The rain hit the window in slanted sheets, each drop catching the neon from the Budweiser sign across the street and fracturing it into something almost beautiful. Sloane Avery watched the colors bleed down the glass while her third bourbon sweated a ring onto the oak tabletop. The bartender, a man with a gray ponytail and a Yankees cap pulled low, had stopped pretending to wipe down the far end of the bar and now stood reading a paperback with the spine cracked backward.
It was a Tuesday in October. The kind of night when Lincoln Park emptied early and the streetlamps cast their light on wet concrete that nobody walked home across. Sloane had chosen this place on purpose. The Pour House sat between a dry cleaner and a tax preparation office on Halsted, far enough from the downtown hotels where visiting reporters stayed, far enough from Wicker Park where her old colleagues at the Tribune liked to drink and be seen. Far enough from anyone who would ask why she had come back.
She had come back for Hattie. Her aunt had died on a Sunday, and the funeral had been on a Wednesday, and now it was the following Tuesday and Sloane was still here, sitting in a bar that smelled of bleach and old lager and the ghost of every cigarette smoked inside it before the ban.
Her phone lay face-down on the table. She had not looked at it in forty minutes. She had not spoken to anyone in forty minutes. The bourbon had stopped warming her somewhere around the second sip, and what it gave her now was the soft, flat distance of being alone in a room with a jukebox that only knew three Hank Williams songs and one of them was the wrong one.
The door opened. A draft moved through the room like a long breath, carrying with it the wet smell of fallen leaves and the faint perfume of white tea and gardenia. Sloane did not turn. She had trained herself, in the years between leaving this city and now, not to turn at every opening door. The world was full of doors opening.
But the perfume followed her. It grew closer, and there was a sound, the soft compression of leather on vinyl, and then a figure slid into the booth across from her.
"I hope you do not mind." The voice was low and clean, each word given its own breath. "I have been told this is where one finds you."
Sloane looked up.
The woman across from her was perhaps seventy, perhaps older, the kind of older that good breeding and good tailoring could make difficult to count. Her hair was silver and pulled back in a chignon so precise it looked lacquered in place. She wore a charcoal coat over a cream blouse buttoned to the throat, a single strand of pearls, no rings except one thin gold band on the fourth finger of her left hand. Her gloves were folded on the table in front of her like a small animal at rest.
She looked, Sloane thought, like a photograph from a society page that someone had folded and tucked into a drawer for thirty years and then, finding it again, discovered the colors had not faded at all.
"Do I know you?" Sloane said.
"No." The woman smiled. It was a careful smile, a smile that had been practiced in mirrors until it could be deployed at will without committing the wearer to anything. "But I know you. Sloane Avery. You wrote the piece on the cement contract corruption in 2014. The one that cost the city inspector general his job."
"That was a long time ago."
"It was a Tuesday in March," the woman said, as if Sloane had not spoken. "You were twenty-six. Your byline photograph showed a younger face and a more certain jaw. I clipped it and kept it. I have a drawer for such things. Drawers are useful for women who must remember."
"All right." Sloane set her glass down. "You have the advantage."
"Delphine Webb." The woman placed a card on the table between them. It was cream-colored, heavy stock, engraved in a font Sloane recognized from funeral programs and courthouse dedications. "I believe you knew my husband. Judge Walter Webb of the Cook County Circuit."
Sloane's stomach did something she did not appreciate. She kept her face where it was.
"I knew of him," she said.
"Then you knew he was found dead at the bottom of the stairwell in our home in Winnetka on the fourteenth of August. The coroner called it a fall. The newspaper called it an accident. My son called it a tragedy and would like the world to move on."
"And you?"
Delphine Webb folded her gloved hands on the table. Her nails, even through the fabric, were neat and unpainted. "I called it impossible."
The jukebox clicked over to a new track. The opening bars of "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" came tinny through the speaker above their heads. Sloane reached up and pressed the power button on the unit's side without asking. The silence that followed was louder than the song.
"Impossible," Sloane repeated.
