Ida’s Cassette

The County Vital Records Annex had been dead for eleven years, and it smelled like it.

It stood at the end of a cul-de-sac behind the old courthouse, a squat three-story brick box with a loading ramp, a rusting fire escape, and a brass plaque by the door that had gone green. Its windows were boarded with plywood. Between the cracked plates of its parking lot grew a wiry gray weed that crunched under our tires. A single yellow lamp burned over the door, with a fat moth beating itself against the glass.

"This is where my mother worked," said my mother, from the front seat, in a small odd voice.

"I know," said Dunleavy. "That's why we're here."

He switched off the engine. I looked at the building through the rear window and thought of my grandmother's hands: the nails short and round, the knuckles knobbed, a smell of lavender soap and carbon paper. She had come here every morning for thirty years, in a gray coat, with a lunch in a paper bag, and walked through that door into a building full of secrets with her face as calm as a plate.

Before we got out, Dunleavy took our phones.

He did it without a word. He held out a pouch, a flat bag of silvery fabric that crackled, the size of a pillowcase, and one by one we dropped them in. My mother's cheap one. Devon's. His own, the open line to Colleen still humming, which he looked at for a long moment before he let it go. He drew the cord tight and knotted it and carried the bag at arm's length, like something that might bite.

"Anything that can transmit," he said. "Anything that can hear. I'm done with it. Until I know who's talking, it's paper and breath."

"Captain," said Devon, "you think someone here...?"

"I suspect everything," said Dunleavy, "that can transmit."

…

The news about Danny came at two minutes to six.

It came on foot. Sergeant Park ran across the weeds in the last of the light, with her vest flapping and her breath smoking, and stopped in front of Dunleavy with her mouth open and nothing in it. He did not ask. He stood with the bag in his fist and every muscle of his body turned toward her, like a plant toward a window.

"He's all right," said Park. "Sir. He's unhurt. We found him on the steps of the Fifty-fifth Street fire station, sitting under the light with his school bag. The man in the car just let him out at the curb and drove away. Colleen was locked in the pantry with her hands tied with a dish towel. She's fine. She's furious."

A sound came out of Dunleavy, low and strange, not quite a word. He put the pouch down on the ramp. He put his big hand over his eyes and stood with his shoulders shaking, and then he lowered it and wiped his face on his sleeve, hard, once, as a man wipes sweat.

"What was he wearing?" he asked, hoarsely.

"Sir?"

"On his feet."

Park's broad face went soft.

"Red," she said. "The red ones. Somebody had tied the laces in a double knot."

"He hates those," said Dunleavy, and laughed, a cracked helpless laugh, and sat down on the loading ramp in the dust.

There was a note, Park added, in a minute. Folded and pinned to the boy's coat. She took it from her pocket and gave it to him in a clear bag. He read it without expression. Then he passed it to me, because I was nearest.

NEXT TIME.

I read it twice, and gave it back.

…

Ida's office was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor of closed doors.

We went up by flashlight. The stairs were steel and echoed like a drum. The air smelled of damp plaster and mouse and the sweet decay of paper. Everywhere were gray metal shelves, floor to ceiling, still full of the cardboard boxes of the dead county: birth books, marriage rolls, tied bundles of certificates yellowing at the edges. Dust lay on everything an inch thick. We left tracks like animals.

Everybody who was ever born in this county, I thought. Everybody who was ever changed.

The door at the end of the hall had a frosted glass panel and a card in a brass holder: I. OSTRANDER — SUPERVISOR. My mother stood in front of it for a long time. She touched the card. She pushed the door, and it swung inward with a groan of dry hinges.

It was a small square room. A wooden desk. A swivel chair with the stuffing coming out. A framed print of a lighthouse, hanging slightly crooked, and a calendar from a year that no longer existed. And on the desk, under a gauze of dust, with a hand-lettered sign propped against it, was a gray plastic machine the size of a lunchbox.

PLAY ME, said the sign.

Nobody laughed.

It was a cassette recorder. An old one, with a carrying handle and a speaker like a grille and a row of big square keys in a line along the front. The plastic was yellow where the sun had touched it. Beside it, in a clear case with a cracked hinge, was a twin to the tape in the lab: no label but a single underlined M.

"We have the other one," said Devon.

"She made two," said my mother, very quietly. "One where they'd look, and one where they wouldn't."

She slid the cassette into the machine and pushed the lid shut with a click. The keys were stiff. It took both her thumbs, and a small grunt, to push down the heavy button marked with a triangle.

