The buzzer for 7B rasped under Sebastian Crowe's thumb, dry as an old husk, and the hallway of the Whitmore Arms held the smell of floor wax layered over boiled cabbage and something fainter, a trace of lavender water that had been on the wallpaper before the current tenants signed their leases. The carpet runner was threadbare at its center, brown stripes worn down to a pale, apologetic gray. A water stain on the ceiling tile nearest the stairwell door had the shape of a moth with its wings spread. Behind the apartment door, a cat complained in a voice pitched somewhere between grievance and full Verdi.
He buzzed again. Four short presses, the way his daughter had taught him when she was six years old and determined to teach Morse code to anyone who would sit still. Short-short-long. The cat inside increased its volume.
"So who is it, who is it, I am coming, I am coming." Footsteps, fast and slightly uneven, and then a chain rattled. The door opened inward six inches and stopped at the chain's full reach. A slice of face appeared in the gap. Gray hair pinned tight to the skull. A sharp nose with a small red dent at its bridge where a pair of glasses had rested for forty years. One black eye with a cataract bloom at its edge. The eye examined him with the speed of a woman who had been opening doors for sixty years and had decided, long ago, exactly how much of herself she intended to display through any particular gap.
"Doctor Crowe," she said.
"Mrs. Klimchak."
"It is not even noon and you are already standing in my hall."
"That is correct."
"You have come about the girl."
It was not a question. The cat yowled again, and this time with such conviction that a small brown paw extruded through the bottom of the door and patted at the air. Mrs. Klimchak glanced down at the paw with the practiced resignation of long acquaintance.
"Poleska, behave," she said.
The paw withdrew. The complaint dropped half a register, then continued at the new pitch with great seriousness.
"Mrs. Klimchak," Sebastian said. "I would like to come in, if you'll allow it."
"Then you will have to take off your shoes, because I waxed the floor yesterday and I am not doing it again." She closed the door. The chain slid free in a series of metallic sneezes. The door opened again, this time the full width of her small body.
She was smaller than he remembered. A blue housedress, clean. Nylon at the elbows, a thicker weave at the cuffs. A gold pin at her throat in the shape of a stylized bird, its wings cupped around a tiny red glass eye. She nodded once into the dimness of the apartment behind her.
"Mrs. Klimchak," he said, "I would not be here if it were not important."
"Nothing important ever comes to the people on this floor," she said. "Cousin Sofia has a plumbing problem since November. I tell her, write it down. She does not write it down. What happens? The ceiling in 6A comes down on a Sunday morning while the man is making his coffee. So." She stepped back into the apartment and waved him in.
The living room of 7B was small and immaculate. A sofa covered in green velvet with two antimacassars, one at each armrest, a crocheted runner on the back. A walnut sideboard against the far wall, its surface crowded with framed photographs in glass, and a glass vase holding three dried peonies on a doily that had gone yellow at the edges. On the wall above the sofa, a print of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa in a gold wooden frame, the gilt rubbed off in two long arcs at the top corners where someone had reached up to take the picture down and put it back over many years. The room smelled of lemon polish and rose potpourri that had gone stale in its bowl, and faintly of the cabbage simmering somewhere in the kitchen.
The cat, Poleska, perched on the windowsill in a shaft of thin morning light, watching him with one yellow eye and one blue. She had a torn left ear, a tail that bent at a flat angle halfway down its length, and a dignity that her body did not entirely support. She considered Sebastian, considered the leg of the small table by the arm of the sofa, and decided to leap. The leap was graceless. She landed, turned once, and arranged herself into a loaf shape against the antimacassar.
"Sit," said Mrs. Klimchak, and pointed to the sofa. "I will bring coffee. You look like a man who has been awake too long."
"Thank you."
"You are welcome. It is what it is."
She disappeared into the kitchen, and Sebastian sat. The velvet of the sofa smelled of mothballs and a faint, perfumed soap he remembered from childhood, rose and glycerin. The cushions compressed around him. From the kitchen came the percussion of enamel on enamel, and the click of a stove being lit, and Mrs. Klimchak's voice under her breath singing something in Polish that he did not recognize.
He looked at the photographs on the sideboard.
