New Orleans, Louisiana — April 1919
Emma Vasent came to the house on Elmira Street on a Monday morning with her coat buttoned wrong and her eyes red from something that was not recent crying but the older kind, the kind that had been going on long enough to leave a permanent watermark, and she sat down at the kitchen table without being asked and looked at the wall and said nothing for a long time.
Amy let her look. She had learned, over the past months, that Emma needed to arrive at things in her own time and that trying to move her toward them faster than she was ready to go produced a closing off, a retreat into the composed self-possession that was Emma's default position and that Amy had come to understand was not coldness but armour, the thing Emma wore when the world was asking more of her than she had available.
Judith was in the basket by the window, awake and watching the light move on the ceiling with the focused intensity she brought to everything, which Amy had decided was either a sign of exceptional intelligence or simply what babies did when there was nothing more interesting available. She was ten months old and had begun pulling herself upright against the furniture and looking around from this new height with an expression of considerable satisfaction.
Amy made tea.
She set it in front of Emma and sat down and waited.
"Oliver knows," Emma said.
Amy looked at her.
"About Louis Harvey." Emma wrapped both hands around the cup. "He read something in the paper — an account of the attack, the police statement, and my name in it. He asked me directly and I—" she stopped. "I didn't lie to him. I've lied to a lot of people in the past three weeks but I couldn't lie to Oliver."
Amy had been expecting this. She had been expecting it since the night Emma came to her door and had told her, in the flat emptied-out voice of someone reporting a fact they could not yet feel, that she had told the police she recognised a face. That she had given them a name. That the name was Louis Harvey, who lived four houses down from the Vasent house on Rendon Street and who had known Oliver since they were boys and who had been, as far as Amy knew, nowhere near Rendon Street on the night of March the tenth.
She had not said any of this to Emma that night. Emma had been in shock and Oliver had been in surgery and Mr. Dufour had been dead and there was a time for truth and that had not been it.
The time for it had apparently arrived.
"Tell me what happened," Amy said. "What you told them."
Emma's jaw tightened. "I told them I saw his face. When he was going through the kitchen. I said I recognised him." She paused. "I didn't. I know I didn't. I know Louis Harvey's face as well as I know anyone's and the man going through my kitchen was not Louis Harvey. The man going through my kitchen was—" she stopped. She pressed her lips together. "I couldn't see his face. I told the police I could because I needed there to be someone. Because if there was someone specific then it wasn't — then it wasn't just a thing that happened. Then it had a reason."
The kitchen was very quiet. Judith had found her own hand and was examining it with great seriousness.
"I understand," Amy said.
"Do you."
"Yes."
Emma looked at her. "Oliver says I have to go back. To the police. And tell them I was wrong." She said this in a tone that was entirely level, entirely controlled, and that Amy understood was costing her a great deal. "He says Louis Harvey could be arrested. Could be charged. He says a man's life—" she stopped. "He's right. Oliver is right. I know he's right. I knew it when I said it and I said it anyway and now I—"
She put both hands flat on the table the way she always did when she was holding something down.
"I need you to come with me," she said. "To the police station. When I go to tell them." She looked at Amy directly. "I know that's a great deal to ask."
"It isn't," Amy said.
"I need someone who—" Emma paused. She looked at the wall, at the months of work pinned there, at the map with its pins and string. "I need someone who knows this isn't over. Who knows that Louis Harvey being released doesn't mean it's finished, it means it's still out there and still — moving. Someone who knows that and can say it to them when I can't."
Amy looked at her.
"I've been waiting to go back to the police," she said. "I have a name. I've had a name since October and I haven't been able to do anything with it because I couldn't find the man and I couldn't prove it and I've been—" she stopped. "Going back together might be the best chance either of us gets to make them listen."
Emma looked at her steadily. "What name?"
"Joseph Mumfre."
Emma said nothing. She was looking at the name the way you look at something that has the weight of a thing you've been waiting to hear without knowing you were waiting for it.
"You're certain?" she said.
"Certain enough," Amy said. "Not in a way a court would accept. But certain."
Emma nodded slowly. She looked at the wall again, at the map, at the red string running between the pins like a diagram of something that had happened and kept happening and had not yet stopped.
"Tomorrow," she said. "Will you come tomorrow."
"Yes," Amy said. "I'll come tomorrow."
The police station on Royal Street had not changed. The smell of it was the same — tobacco and damp wool and the underlying thing she had never been able to name. The desk sergeant was not the same one she had spoken to in June of last year, the broad one with the moustache, but he had the same expression, the professionally patient one that was really impatience wearing a different coat, and he looked at Amy and Emma standing together in the same way the other one had looked at Amy alone — with the assessment of a man deciding how much of his time this was going to require.
Emma spoke first. Amy had suggested this and Emma had agreed without needing to be told why — because Emma was the one who had made the statement and Emma was the one who needed to unmake it and because Amy standing beside her and speaking was support and Amy standing beside her and leading was undermining, and there was a difference, and Emma understood it.
She told it clearly. She had made a statement identifying Louis Harvey as the man she had seen in her kitchen on the night of March the tenth and that statement was incorrect. She had not seen the man's face clearly. She could not identify him. She was retracting what she had said.
The sergeant wrote it down. He did it with the particular blankness of someone writing down something that is going to cause a significant amount of administrative difficulty and is processing this privately.
