The lock surrendered on the third try, a cheap deadbolt dressed up in brushed nickel. Maren Calloway pushed the door inward and let the smell of the apartment tell its first story: stale coffee, cold pizza grease, and beneath both, the faint chemical tang of something synthetic, the kind of sharpness that came from electronics running hot in an unventilated room.
"Smells like a Best Buy threw up in here," Ines Vega said behind her.
Maren did not laugh. She catalogued the silence as she stepped across the threshold, the particular quiet of a place recently abandoned in a hurry. A single plate in the sink, crusted with sauce. A laptop on the coffee table, closed but not asleep, a small amber light still breathing along its hinge. The curtains were drawn across the only window, a wall of streetlight bleeding through the cheap fabric in a sodium-orange wash.
Ines moved past her without waiting for an invitation. She was already pulling on a pair of nitrile gloves, the snap of latex against wrist precise and surgical. Her eyes swept the room the way a person scans a crime scene on television, except Ines did it with the quiet, practiced economy of someone who had done it for real, in basements, in parking garages, in a dozen cold apartments that no one had touched in years.
"We don't have a warrant," Maren said.
"We have probable cause and a flashlight." Ines clicked hers on. "And we have the smell of a man who knew we were coming, even if the doorman didn't."
Maren pulled on her own gloves. They were too large. She had borrowed them from the box Linda kept in the office kitchen, the ones meant for handling deliveries from the courier service. The elastic bit into her wrists, and she flexed her fingers against the constriction, buying herself a moment to think.
The apartment belonged to a man named Thomas Vance, forty-one, formerly of accounting, currently a person of interest in a homicide that had nothing to do with numbers. The prosecution was calling it a mugging gone wrong. The defense, which was now Maren's defense, was calling it a setup so elaborate it had its own zip code. Vance had been arrested six days after the body was found in the alley behind the Majestic Theatre. He had been alone, or so the story went, alone and unlucky and holding a wallet that did not belong to him.
He had hired Maren from a holding cell. She had taken the case because the retainer came from a fund that wanted no record of itself, and because the file had smelled wrong from the first page. She had brought Ines because Ines was the only person she trusted to find the rot.
They moved through the apartment in tandem, a choreography built over three days of mutual suspicion and one shared meal of cold lo mein. Ines took the bedroom. Maren took the living room, then the kitchen, then the narrow hall that connected them like a throat.
In the bedroom, she heard Ines open and close drawers. The sound was methodical, the rhythm of a woman who counted every item she displaced so she could put it back the same way. Maren envied that discipline. She had spent the last week trusting her gut, and her gut had the texture of a wet paper bag.
The bookshelf was in the living room, flanking a television that had not been turned on in some time. A fine layer of dust lay on the screen, disturbed at the edges by what might have been a hand, recent. Four shelves. A row of paperbacks with cracked spines. A hardbound collection of Hemingway that looked untouched. A medical dictionary. A copy of The Great Gatsby, green cloth, gilt lettering worn down to ghosts of letters.
Maren almost passed it by.
She stopped. Pulled it from the shelf. It was lighter than it should have been, the weight of a novel with a novel's worth of pages removed. She tilted it and felt something shift inside, a faint whisper of paper against paper, a presence that should not have been there.
"Ines."
The word was enough. Ines appeared in the doorway, her flashlight beam cutting a clean white line across the carpet. She crossed the room in four steps, took the book from Maren without asking, and held it up to the light as if listening to it.
"Modified," Ines said. "The binding's been recut and glued. You can see the seam if you know where to look." She ran a gloved thumb along the spine, feeling for the ridge. "Amateur work. But careful."
She opened the cover. The first thirty pages were intact, foxed and soft. The rest had been hollowed out, a rectangular cavity the size of a chocolate bar, and inside that cavity lay a black Moleskine notebook, the elastic band still holding it shut. Beside it, wrapped in a square of aluminum foil, was a phone.
Ines set the book on the coffee table and put on a fresh pair of gloves, the snap of the latex deliberate, ceremonial. She unwrapped the phone the way a person unwraps a gift they suspect is rigged to burn. It was a burner, a prepaid model sold in every corner deli from here to the Bronx, the kind of phone that existed to be lost.
"One unsent message," Ines said, turning the screen so Maren could see. "Drafts folder. No drafts, no sent, no received. Just this one."