The largest, in a black wooden frame at the center, was of a young woman standing in a doorway he recognized as the entrance to the Whitmore Arms, the same door through which he had just walked. The young woman had her hair pulled up, exposing a long neck, and she wore a green coat with a wide collar. She had on dark stockings and dark pumps and her arms hung at her sides as if she had been told where to put them and resented the instruction. Behind her, half a step back, a man in a charcoal coat stood with one hand raised and the other hand holding a brown paper grocery bag at his side. Sebastian noted the time on the clock in the photograph above the door. Eleven p.m. The neon of the laundromat across the street bled into the picture and gave both faces a pale blue cast.
Mrs. Klimchak came back with two small cups of black coffee on a tin tray. She set the tray on the crocheted runner on the coffee table. She did not look at the photograph.
"You saw that one," she said.
"You have a good eye," he said.
"I have been dusting that sideboard for thirty-one years. I notice things." She sat down on the wing chair opposite the sofa, the chair that swallowed her almost to the shoulders. "Now tell me why you are here, Doctor Crowe. I have not had my nap."
He took the cup she offered. It was pale blue china with a gilt rim that had rubbed through to the bisque, a pattern of small pink flowers. The coffee was hot and very strong and slightly too sweet. He did not mention the sweetness.
"I'm trying to find a young woman," he said. "Her name is Elise."
"I know who Elise is," Mrs. Klimchak said. "She is the one in this building whose mother does not answer her phone." She picked up her own cup and held it with both hands. "I have eyes. I am not blind. I see things from my window."
"I understand that you might have seen something the night she left the building. The twentieth of November."
Mrs. Klimchak drank. Her eyes moved to the photograph on the sideboard, then back to him. Poleska stirred against her antimacassar and tilted her head.
"I saw her that night," Mrs. Klimchak said.
Sebastian set his cup down on the runner. He did not pick up the notebook in his breast pocket. He looked at her and waited.
"She came down the stairs at eleven o'clock, or just after. I know the time because my cat was yowling at the window and I had got up to let her in from the sill, and I looked at the clock on the stove as I passed it. Eleven-two, eleven-three. Close enough." She shrugged. "I was taking her in because the wind was picking up. You remember the wind that night. The wind took Cousin Sofia's umbrella off the fire escape and made it into the alley. She is still upset about it."
"I remember."
"So. I am at the window. I am holding the cat under one arm. The sash goes up. I see the girl come down the front steps." She paused. "She had on a coat, a camel-colored coat, and her hair was down. Her shoes were wrong for the weather. Open-toed shoes. Not for November. Not for any November. A young person who has not learned about the cold yet."
She lifted her cup again, drank, set it down. She did not look away from him.
"There was a man with her."
"What did he look like?"
"A man," she said. "A man in a coat, charcoal color. Tall. Taller than me, but in my day everyone is taller than me, so this is not a measurement. He had his hat pulled down. He carried nothing. They came down the steps together. He offered her his arm. She did not take it. They crossed the street and went east on Division, toward the bridge."
"Toward the bridge."
"That is correct. East on Division. Not toward the pharmacy. Not toward the diner. East. Toward the bridge, and from there I do not know because the buildings are too tall for me to see any further."
Sebastian kept his face still. He had practiced stillness. He had practiced it at four in the morning beside his wife's bed, watching the rise and fall of her breathing under the sheet.
"Did you see his face?"
"I saw his hat. A dark hat. A fedora, the kind of hat they used to wear in pictures. His face was in shadow of the brim and of the streetlight. The neon from the laundromat was on her but not on him, because he was on the side away from it. I cannot tell you about his face. I can tell you only that he had a coat, charcoal color, and that he walked like a man who had somewhere to be."
"Walked how?"
She considered this. Poleska stretched one paw out toward the warmth of the coffee tray and Mrs. Klimchak pushed the paw back with the back of her hand. The paw returned.
"Decisively," she said. "When my husband walked that way, I knew to get out of the doorway. Not so fast he was running. Not so slow he was strolling. A man's walk when he has decided where he is going."
"Anything else."
"Yes. One thing." She looked at him now, and her gaze had the quality of a woman who has been keeping a small thing in her pocket for a long time and has decided to take it out. "At the bottom of the steps, before they crossed the street, he put his hand to her back. Not to her elbow. To the small of her back. Here." She touched her own back, the place, lightly. "And she did not pull away. So they were not strangers. I am telling you this because it matters, Doctor. I am an old woman and I notice who is a stranger and who is not, and those two were not strangers that night."
