Three Short, One Long

Ten years later

I am twenty-three years old, and I have a gun in a drawer, a badge in a wallet, and a clock on the nightstand that has never once been turned off.

It goes at 3:07. It is an ordinary clock, battery-driven, white-faced, with a second hand that ticks and a pair of tiny bells that chatter when it wants me. I have had it since I was fourteen. Dunleavy bought it for me at a Walgreens the week I came to live with them, because I would not stop asking for one, and he stood in the aisle and turned it over and over in his big hands with the toothpick in his mouth. You sure you want this, kiddo? he said. There's one with a radio.

I said no. I said I wanted the bells.

I have woken to them three thousand six hundred and fifty-two times. I know because I count. Every morning, in the dark, I lie for seven minutes with my eyes open, listening to the house, the old furnace, the pipes, the settle of a wall. And at 3:14, when nothing has happened, I press the little button and the bells stop. And I do not sleep.

Nothing has ever happened. Not once. That is what makes it unbearable.

…

I live in a second-floor apartment above a dry cleaner's on Lorain Avenue, three blocks from the house where I grew up, if you can call it that: a brick two-story with a porch swing and a magnolia, where for ten years I slept in a room with a window that looked out on a yard. The room belonged to a boy named Danny, once, before he went to college. Colleen painted it yellow for me. She put a quilt on the bed. She stood in the doorway holding a laundry basket, a short round woman with gray in her hair and flour on her sleeve, and said, This is yours, honey, for as long as you like, and I said thank you and went into the bathroom and was sick.

They never asked me to call them anything. I called them Frank and Colleen. They never asked me to be anything but what I was.

It is hard to say what I owe them.

Frank retired in the fall of my seventeenth year. Not by choice. They had been asking him to go since the night of the cemetery, politely, through channels, in the kindly regretful voice of men who want a thing quietly done. In the end he went. He turned in his badge, and sat for a month on the porch swing in his undershirt, looking at the magnolia, and then he went up to the attic and came down with a battered cardboard box and began to work.

He has not stopped.

He works at the kitchen table. It is covered with papers: maps, photographs, newspaper clippings, index cards in his square capitals. Ten years of it. He has pinned them to a corkboard that now takes up the whole kitchen wall, and the string runs from card to card like a spider's web. When I joined the force at twenty-one he did not say a word. He took me to the table and put a pencil in my hand.

We have not found her.

…

I will tell you what we know.

We know that on the night of the cemetery, at about 8:10, a woman named Maren Ostrander was taken from the old section of Greywood Cemetery by a man calling himself Ray Pruitt, in the middle of a ring of a hundred and ten police officers, and that no one has seen her since. We know that he went through a storm drain that had been prepared for him, three days before, by a crew of men with a work order from the county, signed by a clerk who was found dead in a Parma motel the following week. We know that he entered a greenhouse. We know that he left it by a door.

We know that at 10:12 that night, in a back lane behind a shuttered brick warehouse, a man named Frank Dunleavy and a girl of thirteen found an empty chair, a camera with its back open, and a message in chalk.

Thirteen frames. Thirteen lives.

We know what was on the film.

Not what was on it. What it was. Thirteen rolls of black-and-white negative, cut and sealed in black paper, one for each child. Thirteen children, twenty-one years ago, whose true birth records had been photographed, one by one, on a Saturday afternoon by an old woman with a Brownie camera, in the back room of a shop where nobody ever looked. The originals. The real documents. The only ones that mattered.

She had hidden them in the one place that would have taken a hundred years to find: in a shop that sold wedding portraits and passport photographs, in a drawer full of other people's pictures.

And my grandmother had sent us there. She had put it in my head when I was seven. That's where we keep the pictures. She had put it on a map, in a scratch on the border of a piece of tracing paper, three short and one long.

I know now what that mark meant.

It took me eight years to understand. I understood it at two in the morning on my twenty-first birthday, alone in the kitchen with a cup of cold tea, turning the photographed map in my hands under the lamp. It was not a signature. It was not a hello. It was a sign. She had put it on everything that led somewhere. On the map to the bridge. On the stone in the old section. On the iron box. On the back of my own small spine, with a fingertip, at bedtime. It meant: this is a pointer.

This is a road. It is not the place.

Do not stop here.

She had known they would follow every road she laid, and she had made it so that every road ended in a lie. The iron box. The bridge. The grave. The photo shop. And each time, my mother and I, and Frank, and a hundred men with rifles, had stopped at the end of a road and said, this is it.

It was never it, I think. It was always a thing that pointed.

And I have been following the pointers ever since.

…

There is a thing I have not told anyone but Frank.

I know the rule.

I did not learn it from a book. It came to me in pieces, over years, from a hundred small things: from a boy's high laugh under a bridge, you came back once, didn't you, from a man's voice on a telephone, kids shouldn't live twice, from a dream. I put them side by side and I looked at them, and the shape came clear. It is a very simple rule. It is so simple that I am ashamed I did not see it at once.