"Mrs. Vasent," he said when she was done. "You understand that making a false statement to police—"
"She understands," Amy said. "She's correcting it. Today. Before any further action was taken on it. She came here as soon as she was able."
The sergeant looked at her. "Mrs. Clark."
"Yes."
He looked at her the way people look at things they have encountered before and had hoped not to encounter again. "You've been in before."
"Several times. With information about the attacks that was not acted on."
"Mrs. Clark—"
"The man who attacked the Vasent house on Rendon Street is the same man who attacked the Lewis house on Upperline Street in May of last year," Amy said. "And Philip Stans on Dauphine Street in June. And my house on Elmira Street in August. And the Vires house on St. Claude Avenue. The same man. One man. And I have a name."
The sergeant put his pen down. He looked at her for a long moment.
"What name," he said.
"Joseph Mumfre." She put her notebook on the counter, open to the page she had prepared — the dates, the addresses, the method of entry, the descriptions, the 1911 attacks, the connection to the Burgundy Street boarding house, the Tureaud house on Dauphine. Everything she had built over the past ten months laid out in order. "He was a suspect in two similar attacks in 1911. He was released for lack of evidence. The detective on that case was a man named Ramsey — I don't know if he's still with the department. The surviving victim from 1911 is a woman named Edith Carver on Ursulines Avenue and she is willing to speak to anyone who asks."
The sergeant looked at the notebook. He did not pick it up but he was reading it — she could see his eyes moving across the page.
"The descriptions from every surviving witness," she said. "Ella Vires, Katherine Vires, Emma Vasent, Edith Carver, and myself. Large man, heavy build, dark suit, hat pulled low, large pale hands, no haste, no fear. Eight years apart and the same description." She paused. "That's not a coincidence. That's a person."
The sergeant looked up from the notebook.
He was quiet for a moment. Around them the station went about its business — someone typing in a back room, a door opening and closing, voices somewhere.
"Leave your notes," he said finally.
She had expected this. She had made a copy. She put the copy on the counter and picked up her original and put it back in her coat pocket.
"I'll want those back," she said. "When you've looked at them."
He nodded. He looked at Emma. "Mrs. Vasent. Someone will be in contact about your revised statement."
Emma nodded. She had held herself together for the entire conversation with the particular controlled composure that Amy had come to understand was not distance but the opposite — something so close to the surface that the only way to manage it was to become very still and very precise and not move until it was safe to.
They went out into the April morning, the door of the station closing behind them, the street opening up ahead of them with its ordinary noise and light and movement.
Emma stood on the step and let out a long slow breath.
"Do you think they'll do anything?" she said.
Amy thought about the sergeant's face when he read the notebook. The thing that had moved across it, briefly, when she said the name.
"I think they might," she said. "This time."
Emma nodded. She looked down the street, at the ordinary morning going about itself. "And if they find him," she said. "If they actually find him." She paused. "Will it—" she stopped. Started again. "Oliver asks me, sometimes, whether it will feel different. When it's over. Whether things will go back to—"
She didn't finish the sentence.
Amy thought about August fifth. About the kitchen floor and the blood and Thomas's face when he found her. About the wall of papers that still covered her kitchen and that she sometimes thought she would never be able to take down, not because the information was still needed but because taking it down would mean it was finished and she was not sure she trusted finished.
"I don't know," she said honestly. "I think it's different for everyone."
Emma was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Louis Harvey."
"Yes."
"I need to speak to him. Before the police contact him about the retraction. I need to go to him myself and—" she stopped. "I know what I did. I know what it could have cost him. I need to look at him and say it."
Amy looked at her. She thought about what it cost to say that. What it would cost to do it.
"Do you want company for that too?" she said.
Emma shook her head. "No," she said. "That one I need to do alone."
She straightened her coat. She had buttoned it correctly this time, Amy noticed. She looked, in the April morning light, like herself again — composed, self-possessed, someone who knew her own mind and the cost of it and was paying it.
She walked down the steps and turned left and didn't look back.
Amy watched her go.
Then she turned right and walked home to Elmira Street through the ordinary city, through the morning market on Magazine Street and the side streets with their old houses and their old doors and their panels of wood set into frames the same way they had been set for fifty years, and she thought about Joseph Mumfre somewhere in this city in his dark suit and his pulled-down hat and she thought about the copy of her notes now sitting on the desk of a police sergeant who had, this time, looked at them properly.
She thought about what came next.
She thought about what she had written on the card in the centre of the wall. What if one of us made him stop.
She had not crossed it out.
She had not acted on it either. Not yet.
She walked home through the April morning and the city went around her in all its ordinary beauty and she thought about what she knew and what she still didn't know and what she was or wasn't willing to do about the difference.
Judith was waiting at home, Thomas's sister said when Amy came through the door, in a tone suggesting that Judith had made her feelings about the wait very clearly known.
Amy picked her daughter up and held her against her chest and stood in the hallway and let herself be held back, the small fierce grip of ten-month-old hands in her hair, and for a moment she let everything else go — the wall and the notes and the name and the sergeant and Emma walking away down the street with her coat buttoned correctly — and just stood there.
Then she carried Judith to the kitchen and sat her on the floor with the wooden spoon she liked to bang against things and sat down at the table and opened her notebook to a clean page.
She was not done.
She was close and she was not done and somewhere in this city the man with the pale hands and the dark suit was still here, still moving through the back streets, still looking at doors.
She picked up her pencil.