The message read: If anything happens to me, the list is in the book. T.V.
No recipient. No timestamp. Just a sentence addressed to the future, or to whoever came looking.
Maren stared at the initials. T.V. Thomas Vance. The same man sitting in a detention cell on Rikers, waiting for a trial that would probably bury him.
"Could be a coincidence," Ines said, in the tone of a woman who did not believe in coincidences and considered them a professional insult.
"Could be." Maren did not touch the phone. She watched it instead, the dark screen reflecting a smeared version of her own face, the overhead light catching the edges of her jaw. "But a man doesn't hide a phone in a hollowed-out novel unless he knows he's going to need it found."
Ines opened the notebook.
The first page was blank. The second was blank. The third had a single line written in blocky capitals, the handwriting of a person trying to disguise their own hand and failing:
42ND. SUBLEVEL. THE ONE WHO WENT IN DIDNT COME OUT.
Below that, a list. No names. Just initials, dates, and dollar amounts, the columns separated by hand-drawn lines that were not quite straight. Twenty-three entries. Some of the dates went back three years. Some of the dollar amounts had a number of zeroes that made Maren's stomach tighten.
"This is a ledger," Ines said.
"This is a confession," Maren corrected.
Ines turned the page. The entries continued, the same format, the same careful hand. But on the fifth page, the handwriting changed. It became smaller, tighter, the letters leaning as if the writer had been moving when the words were put down. A note in the margin, circled twice:
Ask about the woman in the glass. She was there. She saw.
Maren felt the air in the room change. Not a draft. Nothing that simple. A shift, the way a room shifts when someone has been watching you for a long time and you finally notice.
"What woman," she said, though no one in the room could answer.
Ines took a photograph of the page with her phone, the shutter click a small, dry sound in the heavy quiet. She photographed the message on the burner. She photographed the cavity in the book. She worked without speaking, her face unreadable, the flashlight propped under her chin casting her features in a way that made her look carved.
When she was done, she straightened and looked at Maren.
"We take the book. We leave the phone. We tell the prosecutor we found it during a consensual walk-through, which is a lie, and we hope the lie holds long enough for me to make a copy of the chip before anyone with a badge decides to get curious."
Maren nodded. "Linda's contact at the DA's office. Can she sit on the warrant request if one gets filed?"
"Linda can sit on a lot of things, but she can't sit on a wiretap order. If this phone lights up, someone is going to notice, and someone is going to want it." Ines tucked the notebook into the inside pocket of her jacket. "We have until morning. Maybe less."
Maren looked around the apartment one more time, committing the smell, the silence, the particular slant of light. She would need to remember this room. She would need to remember it the way a witness remembers a face, in case no one else ever saw it again.
In the doorway, she paused.
"On the fifth page," she said. "The woman in the glass. Vance was specific. He said she was there. He said she saw."
Ines pulled the door shut behind them, the deadbolt re-engaging with a click that sounded like a period at the end of a sentence.
"Then we find her," Ines said. "Before whoever is keeping that list decides she is a loose end."
They took the stairs. The elevator in the building had been out of service for two months, according to a handwritten sign taped to its doors in English, Spanish, and a third language neither of them could identify. Their footsteps echoed in the concrete shaft, a slow, deliberate rhythm, and somewhere above them, on the forty-second floor of a building that did not have a forty-second floor, a door opened and closed.
The stairwell door opened onto a sidewalk still slick from an earlier rain, the kind of damp that turned the city lights into long, shivering reflections on the pavement. Maren pulled her collar up, felt the cold press against the bare skin of her throat, and tried not to think about the small, chipped teacup still on Vance's kitchen counter, the one with the faded lotus pattern, the one no one had bothered to wash.
Ines was already ten steps ahead, moving with the kind of unhurried purpose that Maren had learned, over the past eleven months of working together, meant her mind was three steps further on. Maren caught up.
"Linda first," Maren said.
"Linda first," Ines agreed. "Before the office knows we're back."
They turned the corner onto Maren's block, the brownstones hunched like old men bracing against the wind. A delivery truck idled at the curb, its hazard lights pulsing orange against the wet street. The driver was asleep behind the wheel, one hand still wrapped around a cold coffee cup. Maren felt a sudden, irrational sympathy for him, the kind of tenderness that surfaces when you have been looking too long at other people's lives.
