City of Liars
1. The Vanishing - 1927
Inside the park, seated on a bench that flanked one of its well-groomed paths, a tiny girl bundled in matching blue coat, hat, and leggings clutched a much-loved bear in one gloved hand.
Cheeks flushed with the cold, she tugged at the scarf of the woman sitting next to her.
“Peas, Bidget,” she said, her toddler-version of ‘please.’
The woman named Bridget sighed. Accustomed as she had been as a child to Ireland’s inclement weather and the endless peat fires her family had burned in their cottage to keep warm, she knew better than to allow her small charge to stay outdoors overlong in the snow.
“Time to go home now, Ella,” she said, gathering the items they’d brought for their midwinter tea party: miniature cups and saucers, and a tiny pitcher far more delicate than any Bridget’s family owned at home.
“Your mum would have my head, did I let you stay out here.”
Ella’s lower lip began to tremble. “Peas,” she said again, widening her eyes in entreaty.
Bridget was about to insist, but then she looked at the girl—chestnut curls peeping out from under her hat, tongue out to catch the drifting flakes—and didn’t have the heart.
Ella was, after all, barely three. Cooped up in that fancy apartment of hers most of the time, forced into starched eyelet dresses and already being groomed to sit perfectly at table, not to run or shout or play…
small wonder she wanted to stay outside as long as she could.
“One more minute, then,” she said, resting her palm against the girl’s icy cheek.
Ella smiled at her, a smile of such surpassing sweetness that, given what came afterward, Bridget would remember it for the rest of her life.
Long after she had been fired from the Carters’ employ for gross negligence, she would sit in the rocking chair of her boarding house room, knitting needles forgotten, and envision a universe in which she and Ella left the park hand in hand, crossing the street and going upstairs for chocolate and biscuits before she tucked the little girl under the quilt with Teddy for an afternoon nap.
But that was not to be.
The wind swirled around Ella’s polished Mary Janes, whipping dead leaves around her ankles. She turned to watch the leaves’ flight through the air, and glimpsed a man outside the park’s fence, looking in. He held a kitten close to his chest, keeping it warm, safe from the snow.
Enchanted, Ella toddled closer, and the man waved. He picked up the kitten’s paw and made it wave too, and Ella giggled.
“Miss Ella!” Bridget called, intent on packing up the remnants of their tea party in the wicker basket that was Ella’s favorite. “Don’t you go too far, now.” She didn’t worry overmuch; Gramercy Park’s gate was locked, accessible inside and out only with a key. Still, one could never be too careful.
“Kitty!” Ella called back, her voice alight with joy. She reached the gate. The man made both of the kitten’s paws wave, one after the other, and patted its tiny head.
The tea party basket spilled, disgorging its contents into the snow. Muttering saints’ names under her breath, Bridget kneeled to pick it up.
A key flashed in the man’s hand as he opened the gate. It swung wide on well-oiled hinges, and Ella stepped through, onto the sidewalk beyond. Smiling a crocodile grin, the man bent to meet her.
If the wind could speak, perhaps it would have voiced a warning. A mute observer, it merely blew harder, in violent gusts, as Bridget stuffed the last of the cups and saucers back into the basket. She got to her feet, ready to shepherd her charge back inside. But Ella was nowhere to be found.
Bridget scanned the white-dusted lawn, looking under benches and in the forks of trees. “Miss Ella!” she called, her accent growing thicker, the way it always did when she wasn’t careful. “It’s no the time for hide and seek. D’ye come out now.”
Then she spied Ella’s prints, crisp in the new-fallen snow, and breathed a sigh of relief. Hoisting the basket higher, she followed the prints toward the fence. Her heart plummeted, landing in the pit of her stomach with a sickening whump.
Outside the wrought iron fence, the trail ended.
Where there had been two sets of footprints, now there was one—as if the child who wore those tiny Mary Janes had been lifted from the ground...
or vanished into thin air. Next to the last of the prints lay Teddy, the snow falling on his blank black button eyes.
