The fluorescent tube above Lena Fairchild's desk flickered at 8:47 on a Tuesday morning in mid-November, casting its sickly hum across a stack of past-due invoices she had been sorting since six. The light made her eyes ache. Outside the single window of her office, the Chicago Loop lay under a flat pewter sky, the buildings opposite dissolving into fog at their fifth floors. Down below, she could hear the distant percussion of a jackhammer somewhere on Wabash, the hiss of bus brakes, and the steady mechanical breathing of the dry cleaner two floors beneath her, where the owner ran his presses from five in the morning until long after dark.
Lena set down her coffee and pinched the bridge of her nose. The coffee had gone cold an hour ago, a skin of something forming across its surface. She had not tasted it when she poured it. She had not tasted anything since the previous night's bowl of cereal eaten standing at the kitchen counter of her studio apartment, listening to rain hit the fire escape.
She turned back to the invoices. Fourteen of them, each printed on paper the color of weak tea, each bearing a logo she had once found professional and now found embarrassing. Marine Research Solutions. Her late father's business. Hers now, legally, since the reading of the will eighteen months ago, though the name on the door still read Fairchild Marine Sciences and she had not yet paid to change it. She could not afford to pay to change it.
The largest of the invoices was from the city of Evanston, unpaid for ninety-three days. Beneath it sat a smaller one from a Lake Michigan environmental nonprofit, sixty-one days past due. Then a personal one to a professor at Northwestern whose consulting work she had completed in July and for whom she had not yet sent a bill, out of some lingering reluctance she could not name. Her father had always sent his bills the day he completed a job, had always said a handshake meant nothing without paper behind it. She had not inherited that particular talent for closure.
The telephone on her desk did not ring. It had not rung since Thursday.
Six weeks ago, her assistant, a young woman named Deidre who had moved to Chicago from Dayton and stayed exactly eleven months, had placed a printed resignation letter on this same desk and said, with the careful cheerfulness of someone who had rehearsed the words, that she was moving back to be closer to her mother. Lena had thanked her and wished her well and meant both of those things, and then she had sat in this chair and looked at the empty chair across from her for a long time. She had not replaced Deidre. She had not advertised the position. She had not told anyone she needed help, because telling someone you needed help was the first step toward admitting you could not run the business your father had built over thirty years from a one-room office in a town called Tideline Harbor, and Lena Fairchild was not ready to admit that. Not yet. Not on a Tuesday.
She picked up her pen. She made a small check mark next to the Evanston invoice, meaning nothing, because she had no money to write an actual check. She made a second mark beside the nonprofit one. She put the pen down.
The stack of unanswered messages sat in a second pile to her left. Sixteen of them, according to her count, though she had stopped counting after the first ten. Email printouts, mostly. One handwritten note slipped under her door from the building manager about a leak in the unit next door, which Lena had read three times and acted on zero times. A message slip from her landlord, a Mr. Patel whose first name she had never learned, marked urgent in red ballpoint. That slip sat unopened at the very top of the pile. The envelope was still sealed. She had not opened it because she knew what it said, or because she suspected what it said, and the difference between knowing and suspecting was, on this particular November morning, the only distance she had left.
She reached for the envelope. Her fingers stopped an inch from the paper. The dry cleaner downstairs coughed its boiler back to life, a sound that rose through the floorboards like a shudder. She withdrew her hand and picked up her coffee instead, remembered it was cold, and set it back down.
The fog outside thickened. A delivery truck ground through a gear on the street below. Somewhere on the next block, a car alarm began its chirping protest, was ignored by everyone, and stopped on its own.
Lena stood. The chair's wheels, one of which had been broken since August, squealed against the linoleum and did not roll backward when she rose. She had to physically lift the chair back. She crossed the room, four steps, and stood at the window. From here she could see the fire escape of the building across the alley, a pigeon roosting on the railing with its head tucked into its shoulder. The pigeon did not move. It had been there every morning this week.
