Wrong Riverview

The doors would not open.

For the first three seconds I did the stupid thing, the thing that anyone does. I pulled at the handle, and pulled again, harder, with both hands. It gave a dull dead rattle, like a toy. Beside me Devon wrenched at the other door with his teeth bared, and when he fell back, panting, I saw that the lock buttons on every door had been pressed flat into the sills. All four. At once. From outside.

Then I heard it.

It was under the floor. It came up through the metal into the soles of my feet, so small and so regular that I took it for my own pulse. Tick. Tick. Tick. Not a clock. Drier, quicker, a patient little click like the cooling of an engine. There was a faint smell. Sweet. Sugar burning in a pan.

I looked at the seat where Officer Pruitt had sat. It was empty. The vinyl still held the shape of a heavy man, and on it, squared against the headrest, lay a gray patrol cap. Under the brim was a small white card. I slid it out. It was a laminated badge, with a photograph of a heavy pale face and rimless glasses. The name had been struck out with a single bar of black ink, hard enough to dent the plastic.

Never his name, I thought. Never anyone's.

"Hammer," I said. "The emergency hammer. There's one on the pillar. Every van has one."

…

A red plastic bracket was bolted to the rear pillar, and in it, held by two clips, a squat steel tool the size of a hatchet, with a hardened point at one end. I had seen the little drawing of it on a hundred buses. IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. I used to read it, bored, and think of the sort of person who would ever need it.

I tore it from its clips. It was heavier than I'd thought. I went to the back window, drew back my arm, and swung the point at the center of the glass with everything I had.

It rang.

It rang like a bell. The shock went up my arm to the shoulder and into my teeth, and my fingers went numb and white. The glass did not crack. It did not so much as scratch. A faint star appeared at the point of impact, no bigger than a dime, and that was all.

"Again," said Devon.

"I know."

"Harder."

"I know."

The ticking had changed. It had grown quicker, the gaps between the clicks smaller, and now there was a new sound under it, a faint whistling hiss like a kettle starting to sing.

I hit the glass again.

The star spread. A crack ran from it, thin and silver, in a long diagonal, and then another, and a web of fine white lines crept out across the pane. I hit it a third time, and I felt something give. A dull crunch. A whole section sagged inward.

"Now!" Devon was beside me. He had stripped off his jacket and wound it around his forearm, and he drove his fist at the middle of the web, and the window caved. It fell outward in a single sheet of crazed glass, in thousands of little cubes, with a soft heavy sigh. The night poured in. It was cold and sharp and smelled of wet leaves, and I gulped it like water.

"Go! Go, go, go!"

I went.

I went out of that van like a cork out of a bottle, headfirst, with my arms before me, and the frame of the window caught my sleeve and tore it. My hand dragged across a jag of glass that had stuck in the rubber seal. I felt it, a cold bright line across the back of my palm, and I did not look. I hit the ground on my shoulder and rolled. There was a slope of cold wet grass. I rolled down it, over and over, with the stars wheeling, and came to a stop on my back in a ditch.

A moment later, Devon landed beside me with a grunt.

"Down!" he gasped. "Stay down!"

I stayed down.

Behind us, with a dull flat whump, the van exhaled.

…

The white cloud rose from the underside of the vehicle in a clean silent fountain, thick as milk, and smothered the van. It rolled over the roof and poured out of the broken window and blew across the grass in a low heavy mist that smelled of hot candy. I put my sleeve over my mouth. In the white, the shape of the van dissolved like a sugar cube in water.

If we had waited a half minute longer, I thought, we would have been in it.

When it thinned, the van stood in the mud with its doors flung open, harmless as a toy.

My hand hurt. I lifted it and looked. The cut ran from the knuckle of the first finger to the heel of the palm, long and clean and shallow, bleeding in a thin dark ribbon that dripped from my wrist. Devon pulled out a handkerchief and bound it up without a word. His own hands were shaking.

"She's gone," I said.

"June—"

"My mother. They took her."

"We don't know that."