Bridget made the sign of the cross. Guilt and fear roiled in her belly, an unsettling brew.
A silent witness, the wind swept onward, burrowing through the alleyways of lower Manhattan.
It raced alongside the elevated trains of the Bowery, swooping lower to sift snow onto the doorsteps of the speakeasies in which patrons defied Prohibition to down contraband glasses of whiskey.
Then it slowed and wandered, rattling naked branches, whipping the waters of the Hudson into a frenzy.
Taking a breath, it paused in the courtyard of a Lower East Side tenement to toy with the overhanging trees.
Beneath them, on the cracked concrete of the courtyard, three-year-old Lily Dressler stared up at the sky, watching in wonder as the snow came down.
The wood frame building where she lived was stifling in summer and frigid in winter, even crowded as their three-room apartment was with her five siblings, mother, and grandmother.
Its floors were so uneven, Lily would often sit for hours, rolling a marble from the kitchen doorway down the sloped, splintered boards into the bedroom she shared with Mama, Bubbe, and Susi.
Mama was at work, and Lily’s four older brothers wouldn’t be home until late; they were fixing machines at the garment factory, earning whatever money they could. But Lily was bored, and her big sister Susi had begged Bubbe to let them play outside, promising to look after her.
They didn’t have enough warm clothing, and as cold as it was inside the apartment, it was even worse outside, what with the wind.
But Susi had pleaded, standing next to the bags of fabric almost as big as she was, hauled home from the garment factory so she and their mother could piece them together at night.
Even though Susi was only seven, she’d stay up for hours, sewing by candlelight until the tips of her fingers were red and sore.
“Children should be children,” Bubbe always said, looking sadly at Susi hunched over her work.
And so she had let them go, saying, “Just for a few minutes, nu? Not so long that you should freeze.”
In the beginning, Susi had held Lily’s hand tight, tucking her brown curls under the hat she’d made for her little sister. But then the snow had bewitched Susi, too. It made the courtyard look almost...beautiful. Like a magic place, instead of a pit that reeked of chicken fat and pee.
Lily couldn’t help but wonder if the rest of the world looked as pretty as their courtyard. She wandered along the building, peeking her head around the edge. This was the furthest she had ever gone on her own. If her sister noticed, she would surely call Lily back.
But Susi didn’t see. Another group of children clattered down the stairs into the courtyard, calling out in Polish and Yiddish and English, scooping up snow from the ground and tossing it at Susi. She dodged, laughing, and scooped up some snow of her own.
Unseen, Lily slipped around the corner.
The wind kept her company for a bit, but it had other business.
It swept on, bringing the snowball fight in the courtyard to an abrupt finish.
Panting and soaked, Susi looked around for her little sister.
A moment ago, Lily had been standing by the side of the building, fat pink tongue out to catch the flakes. But now, where was she?
Frantic, Susi scanned the courtyard, darting between groups of children, calling her sister’s name.
She ran to the edge of the building...sure enough, there were Lily’s tiny boot prints, clear in the snow.
They went to the edge of the curb, and then disappeared, erased by the chaos of 2nd Avenue’s traffic.
Still, Susi called, louder and louder: “Lily. Lily!”
Her baby sister was everyone’s favorite. Susi’s responsibility. Surely, she had just wandered off. She had to be here somewhere.
But the city was a wolf, and a little girl like Lily its prey.
The wind wove through the ice-slick streets, speeding alongside the yellow taxicabs, leaving the slow-moving horses behind. It retraced its steps, crooning a long, regretful moan.
Inside a gilded Gramercy Park apartment, a woman wept, her daughter’s abandoned teddy bear clutched close to her chest. And two miles south, in a rat-infested tenement where the scent of chicken fat was surpassed only by the overwhelming reek of fear, another woman began to scream.