Two Months of Silence

"Some people cry so that the world will notice. Others hold it in so that no one will have to."

It rained on the first Monday of October, a thin, stubborn rain that slid down the windows of the Suffolk County Police Department as if the building itself were quietly weeping. Lauren Vance had been awake since four. She stood at the glass with a paper cup of coffee gone cold in her hand, watching the traffic on Tremont Street crawl through the gray, and she told herself that she was only waiting for the day to begin.

She was not. She had been waiting for something else for weeks, without knowing what it was.

"Captain." Danny Reyes knocked twice on the open door and leaned in, his tie crooked as always. "The consulate people are downstairs. There is a woman with them. She does not speak much English, and she brought her own umbrella, which she will not let anyone hold."

"Send them up."

"Captain, I should warn you, the file they sent over is thin. Two months of nothing. It will be the kind of case where we are mostly going to say sorry."

Lauren turned from the window. Danny was twenty-nine and still believed that bad news could be softened by tone, and she had never found the heart to correct him. "Thank you, Danny. Bring tea, not coffee. The coffee here is not fit for a guest."

He grinned in spite of himself and went.

She set the cup on the sill and straightened her jacket. In the glass her reflection looked back at her, a woman of thirty-nine with brown hair pinned in a plain knot and gray eyes that had stopped being surprised by things some years ago. The Northeast Special Cases Task Force had been her superintendent's idea, a way to keep her away from the front line of Homicide after the business with Julian Frost, and Lauren had accepted it the way one accepts a hospital gown. It was a room full of other people's missing children, cold files and foreign names, and no one had ever been in a hurry to look for any of them.

Perhaps that was why she did the work so well. She understood the particular patience of waiting.

The elevator chimed down the hall. She heard the soft squeak of rubber soles, a man's voice murmuring in careful, official English, and under it another sound, light and dry, like a bird hopping across paper. She had expected a grieving mother to walk heavily. This one did not.

The woman who came through the door was barely five feet tall.

She wore a navy cardigan buttoned to the throat, gray slacks, and flat black shoes polished until they shone. Her hair was white and cut very short, and she carried a closed umbrella in one hand and a clear plastic bag in the other, and in the bag, neatly sorted, there were perhaps a dozen dried plums. She stopped three steps inside the room and bowed her head to Lauren, exactly once, with a dignity that made the consulate officer behind her look suddenly like a boy.

"Captain Vance," said the officer, a pleasant young man called Daniel Brooks, from the State Department's office for overseas citizens, who had spent two years at the American consulate in Chengdu and spoke careful, schoolbook Mandarin. "This is Mrs. Jiang Meihua, from Chengdu. She is seventy-one years old. She flew in on Saturday. Her daughter is Jiang Yingying, twenty-four, a graduate student in comparative literature at Boston University."

"Please sit, Mrs. Jiang." Lauren came around the desk and drew out the best chair in the room herself. "I am very sorry that you had to come so far."

Mr. Brooks translated. The old woman listened without moving, and then she said something short and quiet, and he hesitated before he rendered it.

"She says you are not to be sorry yet. She says it is too early to be sorry."

Lauren paused with her hand on the back of the chair.

Something in her chest turned over, slowly, the way a stone turns in a riverbed when the water changes. It was a small thing, one sentence from a woman who had not even sat down, and yet it went through her more cleanly than any speech of grief she had heard in twenty years on the job. Not yet. Everyone who came into this office was already sorry. They came to be told that they were right to be. This woman had come to be told that she was not.

"Then I won't be," said Lauren. "Not until we know."

…

The file was thin, as Danny had said.

Jiang Yingying had arrived in Boston two Septembers ago on a scholarship, had finished her first year with distinction, and had spent the following summer, by arrangement with the department, as an editorial intern at a Manhattan publisher called Harrow & Finch. The internship was meant to run until the end of August. She had stayed on in a rented room in Queens, and then in the first week of August she had stopped answering her messages.