She unlocked her front door, turned off the alarm before it could chirp, and led Ines into the kitchen. The clock on the wall read 11:47. She set the kettle on the burner without asking, and Ines sat down at the table, spreading Vance's notebook between them like a surgeon preparing for an operation.
"Three weeks," Ines said. "He wrote that on March third. The back of a parking receipt. Someone inside the Meridian Group. Forged documents."
"Maren." Linda's voice came from the doorway, half-asleep, a child on her hip. She was wearing one of the oversized sweatshirts she reserved for late nights, the one with the faded university logo, and her hair was pulled back in the kind of knot that suggested she had given up on it hours ago. "You said you'd call."
"I know. I'm sorry."
Linda set the child down gently, told him to go find his tablet, and crossed the kitchen with the soft, deliberate steps of a woman who had learned not to wake a sleeping household any more than necessary. She looked at the notebook, then at Ines, then at Maren, and her face did that thing it always did when she was trying to decide whether to be angry or afraid.
"Tell me," she said.
Maren told her. She told her about the door, the twenty-second gap in the camera, the man in the second-floor stairwell, the chip in the notebook, the handwriting that shifted from urgent to afraid. She told her about the list, and the alibi that had the wrong shape, and the woman in the glass whose name Vance had known and written down and then, somehow, lost.
Linda listened without interrupting. When Maren finished, Linda exhaled slowly, like someone setting down something heavy.
"Meridian," she said. "You understand what you're saying."
"I understand."
"They have lawyers who bill more per hour than most people make in a week. They have investigators who know how to make problems go away. They have a chief compliance officer who once told me, at a cocktail party, that the best way to handle a rumor was to identify the source and remove the temptation." Linda paused. "He was talking about an employee, not a witness. I remember thinking at the time that he didn't seem like a man who used that word lightly."
"Paranoid," Ines said. "Vance wrote paranoid. Three weeks."
Linda looked down at the notebook, at the cramped, slanting handwriting, at the way the pen had pressed too hard on certain words, as if Vance had been trying to press them into the paper.
"He called me," Linda said. "Two Sundays ago. Late. He said he couldn't sleep. He said he'd found something in the contracts, something he thought I should know about, something that didn't match the public filings. I told him to bring it to me. He said no. He said if he brought it to me, they'd know. He said there was someone inside Meridian who was feeding him documents, and he thought the documents were real, but he wasn't sure anymore. He said the documents had a smell to them, if that makes sense. Like they had been handled too many times. Like they had been printed and reprinted and printed again."
"He was being watched," Maren said.
"Or he was being fed." Linda's voice was very quiet now. "There's a difference, Maren. There's a difference between someone watching you and someone showing you exactly what they want you to see."
Ines turned a page in the notebook. The handwriting shifted again here, the letters smaller, the lines closer together, as if Vance had been trying to fit more thought into less space.
"He trusted you," Ines said. "He called you. He didn't call the firm. He didn't call his partner. He didn't call anyone at Meridian."
"He trusted me because I have never given him a reason not to." Linda folded her arms across her chest, a gesture Maren had seen her make a hundred times, usually right before she said something she had been thinking about for a long time. "But he also trusted me because I am not important. I am not on anyone's list. I am the person you call when you need a form notarized or a deadline tracked. I am the person who remembers birthdays. I am the person who, if she disappeared tomorrow, would be missed by her children and by her cat and by maybe four other people, and that is exactly why he thought I was safe to talk to."
She paused.
"He was wrong about that, by the way. He was wrong about a lot of things. But he was wrong about me being safe."
Maren felt the weight of that sentence settle into the room. She reached for Linda's hand, and Linda let her take it, and for a moment the only sound was the kettle beginning to whisper on the burner.
"The woman in the glass," Maren said. "He said her name. He wrote it down. He said she saw."
"I know who she is," Linda said.
Maren went still. Ines went still. The kettle went still, for a moment, as if it too were listening.
"I don't know where she is," Linda added. "I don't know if she's alive. But I know who she is. Vance told me, the same night he called. He said her name, and I wrote it down, because I always write things down, and then he asked me to burn the paper, and I did, but I remembered it because I am very good at remembering things that people ask me to forget."
She looked at Maren.
"She was a junior associate at Meridian. Eight years ago. She left under circumstances that the firm described, in the press release, as a mutual decision. She was the one who first flagged the discrepancy in the contracts. She was the one who tried to take it up the chain, and she was the one who was told, very politely, that she had misunderstood the numbers. She was the one who went home that night and did not come back to the office the next morning, or the morning after that, or any morning after that for the next eight years."
