New Orleans, Louisiana — May 1919
The police came back in the second week of May.
Not the desk sergeant — someone above him, which told Amy something about what had happened between the day she left her notes on the counter and now. A detective, middle aged, with a careful unremarkable face and the manner of a man who had learned over a long career to give very little away in the way he held himself or looked at things. His name was Beaumont. He came to the house on Elmira Street on a Tuesday morning and stood in the hallway and looked at the kitchen wall before she had said a word to him and she watched him look at it and read something in the quality of his attention that she had not seen in anyone from the department before.
He was actually looking at it.
Not with the tolerant patience of the desk sergeant or the careful blankness of the detective who had thanked her for coming in last October. He was looking at it the way she looked at it — the way she had looked at it a hundred times since August, scanning for the thing she hadn't yet seen, the connection she hadn't yet made.
"Mrs. Clark," he said, still looking at the wall. "How long have you been building this."
"Since June of last year," she said. "The day the second article appeared. Philip Stans."
He nodded slowly. He was reading the cards, she could see — moving across them the way you move across a page, following the logic of the arrangement. He stopped at the card in the centre. He wanted me to see him. He stopped at the one below it. He wanted the whole city to see him. He stopped at the one at the bottom right corner. Joseph Mumfre.
He looked at that one for a long time.
"Sit down," Amy said. "I'll tell you everything."
She told him everything. She had not told everything to anyone in one sitting before — she had given pieces to the desk sergeant and pieces to the October detective and pieces to Arceneaux the journalist and pieces to Thomas in the accumulated conversations of ten months of living alongside it. But she had not sat down and given the whole of it to one person from the beginning.
She did it now. She started with the morning she had read about the Lewis murders and ended with the Tureaud house on Dauphine Street and the door closing in her face. She told him about Edith Carver on Ursulines Avenue and the 1911 file and the description that matched across eight years and five witnesses. She told him about the letter and the jazz night and what she thought the letter told you about the person who wrote it. She told him about the way he moved — the walking, not running, the deciding — and what she thought that meant and why she thought the scream mattered.
Beaumont listened. He wrote things down. He asked questions — good questions, specific questions, the kind of questions that told her he was following not just the sequence of what she was saying but the logic underneath it.
When she was finished he looked at his notes for a moment.
"Mumfre," he said. "You got the name from the 1911 file."
"From Arceneaux's copy of it. He was the States reporter who covered the attacks. He kept everything."
"Arceneaux." Beaumont wrote this down. "And your contact with the Tureaud house."
"I knocked. She said she didn't know the name. She was lying."
Beaumont looked at her. "You're certain."
"I'm certain."
He nodded. He looked at the wall again. He looked at the map with its pins and its red string, at the line she had drawn from the first pin through the second and past her own street toward the river. He looked at the circle she had drawn around the neighbourhood — the eleven blocks, the forty houses with the same door construction.
"The door type," he said.
"Old Creole cottage construction. Panels set in groove joinery, no screws, held by the frame. Every house he's entered has had it." She paused. "Every house on this street has it. Most of the streets in this neighbourhood."
"You think he's local."
"I think he knows these streets the way you only know streets you've walked for a long time. The way he moves — the timing, the knowledge of which houses to approach, the way he gets out before anyone comes." She paused. "He's not choosing randomly. He's choosing houses he's already looked at. Already walked past. He knows the doors before he touches them."
Beaumont was quiet for a moment. He was looking at the map.
"We found him," he said.
Amy went still.
"Mumfre. We found him two weeks ago. He's been in the city since at least January — renting a room on Basin Street. Not the Tureaud house. Somewhere else." He paused. "He has a record. Burglary, assault, a charge in 1907 that didn't go anywhere. He was picked up in Mississippi in 1915 on a burglary charge and served two years, which is why he was gone for that period. He came back to New Orleans sometime in late 1917."
Late 1917.
Amy thought about the Lewis house. May 1918. He had come back to the city and spent months — doing what? Walking the streets. Looking at doors. Learning the neighbourhood again or for the first time, deciding which houses, which panels, which order.
"He's been watching," she said. "Before the first attack. He spent months watching."
"That's our assessment," Beaumont said. "Yes."
She looked at him. "What happens now."
He put his pen down. He looked at her with the careful face, the unremarkable face, and she understood that what he said next had been decided before he came here this morning and that coming here was partly official and partly something else — a courtesy, or an acknowledgment of something.
"We're watching him," Beaumont said. "We've had a man on Basin Street since Monday. We're building a case — looking at the physical evidence from each scene, going back to the original reports, talking to witnesses again with the name in front of us rather than—" he paused. "Rather than the way it was handled before."
Rather than separately. Rather than the way she had told the desk sergeant last June and the October detective and nobody had listened.
She did not say this. She had decided, somewhere between waking and getting up this morning, that she was not going to spend time on that.
"The evidence," she said. "Is it enough."
Beaumont's expression told her before his words did. "We're working on it," he said. "The descriptions are consistent but descriptions are—" he paused. "A court requires more than descriptions."
"Physical evidence."
"The door panels. The axe handles — we've been looking at prints. The bloodied clothes found at the Lewis house." He paused. "It takes time."