Sebastian sat back. The velvet of the sofa creaked faintly under him. The coffee cooled on the tin tray. The cat's purr had become a small motor in the room, and the morning light on the windowsill had shifted so that it made a square on the floor between them. The square moved as he watched it, very slowly, the way squares of light move when you stop noticing them and begin, instead, to notice everything else.
"Mrs. Klimchak," he said, "what is the man's walk. When a man walks with the girl he raised. Does he walk the same way as a man with somewhere to be, or differently?"
Her hand went to the small gold pin at her throat and rested there. She looked at him with the cataract bloom in her eye and the bright side of it, both, and he understood that she had heard what he had asked and had decided to answer it.
"That girl had no one," she said. "You know this. I tell you this is the second time now, so pay attention. Her mother is a cold woman. Cold as the radiator in February. The girl had no one. So anyone who walked with her at eleven at night had to be someone. That is all I know."
Sebastian nodded. He took the coffee and drank the last of it. The sweetness had not changed.
"I would like to speak to Cousin Sofia," he said. "Does she remember that night?"
"Cousin Sofia does not remember what she ate for breakfast yesterday. But she saw the umbrella go, and she would tell you about the umbrella until you grew old."
He stood. The sofa released him. Mrs. Klimchak stood also, and she was shorter than he had expected, and the housedress fell straight from her shoulders to her shoes, and the pin at her throat caught the light as she moved toward the door.
"Doctor Crowe," she said at the door.
"Doctor Crowe," she said at the door, and then she did not say anything else for a moment, which was the way she told him the important part. Her hand found the doorframe and rested there. The light from the corridor fell across her housedress and made the small gold pin at her throat throw a single warm coin onto the wall.
"You were a pathologist," she said. "Before. I read this. You know how a body lies. So you listen to me now. When I tell you about the umbrella, you listen. Cousin Sofia saw the umbrella, and I saw the girl, and the man we did not see was there all the same, because you cannot walk with someone who is not there. That is not a thing. That is not in the world."
He listened. She watched him listening.
"Across the hall," she said, and her voice dropped half a register, the way a woman's voice drops when she is about to say something she has been saving. "There is a young man. He says he saw her leave. He says six o'clock. He says a duffel bag. You go and you ask him, Doctor. You ask him about the umbrella. If he does not know about the umbrella, then you know what I know."
She opened the door. The corridor smelled of carpet cleaner and of something frying somewhere on a lower floor, and the overhead light had the greenish cast of a fixture that had been promised replacement for a year and had learned to wait.
"Which apartment," he said.
"Seven B," she said. "The one with the bicycle."
He stepped into the corridor. The door closed behind him with the soft click of a mechanism that had been oiled that morning by someone who still oiled door hinges. Across the hall, a bicycle leaned against the wall. Its chain had been recently wiped. The handlebar tape was new. A pair of cycling shoes sat on the doormat, cleats down, as if waiting.
He knocked.
The door opened at once, which is to say it opened before the sound of his knuckles had finished traveling through the wood. The man on the other side was tall and young in the way that recent graduates are young, which is to say he had not yet been taught by his own face that it would change. He wore a shirt that had been ironed that morning and slacks that had not, and his socks were a brighter blue than the rest of him, and he had the open, faintly startled expression of a person who has been waiting for a knock and is now embarrassed to be found waiting.
"Dr. Crowe," the young man said. "It's Theo. Brand. From the clinic. I didn't know you lived in this building."
"I don't," Sebastian said. "I came to speak with Mrs. Klimchak."
"Oh," Theo said. "Right. Of course. She's great. She's a great neighbor."
He stepped back and Sebastian stepped in. The apartment was small and very clean, and it smelled of fresh paint and of the green apple that was sitting in a bowl on the kitchen counter, half-eaten, the bite mark browned at the edges. There was a stethoscope on the back of a chair and a laptop open on a desk and a mug of tea on the windowsill that had gone cold. The window faced the street.
"Sit," Theo said. "Please. Sorry. Sit. Can I, do you want anything, I have water, I have, I think I have something else, let me check."
"Water is fine," Sebastian said.
Theo Brand moved in his kitchen the way a young man moves in a kitchen he has just moved into, opening three cabinets before he found the glasses. He poured water from a filter pitcher with the careful concentration of a person performing a procedure. He brought the glass to Sebastian and then sat on the edge of a chair that was not quite a chair for sitting, which was the chair with the stethoscope, so he moved the stethoscope and then sat again.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm a little. I was up last night, I had a shift. I'm sorry."