That was the whole of it. Two months of silence, spread across a few pages.

"She called her mother every Sunday," said Mr. Brooks, reading from his notes. "Always at eight in the evening, Chengdu time being, of course, the next morning. Never missed one in two years. The last call was Sunday the fourth of August. Then nothing. The mother waited three weeks, then called the consulate, and the consulate, being a consulate, took the rest of the summer to write to anyone. The consulate wrote to the university. The university said she had withdrawn from her fall classes, and that the matter was personal."

"Personal," said Lauren.

"That is the word they used."

She looked down at the single photograph clipped to the first page. It had been taken in a university library, with a shelf of spines blurred behind it. The girl in it was slight and serious, with round glasses and a black bob that had been cut by someone who loved her, and she was looking at something outside the frame with such total absorption that she seemed not to know she was being photographed. Her fingernails, resting on the book in front of her, were bitten down to the quick.

Lauren knew that habit. Her own daughter had done the same during every exam of her life.

"Mrs. Jiang," she said slowly, and waited for Mr. Brooks to catch up. "Did Yingying ever say anything to you, anything at all, about being afraid? About someone she disliked, or someone who disliked her?"

The old woman shook her head. Then, with the same economy, she opened the plastic bag, took out one dried plum, and set it on the edge of the desk beside the photograph. She did not say what it was for. She only looked at it for a moment, and Lauren saw her thumb brush the table once, lightly, as if she were smoothing a child's blanket.

Then she drew a folded sheet of lined paper from her cardigan pocket and spread it flat on the desk beside the plum. It was covered in tiny, upright handwriting, a column of dates down the left side, each one followed by a short stroke of the pen. There were nine of them. Lauren looked at the dates for a moment before she understood that they were Sundays.

"She says she writes down every Sunday that her daughter does not call," said Mr. Brooks quietly. "So that she will not lose count."

"She says," said Mr. Brooks, and cleared his throat, "that the girl is very stubborn, and that when she wants something she does not tell people. She says she told her mother that she was going to New York to learn about books. But she says her daughter has never wanted to learn about books. Her daughter has only ever wanted to learn about people who were not there anymore."

The rain tapped on the glass. Down the hall a phone began to ring and was answered.

Lauren did not say anything for a while. She had learned, in this profession, that silence is a tool that cuts both ways, and that the secret to using it was never to fill it with your own noise. Mrs. Jiang sat with her small hands folded on her umbrella and her back straight, looking at the plum, and for a second the light from the window fell across the side of her face, and Lauren saw that her eyelids were swollen, and that she had pressed a little powder across them to hide it.

She had not cried in front of strangers. She had not cried in front of her own daughter's photograph. She had saved it, Lauren realized, for somewhere no one could see.

The sight made Lauren's throat tighten. She looked away, at the wet window, and let the feeling pass the way a car's headlights pass across a ceiling.

"Who did she work for at the publisher?" she asked at last.

Mr. Brooks turned a page. "A senior editor. A Ms. Sophia Lindqvist. She appears in the last four messages that Yingying sent to her mother. The mother says Yingying admired her very much."

"Do we have an address for Ms. Lindqvist?"

"We have the publisher's address. Nothing more."

"Good." Lauren closed the folder. "Then I will have to go and ask her myself."

…

At half past eleven the door opened again, without a knock.

"I smelled tea," said a voice, "and it was a lie. This building smells like wet carpet and regret. Hello, Laurie."

She did not turn around at once. She waited for the little pull in her ribs that always came when he walked in unannounced, the one that said alive, still alive, and she let it settle before she looked.

Ethan Vance stood in the doorway with his raincoat over one arm and a paper bag from a bakery in his hand. He was thirty-four, with their father's dark hair going early to gray at the temples, and a face that looked amused even when it was not. He wore a navy sweater, an old watch on a leather strap, and a shirt that someone had ironed a little too carefully. There was a pale seam across his left palm, where the glass had cut it on the Aurelia Star, and on cold days like this one he favored the right leg when he walked.