She pressed her forehead against the cool glass. The glass tasted faintly of dust if she got close enough. She did not get close enough.
Fairchild Marine Sciences had fourteen active clients when she took over the business. She knew this because her father had kept a ledger, an actual cloth-bound ledger, and the first entry she had made in it was to copy his final client list into her own files. Fourteen names. Most were small municipal contracts, water testing for lakefront towns, environmental assessments for marina developments, the kind of work that paid modestly and arrived in clusters and disappeared entirely if you let two months pass without a phone call. Some were private. The Northwestern professor. A foundation in Saugatuck. A man in Traverse City who ran a charter fishing outfit and paid her twice a year to sample the harbor for contaminants. She had not spoken to the man from Traverse City since June.
She had eleven active clients now. Three had quietly moved on. One had written to say so. Two had simply stopped returning her calls. She had counted and recounted, hoping for a miscount. There was no miscount.
She had been back in Chicago for the better part of a year now, after ten years away, ten years of graduate work and postdoctoral fellowships and a research position with a federal agency in Woods Hole that she had quietly resigned from the week her father died. Tideline Harbor, Massachusetts, the small coastal town where she had grown up and which she had fled at twenty-two with the burning conviction that she would never live in a place with a single stoplight again, had been her father's home for fifty-three years and the home of his research station for thirty-two. She had inherited the station. She had inherited the office above the dry cleaner in Chicago because her father had kept it as a winter base, the place where he met with midwestern clients and escaped the harbor's off-season gloom. She had inherited both because the will had said so and because her father, a stubborn and unsentimental man who wrote everything down and meant everything he wrote, had thought she should.
She had not yet been back to Tideline Harbor since the funeral. The research station sat shuttered. A neighbor, an old woman named Margaret Halsey whose cottage shared a property line with the station, had been writing her monthly letters about the building's condition, and Lena had been writing back with instructions about things she could not afford to fix. This arrangement had been going on for fifteen months. It would go on for fifteen more if Lena had anything to say about it, which was, she understood, not a sustainable position for any of the parties involved.
She turned from the window. The pigeon shifted on its railing. The fog pressed closer.
Lena returned to her desk. She sat. She pulled the unopened envelope toward her, very slowly, with two fingers, until it sat centered under her hand. She looked at the red urgent scrawl. She looked at the return address. She looked at the window. She looked at the empty chair where Deidre had once sat and answered the phone in a voice that always made clients feel as if they had called a real company and not a one-woman operation above a dry cleaner.
She picked up her letter opener, an old bone-handled thing she had found in her father's desk the day she cleared it out, and slid it under the flap of the envelope. The paper resisted, then gave. Inside was a single sheet, printed on Mr. Patel's letterhead, dated four days earlier. She read it standing up. She read it a second time sitting down. She read it a third time with her hand over her mouth, as if the words needed to be physically filtered before they reached the rest of her.
The rent was three months past due. The total was a number she could not pay. The letter informed her, in language that was careful and correct and entirely without cruelty, that she had thirty days to bring the account current or vacate the premises. Thirty days. She did the arithmetic in her head and then did it again because the first answer was not one she wanted to keep.
She folded the letter. She unfolded it. She folded it again, along the original creases, and slid it back into its envelope. She placed the envelope in the top drawer of her desk, beneath a half-empty box of staples and a roll of adding machine tape.
The fluorescent tube flickered again, twice in quick succession, and steadied.
Downstairs, the dry cleaner began playing a radio, tinny and faint, something with a country twang that climbed through the floorboards in broken phrases. Lena pulled the stack of unanswered messages toward her and began, mechanically, to sort them into two piles. Those that required a response she could not give. Those that required a response she could not afford to give. By the time she finished, both piles were roughly the same height.
She sat back. The chair's broken wheel squealed.
The phone did not ring.