"No," Sebastian said.
"What?"
"You don't need to apologize."
"Right," Theo said. "No. Sorry."
The word had come out before he could catch it, and he looked at Sebastian with the candid, slightly apologetic face of a young man who had just heard himself and wished he had not. His hands were in his lap. He was not fidgeting, which is to say he was not yet fidgeting, which is to say the fidgeting was about to begin.
"I came," Sebastian said, "to ask you about the girl in seven C."
"Elise," Theo said. "Right. Yes. Of course. Elise Dorin."
"You knew her."
"I mean, I know of her. I've seen her. In the hall. On the stairs. She's, she's around. She's quiet. She keeps to herself. She has a keychain that makes a sound, this little, it's a charm, it's a, anyway, you hear her before you see her."
"A charm," Sebastian said.
"A little metal thing. A bell, maybe. Or a, I don't know what you call it. A small musical thing. You hear her coming and going."
"And you saw her last," Sebastian said. "When."
"Six," Theo said. "Six o'clock. Monday evening. I was leaving for my shift at the hospital. I had my bag. I had my, I had my bike helmet. I saw her come out of her door with a duffel bag. One duffel. Navy. With a red zipper. She had it over her shoulder and she went down the stairs and out the front."
"Alone."
"Yes," Theo said. "Alone. Just her."
"You're certain."
"I am. I am certain. I remember thinking, that's a lot of bag for a Monday. I remember because I almost offered to help her carry it, and I didn't, because I was late, and I thought about that later, that I should have, you know. Helped."
"You said Monday."
"Yes."
"Monday evening at six."
"Yes."
Sebastian set the glass of water on the side table and did not drink from it. He had not yet decided whether to drink from it. He let the silence do what silence does in a small room, which is to press gently on the soft parts of a person's face and bring out what is hiding behind them.
"You told this to the police," Sebastian said.
"I told, yes, I told Detective Wren. I told him on Tuesday. He came and he, he had a notebook, and I told him what I told you. Six o'clock. The bag. The stairs. Alone."
"And the direction," Sebastian said. "When she went down the stairs. Which direction."
"Toward the front. Toward Main. Toward the bus stop."
"The bus stop on Main," Sebastian said.
"Yes."
"There is no bus stop on Main anymore," Sebastian said. "It moved to Birch six months ago."
Theo Brand looked at him. The fidgeting began. It began in his left foot, which began to tap the floor in a rhythm that was not quite a rhythm, which is to say it was the rhythm of a person whose body had decided to do something while his mind caught up.
"I, I think," he said, "I think it was the old one. I think she went toward where the old one was. People still go there. They wait there and then they remember."
"She did not get on a bus," Sebastian said.
"No," Theo said. "No, I didn't say she got on a bus. I said she went toward the bus stop. Toward where it was. The old one."
"You said she left alone."
"Yes."
"She did not meet anyone."
"No."
"There was no one with her."
"No."
"A man," Sebastian said. "Did you see a man."
"No," Theo said. "No, there was no man. There was just her. Just Elise. With the bag."
He said it cleanly. He said it the way a young man says a thing he has practiced, not because he is lying but because he has told it twice and the second telling has worn a groove in the telling, and now the groove is the truth, and the truth before the groove is harder to find.
Sebastian looked at him for a long time. He looked at the way Theo's shoulders had drawn up a quarter inch. He looked at the way Theo's hand had migrated to the stethoscope on the chair beside him and was holding it by the tubing, not using it, just holding it, the way a child holds a familiar object in an unfamiliar room.
"Across the hall," Sebastian said, "Mrs. Klimchak saw her leave at eleven at night. With a man. Walking toward the river, not toward Main. She saw a man whose face she did not see. She saw an umbrella."
"An umbrella," Theo said.
"A yellow one," Sebastian said. "Cousin Sofia saw it from the window of seven A."
"I don't, I don't know about an umbrella. I wasn't. I left at six. I didn't see her at eleven. I was at the hospital."
"At the hospital," Sebastian said.
"Yes."
"Until when."
"Midnight. I had a twelve-hour. I got home at, I got home around twelve thirty, one. I didn't see anything. I came in and I went to bed."
"Did you hear her come back?"
"No," Theo said. "No, I sleep pretty hard. I sleep like, I sleep very deeply. I have since med school. It's a, it's a thing."