The reels began to turn, with a faint dry whirr.

…

"Little Maren."

It was my grandmother's voice.

I have heard it a hundred times since, in dreams. It came out of the speaker thin and soft and a little hoarse, with a hiss of old tape behind it like rain on a roof. She sounded as she'd sounded when I was seven, and she'd sat on my bed with a cup of cocoa.

"If you're hearing this, then they finally came for you. I'm so sorry, sweetheart. I'd hoped to be wrong."

My mother made a small noise. She put her hand over her mouth.

"I'll say this plainly, because there isn't much time and I'm not much good at speeches. Twenty-one years ago, beneath the Harmon Street Bridge, there was a lot of false records. Lot Thirteen, they called it. Thirteen children. Thirteen names changed, thirteen birthdays moved. They were taken from where they belonged and given to other families, for money. Some of them found good homes. Some of them did not. Some did not live to see the next year."

A pause. A breath. A tiny sound of something tapping on wood, over and over. A fingernail on a table.

"The man at the center of it was named Gordon Ashby. He was not a monster at the start. He was a coward, which is worse. He ran a tutoring school. He came to me, and then he came to the others, and he said: 'It's just paper.' He said that the children would be better off. By the time I knew what I was doing, I had signed my name to nine of them."

"Nine," whispered my mother.

"I have never forgiven myself. I'm telling you that first."

"Ashby didn't start with the school. The school came after. It was a shell. He used it to wash things clean, the children, the money, the files. He hid them inside the records of students. A name here, an address there. Nobody would think to look. A boy was enrolled for a year and then he wasn't, and no one asked. Three years ago, I heard, a child at that school found a photograph of himself in a drawer he wasn't meant to open. He was three years old in it. He was wearing a coat he didn't remember. I think that's when the fire started."

"I have a list. I am not fool enough to say where."

The tapping stopped.

"But the list is not what matters, my dear. Lists are only people's names. What matters is what's underneath: the original records. The true ones. The birth certificates, the hospital charts, the court orders, the real names in the real hand. Without them, there's no proof that any of it happened. With them, there is no escape for any of them. Every one of them knows it. That's why they want them."

"They are not in the iron box. Don't open the iron box. It is a coat of paint."

"They are not under the bridge."

"Find your father's grave."

…

There was a silence on the tape. A long one. In it, faintly, I heard something I had not heard at first. A rhythm, beneath the hiss. It was a soft dull knocking, patient and clear, the sound of knuckles on wood. It went tap, tap, tap, three quick, and then, after a gap, a fourth, slow and heavy.

Three short, one long.

"Grandma," I whispered.

"Do not trust the man named Voss. The one who stands beside Ashby. Ashby is only a frightened man. Voss is the one who writes the list."

Her voice sped. It dropped. It was suddenly close to the microphone, rushed and low, a voice in a closet with the door shut.

"He doesn't take money. He doesn't take anything. He cleans. Do you understand? When a thing goes wrong, he cleans it. A fire, a disappearance, a death on a ward that was never written in a chart. He is very good, and he has never been afraid of anything, and I think—Maren, I think he is a person who only fears the light—"

A sound.

It was the scrape of a chair. A big sound, close and sudden, a dragging screech of wood on a bare floor. My grandmother's breath caught. I heard a creak, and a second, heavier tread, a man's, slow and unhurried, coming nearer. A door must have opened, somewhere behind her, for there was a breath of wind in the microphone.

And a voice said, quite gently, from a little distance:

"Old woman. Enough."

A pause.

There was a dull heavy sound. It was a sound I knew, in my bones, from a bathroom floor. A wet, deep, final thud, as of something heavy meeting something soft.

The tape ran on. I could hear the hiss of it. I could hear a man's breath, very quiet. Then a click, and the reels spun faster, and slowed, and stopped.

…

For a long time nobody spoke.

The wind pressed on the boarded window. Down in the weeds, something small ran across the leaves. My mother stood with both hands over her mouth, and her face above them was like a cut flower, white and waxy and perfectly still. I wanted to reach for her. I could not move.

"She survived it," said my mother at last, through her fingers.

"What?"

"She had a scar." Her voice was thin and flat. "On the back of her head. Under the hair. A long white one, this big. She always said she'd fallen off a stepladder in the pantry. I was twelve. I held the ladder." She drew a breath. "I held the ladder."

