personal failing, and she opened the door to Amy with the expression of someone who had read the letter twice and decided to be interested.

"Mrs. Clark," she said. "Come in. You look tired."

"I have a seven month old," Amy said. "I'm always tired."

"Sit down then."

She sat. The parlour was small and very full — furniture, books, photographs, the accumulated material of a long life in one place. A cat slept on the windowsill with the philosophical composure of a cat that has made its arrangements and intends to keep them. From somewhere deeper in the house came the smell of something baking.

Mrs. Carver sat across from her and folded her hands and looked at her with the directness of a woman who had no particular interest in preliminaries.

"You want to know about 1911," she said.

"I want to know about Joseph Mumfre," Amy said.

Something moved across Mrs. Carver's face. It was not surprise — she had known, Amy thought, from the letter, what this was going to be about. It was something more specific than surprise. A kind of grim recognition, the look of someone who has been waiting for a particular subject to come back around and has always known it would.

"They let him go," she said. "In 1911. Detective Ramsey — he was certain, he told me he was certain, but certain isn't enough and they let him go and I never—" she stopped. "I told them he would do it again. I told Detective Ramsey. He said he understood and I told him that understanding wasn't enough either."

"Do you know where he is now?" Amy said. "Mumfre. Do you know where he's been living."

"I haven't seen him since 1911. I wouldn't know him now — it was dark, I only saw him for a moment before I screamed and he went." She paused. "But I know people who knew him. Back then. There was a woman on Dauphine Street — not the same building as your Mr. Stans, further north — a woman called Tureaud who rented rooms and who had a man she called her nephew staying with her in 1911 who wasn't her nephew. I always thought—" she stopped. "I never had any reason to say it to anyone officially. It was just a feeling."

Amy wrote the name down. Tureaud. Dauphine Street, north end.

"Did you know his face?" she said. "Could you describe him. Beyond the dark and the hat."

Mrs. Carver was quiet for a moment. "Large," she said. "The way he moved. Heavy through the body. He didn't move like a young man." She paused. "I remember his hands. I don't know why I remember his hands — I barely saw him. But they were very large. Very pale in the dark."

Amy looked at what she had written.

Large. Pale hands. The same words from Katherine Vires. The same words from Emma Vasent. Eight years apart and the same hands, the same unhurried walk, the same dark suit and the same hat pulled low and the same nothing taken from any room in any house in all that time.

Eight years.

"Mrs. Carver," she said. "When he was in your room. Before you screamed. Did he know you were awake?"

Mrs. Carver looked at her. "No," she said. "I made sure of it. I kept still. I kept my eyes almost closed. I watched him through — just a slit. I watched him for a moment before I screamed and in that moment he thought I was asleep."

"Why did you scream when you did? What made you scream at that particular moment rather than earlier or later?"

The old woman was quiet for a long time. The cat on the windowsill shifted and resettled. Outside the street went about its afternoon.

"He moved toward me," Mrs. Carver said. "He'd been standing still — the way you described in your letter, that stillness — and then he moved and I knew if I didn't scream then I wouldn't get another chance." She paused. "He was raising the axe."

Amy sat with that.

"He stopped when I screamed," Mrs. Carver said. "He stopped and he looked at me — just for a moment — and then he turned and went. As though he'd made a decision." She looked at Amy. "The same thing you said happened to you. And to the Vires girl."

"Yes."

"He stops for women who see him," Mrs. Carver said. "He doesn't stop for—" she paused. She was thinking about something. "The ones who died. Or the men who died. He didn't stop for them."

Amy had thought about this. She had been thinking about it since August, since the morning after, since she had sat in the bedroom with her bandaged head and understood that he had wanted her to see him. "I think he stops because he wants to be seen," she said carefully. "And when a woman sees him and screams it breaks something — some version of it he had in his head. The way he wanted it to go. The scream makes it wrong and he leaves."

Mrs. Carver looked at her steadily. "That's a very specific thing to understand about a person."

"I've had seven months to think about it."

The old woman nodded slowly. She looked at Amy's notebook, at the pages of careful handwriting, at the name written at the top of the current page.

"The Tureaud woman on Dauphine Street," she said. "If he came back to New Orleans — if he'd been away and came back — she's the kind of person he'd go to. She rents to people who need to not be found. Has done for thirty years." She paused. "I'm not saying he's there. I'm saying if you wanted to find where a person like that might have anchored himself when he came back, you'd start there."

Amy closed her notebook.

"Thank you," she said.

"Don't thank me," Mrs. Carver said. "Find him."

She went to Dauphine Street on a Thursday afternoon in the last week of March, because Thursday was the day Thomas's sister took Judith and because Thomas thought she was going to the library and she had decided that this particular errand did not require his knowledge in advance, which she would explain to him afterward in a way that would not be untruthful but would not be entirely complete either, and which she had made her peace with.

The Tureaud house was a narrow double shotgun on the north end of Dauphine, three storeys, the paint on the shutters going grey at the edges the way paint does in the wet New Orleans air when it has been a few years since anyone attended to it. A house that had been respectable once and was respectable still in a tired, qualified way, the way of a house that had made certain accommodations over time and had found them practical.

She knocked.

The woman who answered was perhaps seventy, small and dark eyed, with the look of someone who assessed visitors quickly and thoroughly and had been doing so for a long time. She looked at Amy with an expression that gave nothing away.

"Mrs. Tureaud," Amy said. "My name is Amy Clark. I'm looking for a man named Joseph Mumfre. I have reason to believe you may know him."

Mrs. Tureaud looked at her for a long moment.

"I don't know anyone by that name," she said.

"I think you do," Amy said pleasantly. "I think he may have stayed here in 1911 and I think he may have come back. I'm not the police. I'm not going to cause you any difficulty. I only want to know if he's here or if you know where he is."

Mrs. Tureaud's expression did not change. She had very good control of her expression, Amy noted. The kind of control that came from years of practice.

"I don't know anyone by that name," she said again. And closed the door.

Amy stood on the step for a moment.

Then she turned and looked at the street. At the houses on either side. At the alley that ran alongside the Tureaud house on the left, the narrow passage between it and the next building, leading to the back of the property.

She did not go down the alley. She was not yet ready to do what going down the alley would mean doing, and she was honest enough with herself to know it. She was a woman alone on a street in the middle of the day looking for a man who had stood over her in the dark with an axe, and there were limits to what honesty required.

She went home.

She sat at the kitchen table and looked at the wall and thought about Mrs. Tureaud's face when she said the name. The thing that had happened in it, very briefly, before the control came back.

Not nothing. Not the blankness of genuine ignorance.

Something.

She wrote it down. Tureaud knows the name. Tureaud knows him.

She sat back and looked at it.

Then she picked up her pencil and wrote the thing she had been turning over since she left Ursulines Avenue, the thing Mrs. Carver had said and that had been sitting at the back of her mind since, waiting:

He stops for women who see him.

She looked at this for a long time.

Then she wrote: What if one of us made him stop.

She looked at that.

Outside the kitchen window the afternoon light was going gold and long across the street, the way it did at this hour, the particular late light of a New Orleans afternoon that turned everything warm and amber and made the city look, from certain angles, like something that had been here forever and intended to stay. She looked at it through the window and thought about what she was considering and thought about Judith asleep upstairs and thought about Thomas coming home at midnight and thought about the axe on the floor of Emma Vasent's kitchen and the panel leaning neatly against the wall and the door standing open on the dark alley.

She looked at what she had written.

What if one of us made him stop.

She did not cross it out.