Outside, the pigeon on the fire escape across the alley lifted its head, looked directly at her window for a moment that felt longer than it was, and tucked its head back into its shoulder. The fog had reached the rooftops now. The buildings opposite had vanished entirely. There was nothing to look at from the window except gray.
Lena Fairchild picked up her pen and opened her father's ledger to the next blank page. At the top she wrote, in small careful letters: November 14. She did not write anything beneath the date. She sat with the pen in her hand for a long time, the tip resting on the paper without moving, and the dry cleaner played its radio, and the fluorescent tube hummed its one sick note, and the phone did not ring.
The knock came at 4:17 in the afternoon, three sharp raps against the frosted glass of the office door, the kind of knock that belonged to a generation that believed doors were meant to be announced at rather than opened.
Lena did not move at once. She had stopped expecting anything at this hour. The fog pressed against the window like something trying to get in, and the dry cleaner's radio had gone quiet, and the building itself seemed to be holding its breath. She looked at the door. The shadow behind the frosted glass was small, hunched slightly, the silhouette of someone waiting with the patience of long practice.
She stood, and the chair's broken wheel squealed again, and she crossed the small office in three steps and opened the door.
Margaret Halsey stood on the landing with her coat buttoned wrong, the top button fastened into the second hole, the collar sitting crooked against her throat. She was a small woman, five foot two in her good shoes, but she carried herself with the particular dignity of someone who had outlived everyone she owed deference to. Her hair was the color of clean salt, pulled back in a braid that had come loose on one side and hung over her shoulder in a thin gray rope. Her hands were trembling. Her eyes were wet.
She did not say hello. She said, "You took the Kowalski boy."
It was not a question.
Lena stepped back from the doorway. "Mrs. Halsey. Come in. The stairs are cold."
"I know what cold is." Margaret walked past her into the office without waiting to be invited twice, her carpetbag held in front of her with both hands the way another woman might hold a child. She did not sit down. She stood in the middle of the room and looked at the desk, at the ledger, at the pen, at the two stacks of unanswered mail, and her mouth thinned into a line Lena had seen before, the mouth of a woman deciding whether to be polite or to be honest.
Honesty won. It usually did with Margaret Halsey.
"You look terrible," Margaret said. "When did you last eat a proper meal?"
"Mrs. Halsey."
"Don't Mrs. Halsey me. Your father's daughter. I knew you before you had teeth, Lena Fairchild. Sit down and tell me what you need, and then we'll talk about Erin."
Lena did not sit down. She pulled the second chair around from behind the filing cabinet and set it near the desk and waited. Margaret regarded the chair the way she regarded anything offered to her, with the suspicion of a woman who had learned that kindness was rarely free. Then she sat, lowering herself with the careful precision of someone whose knees had started making announcements, and set the carpetbag on her lap.
The carpetbag was old brown leather, cracked along one seam, the handle wrapped in electrical tape where the original stitching had given up. Lena had seen it before, at town meetings, at funerals, at the post office on Saturday mornings. Margaret Halsey did not leave the house without it. Whatever was inside it was, by long tradition, Margaret's business.
Margaret undid the clasp. Her fingers fumbled. The trembling had not stopped.
"Now then," Margaret said, and her voice, which had been pitched for the hallway, dropped half a register. "I am going to show you something, and I am going to ask you something, and I would like you to do me the courtesy of not interrupting until I have finished both."
Lena nodded.
Margaret drew a photograph from the bag.
It was a wallet-sized print, the kind that came in a strip from a drugstore machine, the colors gone faintly pink at the edges where time had leached into the paper. A girl looked out of it. Seventeen, maybe eighteen. Dark hair cut in a bob that did not quite suit her face. Eyes that were Margaret's eyes, the same sharp gray, but younger and less guarded. She was smiling, but not at the camera, at something off to the side, a joke she had heard a moment before the shutter clicked.
"Erin," Margaret said. "My Erin's girl. Sixteen last March."
Lena took the photograph when it was offered. The paper was soft with handling, the corners worn round. Whoever had carried it had done so often.