"My husband," Mrs. Webb said, "was a man of habit. Every morning for thirty-one years he rose at five forty-five. He made his own coffee. He read the paper at the breakfast table, sections A through D, in order. He left for the courthouse at seven ten. He took the rear staircase, the one off the mudroom, because he said it kept his knees from forgetting what they were for. He had been taking that staircase every morning for thirty-one years, and on the morning of the fourteenth of August he fell down it and died."
Sloane said nothing. She had learned long ago that the worst thing you could do with a person who wanted to talk was to interrupt them.
"On the morning of the fourteenth of August," Mrs. Webb continued, "my husband did not make his coffee. He did not read the paper. He left the house at six twenty, an hour early, through the front door. I found him at the bottom of the rear staircase at six forty-five, when Marisol, our housekeeper, came in through the kitchen and screamed."
She paused. The careful smile had left her face. What remained was something Sloane could not yet name.
"He had not been drinking," Mrs. Webb said. "His blood work was clean. There were no pills in his system. There was no note. There was nothing on his desk, nothing in his calendar, nothing in the days before that suggested a man who had decided to die."
"Many suicides," Sloane said quietly, "look exactly like that."
"Yes." Mrs. Webb met her eyes for the first time. "And many of them are not suicides at all."
The bartender glanced over. Sloane held up two fingers. He nodded and reached for a glass.
"I did not come here," Mrs. Webb said, "to convince you of anything. I came here because I have read your work for eleven years, and because you are the only journalist I have ever trusted who also happens to be in this city, and because my son, Marcus, has made it clear that any further inquiry into his father's death will be met with the considerable resources of the Webb family and its friends. Which is to say, the considerable resources of every institution in this county."
"Marcus Webb," Sloane said. "The senate candidate."
"You have heard of him."
"Everyone has heard of him."
"Then you know he is charming.
"Then you know he is charming."
The bartender set two glasses of bourbon on the scarred wood between them. Sloane wrapped her fingers around hers but did not lift it. The ice sat undisturbed, a small white island.
"Yes," Sloane said. "I know he is charming. I also know charm is a currency, and the Webb family has never been short on change."
Delphine inclined her head, the faintest acknowledgment. "You have done your research."
"It is what I do."
"And what have you found?"
Sloane took a breath. The bar smelled of stale peanuts, lemon disinfectant, and the particular human staleness of a room that had held too many quiet conversations. A jukebox in the corner played something old and slow, a woman's voice threading through the noise of ice and glasses.
"I have found that your husband presided over half the major civil cases in this county for twenty-six years," Sloane said. "I have found that his rulings consistently favored a small circle of developers and landowners. I have found that he sealed more records than any sitting judge in state history. I have found that your son, Marcus, clerked for him during the years when several of those rulings were made, and that Marcus went on to marry the daughter of one of those developers."
She paused. Let it land.
"I have found," Sloane added, "that your husband's death came six days before he was scheduled to testify before a grand jury regarding the 2014 disappearance of a woman named Evangeline Marsh."
The name hung in the air between them like smoke. Delphine Webb did not flinch. Her fingers remained laced around her glass, the knuckles smooth and pale, the nails shaped into neat ovals.
"Evangeline Marsh," Delphine repeated. "Yes. I remember that name."
"You remember her."
"I remember the headlines. A young woman. A search. A funeral without a body."
"Some people thought there should have been a body."
"Some people think many things." Delphine lifted her bourbon and took a small, precise sip. "Are you one of those people, Miss Avery?"
"Sloane."
"Sloane." The elder woman let the name settle. "Are you one of those people who believe Judge Webb had something to do with that young woman's disappearance?"
"I believe," Sloane said carefully, "that Judge Webb had something to do with a great many things. I believe the grand jury was going to ask him about several of them. I believe he knew what was coming. And I believe that a man does not walk out of his house at six twenty in the morning, leave through the front door, and go stand at the top of his own rear staircase unless he has been told to."
Delphine set her glass down. The soft clink was the loudest sound in the room.
"You think he was pushed."
"I think he did not jump. I think he was helped. And I think the person who helped him is in this room, or was until very recently, or will be again."
The bartender had moved to the far end of the bar, polishing a glass with the slow attention of a man who knew when to disappear. The jukebox clicked over to another song, something with a fiddle and a woman's high, lonesome note.