"They took her." I sat up. I looked at the hill, where the pines rose against the sky. "He wanted me out of the way. That's all this was. He didn't want to kill us. He wanted a clean screen."

Devon's face was gray. He opened his mouth to answer.

And something in his coat began to buzz.

…

It was not his radio. It was a small black phone, a cheap prepaid thing that he had pulled from some inside pocket, a spare, a thing the Captain had made him carry in case the others were compromised. He stared at it as it vibrated in his palm. The screen showed no name. Only a string of digits, and a green button, blinking.

"Don't," I said.

"I have to."

"It's him."

"I know it's him." He pressed the button. He did not put it to his ear. He held it between us with his thumb on the speaker, and in the silence of the ditch, with the smoke dying on the grass, I heard the voice.

"Officer Tran."

It was warm. It was a rich low baritone with a little rumble in it, easy and well-mannered, and I knew it, and I knew it was not the one from the hotel. It was the voice of Officer Pruitt.

"I thought I'd let you know that we're quite all right. Ms. Ostrander is unhurt. She's resting. I would rather you didn't worry."

"Where is she?" Devon's voice was a croak.

"Somewhere quiet." A soft dry sound, as of a man settling back in a chair. "Is the child with you?"

Devon looked at me.

I took the phone out of his hand.

I don't know why. I think it was the same instinct that had made me seize the radio. I held it up to my mouth with my cut hand, the blood already seeping through the handkerchief, and said into the speaker, quite clearly:

"I'm here."

There was a pause.

"June." The voice was gentle. It was almost fond. "There you are. I'm very glad you're all right. I did hope you'd be able to manage the glass."

"Where is my mother?"

"She's safe. As long as you are sensible." A little sigh. "I'm going to ask you to listen carefully, because I'm going to say this once, and I should so much hate to have to repeat it to someone else. Tonight, at half past nine, I will be in a place called Riverview Alley. I should like you to come."

"Where is it?"

"I'm sure you'll find it. You've always been such a clever girl."

"Where—"

"Alone," said the voice. "Quite alone. Not Officer Tran, or Captain Dunleavy, or any of the others. You'll bring nothing. You'll tell no one. And if you are late, or if you are followed, or if there are any men in coats standing about with their hands in their pockets, I shall have to take it that you've changed your mind." A pause. "Your mother would be so sorry to hear that."

"Don't touch her."

"Half past nine," said the voice. "Riverview Alley. You alone, little girl."

The line clicked and was empty.

…

We spent the next forty minutes finding the wrong place.

I will tell this part quickly, because I cannot bear to tell it slowly. Dunleavy came down off the hill at a run with his coat flying, gray as a ghost, shouting my mother's name, and found me sitting in a ditch with a bandaged hand and a broken phone. He looked at the van. He looked at the smoke. He looked at me for a long moment, and I saw him understand, and I saw something crack in his face that did not heal.

"Riverview," he said. "Where?"

"I don't know."

"Think."

I did. We all did. We stood in a circle by the roadside under the pines, a dozen exhausted men and one child, with a city map spread on the hood of a car and a flashlight clamped in Devon's teeth, and we looked for Riverview.

There were three.

There was a Riverview Park, a big green rectangle of lawn and playground and boat ramp on the lakeshore. There was a Riverview Terrace, a dreary housing project on the east side with six brown towers and a basketball court. And there was a Riverview Avenue, a long, dull, tree-lined street in the south suburbs, where nobody had ever done anything wrong. Not one was an alley. Not one had any reason, that I could see, to be in a story about my grandmother.

"The park," said Dunleavy. "It's the park. Water. Open ground. Sight lines on every side. It's where I'd do it."

"It's not an alley."

"He's playing games, June. It's the park."

"But—"

"We'll take the park. Park, take the Terrace. Tran, the avenue." He swung round. "Everybody, go."

I went with him.

I sat in the back of his car with my cut hand in my lap and tried to remember what my grandmother had shown me. Somewhere in my head there was a door, and behind it the thing I needed, and I could not make my fingers turn the knob.