"She went to Chicago in September," Margaret continued, and her voice had taken on the cadence of something she had rehearsed in her head, the words arranged in a particular order that she was not going to let be rearranged. "Got a job waiting tables. A rooming house in Lincoln Park. She was going to send money home. She was going to come home for Thanksgiving. She did not send money home. She did not come home for Thanksgiving. I telephoned the rooming house on the twenty-eighth of November and the woman who answered told me Erin had moved out at the end of October and she had no forwarding address and that was all she knew about it."
She paused. Lena kept her eyes on the photograph.
"I went to Chicago."
"Mrs. Halsey."
"I took the train. I have not been on a train in eleven years. I sat up all night because the sleeper cost extra and I will not pay extra for a bed when I am not going to sleep in it anyway. I went to the police. I sat in a waiting room for four hours. A man came out. He was young enough to be my grandson, and he smelled like he had put his jacket on over his breakfast. He listened to me. He took notes. Then he said the word."
Margaret's hand closed in her lap. The knuckles were white.
"He said runaway."
The fluorescent tube hummed.
"He said she was sixteen. He said she had left of her own accord. He said there were no signs of foul play. He said she had probably gone to stay with a friend or a boyfriend. He said these were typical. He said the file would remain open. He said he was sorry for my worry. He said a great many things, Lena, and not one of them was my granddaughter's name."
Lena set the photograph down on the desk, face up, between the two piles of unanswered mail. Erin Halsey's smile was the brightest thing in the room.
"Mrs. Halsey," Lena said. "When did you last see her?"
"August. She came to the cottage for a week. She helped me can tomatoes. She said Chicago was loud. She said she missed the water. She said she would be home by Christmas." Margaret's voice, for the first time, slipped. The measured cadence broke on the word Christmas, and underneath it was something raw and thin. "She would not run. You know her. You have known her since she was in pigtails and wanted to be a marine biologist because you were one. She would not run."
Lena knew Erin Halsey. She had watched the girl grow up in the summers, tagging along behind her father on the docks, collecting shells in the lighthouse cove, asking questions that were too old for her. The last time Lena had seen her, three summers ago now, Erin had been thirteen and serious and had asked Lena, in a voice that meant it, what it felt like to know things about the ocean that no one else knew.
It had felt, Lena had said, like being responsible for a secret.
Erin had nodded as if this answered something she had been wondering about for a long time.
"I am not a finder," Lena said. "I am not a private investigator. I do not have a license. I do not have a badge. I do not have any way to compel a person in Chicago to speak to me when they would not speak to you."
Margaret looked at her. The trembling in her hands had stopped, or had been forced to stop by an act of will that Lena could almost see being performed.
"I do not want a finder," Margaret said. "I do not want an investigator. I want you."
The dry cleaner's radio came back on downstairs. A woman's voice, tinny and distant, singing something about a train. Lena could not make out the words.
"The Chicago police have stopped looking," Margaret said. "I know because I telephoned them again yesterday and the young man said, very kindly, that there was nothing further to be done. He used the word resources. He said resources were allocated to cases where there was evidence of. He stopped himself before the word. He knew I knew what word he was not going to say. He was sorry for my worry. He was sorry for my worry, Lena. As if that helped. As if sorry was a thing I could put in a pot and boil for dinner."
She reached into the carpetbag again and brought out a folded sheet of paper, creased twice, and held it out.
"This is what I have. The rooming house address. The name of the woman who answered the door. The name of the restaurant where Erin worked. The names of two girls she said she had befriended. I have walked the streets. I have asked questions. I have been told, in the kindest possible voices, that I am a worried grandmother and that Erin will come home when she is ready."
She set the paper on the desk, on top of the photograph.
"I am not a worried grandmother. I am an old woman whose granddaughter is missing, and I am asking, for the first time in my life, someone I do not pay to do something for me. I am asking because I have run out of options, and I have never in seventy-eight years run out of options, and I would very much like not to begin now."
