the Model Cities program. “It was supposed to clean everything up, but they built places
no one wanted to be. And then the money ran out and New Haven just has these … gaps.”
Wounds, Alex had thought at the time. He was about to say “wounds,” because the city is alive to him.
Alex looked down at her phone. Turner hadn’t replied to her texts. She hadn’t worked
up the nerve to call, but now she was here and there was nothing else to do. When he didn’t answer, she hung up and dialed back again, and then again. Alex hadn’t been anywhere near a police station since after Hellie died. Not only Hellie died that night. But to think of it in any other terms, to think of the blood, the pale pudding of Len’s brain clinging to the lip of the kitchen counter, set her mind rabbiting around her skull in panic.
At last Turner answered.
“What can I do for you, Alex?” His voice was pleasant, solicitous, as if there were no
one else he’d rather speak to.
Reply to my goddamn texts. She cleared her throat. “Hi, Detective Turner. I’d like to speak to you about Tara Hutchins.”
Turner chuckled—there was no other word for it; it was the indulgent laugh of a seventy-year-old grandfather, though Turner couldn’t have been much over thirty. Was he
always like this at the office? “Alex, you know I can’t talk about an active investigation.”
“I’m outside the police station.”
A pause. Turner’s voice was different when he answered, a bit of that jolly warmth gone. “Where?”
“Right across the street.”
Another long pause. “Train station in five.”
Alex walked Tripp’s bike the rest of the way up the block to Union Station. The air was
soft, moist with the promise of snow. She wasn’t sure if she was sweaty from the ride or
because she was never going to get used to talking to cops.
She propped the bike against a wall by the parking lot and sat down on a low concrete
bench to wait. A Gray hurried past in his undershorts, checking his watch and bustling along as if afraid he was going to miss his train. You’re not going to make that one, buddy.
Or any of the rest.
She scrolled through her phone, keeping one eye on the street as she searched Bertram
Boyce North’s name. She wanted a little context before she went asking the Lethe library
questions.
Luckily, there was plenty online. North and his fiancée were celebrities of a kind. In 1854, he and his betrothed, the young Daisy Fanning Whitlock, had been found dead in the offices of the North & Sons Carriage Company, long since demolished. Their portraits
were the first link under New Haven on the Connecticut Haunts site. North looked handsome and serious, his hair more tidily arranged than it had been in death. The only other difference was his clean white shirt, unmarred by bloodstains. Something cold slithered up her spine. Sometimes, despite her best efforts, she forgot she was seeing the
dead, even with the gore splattered all over his fancy coat and shirt. Seeing this stiff, still black-and-white photo was different. He is moldering in a grave. He is a skeleton gone to dust. She could have what was left of him dug up. They could stand by the edge of his tomb together and marvel at his bones. Alex tried to shake off the image.
Daisy Whitlock was beautiful in that dark-haired stony-eyed way that girls of that time
were. Her head was tilted slightly, only the barest hint of a smile on her lips, her curls parted in the middle and arranged in soft loops that left her neck bare. Her waist was tiny
and her white shoulders emerged from a froth of ruffles, a posy of mums and roses clutched in her delicate hands.
As for the factory where the murder had taken place, parts of it hadn’t yet been finished
at the time of North’s murder and it was never completed. North & Sons moved their operations to Boston and continued to do business until the early 1900s. There were no
photographs of the crime scene, only lurid descriptions of blood and horror, the gun—a pistol North had kept in his new offices in case of intruders—still gripped in his hand.