Delphine Webb did not speak for a long moment. Her eyes, Sloane noticed, were the pale gray of winter sky, and they did not waver.
"You came home for your aunt," Delphine said at last. "Hattie Avery."
"Yes."
"And Hattie died. And in going through her things, you found something that brought you here."
"I found letters."
"From my husband."
"About your husband. About the Marsh girl. About a great many things." Sloane felt the old tightness in her chest, the weight of the manila envelope in the lockbox under her bed, the weight of the letters in her aunt's careful handwriting, the weight of a dead woman's secrets pressed into paper. "Letters my aunt kept for eleven years. Letters she never sent to anyone. Letters that suggest your husband knew exactly where Evangeline Marsh was, and that he knew who put her there."
The silence that followed was not empty. It was full of the hum of the coolers behind the bar, the scrape of a pool game next door, the dust settling in the late autumn sun that slanted through the window and lay in pale bars across the table.
Delphine Webb folded her hands in her lap.
"My husband," she said, "was a complicated man."
"Most powerful men are."
"He believed in the county. He believed in its future. He believed that progress required certain sacrifices."
"That is one way to describe it."
"It is the only way I am willing to describe it in a public place." Delphine's gaze flicked, briefly, to the small television mounted above the bar. It had been showing a rerun of an old game show, the picture snowy and the sound off. Now the screen flickered, and the picture changed.
Sloane saw it in the older woman's face before she turned to look. The micro-expression, quickly smoothed. The way her hands stilled. The way her breath stopped, just for a beat.
Sloane turned.
The screen showed a building Sloane recognized. River North. Glass and steel and money. The chyron at the bottom of the frame read, in white letters on a red band: BREAKING NEWS. Above the chyron, a reporter in a trench coat stood on a sidewalk, her hair blown by wind, her mouth moving silently. Behind her, yellow tape. Behind the tape, an ambulance. Behind the ambulance, the dark shape of a building Sloane had written about three years ago, when a different man had fallen from a different window.
The sound came on. The bartender had unmuted it, or someone had. A man's voice filled the bar, tinny and urgent.
"...confirmed at this hour that Marcus Webb, attorney and candidate for the state senate, has been found dead at the bottom of the stairwell of his River North penthouse. Police are calling the death an apparent suicide, though sources tell Channel 7 the investigation is in its early stages. Webb, forty-two, was the son of the late Judge Marcus Webb Sr., whose own death in September remains under investigation..."
Sloane's hand tightened around her glass. The ice shifted. She did not look at Delphine Webb. She did not need to.
The bartender set down the glass he had been polishing.
"Holy mother," he said quietly.
The reporter continued. Webb had been scheduled to appear at a fundraiser that evening. He had missed a meeting with his campaign manager that morning. His wife had called 911 after returning home to find the front door unlocked and her husband gone.
"His wife," Sloane said. She tasted the word. It was bitter.
"There is no wife," Delphine said. Her voice was very steady. "Marcus was not married. He divorced two years ago. He has been seeing someone. I do not know who."
The reporter on the screen was saying something about a note. There was no note. There were no pills. There was nothing in his calendar, nothing on his desk, nothing in the days before that suggested a man who had decided to die.
Sloane felt her aunt's letters in her mind like a weight. She thought of the date on the first one. October 2. Two days before Judge Webb died. She thought of the date on the last one. November 11. Three days ago.
"He knew," Sloane said. "He knew something was coming."
Delphine Webb lifted her glass. Her hand did not tremble.
"My son," she said, "knew many things."
The reporter's voice filled the bar. The jukebox had gone silent, as if the room itself had decided to listen. In the pale autumn light, Sloane saw the first true expression cross Delphine Webb's face. Not grief. Not shock.
Recognition.
The same look, Sloane thought, that she had seen on her aunt's face, in the last photograph taken before Hattie Avery's house burned to the ground.
"Tell me about Evangeline Marsh," Sloane said.
Delphine Webb set down her glass. She did not pick it up again.
"If you want to know about Evangeline Marsh," she said, "you will have to drive me home."