"Maren," said Dunleavy, from the doorway. He had been there all along, a big dark shape with his hat in his hand. "I'm sorry."

"Don't," she said. "Not yet." She wiped her face. Her eyes were red and steady.

"My mother said, find your father's grave. So find it." She drew herself up. "I know where it is. It's at Greywood. Row three, plot twelve."

And that was when we heard the car.

…

It was a long black vehicle.

It rolled across the broken asphalt at a funeral crawl, headlights dim. It stopped at the loading ramp. A tall man in a black overcoat and a black homburg stepped down into the yellow glow of the lamp, holding a clipboard and a flashlight. Behind him, in the dark of the rear window, lay the unmistakable long shape of a hearse.

Devon had his gun out. "Hold it right there—"

"Please." The man held up both palms. He had a long, mournful, bloodhound's face, and a voice like a velvet curtain. "Please. I mean no harm. My name is Mr. Pell, of Pell & Sons, funeral directors. I was told to come to this address." He consulted his clipboard. "A private service at Greywood Cemetery, six-thirty tonight. A disinterment. The family asked us to collect the paperwork here, at the old county annex, and meet the next of kin. I have a signed order." He cleared his throat. "The party's name is Ostrander."

My mother stopped breathing.

"On whose authority?" said Dunleavy, very softly.

"The identification was correct," said the man, turning a page. "Final digits 7-1-3-0. Submitted by telephone this afternoon. The deceased is listed as Walter J. Ostrander. Plot in the old section. Very unusual. That area hasn't been opened since the sixties." He looked up, bewildered. "Is there some difficulty?"

…

"He isn't in the old section," said my mother.

She said it slowly, as if reading from a card. "My father's in the new part. East slope. Row three, plot twelve. I've stood at it every spring since I was fourteen. He isn't in the old part. Nobody in my family is in the old part. It's all unmarked graves and people from a hundred years ago."

"Then someone's lying," said Devon.

"No." It was Dunleavy. "Someone's baiting."

"But the old section—" My mother's face changed. She turned slowly, and I saw a thought go across it. "Every year. Every single year, when we went to see him. She'd take the long way. She wouldn't go straight in through the east gate. She'd go round by the west, past the old graves, up the hill with the pines. I used to complain. I was a girl. I said, Mom, it's so far. And she'd say—" She laughed, a small bright dry laugh, shaking. "She'd say, 'There's more shade.'"

"Shade," said Dunleavy.

"In November. In the rain."

I thought of my grandmother's small gray coat and the way she walked: slowly, with her eyes on the ground, taking an extra loop, turning aside to touch a stone as if to greet it. We had called it the foibles of an old woman.

"Grandma never went straight to Grandpa," I said.

They all looked at me.

"She went there first. To the old part. Every time. She'd stop by one stone, near the back, and put her hand on it." My heart had begun to race. "She wasn't visiting. She was checking. She was checking that it was still there."

Dunleavy didn't speak. He stood in the door with his hat turning in his hands. Behind him, in the yellow lamplight, the long black car ticked and sighed.

"They know the place," he said slowly. "Whoever sent that order. They know it's the old section. They want us to go."

"Or they want us to go the other way," said my mother.

"At six-thirty."

"To dig up my father."

He put on his hat. He pulled it down to his eyes. He turned to Park and to Devon and to the three silent officers who had come up from the cars, and when he spoke, it was in the voice of a man who has made up his mind to take the whole hill.

"Greywood Cemetery," he said. "Every officer I have. Every car, every dog, every man with a rifle. We lock it down before they're through the gate. We put eyes on every path, and a gun on every tree, and they won't take a step I haven't seen." His jaw set. "That's what I'd do."

"No," I said.

It came out before I had decided to speak.

He turned.

I was standing by the desk with my hand flat on the cold plastic of the tape recorder, and my heart was going like a hammer. I thought of the black sedan on Chester Avenue. I thought of how every plan we had made had been known before we made it.

"If you put everyone there," I said, "he'll see them. Every one."

"That's the idea."

"That's his idea."

WHAT DO YOU DO?

You are standing in the dust of your grandmother's office, in a dead building, with an old woman's voice still hissing on the tape. Outside, a hearse is idling under a yellow lamp. Captain Dunleavy wants to bring every officer in the city to Greywood Cemetery and seal the hill. You have a suspicion that the more people you bring, the better the stage you give the man who is waiting. And tonight you may only get one chance.