Harmon Street Bridge

By five o'clock the light was going out of the sky like water out of a basin.

It happens fast in November. At four there is a flat pewter glare over the lake, and the shadows are long and gray and still have edges; at five the edges have gone, and the buildings are cutouts against a streak of dull red, and the streetlamps come on one by one along the river road with a little sodium hum, turning the wet pavement amber. The wind turns raw. The cold has a taste, iron and snow and old leaves, and it finds the gap between your scarf and your collar and settles there like a hand.

I stood on the east bank of the Cuyahoga at 5:17 in the afternoon, forty-three minutes before the hour the man on the phone had named, in the company of nine strangers dressed as nothing, and I thought that I had never in my life seen a river look so much like a thing that was waiting.

Harmon Street Bridge was older than I had imagined. I had driven over it a hundred times without looking up. It was a low flat concrete span of the kind they built in the thirties, four stout piers rising from the black water, slabs of stained gray cement with iron rings let into them for the tying of barges. Rust bled down the face of the abutments in long brown streaks. Underneath, where the road deck made a ceiling and the traffic hammered overhead, a bank of broken stones sloped down to the water, jumbled and slimy, scattered with the usual litter of such places: bottles, a shopping cart, a sodden mattress, a tangle of fishing line. A faint ripe smell of mud and diesel rose from it.

The river itself had turned black. Not dark. Black, thick and slow and oily, with a skin on it that took the last of the red sky and slid it along in long ribbons. It made no sound. There was a coldness coming off it, a breath, that I could feel on my face from thirty feet away, and it was not the coldness of the day. It was an old cold. It was the kind that rises out of a cellar.

"Is it always like this?" I asked.

"No," said Dunleavy.

He stood a pace behind me, bundled in a dun-colored parka that made him look like a man who fishes. He had a thermos in one hand and a paper bag in the other, and I knew without being told that the bag contained nothing but a radio. Up the bank, on the road, an old man was walking a small dog. A pair of joggers in neon vests were stretching by a lamppost. A woman on a bench was eating a sandwich and reading a magazine. They were the most convincing people I had ever seen. They were every one of them armed.

"We cleared it this afternoon," he said. "Divers. Dogs. A man with a metal detector. We found two bicycles and a safe. The safe was empty. It was from a bakery, in 1988." He pursed his lips. "It's clean, Ms. Ostrander. As clean as a river gets. But I won't pretend I like the feel of it. It's like the water's listening."

"I thought that."

"Did you?"

"A minute ago. I thought it was waiting."

He looked at me sidelong. Then he nodded, very slightly, and said nothing.

…

"Third pier," he said.

I walked.

It was thirty yards along the bank, over rubble and weeds and broken glass, with the wind in my face and the cold coming up off the water in my nose. My boots, the black ones that the policewoman had found me from the lost-and-found, slid on the wet stones. A man in a gray cap, fishing in the shallows, did not look around. I passed the first pier, a stained shaft with a ring bolted to it at the height of my shoulder. I passed the second. Their shadows lay across the stones in long dark bars.

The third stood a little apart from the others, nearer the middle, where the river bent. Its base was submerged. Its upper face was black with weather and slick with moss, and it rose above me into the shadow of the deck, where something dripped slowly into the dark: tick, and tick, and tick, with the patience of a clock.

I stopped in front of it.

"Where?" said Dunleavy, behind me.

I pulled the map from my coat. The tracing paper had been sealed in a clear sleeve and photographed and signed, and I held it up to the last of the light and read it again. The red ring. The block capitals. Beside the pier, on the paper, a second mark I had not noticed in the basement, a tiny thing in the margin, the width of a grain of rice: a short stroke, drawn at an angle, and under it a number. 3.

"Three," I said. "The third brick."

"Third from what?"

"I don't know."

I laid my hand on the stone.

It was cold as a tombstone. It was wet, and it was furred with a fine green slime that came off on my glove. I ran my palm over it slowly, from left to right, the way I'd run it over a page of braille. The surface was not smooth. It was pitted, flaked, patched here and there with old crumbling mortar. Halfway up, at the height of my waist, I felt a line.

A thin one. A straight vertical seam, no wider than a hair. I traced it down, with my thumbnail, and it stopped at a horizontal one. Another. Another. I felt along the face of the pier, and found that what I had taken for a single slab of concrete was, in this one place, a wall of small square units, set in a neat grid, as though some mason had, a long time ago, been called away and had done the last course in brick.

"Dunleavy."

"I see it."

"There are bricks here."

"Yes." His voice had gone very soft. "Count from the left. The bottom row."

I counted. One. Two. Three.

The third was loose.

I knew it before I touched it. The mortar around it had been picked out, carefully, and replaced with something softer, a gray putty that had crumbled under the damp. I worked my fingernails into the gap. It resisted for a moment. Then it came with a dull grating sound, and slid out of the wall into my hands, a plain red brick, heavier than I'd expected, with a rime of mud along its edges.

Behind it was a hole.

…

It was small and dry and square, a niche about the size of a loaf of bread, cut into the core of the pier. The air that came out of it was cooler than the air around it and smelled strongly of tar and old canvas. I put my hand in. I felt the cold roughness of stone, and the grit of dust, and then something smooth and cylindrical and wrapped in cloth.

I drew it out.