"What was her name?" Ines asked.
Linda told them.
Maren wrote it down. Ines did not write it down. Ines simply repeated it, once, very quietly, as if she were testing the weight of it in her mouth.
"Vance wrote it in the notebook," Maren said. "On the fifth page. The same name."
"I know," Linda said. "He told me he had written it down. He told me he had finally written it down. He said he had been afraid to write it down for eight years, because writing it down made it real, and if it was real, then it could be taken from him, and if it could be taken from him, then he was no longer safe."
She paused.
"I asked him why he was writing it down now. He said he had run out of not writing it down."
The kettle began to sing, a low, steady note that filled the kitchen. Maren got up to take it off the burner, and as she did, she caught her reflection in the dark window above the sink, her own face looking back at her with an expression she did not recognize.
She poured three cups. She set one in front of Linda. She set one in front of Ines. She sat down with her own and did not drink.
"Eight years," Ines said. "She has been a ghost for eight years. And Vance has been carrying her name in his head, unsaid, unwritten, for eight years. And now, three weeks ago, someone starts feeding him documents, and he starts writing again, and the first thing he writes is her name."
"Yes," Linda said.
"And then he dies," Ines said. "Fifteen days after he starts writing it down."
"Yes."
"And we are sitting in this kitchen," Maren said, "with a notebook that knows things, and a phone that will not stop knowing things, and a name that has survived eight years of being unsaid."
She wrapped both hands around the cup, feeling the warmth seep into her palms.
"We need to find her," Maren said. "Before whoever is keeping that list decides she is a loose end."
Linda looked at her, and there was something in Linda's face that Maren had not seen before, something that lived in the space between loyalty and terror.
"You understand," Linda said, "that if you find her, you cannot put her back. You cannot pretend you didn't. You cannot hand her to anyone and walk away clean. Whoever she is, whoever she was, she is going to look at you and she is going to see the last person who came looking for her, and if that goes wrong, there will not be a notebook that fixes it."
Maren thought about the teacup on Vance's counter. She thought about the handwriting in the notebook. She thought about the man in the second-floor stairwell, and the twenty-second gap in the camera, and the chip taped to the inside cover of a book no one had bothered to read.
"I know," Maren said.
Linda nodded, once, slowly, the way a person nods when they have decided to stop trying to talk someone out of something and have started, instead, trying to figure out how to help.
"Then we start tonight," Linda said. "I have a contact at the bar association who owes me a favor. I have a contact at the motor vehicle bureau who owes me two. And I have a contact at a storage unit in Queens who has been holding a box for me for six years that I have never opened and have never been able to bring myself to throw away."
She paused.
"Vance gave it to me," she said. "Six years ago. He said if anything ever happened to him, I should open it. He said it would tell me where to find the woman in the glass. He said I would know when the time was right."
Ines set her cup down.
"And you think tonight is the time," Ines said.
"I think tonight is the only time," Linda said. "I think if we wait until morning, someone else will have decided for us."
Maren looked at Ines. Ines looked at Maren. The clock on the wall read 11:53.
"Then we go tonight," Maren said.
The storage unit in Queens was the color of a bruise, which is to say it was painted a color someone had probably once called burgundy, but years of weather and neglect had turned it into something darker, something closer to the inside of a closed eye. The door rattled in a wind that came off the water and smelled, faintly, of diesel and something sweeter underneath, like fruit left too long in a bowl. Linda led them down a row of identical doors, counting under her breath, her breath coming out in small white clouds that the wind tore apart almost before they formed.
"Seventeen," she said. "Eighteen. Nineteen."
She stopped in front of number twenty-three. The padlock on the hasp was new, which was strange. The hasp itself was old, scarred with rust blooms, the kind of orange that looked almost alive in the glow of the overhead bulb. But the padlock, a Master combination model, was shiny. Untouched by the salt air. Someone had replaced it, and recently.
"Maren," Linda said. Her voice had gone flat, the way it went when she was not surprised but wished very much to be.
"I see it," Maren said.
Ines crouched beside the door, her knees popping in a way she did not bother to disguise. She ran one gloved finger along the gap where the door met the frame, held it up to the light, and examined the residue on the latex with the detached curiosity of a woman who had seen a great many worse things in a great many worse places.
