Despite the events of the weekend, she made it through Spanish without her usual sense
of blurriness or panic, spent two hours in Sterling powering through the last of her reading
for her Shakespeare section, and then ate her usual double-serving lunch. She felt awake,
focused the way she was on basso belladonna but without the heart-twitching jitters. And
to think, all it had taken was an attempt on her life and a visit to the borderlands of hell. If only she’d known sooner.
That morning, North had been hovering in the Vanderbilt courtyard, and she’d muttered
that she wouldn’t be free until after lunch. Sure enough, he was waiting when she emerged
from the dining hall, and they set out together up College to Prospect. They were nearly to
Ingalls Rink when she realized she hadn’t seen a single Gray—no, that wasn’t quite true.
She saw them behind columns, darting into alleys. They’re afraid of him, she realized. She remembered him standing in the river, smiling. There are worse things than death, Miss Stern.
Alex had to keep consulting her phone as she cut down to Mansfield. She still couldn’t
quite hold the map of New Haven in her head. She knew the main arteries of the Yale campus, the routes she walked each week to class, but the rest of the body was vague and
shapeless to her. She was headed toward a neighborhood she’d driven with Darlington once in his old battered Mercedes. He’d shown her the old Winchester Repeating Arms factory, which had been partially turned into fancy lofts, the line running straight down the
building where the paint gave way to raw brick—the exact moment when the developer had run out of money. He’d gestured to the sad grid of Science Park—Yale’s bid for medical-tech investment in the nineties.
“I guess it didn’t work,” Alex had said, noting the boarded-up windows and empty parking lot.
“In the words of my grandfather, this town has been fucked from the start.” Darlington
had leaned on the gas, as if Alex had witnessed some embarrassing family spat at the Thanksgiving table. They’d passed the cheap row houses and apartment buildings where
workmen had lived during the Winchester days, then, farther up the slope of Science Hill,
the homes that had belonged to the company’s foremen, their houses built of brick instead
of wood, their lawns wider and trimmed by hedges. Up the hill, farther and farther, solid
homes giving way to grand mansions and, at last, the imposing, wooded sprawl of the Marsh Botanical Garden, as if a spell had been lifted.
But today, Alex wouldn’t go to the top of the hill. She kept to the shallows, the weathered row houses, barren yards, liquor stores notched into the corners. Detective Turner had said Tara lived on Woodland, and even without the uniform posted at the door,
Alex would have had no trouble picking out the dead girl’s place. Across the street, a woman leaned against the fence bordering her yard, arms draped over the chain links as if
caught in a slow-motion dive, gazing at the ugly apartment building as if it might start speaking. Two guys in tracksuits stood talking on the sidewalk, their bodies turned toward
the scrubby front lawn of Tara’s building but keeping a coy distance. Alex couldn’t blame
them. Trouble had a way of catching.
“Most cities are palimpsests,” Darlington had once told her. When she’d searched for
the word’s meaning, it had taken her three starts to find the right spelling. “Built over and over again so you can’t remember what went where. But New Haven wears its scars. The
big highways that run the wrong way, the dead office parks, the vistas that stretch into nothing but power lines. No one realizes how much life happens between the wounds, how much it has to offer. It’s a city built to make you want to keep driving away from it.”
Tara had lived in the ridges of one of those scars.
Alex hadn’t worn her peacoat, hadn’t pulled her hair back. It was easy for her to fit in
here and she didn’t want to draw notice.
She set a slow pace, stopped well down the block as if waiting for someone, checked
her phone, glanced at North just long enough to detect his frustrated expression.