It was about eighteen inches long and as thick as my forearm. It was wound in oilcloth, black and cracked and stiff, bound at both ends with twine in knots I did not recognize. It was heavy. It had a weight that was too dense for its size, the heft of iron, and when I tilted it something inside shifted with a soft dry whisper, like rice in a jar.

"Don't open it," said Dunleavy.

He had come up beside me. He had put on a pair of gloves, thick ones, and set down his thermos, and from his pocket he drew a roll of clear bags. His eyes were not on my face. They were on the cylinder. I saw his jaw tighten and loosen, and the tiny muscle at the corner of his mouth.

"May I?"

I gave it to him.

He took it with both hands, the way you take a sleeping animal. He turned it slowly, studying the cloth, the knots, the seam. Around us, the ordinary people on the bank had stopped being ordinary. The joggers had ceased to stretch. The man with the dog was standing perfectly still, looking at nothing. Up on the road, a car had stopped, and its engine was running, and in the back seat I could see a small pale face turned toward us, tilted up, with its two hands flat on the window.

June.

Dunleavy slit the twine with a pocket knife. He peeled the oilcloth back, layer on layer, like the skin of a sausage, and under it was a tube of dull gray iron, capped at both ends, with a rim of rust at the seam. He unscrewed one cap. It turned with a squeal. Something slid out into his palm, a tight scroll of paper, yellow and curled, held with a rubber band so old that it had fused into a brown stripe.

"I'm going to unroll this," he said. "Stay where you are. Don't look at it until I tell you."

"I'm looking at it."

"All right." A short, bitter breath. "Then look."

…

It was a list.

He unrolled it on the flat of the abutment, under the light of a flashlight that Devon Tran had run down the bank to bring him, and he smoothed it with the side of his hand. It was a single long sheet of ruled ledger paper, the kind with a green tint and a red margin. It was written on in ink, by a fine hard pen, in a hand that I recognized at once as neither my mother's nor the draftsman's on the map, but a third: clerkly, rounded, plain. It was written in columns. There were three. A name. A date. A sum.

They ran down the page in a tidy cascade, nineteen rows.

Gordon J. Ashby — 4/14 — $12,000.

That was the first one. I saw it, and my stomach turned. Just that, at the very top, as bald as a headline.

I read on. I could not help it. My eyes went down the page like water down a drain. Names I did not know. D. Voigt, Records Clerk. T. Mehlman, Notary. P. Strand, School Board. Dates stretching back across twenty-one years, and the sums rising and falling, five hundred, two thousand, nine thousand dollars. A hospital administrator. A county judge's secretary. A man whose title was just Transport. The seventh line down read, in the same round hand, R. Tillis, Lakeshore S&T — 8/8 — $400. I looked at the date and thought of an empty desk with a cup of tea. And near the bottom, in the twelfth row, with a sum beside it that was larger than any other, H. Dreyer, Cedar Terrace — 10/29 — $25,000.

The dates were this year's. Some of them were only weeks old.

"Somebody's been updating it," whispered Tran.

"Somebody's been paying," said Dunleavy.

He ran his finger down the page. He stopped at the nineteenth line, and his finger stayed there, and I saw something happen in his face that I could not name. It was as if the light had gone out of the flashlight, though the beam was steady.

"What?" I said. "What does it say?"

He did not answer. I bent over his arm.

The last line was not like the others.

It had no date. It had no sum. It was not in the round clerkly hand. It had been typed, on a machine, in a flat black impersonal capital face, a hard line of letters in the form of a sentence that stood out against the faded ledger like a cut across a palm.

NEXT: SGT. DUNLEAVY. FIRST.

…

I don't know how long we stood there.

The river dripped. The wind combed through the weeds at our feet. Up on the road, the engine of a car idled with a low rich throb. I heard a distant siren, a long way off, and the thin cry of a gull circling over the water, and I heard my own heart, dully, like a fist on a door.

Next.

Next, after Ashby. Next, after the girl at the bank, after the man who cut the lights. Nineteen names on a page, and each had been used, and each had been paid, and then each had been crossed off, I saw, by a faint steel line through the ink, or left to rot. And now there was a twentieth, and he was standing beside me in a dun-colored parka with a thermos at his feet.

"Frank," I said.

It was the first time I had used his name.

"It's all right." He folded the list. He did it carefully and slowly, with the care of a man handling a bomb. "It's a paper. It's a line on a paper. They like to write things down. I've seen worse."

"Where's the real one?"

"What?"

"This isn't hers." I pointed. My hand was shaking. "The handwriting isn't hers. The ink's different. She didn't put this in here." I swallowed. "Somebody opened that wall. Somebody took the brick out. They wrote this on top of what was there, or instead of it. They knew where to look. They knew before we did."

He stared at me.

"This is a message," I said. "It's addressed to you."

His mouth opened.

And in his pocket, against his chest, quite loudly, his telephone began to ring.

It was an ordinary ring, a cheap tinny little tune. In that silence, under that bridge, it sounded like a thing from another world. We all turned our heads. Dunleavy took it out and looked at the screen. His face changed. All the dryness went out of it, and all the age, and for a moment he looked like a very young man.

"Colleen," he said.

He put it to his ear.

I heard it too. I was standing six inches from him and the night was dead quiet, and the voice that came out of that little speaker was a woman's, small and thin and breaking, half a shriek, half a sob, so loud and so frightened that I stepped backward on the stones.

"Frank. Frank, oh God. Someone picked Danny up from school."