The bartender looked over. Sloane held up two fingers. He nodded and reached for the bottle.
But Sloane did not wait for the pour. She was already standing, reaching for her coat, reaching for her keys, reaching for the door that would take her out of this stale room and into the cold autumn afternoon where a man had fallen from a great height and a county was holding its breath.
Behind her, Delphine Webb rose with the slow grace of a woman who had been raised to stand in parlors and receive condolences. She straightened the hem of her jacket. She picked up her gloves.
"My car is across the street," she said.
"I will drive," Sloane said.
"I did not ask you to drive."
"You are asking now."
Delphine Webb paused. She looked at Sloane Avery with those pale winter eyes, and for the first time, Sloane saw something in them that was not composure.
It was fear.
"Very well," Delphine Webb said. "Drive."
They walked out together into the wind. The television in the window behind them flickered, and the reporter's voice followed them into the street like a warning.
The wind cut across the parking lot like a blade drawn through cloth. Sloane fished her keys from her coat pocket and pressed the unlock button. The old Buick answered with a tired chirp and a flicker of its parking lights, and the door groaned when she pulled it open, the same groan it had made since she was sixteen and learning to drive on these back roads with Hattie in the passenger seat, correcting her clutch work with a calm that never wavered.
She had not been behind this wheel in eleven months. Not since the funeral.
"Sit," she said.
Delphine Webb lowered herself into the passenger seat with the care of someone accustomed to being watched. The leather sighed beneath her. She set her gloves in her lap, one atop the other, and folded her hands over them as though she were in a pew.
Sloane crossed to the driver's side. Before she got in, she opened the rear door and reached into the cargo well behind the backseat. A cardboard banker's box sat there, lid warped from heat, corners soft with handling. She carried it to the front and set it between them on the bench seat.
From the glove compartment, she withdrew a battered manila folder. The tab had been written over so many times it was nearly black. She smoothed it flat on her thigh, uncapped a ballpoint pen, and, in small, deliberate letters, wrote DELPHINE WEBB across the tab. The ink shone wet in the dashboard light.
Delphine watched her do it. Her hands did not move.
"You carry your work in a car," Delphine said.
"I carry everything in this car," Sloane said. She recapped the pen. "It is the only place no one has been through."
She turned the key. The engine caught on the second try, a rough cough that settled into a low rumble she could feel through the steering wheel. She backed out of the space, flicked on the headlights, and aimed them down the two-lane toward the river.
Neither of them spoke for the first mile. The heater pushed out air that smelled of dust and old vinyl and, faintly, of the cinnamon gum Hattie had kept in the ashtray. Sloane had not had the heart to remove it. The wipers dragged across the windshield in a dry arc, leaving pale streaks where they passed.
"You said you wanted to tell me about Evangeline Marsh," Sloane said. "Start anywhere you want."
Delphine Webb did not look at her. She looked out the window at the fields, bare and brown, the stalks of last summer's corn cut down to ankle-stubble. Smoke rose in a thin line from somewhere on the far side of the tree line, someone's burn pile, and the smell of it came in through the vents.
"She was not what people said," Delphine said.
"Tell me what people said."
Delphine's mouth thinned. "They said she was trouble. They said she had come down from Pittsburgh with no family and no history and a child on her hip, and they said she had a way of looking at a man that made him forget he had a wife waiting." She paused. "Some of that was true."
"And some of it?"
"The rest was a story my husband built. Brick by brick. Year by year. Until no one could tell where the truth stopped and the stone began."
Sloane kept her eyes on the road. A tractor trailer lumbered past in the opposite lane, throwing gravel that pinged off the Buick's rocker panel. She waited three seconds after the sound faded before she spoke.
"Where is she now?"
"I do not know."
"You are lying to me, Mrs. Webb."
"I am telling you what I am permitted to tell you." Delphine's voice did not rise. It remained low, and courteous, and as cold as the pewter sky pressing down on the cornfields. "There are things I cannot say. Not because I do not wish to. Because I made a promise."
"To whom?"
"To a woman who had already lost everything. And to a child who had not yet learned what had been taken from him."