The fog had reached the window. Lena could feel the cold off it through the glass, faint and mineral, the way the harbor smelled in November when the water turned over.
"I do not know Chicago," Lena said.
"I do not either."
"I do not know where to start."
Margaret's chin came up. "I do, either."
"I cannot promise you anything."
"I am not asking for a promise. I am asking for a door to open. You open doors, Lena. Your father opened doors. People came to him when the Coast Guard would not come, and the harbormaster would not come, and the town would not come. He went out. He looked. He found things. Not always the right things. But he looked."
Lena did not answer at once. She looked at the photograph, and at the creased sheet of paper, and at the carpetbag with its cracked seam, and at the woman sitting across from her in a coat buttoned wrong, whose hands had begun to tremble again now that the rehearsed speech was over.
Downstairs, the radio kept singing.
Outside, the fog pressed against the glass, and somewhere below, in the alley, the pigeon on the fire escape made a sound that was not quite a coo and not quite a complaint, and the fluorescent tube hummed its one sick note, and the phone did not ring.
Margaret Halsey waited. She had the patience of a woman who had kept a lighthouse, and she was not, Lena understood, going to leave without an answer.
Lena watched the trembling hands and thought of her father, and the thought did what it always did, which was to arrive like a change in pressure, a door opening somewhere in her chest that she had not installed and could not lock.
"All right," she said.
The word came out quieter than she meant it to. She heard herself say it, and Margaret heard it too, and the difference between the two hearings was the whole of the thing, because Lena heard a decision being made and Margaret heard a door being opened, and both of them were right, and neither of them was the whole story.
"All right," Lena said again, and this time she set the word down like a jar on a shelf, steady, deliberate, done. "I will look."
Margaret's hands stopped trembling. Not all at once. The left one first, then the right, the way a wave goes out, in two stages, leaving a tideline.
"I did not want to ask," Margaret said.
"I know."
"I am not a woman who asks."
"I know that too."
"Your father knew it. He used to say I would sooner ask the tide to come in twice. I told him the tide did not listen to me, which was a lie. The tide listened to everyone in this town. It just did not always do what it was told."
Lena almost smiled. Almost. The muscles around her mouth shifted a quarter inch, and then she thought of the photograph again, the young woman with the cap and the open mouth, the Christmas card from a city Margaret had never been to, and the almost-smile retreated.
"I want you to understand," Lena said, and she heard her voice take on the cadence she used with her research staff when something mattered, when she was about to say something she did not want to have to repeat, "that this is not a thing I know how to do. I am not a finder of people. I am a person who watches fish. I watch them go where they go. I do not make them go."
"You are a person who looks," Margaret said. "That is all I am asking."
"Looking is not finding."
"No," Margaret agreed. "But you cannot find without it."
The radio downstairs had moved on to something else. A male voice now, lower, reading a list of items lost and found at the ferry terminal: a blue umbrella, a child's backpack with a lobster on it, a set of car keys with a tag shaped like a lobster, a dog of indeterminate breed answering to the name of Captain. The list went on. Tideline Harbor, even its lost and found, was a town of lobsters.
Lena stood. The motion was sudden enough that Margaret looked up sharply, the way old people looked up when a younger body moved in a way they had not anticipated, the quick recalculation, the small flare of caution that age taught.
Lena went to the small desk in the corner of her office, the one her father had used for forty years, the one with the green leather top worn pale at the corners by his forearms. She opened the middle drawer and took out a notebook, a black-and-white marbled composition book the size of a missal, and a pen. She carried them back to the chair across from Margaret and sat down again, and she opened the notebook to the first clean page and wrote, at the top, in small neat letters, Erin Halsey, and underlined it once.
"Tell me," Lena said. "Not the parts you rehearsed. The parts you have not said to anyone."
Margaret looked at the notebook. She looked at it for a long time, as though the page were a horizon she was deciding whether to walk toward.
