Riverview Alley

At 9:29 the yellow streetlight at the head of the alley flickered on.

It did not come on all at once. It stuttered, buzzed, caught, lost itself, caught again, and settled at last into a dull amber glow the color of old piano keys. It lit a circle of wet pavement perhaps twelve feet across. Beyond the circle the alley went on, a narrow brick throat between two blind walls, into a darkness so complete that it looked painted.

I stood in the circle with my hands in my pockets.

I was wearing a gray coat. It wasn't mine. Mine had been ruined in the smoke, stinking of burnt sugar, and Devon had found this one in the trunk of a squad car, a man's gray wool thing three sizes too large, with the sleeves rolled twice at the wrist and a smell of cedar. I had no phone. They had taken the phone and given me nothing in exchange, and I'd had to decide what I was willing to carry. In the right pocket, folded in quarters, there was a sheet of paper. Brandt had run it through a copier in the back of the hearse: a life-size picture of an iron strip, black on white, with the word RIVERVIEW printed in tiny crooked letters. The real one sat in a plastic bag in a detective's glove box, a mile away. The paper was all I had.

Lead him a long way, I thought. But not to the real one.

It was not a brave thought. It was the kind you have in a dream, when you know you're dreaming and hold on to it like a rail.

…

I looked at the street behind me.

It was a quiet one. Low brick buildings, a dry cleaner's, a tire shop, a shuttered bakery with a faded awning, and over everything the smell of the river a block away, brown and cold and faintly sweet. Two blocks down, a bus shelter glowed. A cat sat on a fire hydrant. If I had been a stranger I'd have thought it was the quietest place on earth.

I knew they were there.

I couldn't see them. That was the art of it. Dunleavy had put team one in the open, as he'd promised, and then he had made them disappear. A man in a delivery van, with a thermos. A woman at the bus shelter, with a shopping bag. Two figures in coveralls on a rooftop across the street, behind a vent. A cab, idling at the corner, with no fare. They were all around me. I could feel them the way you feel eyes in a dark theater. And twenty yards behind me, at the mouth of a doorway, where I had asked him to stand, Devon Tran leaned against a wall with his arms folded and his chin down, trying to look like a man waiting for a girlfriend.

Head of the alley, I told myself. Not one step more.

I put the toe of my shoe on the edge of the circle of light. I did not cross it.

Nine thirty came and went.

…

The first clap was so soft I thought I'd imagined it.

It came from deep in the alley, from the dark, from somewhere far down the left-hand wall: the small dry smack of two palms meeting. Pat. Like the tap of a moth against a lamp. I held my breath. The wind moved a scrap of paper across the pavement. And then:

Pat. Pat.

Two.

I went cold.

I stood absolutely still. My hands were in my pockets and I could feel the nails of my fingers digging into my palms, and I thought of a hallway, a long one, with a runner of faded red carpet and a row of closed doors, and a woman in a green cardigan crouching at the end of it with her face pressed to the wall.

Found you, she used to say.

It was a game. It was the only game she ever played with me, and I played it on every visit, every summer weekend of my life until I was nine. She would count. She would hide. I would wait, in the hallway, with my eyes shut, and listen. She never made a sound while she moved, not a creak, not a breath. Then, from somewhere in the dark, she would clap. Once. Twice. Three times. She would wait until I had counted the three, and the third, I knew, was the signal for her to step out from behind a door, with her arms wide, smiling, and say, softly, in her low funny rasp of a voice:

Found you, June.

Pat.

Three.

…

I will never be able to explain what I felt in that moment.

I have tried. I have lain awake in the dark and tried to put words to it, and every word is a lie. I can say it was fear, and it was. I can say it was grief. But there was something underneath those, something older and simpler and more shameful. It was hope. For one half second, before the part of my mind that had died in a bathroom and woken in a bed could catch up with the part that was a little girl, I thought: it's her.

She isn't dead. They told me wrong. She's been hiding. She's been waiting in the dark, down the alley, all this time, and she is going to step out from behind a door.

I took a step.

I don't know that I decided to. My foot moved on its own. It came down on the edge of the light, and over it, onto the dark, and I felt a long cold shudder of the wet brick air go over my face.

"June," Devon said, behind me, very low. "June."

I stopped. I said, "I know." I said it aloud, to the air, in a voice I didn't recognize, and I dragged my foot back an inch, to the line.

A door opened in the dark.

…

It was a small one. It was set low into the left-hand wall, thirty feet down the alley, a plain gray steel door with a push bar, and it swung out slowly with a long tired creak. A bar of pale light came out of it onto the cobbles. Something stood in the light.

It was not my grandmother.

It was a woman, slim and not tall, in a long dark raincoat that was belted too tight. She wore a surgical mask over the lower half of her face and a knitted cap pulled down to her eyebrows, and the hair under it, I could tell, had been tucked up out of sight. Her hands were in her pockets. She stood in the doorway for a long moment, looking down the alley toward me, and she did not clap again.