Lauren looked at him for a long moment.

"How are you?" she said, because she had to.

"Alive," said Ethan. "It's my answer these days. I find it more accurate than fine."

She nodded. She had learned not to push. "You're early."

"I'm exactly punctual. You're simply not accustomed to it." He came in, set down the bag, and glanced at the old woman in the chair, and the amusement in his face went quiet the way a lamp goes down. "I'm sorry. I did not know you had company."

"This is Mrs. Jiang. Mrs. Jiang, this is my brother, Ethan. He is joining us on the case."

"Is he?" said Ethan lightly. Then, seeing her face, he stopped. "He is."

He bowed to the old woman, not as deeply as she had bowed, but with the same seriousness, and she studied him with sharp, dark, unhurried eyes. Then she did something Lauren had not expected. She reached into the plastic bag, took out one of the dried plums, and held it toward him on her flat palm.

Ethan took it. He looked at it, then at her, and put it in his mouth.

"Sour," he said gravely, in English, and then, because she did not understand, he made the face a man makes when a plum is sour, and for the first time since she had walked into the room, Mrs. Jiang smiled. It was a brief, crooked smile, with a missing tooth at the corner, and it went through the office like a draft through a shut house.

"Thank you," Ethan said. "Delicious. Very good."

Mr. Brooks, who had been working a long time in a profession of formal sentences, wiped his forehead and said nothing.

…

When they were gone, when the elevator had sighed shut around the old woman and her umbrella and her careful plastic bag, Ethan went to the window and stood beside his sister without a word. He smelled of rain and cardamom and the faint metallic tang of the subway. Beneath that, as always, there was the thing that no one else could have found on him.

Not him. His hands, the cuffs of the sweater, the air around the paper bag. The memory of a hundred kitchens.

"You can tell," said Lauren quietly. "Can't you? Just from the folder."

"I can tell that a great many people have touched it." He did not turn. "Mr. Brooks's cologne. Danny's cigarette habit, the one he thinks you don't know about. The old woman's ginger, and camphor, the kind that comes in a tiny blue jar." He paused. "And something else. Faint, sweet, almost nothing. Near the corner of the photograph."

The room seemed to grow very still.

She had been waiting for him to say it. She had half hoped he would not.

The Vances had always kept this to themselves. It had come down from their father, Walter, who had spent forty years as a morgue attendant in Worcester and who had taught his children, long before they could have understood why, that some things in the world could be known by their scent alone. Human flesh. Not blood, not decay, nothing so crude. It was something finer and stranger, a sweetish, mineral note, like a copper coin held in the mouth, with a thread of milk underneath. Cooked or raw, living or dead, under bleach or perfume or smoke, Lauren could always find it. And Ethan, who had spent ten years learning to taste, could find it better than she could.

No court would accept it. It could not be photographed or sworn to or entered into evidence. It was only a compass, a needle that swung, and the Vances had learned to follow it in silence.

"On the photograph?" she said.

"On the margin of the photograph. Where a thumb would hold it." He looked at his own left hand, the pale seam across the palm, then curled it shut. "It could be anything, Laurie. A butcher's thumb. A hospital worker. It could be the person who printed it."

"Or it could be the person who took it."

"Or that." He turned at last, and she saw that he was no longer smiling. The brightness had gone from his face, and behind it was the sharp, tired, quiet man who had come out of the sea off Port Canaveral fourteen months earlier and said to her on the dock, I don't think I can go back to being only a cook. "She said it was too early to be sorry."

"She did."

"Then let's be very careful," said Ethan, "not to make her wrong."

Outside, the rain began to ease. A thin gray light came up behind the clouds, and the plum Mrs. Jiang had left on the edge of the desk rolled slightly in the draft and came to rest against the folder, small and dark and perfectly round, as if it had been put there to hold the place.