Sloane's hands tightened on the wheel. She had asked the question before. She had asked it in other interviews, in other cars, with other grieving women who spoke in euphemisms and withheld what they could. She knew the texture of a kept secret. She knew how it sat in the jaw.
"Evangeline Marsh had a son," Sloane said. Not a question.
"She did."
"And Judge Webb had him removed."
Delphine Webb closed her eyes. For the first time, the composure cracked. What came through was older than grief. It was the exhaustion of carrying something so long that the muscles had atrophied, of feeling the weight only when you set it down.
"My husband did what he believed was right," she said. "For this county. For our family. For the boy."
"Believed," Sloane said.
"Yes."
"And you?"
"I believed him." Delphine opened her eyes. They were wet, but the tears did not fall. "For a long time. Until your aunt came to see me."
The road curved along the river. Below them, the water moved slow and brown, carrying the last of the season's leaves. Sloane took the curve at a speed she would not have taken with anyone else. She did not trust the shoulder, did not trust the guardrail, did not trust the woman beside her to keep her composure past the next bend.
"When did Hattie come to see you?"
"Two summers ago. In July. She arrived unannounced, as she always did, and she sat in my parlor and she drank my iced tea and she told me she had found a photograph."
"Photograph of what?"
"Of Evangeline. With a child on her hip. Standing in front of a house that does not exist on any record." Delphine's voice dropped. "It was the only photograph of her that survived."
The Buick's heater clicked off, then on again, a mechanical tic that sounded almost like a swallow. Sloane eased off the accelerator as a county sheriff's cruiser passed them going the other way, its lights off, the deputy inside not looking up from whatever was on his dash. She watched him disappear in the mirror.
"Why did she bring it to you?"
"Because she knew my husband would never allow the truth to surface. Because she knew I was the only one left who remembered what Evangeline looked like, and what her voice sounded like, and what her son looked like when he smiled."
Sloane thought of the Joker card on Judge Webb's desk. She thought of the one she had found in Hattie's mailbox a week before the fire. She thought of the envelope that had arrived at her own apartment last Tuesday, postmarked this county, containing nothing but a playing card and a single line in a hand she did not recognize: HE KNEW WHAT HE TOOK.
"The letter Hattie received," Sloane said. "The one with the card."
"Yes," Delphine said.
"The same person sent one to me."
Delphine turned her head for the first time. She looked at Sloane the way one looks at someone standing at the edge of a cliff.
"Then you must understand," she said, "that what you are about to uncover will not stay in this county. It will not stay in your file folder. It will follow you into your kitchen and your bedroom and your child's bedroom, and it will sit on the chest of drawers beside the lamp you turn on at three in the morning when you have heard a sound you cannot name."
Sloane did not ask how Delphine knew about the lamp. She did not ask how Delphine knew about the child.
"Your husband," Sloane said. "He fell."
"He jumped," Delphine said.
"Sixteen stories."
"Seventeen, with the ledge."
"And you believe the letter and the fall are connected."
Delphine Webb did not answer. She picked up her gloves from her lap and began to fold them, finger to finger, the way one folds a burial shroud. Outside, the river made its long, indifferent turn toward the Gulf.
"My husband," Delphine said at last, "kept two ledgers. One for the county. One for himself. The second one is in his study, in the bottom drawer of his desk, behind a false panel you will not find unless you know to press the small rose in the woodwork."
Sloane felt her pulse shift. She kept her eyes on the road. She did not let her hands move.
"How do you know this?"
"Because I am the one who built that desk. And I am the one who chose that rose." Delphine's voice was very quiet now. "Because my husband did not make that secret. I did. And I made it for a reason."
The Buick crested the rise. Below them, the long valley opened up, and at the center of it, gray and square against the bare trees, sat the Webb estate on its hill. The shutters were closed. A single light burned in a second-floor window.
Sloane Avery pulled the case file from between them. She smoothed the tab with her thumb, the fresh ink of DELPHINE WEBB still tacky under her touch, and she took the turn toward the house where a dead man's secrets were waiting to be opened.
The road wound on. The river ran below. And somewhere, in a room neither of them could see, a telephone began to ring.