She walked up the lane.

Her heels rang on the brick. Click, click, click. She came out of the dark at a slow steady pace and entered my circle of light and stopped, eight feet away, and I smelled her before I saw her face. Not soap. Something else. Powder and cigarette smoke and a sad, cheap, flowery perfume that I had last smelled in a bank, in a gray room, through a glass.

"Hello, June," said Rhonda Tillis.

…

I had expected a monster.

I'd expected someone broad and cold. I had looked at the Rhonda in the photograph, the girl with the bright laughing mouth, young, with her arm around a man in a tweed jacket, and I had thought, so that's who you were before. I had looked at the Rhonda in the bank's lobby on the security video, a thin pale stooped woman hunching along a wall, and I had thought, so that's who you became. I had thought of her as a stick figure in a story that other people were telling. She was not one.

She had a face. Above the mask, her eyes were large and brown and red-rimmed, and there were fine lines at the corners, and they were bright with something that might have been tears. She looked tired. She looked like someone who had not slept in a week. She looked, I thought, like a person who had been carrying something heavy a very long way.

"You did very well," she said. "I'd thought you'd run."

"Where's my mother?"

"You're a smart girl. I told him. I said, she'll know the clap. She'll know it's a game." The brown eyes crinkled. "He didn't believe me. It was your grandmother's. Ida taught it to all of us, you know. When we were children."

"Where is my mother?"

"Safe." A short breath behind the cloth. "For the moment. She's where she belongs, at the end of the lane, with a chair and a blanket. She's a little bruised. She's a good woman, your mother. She never once asked for a thing."

"Let her go."

"I can't."

"Then take me to her."

Her eyes slid away. They slid past me to the street, and the bus shelter, and the van, and the cab, and the long slow quiet of the block. "Not here," she said softly. "We can't do this here. Come into the lane. It's fifty feet, that's all. No one will touch you. I swear."

"I'm not allowed."

"Yes. I know. The captain." The mask moved faintly. "He's very good, your captain. He's put a great many people in a great many windows. He thinks that's what matters, to be seen." She looked back at me. "Your grandmother really loved you, June. She left you the last road, too."

…

I should have been ready for it.

I should have known, from everything I'd read and heard and lived, that the way to hurt a person is to say the one name that is already a wound. I knew, and it didn't help. It landed under my ribs, and for a moment, a very short one, I could not breathe.

The last road, I thought. She knows about the road.

"What road?" I said.

"You'll see."

"What do you want me to lead you to?"

"It isn't me." She shook her head. "It was never me. I only wanted to keep my mother out of it."

It was the nearest thing to a truth that I had yet heard. It rang, a thin small note, like a spoon on glass. I looked at her. I looked at her hands, deep in her coat pockets, at the way her shoulders were drawn up, as if against a blow, and I saw that she was holding the cloth of her coat so tightly that the stitching had begun to pull.

"You're afraid," I said.

"Lead right," said Rhonda, "and she lives."

"Where is Voss?"

I said it quietly. I said it the way you would say a name in a church.

And she blinked.

It was only a blink. It was so quick that if I had not been looking, I'd have missed it. Her whole face stayed still above the mask. But the eyes flickered, once, a tiny hurried movement toward the dark end of the alley and back, and in that moment I saw it. I saw what was behind them. It was not hatred. It was not triumph. It was the look of a mouse in a room with a cat: bright, flat, and entirely without hope.

She's afraid of him, I thought. She's more afraid of him than I am.

He sent her out here to walk in front.

…

"Come," said Rhonda.

She did not reach for me. She only stood aside, with a small stiff gesture, as a hostess would make to show a guest into a room, and I looked down the alley. I did not move. I looked at the black walls, the dripping drainpipes, the old shuttered doors pasted with the ghost-posters of long-dead shows, and the wet cobbles gleaming faintly in a line, down to the end.

Where there was a light.

It was a small one. It had not been there before. It came on at the far end, perhaps sixty yards away, with a soft electric tick, and it did not shine white or yellow. It was red.

A deep, dull, thick, bloody red, like a coal. It filled the end of the lane with a sullen glow, and it showed me, a dark shape in the middle of the glow, a wooden chair.

A woman was tied to it.

She sat bolt upright in a pool of red with her wrists bound behind her. Her head hung forward. Her hair had come down. Her coat was torn at the shoulder, and a long raw scratch ran down one cheek, and across her mouth a strip of silver tape had been pressed flat from ear to ear. I knew the shape of her. I knew it the way I knew the shape of my own hand.

And standing behind the chair, a big dark shape with its face turned up into the lamp, one pale hand resting on the back of my mother's neck, stood a man in a long coat.

He held something against his chest.

It was a camera. An old one, black and heavy, with a bellows and a brass lens as wide as a saucer, of the kind that I had seen in museums and on the walls of Grandma's hall. He held it the way a priest holds a cup. The lens was pointed up the alley.

It was pointed straight at me.