"St. Brendan's," Margaret said. "You know Sister Anne."
"I know Sister Anne."
"She sent you the eel last spring. The one with the tumor."
"The one with the fibroma," Lena said. "Yes."
"She told me, when I came to her, that you were the one I should come to. She said, 'Margaret, you have worn out every door in this town, and the only one left is the one belonging to a woman who has come home and has not yet learned to say no.' Those were her words. She has a mouth on her, that woman."
"She does."
"I asked her if you were trustworthy. She said you were stubborn, and that the two were not the same thing."
Lena wrote: Sister Anne, St. Brendan's, referral. She did not write stubborn.
"I am doing this as a favor to Sister Anne," Lena said, and the words were a rope she was tying around herself, a way of making the size of the thing smaller than it was. "You understand that. Not as a promise to you. As a favor to a woman who once drove a sick eel across three counties in the back of a station wagon because she could not bear to leave it at the vet's overnight."
"A Buick," Margaret said. "It was a Buick. And she sang to it the whole way. Hymns. I am not making this up."
"I believe you."
"Good. You should. I rarely do."
Lena set the pen down.
"Tell me about Erin," she said.
Margaret did not answer at once. She looked at the carpetbag on the floor between them, and then she bent, with the careful deliberation of a woman whose knees had become an enemy she had learned to negotiate with, and she drew out, first, a small manila envelope sealed with a paper clip, and then a key on a loop of faded blue ribbon, and then a book.
The book was the size of a hand, bound in something that had once been red leather and was now the color of dried blood where it had not been rubbed to pink. It was soft at the corners. It opened with a sigh when Margaret laid it on the desk, and the pages inside were covered in a small, tight handwriting that slanted to the right, and the ink had faded in places to the brown of weak tea.
"This is her address book," Margaret said. "She kept it since she was sixteen. She has never thrown out a card she has ever been sent. She has the address of every person she has ever known well enough to send her a card."
Lena took the book. It was lighter than she had expected, and warmer, as though it had been held often.
"The key," Margaret said, and she laid it on the desk next to the envelope, the blue ribbon curling a little in the draft from the window, "is to her apartment. In Chicago. I have not been inside it. I do not know what is inside it. I have it because I asked her, two Christmases ago, to send me a key so I would have it, in case. I do not know what kind of case I meant. Any kind. All kinds. The kind I am in now."
Lena did not touch the key. She looked at it.
"The envelope," Margaret said, and her voice had gone quieter again, and the rehearsed quality was back, but thinner now, worn through in places, "is the things she left behind here. The things she did not take to Chicago. I have been keeping them in my attic for six years. I have not opened the envelope. I feel I should tell you that. I want you to know I have not been reading her mail or going through her things. I have been keeping them. That is what I have been doing."
She said the word keeping the way a person says a word when they have been holding it in their mouth for a long time and are tired of the taste of it.
Lena picked up the envelope. It was thin. There was a weight to it, but a slight one, the weight of paper and perhaps a photograph and the smell, faint through the paper, of a perfume she did not recognize, something floral and old.
"I will take these," Lena said. "I will look through them. I will not promise what I will find."
"I did not ask you to promise."
"I know."
"I am asking you to look."
"I will look."
Margaret looked at her, then, in the way that older women sometimes look at younger ones when the younger one has just agreed to something that cannot be agreed to lightly, a look that took inventory of the whole face, the eyes, the mouth, the set of the jaw, and weighed what it found.
Lena held the look. She had learned, from her father, that people who had come to ask for something often needed to be looked at as part of the giving, that the look itself was a kind of receipt, that being seen was part of what they were paying with.
"You look like him," Margaret said. "Around the eyes. The way you set your mouth when you mean a thing."
"My mother said the same thing."
"Your mother was a smart woman."
"She was."
"She would not have liked this. Her coming to you."
"No," Lena said. "She would not have."
"Good. She would have been right not to."