"Talcum," she said. "Medical grade. The kind they use in labs and clean rooms. The kind they also use in some formulations of fingerprinting powder, but this is too fine. This is the cosmetic variety. Someone who cares about their hands. Someone who does not want to leave prints."
"Or someone who already knew we were coming," Linda said.
"That too," Ines said. "The mathematical probabilities are interesting either way."
Maren looked at the padlock. She looked at the chain that ran from the hasp down to a ground anchor set into the concrete pad. She looked at the way the light fell, which was uneven, which meant one of the bulbs in the row above them had burned out and no one had replaced it, which meant the property manager either could not or would not maintain the lighting, which meant it was dark in places it should not be, which meant if someone was waiting they had chosen a place to wait that was not a place Maren could see from where she was standing.
"I did not call anyone," Linda said. "I did not tell a soul."
"I know," Maren said.
"Then how," Linda said.
Maren did not answer, because the answer was the same answer it had been since the night she had stood in a stairwell in Hell's Kitchen and watched a chip get removed from a book by a man who had known exactly where to look. The answer was that someone was always one step ahead. The answer was that someone had been one step ahead for a long time, possibly since before Vance died, possibly since before Maren took the case, possibly since before the case existed in any form that could be taken. The answer was that the game had been in motion before any of them had known there was a board.
She took the combination from Linda. She dialed it in, slowly, listening to the clicks. The lock opened with a sound that was both heavier and quieter than she had expected, like a stone dropped into deep water. Ines caught it before it could fall against the hasp and make a noise that would carry.
"Good," Maren mouthed.
Ines nodded once.
The door swung outward. The air that came out was not stale, which was the first wrong thing. It should have been stale, after six years of closed space and a new lock that suggested no one had been inside, but it was not. It smelled of cedar. It smelled faintly of something sharper, like the ghost of a cleaning solution, the kind used in evidence lockers to keep biological material from doing what biological material does when left to its own devices. Someone had cleaned the unit. Someone had cleaned it well, and not long ago.
Maren produced the flashlight she had taken from her bag, clicked it on, and swept the beam across the interior.
The unit was small, perhaps six by eight, which was enough for a motorcycle and not much else. A bare bulb hung from a pull chain. Linda reached past Maren, pulled it, and the bulb came on with a faint hum that sounded, in the quiet, almost like a voice. The light was yellow. The light was old. The light fell on a single cardboard box in the center of the floor, the kind of box that moving companies call a medium, and on the box, in handwriting Maren recognized with a lurch that went all the way down to the soles of her feet, three words: For Linda Park.
"He was here," Linda said. Her voice was not steady. "He was here not long ago. He cleaned it. He put the box back. He wanted us to find it."
"Or," Ines said, "he wanted us to think he was here not long ago. The handwriting is real. The box is real. Whether the cleaning is his is a different question. There is also the possibility that the handwriting is not his at all, that someone has studied him long enough to reproduce it. Forgeries are not difficult. They are only time-consuming."
"You don't have to say things like that," Linda said.
"I have to say everything like that," Ines said. "It is the only thing I know how to do."
Maren knelt beside the box. The tape had been cut, not torn, which meant a blade had been used, which meant the person who had sealed it had intended it to be opened without damage, or had wanted the appearance of having intended such. The flaps were tucked in, neatly, the way a person tucks in flaps when they have opened a box and then decided to close it again without taking anything out, or when they have taken something out and put something else back in, or when they have done both, in some order, for reasons they have not explained and may never explain.
She lifted the flaps.
Inside, on a bed of clean white tissue paper, was a single manila envelope, unsealed. Beneath the envelope was a folded piece of paper, heavier stock, the kind used for documents that are meant to be preserved. Beneath that, at the bottom of the box, was a small glass jar with a metal lid, the kind of jar that in another era would have held preserves. The jar was empty. The jar was clean. The jar was the kind of clean that meant it had been washed, dried, and put back, which meant the contents, whatever they had been, had been removed, and the question of where they had gone was now part of the question Maren was trying to answer, which was itself part of the larger question, which was, at its heart, a question about a dead man and a living man and a notebook and a chip and a city that never slept and yet seemed, tonight, to be holding its breath.
She took the envelope. She took the folded paper. She left the jar where it was, because some objects are not meant to be carried, and some absences are heavier than the things that fill them.