Amy looked at the wall. She looked at the name on the card in the bottom right corner and thought about the months she had been looking at it and the months before that when she had been looking at everything else and she thought about Anni Lewis and Jesse Lewis and Philip Stans and Benjamin Vires and Mr. Dufour who had gone to supper and ended up in the wrong room.
"How long," she said.
"I can't tell you that."
"Weeks? Months?"
"I can't tell you that," he said again, gently. "But we're not stopping. I want you to know that. Whatever happened before — however this was handled before I was assigned to it — we are not stopping."
Amy looked at him for a long moment.
She believed him. She was not sure that was the same thing as trusting the process that employed him, but she believed him personally and she had learned over the past year that this was sometimes the best you could get and that it was not nothing.
"What do you need from me," she said.
He looked at the wall. "I'd like a copy of everything," he said. "Every note. The map. The timeline. Everything." He paused. "With your permission."
She had made three copies over the past months, a habit born of the fear that something would happen to the originals. She went to the shelf above the flour tin and took down the envelope that held the most recent one and brought it to the table and set it in front of him.
He looked at it. Then he looked at her.
"You made a copy," he said.
"I always make copies," she said. "In case someone loses the original."
He picked it up. He looked at her with something that was almost — not quite, but almost — a smile.
"Mrs. Clark," he said. "I want you to know that when this is over — however it ends — this—" he gestured at the wall, at the envelope in his hand, at all of it. "This is what found him. Not us."
Amy looked at the wall.
She thought about June of last year, the morning she had read four paragraphs on page four and looked at her back door. She thought about the kitchen table at three in the morning and the index cards and the red string and the map and the library on Prytania Street and Ella Vires's direct eyes and Mrs. Carver's immaculate parlour and the door closing in her face on Dauphine Street. She thought about the floor of this kitchen and the blood and Thomas's face and the bandage and Judith arriving two days later as though she had decided that whatever was happening out there was not going to delay her.
She thought about the card in the centre of the wall. He wanted me to see him.
"Just find him," she said. "That's all."
Beaumont left at half past eleven. Amy stood at the kitchen window and watched his car go down Elmira Street and turn the corner and disappear and then stood there a while longer looking at the empty street.
She felt something she didn't immediately have a word for. Not relief — it was too early for relief and she had learned not to spend relief before it was earned. Not satisfaction. Something quieter than both of those. The particular stillness of a person who has been pushing against something for a very long time and has felt it, for the first time, begin to give.
She turned back to the kitchen.
Judith was on the floor with the wooden spoon, engaged in a sustained and apparently purposeful percussion project involving the spoon and the leg of the kitchen table. She looked up when Amy came back in and held the spoon up with the expression she had recently developed for things she considered significant.
"Yes," Amy said. "Very good."
She sat down at the table. She looked at the wall. She looked at the map and the cards and the string and the name in the bottom right corner and she thought about what Beaumont had said. We found him. Two words. The simplest possible answer to the question she had been asking for ten months.
We found him.
She looked at the centre card. He wanted me to see him.
She thought about Basin Street. About a man in a rented room on Basin Street who did not know that there was a detective watching the building. Who was going about his days — eating, sleeping, walking the streets, looking at doors — in the ordinary way of a person who believes himself unseen.
She thought about the jazz night. About him writing that letter and sending it and sitting somewhere in this city listening to the whole of New Orleans play music for him, the city performing for him, doing what he had told it to do. She thought about how that must have felt from the inside. The sense of a city under his hand.
She thought about what it would mean to that feeling — to that particular inflated sense of himself — to be watched. To be the one who was seen without knowing it.
She hoped it happened soon enough that she was there to see his face when he understood.
She was at the table when Thomas came home that evening, which was early for him — something had finished ahead of schedule and he had taken the early streetcar and come through the front door at half past seven with his jacket over his arm and the look of a man who has been looking forward to an ordinary evening and intends to have one.
He stopped in the kitchen doorway. He looked at her and then at the wall and then at her again.
"Something happened," he said.
"A detective came this morning. Beaumont. He's been assigned to all of it — all the attacks, together, one investigation."
Thomas was very still.
"He has a name," she said. "They found the man. He's on Basin Street. They're building a case."
Thomas put his jacket on the back of the chair. He sat down across from her. He looked at the wall for a long time without saying anything and she let him look because he had been living with this wall for ten months and he had fixed the back door bolt and made the coffee and taken Judith to his sister's and not said what she sometimes suspected he wanted to say, and he had earned the right to take his time with it.
"Is it over?" he said.
"Not yet," she said. "But closer."
He nodded. He looked at Judith on the floor with her spoon, who had fallen asleep in the abrupt total way of small children, the spoon still in her hand.
"What do you need to do now?" he said.
Amy looked at the wall. At the months of it. At the shape of everything she had built and followed and refused to put down even when she was in a hospital bed with her head bandaged and a two-day-old baby and the police still hadn't called.
"Wait," she said. "For the first time in ten months. I think I just need to wait."
Thomas reached across the table and put his hand over hers.
Outside Elmira Street went about its evening. The Thibodeaux boy had long since put his bicycle away. Old Mrs. Arcand, recovered from the flu and apparently galvanised by the experience, was sweeping her step with renewed intensity at an hour when no reasonable person swept their step, the sound of it coming through the open window steady and rhythmic and deeply ordinary.
Amy left her hand where it was.
She looked at the wall.
She waited.