Lena did not argue with that. She put the key and the address book and the envelope into the inner pocket of her jacket, which she had not taken off, which she had been wearing all evening like a kind of armor against the fog and the fluorescent light and the weight of the conversation she had not known she was going to have when she came upstairs.
"I will call you," Lena said. "The moment I learn anything. Not before. Not after. The moment."
"The moment," Margaret agreed.
"Tomorrow morning I will drive to the research station. I will put these in my desk. I will begin."
"Begin where?"
"Wherever I begin. I do not know yet. I will go through the address book first. I will look at who she knew. I will look at who she wrote to and who wrote to her. I will look for the names that go quiet."
"The names that go quiet," Margaret repeated, and the way she said it made it sound like a phrase she had known for a long time and had not heard spoken aloud in a long time and was surprised to find had survived.
"Yes," Lena said.
Margaret reached down, then, and unbuttoned the top button of her coat. She had buttoned it wrong on the way in, and she unbuttoned it now and rebuttoned it the right way, with the careful concentration of a woman who was not going to leave the room looking like she had come apart at the seams. When she had done it, she sat back, and the coat sat right, and her shoulders came down a quarter inch, and she looked, for the first time since Lena had met her that evening, like a person instead of a request.
"I will let you go," Margaret said.
Lena stood again, and this time Margaret rose with her, more slowly, using the arms of the chair. They stood facing each other across the small distance of the office, and the fog pressed at the window, and the radio downstairs had moved on to a piece of music, something with a clarinet in it, low and sweet and old.
"Margaret," Lena said.
"Yes."
"Come back tomorrow. Come for coffee. I will tell you what I have found, if I have found anything by then. If I have not found anything by then, I will tell you that I have not found anything, which is also information."
"You are very like him."
"Stop saying that."
"He would have said the same thing."
"I know he would have."
Margaret picked up the carpetbag. It was lighter now by the weight of the key and the book and the envelope. She held it against her hip the way she had held it coming in, and she turned toward the door.
At the door she stopped. She did not turn around.
"The eel," she said. "The one Sister Anne brought you."
"Yes."
"Did it live?"
"Yes," Lena said. "It lived."
"Good," Margaret said. "That is one."
She went out. Lena listened to her footsteps on the stairs, slower going down than they had been coming up, and the particular rhythm of a woman with bad knees and good posture, and the creak of the door at the bottom, and then the street door, and then nothing, or almost nothing, the fog and the clarinet and the hum of the tube and the pigeon, who had settled, finally, into a sound that was only a coo, a single note, repeated, the way a person repeats a thing to themselves in the dark to make sure they are still there.
Lena stood in the office for a long time after that. She did not sit. She did not turn on another light. She stood with her hand in the inner pocket of her jacket, feeling the shape of the key and the spine of the book and the corner of the envelope against her fingers, three small weights against her ribs.
She thought of her father. She thought of the doors he had opened. She thought of Sister Anne in the Buick, singing hymns to a sick fish across three counties, and of Margaret Halsey at seventy-eight in a coat buttoned wrong, and of a young woman named Erin who had once lived in Tideline Harbor and now lived in Chicago, or had lived there, or might still live there, and might or might not pick up a phone if it rang.
She took her hand out of her pocket.
She went to the window. The fog had come all the way in now. She could not see the harbor. She could not see the street. She could see, if she pressed her face close to the glass, her own breath blooming and fading on the pane, and beyond it the vague moving shape of the world being slowly erased.
Tomorrow morning she would drive to the station. She would sit at her desk. She would open the address book. She would begin with the first name, and the second, and the third, and she would not stop until she had called every name that still had a number beside it, and written down every name that did not, and she would find out, one way or another, what had become of the niece of Margaret Halsey, who had once gone to Chicago with a suitcase and a Christmas card and the habits of a town she had carried with her like a second skin.
She touched the glass once, lightly, with her fingertips.
The glass was cold.
She drew her hand back.