If you die in someone else's place, you come back.

One time. To the minute before. With the face of your killer in your head, and the whole of what you learned, and nothing else.

I died for my mother. I walked out of a bathroom into smoke and said take me, and woke at 3:07 with an alarm in my fist. It's the only reason she was alive that night. It's the only reason I was.

And a man named Desmond Voss knows it, too. He has known it for a very long time. He hunts us. I don't know how many of us there are. I know that every night I lie awake, I think of a boy of eleven, a girl of nine, a woman in a nursing home with white hair and a scar on the back of her head, dying quietly in a bed for someone she loved, and waking up, and finding that the room was full of men.

The only witnesses he cannot buy, I have written on a card, and pinned it to the board.

He can't buy us. He can only wait for us to be afraid.

I have not found one of the others. Not one in ten years.

…

The list of nineteen names went to the grand jury, in the spring of that year, and it was a very good list.

I read the transcripts a thousand times. They indicted fifteen. They convicted nine. A records clerk named Voigt, a notary, a man from the school board, a supervisor of the county transport department with a grandchild in a wheelchair. They went to prison, one after another, for terms of three years, five years, seven. They were all small. They were the kind of men whom one looks at in the paper and says, Well, that's something. Hal Dreyer cooperated. Rhonda Tillis was never found. Gordon Ashby, in a shaking voice, in a courtroom full of cameras, stood up and confessed to everything, every name, every child, every dollar, a long, clear, wretched, complete confession, and was sentenced to life.

There was no Desmond Voss on the list.

There was no Desmond Voss in the courtroom. There was no Desmond Voss in the file, no photograph, no fingerprint, no dental record, no tax return, no birth. There was a Ray Pruitt, a patrolman from the Second District, who had been issued a badge by an administrator who had been paid. That was all. There was a gray patrol cap on a seat. There was a set of keys.

Without the films, there was no proof. Without the originals, there was no way to say this child is this child. Thirteen people are still living under other names, in other cities. They don't know. They go to work. They pay their taxes. They have children who never met their real grandmothers. I have never found one of them.

I have a fear I have never been quite honest about. I think that if I found one, I would not be able to look at his face.

…

I knock on the wall every night.

It started when I was thirteen, in a room in Frank's house, the first week. I had not known I was going to do it. I was lying in the dark with my shoes on, and I put out my hand to the plaster beside the bed and knocked. Three short, and one long. I did it very softly. It made a dull little sound, like the tap of a mouse. I held my breath. I waited.

Nothing.

I did it again, the next night. And the next. For ten years, I have done it every night, at the same hour, with the same hand. Three little knocks, and then a slow one. My grandmother's. I'm here. I lie there in the dark and listen for an answer.

Some nights I think I hear it.

It was a Tuesday in October, a few weeks ago, a cold clear night. I was lying on my back in the apartment above the dry cleaner's with my boots on, looking at the ceiling. It was a quarter to three. The street was quiet. I raised my hand and knocked on the wall, the old way, and let my knuckles fall.

Knock, knock, knock. Knock.

And the wall answered.

It was a soft, dull, distant sound, from somewhere far inside the plaster. Three quick. Then a pause. Then one heavier, slow. My heart stopped. I sat bolt upright. I put my palm flat against the wall, and the plaster was cold, and I felt the sound travel up through my wrist like a pulse.

Knock, knock, knock. Knock.

I stopped breathing.

I did not move for a long time. The room was pitch dark. The bells of the clock stood silent on the nightstand. Outside, a bus went by, with a hiss of tires. And in the wall, a little way down, the knocking came again, patient, steady, close.

I got up.

I put on my coat. I took the gun from the drawer. I stood in my own hallway with my heart going, and I followed the sound, down the corridor to the bathroom, and stood in front of the old radiator. It was cast iron, cream-painted, with a pipe running up through the floor.

Knock, knock, knock. Knock.

I put my ear to the pipe.

It was warm. Inside it, I heard water. A long thin gurgle, rising and falling, the slow clank of an old system heating through, a hammer in the line. Three short. One long. It was the pressure in the steam heat. It was the radiator. It had been knocking on that wall for forty years, I suppose, the same way, and I had never once noticed.

I stood there for a long time with my cheek against the iron.

Then I put the gun back in the drawer. And I got into bed in my boots, and set the clock for 3:07, and lay in the dark, and waited for morning.

…

THE END — Ending 3 of 5: Breached Cordon.

You put every man you had on the hill, and the hill was exactly the stage he wanted. In a ring of a hundred officers, no one saw the one man who lived inside the wall. The records are gone. Your mother is gone. And a girl who came back once now spends her life following the pointers, one dead road at a time, knocking on a wall for an answer that is only a pipe.

Go back to Chapter 40 to choose differently.