Chapter Four
Farkas
Tammy walks across the parking lot at nine-twelve, hunched into her red coat against the wind. She has a habit I haven't noticed before — she touches her car keys to her lips before she puts them in the lock. A small, private gesture. A prayer or a superstition or both.
I take her before she can turn the key.
I don't pull her into the alcove or put my hand over her throat. I step out of the dark behind the Oldsmobile and I'm beside her before she registers me, and I cover her mouth with my palm gently and lower her to the ground beside the rear tire of her own car.
"Be still," I say, quietly, against her ear. I haven't spoken in many months. The sound of my own voice is strange to me. "Be still. You won't be hurt."
She's rigid. Her eyes are wide. Her breath is fast against my palm.
I don't let her see my face. I keep behind her. I tilt her head to the side and find the artery beneath the line of her jaw and I open my mouth and I take what I need.
The blood comes warm and quick. She slumps against me. Her body goes loose. I hold her up so she doesn't strike the asphalt.
Her memories open.
I reach.
This is what I came for. I'm not interested in her boss or her son or her husband from many years ago. I push past the surfaces of Tammy's mind and I begin to search.
She knows Jenny.
She knows her better than anyone. She's worked beside her for eight months. She's watched her come in tired and leave tired. She's been the one to ask her if she's eaten and to push her about her family and to make her laugh on slow Thursday shifts.
I see Jenny through Tammy's eyes again and again. The two of them behind the counter. The two of them in the parking lot at the end of a shift. The two of them in the breakroom, Jenny picking at a sandwich she didn't want, Tammy watching her without seeming to.
There's more.
Conversations. Small fragments. Jenny saying I dropped out two years ago.
Jenny saying My father is a doctor in Omaha.
My mother is a nurse. Jenny saying Lin. L-I-N.
Jenny saying University of Nebraska. The Lincoln campus.
Jenny saying I don't want to talk about it.
Jenny shutting down a conversation she'd started by accident.
And then — once — months ago — Jenny saying:
I used to play the violin. I was going to study it.
Are you any good?
I was, once.
The conversation ends there. Jenny turned away. Tammy didn't push.
I pull back from the feeding. I lower Tammy the rest of the way to the asphalt beside her car. Her head rolls back. Her eyes are half-open and unseeing. The breath fogs in front of her mouth in slow, regular puffs.
I take the keys from her loose hand and unlock the driver's side door of the Oldsmobile. Lifting her gently into the seat, I arrange her against the headrest, her coat pulled tight, her purse on her lap. Then I close the door and look at her through the window.
She'll wake in twenty or thirty minutes. The cold of the car will help her come around. She'll be foggy and confused and she'll probably blame herself for falling asleep at the wheel. She won't remember me.
I leave her keys on the dashboard.
I walk away from the Oldsmobile and across the lot. The wind is in my face. The cold doesn't reach me tonight. I have what I came for.
Jenny Lin. Twenty-three years old. Dropped out of the University of Nebraska two years ago. Parents in Omaha. Her father is a doctor. Her mother is a nurse. She used to play the violin. She used to be good at it.
She used to be good at it.
The phrase repeats in my head as I walk. I was, once. The sound of her saying it. The look that must have crossed her face. The way she turned away.
I drive home through the dark fields. The eastern sky is beginning to gray when I let myself in through the back door. I don't have much time. I cross to the kitchen table and lift the phone receiver from the cradle.
I dial the number from memory. The cord is taut against the wall.
The line rings four times. Then there's a click, and a voice.
"Whitfield."
"It's me."
There's a pause, brief and professional. The voice on the other end shifts.
"Sir. Good morning."
It's three in the morning where he is. He doesn't say so.
"I have a name," I say. "Jenny Lin. L-I-N. She attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. She left two years ago without a degree. Her father is a doctor in Omaha. Her mother is a nurse."
"Yes, sir."
"I require two things. The home address of the parents."
"Of course, sir."
"And the name and home address of a music faculty member at the university who'd have known her during her time there. Someone she studied with, or who supervised her. The violin specifically."
"The violin," Whitfield repeats. There's the faint scratch of a pen on paper. "Understood, sir."
"How long."
"Forty-eight hours, sir. I can have a courier deliver it by Monday evening."