The envelope contained a single sheet of paper, lined, torn from a legal pad. The handwriting was Vance's. The handwriting was hurried. The handwriting was the handwriting of a man who had known, when he wrote it, that he was running out of time to write it.
Linda, it began. If you are reading this, then I am gone, and you have done what I asked, which was to wait, and which I knew you would hate, because you have never been good at waiting, and I have always loved you for it. I am sorry. I am sorry for the waiting. I am sorry for what comes next. I am sorry most of all that I cannot be there to explain it in person, which is the coward's apology, and I know it, and I make it anyway.
Do not open the other paper yet. Not here. Not in the open. What is on it will only matter if the right person sees it, and the right person is not me, and is not you, and is not, I think, anyone you would expect. Take it to Maren. Tell her what I told you, which is that the woman in the glass is real, and that she saw everything, and that the reason no one has found her is that the people who do not want her found have made finding her cost more than most people are willing to pay. Tell her I am sorry. Tell her the name on the back of the other paper is the only name that matters, and that the only thing I have ever been able to give her that might make up for the thing I cannot give her is the chance to do what I could not, which is to finish it.
Maren handed the letter to Linda. Linda read it. Linda's hands did not shake, which Maren took as a sign of either great strength or great practice at hiding great weakness, and which she suspected was both.
"He knew," Linda said. "He knew you would be the one. He knew it before I did."
"Vance knew a great many things before the rest of us," Maren said. "It was his gift and his curse. I am not yet sure which one it turned out to be."
She unfolded the second paper.
It was a single sheet, heavier than the first, the kind of stock used for certificates and other documents meant to survive. On the front, in the same hurried hand, were three lines:
The witness is not a witness. The witness is a message. The message is in the glass.
On the back, in a different hand, in script that was older and steadier and that Maren did not recognize, was a single line. The ink was brown with age, or made to look so. The line was a name, and the name was not a name Maren had expected, and was not a name she had ever seen in any file connected to the case, and was, in fact, a name that should not have existed, because the person to whom it belonged had, according to every record available, been dead for eleven years.
Maren stared at the name. Maren did not speak. Maren did not move. The storage unit hummed around her with the hum of a place that held things, and the hum sounded, to her ears, like a question asked very quietly by a voice that did not expect an answer.
"What is it," Linda said.
Maren turned the paper around so that Linda could see it. Linda looked. Linda's face did something complicated that Maren had never seen it do before, and Maren had known Linda long enough to have seen most of the things her face could do.
"That's not possible," Linda said.
"I know," Maren said.
"Who is that," Ines said.
Maren looked at her. Ines looked at her. Ines's face was the face of a woman who had been surprised exactly once in her life and had decided, afterward, never to be surprised again, and was now revising that decision in real time.
"Tell me," Ines said.
Maren told her. Ines listened without interruption, which was itself a kind of interruption, because Ines interrupted everything. When Maren finished, Ines was quiet for a long time. The bulb above them hummed. The wind outside found a gap in the door and slipped in, and the air that moved past Maren's face was cool and smelled of diesel and of the city, and of all the things the city kept that the city did not want found.
"Well," Ines said, finally. "That is a complication."
"That is more than a complication," Linda said.
"That is a complication," Ines said, "and everything else is a category we will have to invent as we go. I do not like it. I do not like any of it. But I have learned, in a long and unrewarding career, that the cases worth solving are the ones that make me feel exactly like this, and that the feeling, unpleasant as it is, is also the only compass I have ever been able to trust."
She looked at Maren.
"We are not stopping," Ines said. "I want to be clear about that. Whatever that name means, whatever it opens, we are not stopping. We are going to find out what is in the glass. We are going to find out who R.P. is. We are going to find out what happened to Vance. And we are going to do it in that order, because that is the order in which the questions will kill us if we do not."
Maren folded the paper. Maren put it in her coat, against her chest, where the weight of it settled against her ribs like a hand laid flat.
"Then we start tomorrow," Maren said. "We start with the name. We start with the only person who can tell us whether the dead are as dead as we have been told."
Linda nodded. Ines nodded. The bulb hummed. The wind pressed. Somewhere in the city, a clock struck midnight, and the sound of it came to them through the walls and through the door and through the thin air, and it sounded, to Maren, like the first line of a story that had not yet decided how it wanted to end.