Sebastian nodded. He picked up the glass of water and drank from it. The water was cold and it tasted of the filter and of the pipes and of nothing else, which was the right taste for what he was doing.
"Thank you," he said. "You have been helpful."
"I have?"
"You have," Sebastian said. "Yes."
He set the glass down. He stood. Theo stood also, with the sudden, slightly graceless motion of a young man who has been sitting in a chair that was not his chair and has forgotten where his own body was.
"At the door," Theo said. "Dr. Crowe. I just, I want you to know, I liked her. I didn't know her, but I liked her. She was quiet. She kept to herself. I should have helped with the bag."
"Yes," Sebastian said.
He stepped into the corridor. The door of seven B closed behind him, and the corridor was quiet again, and the bicycle leaned against the wall, and the cycling shoes sat on the doormat, and the overhead light gave its greenish blessing to the carpet cleaner and to the frying smell from a lower floor.
He did not go to the elevator. He went to the stairwell, the way a man goes when he wants to see the street before the street sees him. The stairwell door opened onto a small landing with a window that faced Main, and through the window, in the gray of late afternoon, he could see the length of the block.
A black SUV was idling at the curb across the street.
It was not parked. It was idling, the way a vehicle idles when its driver has been told to wait, and the engine had the low, patient sound of a thing that had been running for a long time. The windows were tinted. The plates were not local. The body of the vehicle was clean in the way that expensive vehicles are clean, which is to say it had been washed by someone who had been paid to wash it, and the wax on it caught the greenish light of the street lamp and threw it back.
Sebastian stood at the window. He did not move. He let his breathing slow. He let his eyes adjust. He looked at the driver's seat the way a man looks at a thing he has been looking for without knowing he was looking for it, and the thing was there, and the thing was a face.
The face was older than it had been. The hair had gone the color of iron. The jaw had thickened in the way that jaws thicken when a man has eaten well and argued often and slept the sleep of a person who has made his peace with what he has done. But the eyes were the same. The eyes were the eyes of a man who had sat in a witness box fifteen years ago and had not once looked away from the man who was asking the questions, and who had answered every question with the same three words, and who had walked out of the courthouse into a winter afternoon and had not looked back.
Sebastian remembered the name. He had not spoken it in fifteen years. He had not written it. He had carried it the way a man carries a small stone in his pocket, not because he wished to forget it but because he wished to remember it accurately, which is a different thing.
He had been a junior forensic pathologist then. He had been called to testify in a trial about a man who had died in a police holding cell, and the man in the witness box had been a fellow in a gray suit, and the fellow had been the one who had ordered the cell door closed, and the fellow had said he did not remember, he did not recall, he was not certain, and the fellow had said these three things in that order, and in that rhythm, for two days, and the fellow had walked.
Sebastian had testified anyway. He had testified about the bruises. He had testified about the hyoid. He had testified about the hour. He had been twenty-six. He had thought, at twenty-six, that testimony was a thing that was heard.
The man in the SUV had not seen him. The man in the SUV was looking at the front door of the building. The man in the SUV was waiting.
Sebastian stepped back from the window. He did not step back quickly. He stepped back the way a man steps back when he has decided that what he has seen is true, and that being true, it will require a different kind of care than he had brought with him this afternoon.
He took out his phone. He did not call Detective Wren. He stood in the stairwell with the phone in his hand and the gray light on his face and the sound of the SUV's engine drifting up through the window like the sound of a thing that intended to stay.
He thought of Elise. He thought of the duffel bag with the red zipper. He thought of the yellow umbrella seen from a window on the seventh floor. He thought of a young man in seven B who had told him a story that was wrong in three places and true in none of them, and he thought of a man in a black SUV across the street who had once walked out of a courthouse and into a winter and had not looked back.
He put the phone back in his pocket.
He went down the stairs. He went out the side door, the way a man goes out a side door when he does not wish to be seen going out the front. He turned up his collar. He walked toward Birch, where the bus stop actually was, and where, if he was careful, he could circle back to Main without passing the SUV, and where, if he was very careful, he could be a man walking home from an errand, which is the kind of man no one remembers.
The afternoon closed around him. The streetlight came on. The SUV idled.
Somewhere above him, on the seventh floor, a bicycle leaned against a wall and a pair of cycling shoes sat on a doormat and a young man was standing in a kitchen he had just moved into, holding a stethoscope by the tubing, listening to the silence of an apartment that had just been told a thing it would have to learn to hold.