At nine-thirty, we stood in the center of Riverview Park under an enormous sky, in a field of frozen grass, with eleven men in a ring around us and nothing in any direction but the black flat water. In the playground, a single swing turned on its chain.

Nobody came. Nobody came at nine thirty-five. Nobody came at nine-forty. I stood with my arms wrapped around me and my teeth chattering, and I thought: I've lost her.

…

I remembered at ten to ten.

It came to me the way a word comes that you have been hunting for. Not in a flash. In a trickle, as one gets a taste, as one smells the rain before it falls. I was sitting on the curb with my face in my hands, listening to the radio chatter, Terrace clear, avenue clear, nothing, and I thought of a smell. A strange smell. Sharp and sour and cold, like vinegar and pennies, and under it a dry burnt note, like a lit match.

And a bell on a door.

Ding.

"Photographs," I said.

Dunleavy turned.

"Grandma took me. When I was seven. For a passport photo. We went on the bus, and then we walked, down a street with a bakery and a laundromat, and a little shop at the end with a green door." My voice shook. "There was a man. A fat man with a mustache. He put a stool in front of a sheet. And there was a sign. A red one. On the window. It had a name on it with a letter missing."

"What name?"

"Riverview."

He stared at me.

"Riverview Photo," I said. "It was an alley. It was in a back lane. Grandma took Mom there too, when Mom was little, to have her papers copied. She told me. She said—" I swallowed. "She said, that's where we keep the pictures."

We went.

It took twenty-two minutes, through back streets and across tracks, with the siren off. Dunleavy got lost twice. At the end I leaned out of the window and said left, and there, and at last, at the tail of an alley so narrow that the car scraped its mirrors on the brick, I said stop.

A single yellow lamp hung over the lane, swaying on its bracket. The shopfronts were roll-up steel shutters, posted with the ragged scraps of old bills. And at the far end, where the lane dead-ended at a wall, stood a small low shop with a green door and a window.

The shutter was up.

It had been raised halfway, a yard from the sill, leaving a black gap under the steel, like an eyelid half closed. Above the door hung a red sign with white letters. The paint had faded to the color of a scab. It said, in script:

Ri erview Photo.

The v had lost a stroke.

…

I went in first.

Nobody stopped me. Dunleavy had his hand on my shoulder; I felt it tighten and let go. I ducked under the shutter, and the door beyond it was ajar, and a little brass bell on a spring over the lintel gave one faint cracked ding as I passed beneath. The air that met me was cold and dry and chemical. Vinegar. Pennies. A match.

It was a tiny room. A counter with a glass top. A shelf of dusty frames. A rack of yellowed postcards. A stool in front of a wrinkled backdrop, a sheet of blue cloth, with a pair of lamps on stands, their reflectors gone brown. A red velvet curtain hung across the back wall, tied at one side with a tasseled cord.

There was a chair in the middle of the floor.

It was a plain wooden one, with a cane seat. It stood by itself, facing the door, empty. A few frayed lengths of cord lay at its feet, severed. Beside it, on a low table, someone had set an old camera on a tripod, a black box with a leather bellows, its lens as big as a coffee cup. The back of it had been opened like a book. The film holder hung out, empty. Next to it lay a small pouch of black paper, torn open, with nothing in it but dust.

Through a gap in the velvet curtain came a glow.

It was red. It was deep, dim, steady, the color of a dying ember. Someone had left the safelight burning in the darkroom, and the whole shop was bathed in its faint bloody light, so that my hands, and the glass, and the chair, all seemed to be made of the same dark wine.

"June," said Dunleavy, in a whisper.

I did not hear him. I was looking at the table.

It was a card table, scarred and stained. On its top, beside the camera, in a spill of dust, someone had written. They had used chalk. A stub of white schoolroom chalk lay beside the words, as neat as a pen on a desk. The handwriting was small, upright, precise. A square, clerkly, courteous hand, such as a banker writes.

Thirteen frames. Thirteen lives.

Thank you, June.