"Acceptable."
"Sooner is better, sir?"
"Sooner is always better."
"I'll have it by Monday afternoon."
"Thank you."
There's another brief pause. Whitfield clears his throat.
"Is there anything else, sir?"
"No."
"Very well." He hesitates. Whitfield rarely hesitates. "Sir, may I ask — is everything in order?"
I look at the empty kitchen. The phone cord against my wrist. The light beginning to gray the edge of the blackout fabric over the kitchen window.
"Yes," I say. "Everything's in order."
"Very good, sir."
I hang up the receiver.
I have another matter to attend to before the sun comes up.
I take an object from the inside pocket of my coat, a thing wrapped in damp cloth.
A branch of winter jasmine from a greenhouse in Omaha I've known the location of for many years.
The greenhouse owner doesn't know me. He sells exotics to florists across three states.
I left him the money in a paper sleeve on his front step at four this morning with a note.
The branch was on the counter in his back room with my name on the wrapper by midnight.
I cross the kitchen and let myself back out into the cold.
The drive to the apartment complex takes ten minutes. I park half a block down. I walk.
The Granada is in its usual spot, dusted with a fresh layer of snow that's fallen in the last hour. I crouch beside the driver's side and I work the lock the way I've worked a hundred locks across a hundred years. The pin tumblers give without resistance.
I open the door. I lay the branch carefully on the passenger seat.
I close the door. I press the lock down on the inside before I do.
I linger beside the car for a moment, looking at the branch through the glass. Yellow against the gray vinyl. The cold hasn't damaged the petals yet. They won't last long in this air, but they'll last long enough.
I walk back to the van.
The sky is fully gray by the time I let myself back in through the door of the farmhouse. The day is coming. I can feel it already in the slowness of my limbs.
I go to the interior room. I sit on the floor and close my eyes.
She's at the violin behind my eyelids, but this time I can see the violin.
The case in the corner of her room is no longer a question.
I know what's inside it. I know what she used to do with it.
I know the shape of it pressed against her shoulder, her left hand wrapped around the neck, her right hand drawing the bow.
I was, once.
I sit with that until the sun comes up and I fall into the still dark place that passes for my sleep.
* * *
I rise at full dark. The phone hasn't rung. It won't ring until Whitfield has the information. There's nothing for me to do but wait.
I don't wait.
I drive the van to her apartment complex. I park half a block down. I walk.
The window on the second floor at the southeast corner is dark. The room behind it is quiet. I climb the brick as I did last night, and the latch on her window gives as it did. I step into her room.
She's asleep.
She's on her side, curled the same way she was last night, one hand tucked beneath her cheek.
The stone is still on the nightstand. The lamp is off. The streetlight beyond the window throws a thin pale strip across the floor.
I look at the violin case in the corner.
I cross to it. I don't touch it. I crouch in front of it. The handle is worn smooth in the center where her hand has held it many times. The leather there is soft.
I look at it for a long time.
I don't open it. The case isn't mine. The thing inside isn't mine. There'll come a day when she'll open it again, and I want to be the kind of creature who waited for that day instead of the kind of creature who looked first.
I rise and cross back to the bed.
She has shifted in her sleep. Her face is turned a little more toward the window.
The blanket has slipped down to her waist and one of her arms is exposed to the air of the room, the pale inside of her wrist turned up.
I look at the faint blue veins beneath her skin, the dark line of her hair where it falls across the pillow.
I lower myself to my knees beside the bed.
She's been good. She's been very good. She used to be good at something and someone made her stop. The shape of that loss is now in me alongside everything else I've learned about her. It's a pain I didn't know I was capable of feeling on behalf of another person.
I look at her hand on the pillow, the thin white scar near her index finger.
I don't touch her.
I stay until the first gray shows in the east, and then I climb back out the window and close it carefully behind me, and I go home.
* * *
Jenny
I wake Saturday morning to gray light through the curtain and the tick of the heat kicking on through the vent.
I lie in bed for a while. Saturday means a noon-to-eight shift at Mr. Burger, which is the longest shift of the week but also the one with the latest start, so I have time.
I stare at the ceiling. The stone is on the nightstand.
The light in the room is the dull gray of a winter morning with low clouds.