The first row of bricks crumbled under the hammer’s claw. The edges were weak. They would not hold the center. Will had to use his bare hands to scoop out the pieces. Finally, by the third row, he had found a more successful system. He had to use precision with every swing of the hammer in order to wedge the claw into the cracks. Sand was packed into the joints. It got into Will’s eyes, flew up into his mouth. He clenched his teeth. He thought of himself as a machine as he worked back and forth across the room, clearing each section brick by brick, digging a few inches into the dirt to see what was underneath.
He was a third of the way through when the futility overwhelmed him. He kicked away the debris covering the next section, then the next. He used Amanda’s Maglite to study each crack and crevice. The bricks were tight. Nothing had disturbed them—not in Will’s lifetime, or the building’s lifetime, or at any time at all.
Nothing. Just like the walls. There was nothing.
“Dammit!” Will flung the hammer across the room. He felt a tearing in his bicep. The muscle spasmed. Will clutched his arm. He stared into the loam, the useless fruits of his labor.
Will thought about his revenge fantasies from the Grady ER. His mind flashed up an image of Amanda—terrified, willing to answer any question he asked. He’d been in plenty of fights during his lifetime, but he’d never used his fists on a woman. Amanda was probably sleeping like a baby back in her hospital bed while Will was chasing ghosts that he wasn’t even sure he wanted to find.
He clenched his hands. There were tiny rips up and down his fingers—like paper cuts, only deeper. His sutured ankle felt like it was on fire. He tried to stand, but his knees wouldn’t hold him. He forced himself up to standing. This time he stumbled. He grabbed onto one of the studs. A splinter dug into his palm. He screamed just to let out some of the pain. There was not a muscle in his body that did not ache.
All for nothing.
Will took his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face. He grabbed his jacket off the nail. The streetlight was no longer strobing when he pulled himself out of the basement. The air was so crisp that he started coughing. He spit out more chunks of plaster. Will went to the faucet in the middle of the yard. It was the same one he’d used as a kid during the summer months when Mrs. Flannigan locked them all out of the house and told them not to come back until suppertime. The pump handle was nearly rusted through.
Carefully, Will moved the lever up and down until a thin stream of water came out of the spigot. He put his mouth to the water and drank until he felt knives in his stomach. Then he put his head under the stream and washed off the grime. His eyes stung from the water. There were probably chemicals in there that he didn’t want to know about. A tannery had operated down the street when he was growing up. Will had probably drunk enough benzene to fill a cancer ward.
Another souvenir from his childhood.
He pushed himself up, using the pump for leverage. The handle snapped off. Will could only shake his head. He tossed the handle into the yard and started the long walk home.
Will sat at his kitchen table, hands clutching a blue file folder. His eyes wouldn’t stay open. He was punch-drunk from exhaustion. He hadn’t bothered to go to bed. By the time he got home, it was already three in the morning. He had to leave by four to get to the airport in time for the business travelers. He’d taken a shower. He’d cooked a breakfast he couldn’t eat. He’d walked the dog around the block. He’d shined his scuffed shoes. He’d put on a suit and tie. He’d used Bactine on the thousands of tiny cuts and blisters on his hands. He’d wiped away the weird pink fluid seeping through the Band-Aid on his ankle.
And now he couldn’t make himself get up from the table.
Will picked at the edge of the file folder. His mother’s name was neatly typed on the label stuck to the tab. Will had seen the letters so many times that they were burned into his retinas. He was twenty-two years old before he finally gained access to her information. There was a lot of paperwork that had to be filled out. He’d had to go down to the courthouse. There were other things, too, all of which involved navigating the juvenile justice system. The biggest obstacle was Will. He’d had to get to a point in his life where the prospect of going before a judge didn’t bring on a cold sweat.
Betty came in through the dog door. She gave Will a curious look. The dog was adopted, an embarrassingly tiny Chihuahua mix that had come to Will through no fault of his own. She put her front feet on his thigh. She looked perplexed when Will didn’t lean back to let her into his lap. After a while, she gave up, circling the floor three times before settling down in front of her food bowls.
Will let his gaze fall back to the file, his mother’s name. The black typed letters were sharp on the white label. Not that it was white anymore. Will had rubbed his fingers along her name so many times that he’d yellowed the paper label.
He opened the file. The first page was what you’d usually find in a police report. The date was followed by the case number at the top. Then there was the section for the more salient details. Name, address, weight, height, cause of death.
Homicide.
Will stared at his mother’s picture. Polaroid. It was taken years before her death. She was thirteen, maybe fourteen. As with the label, the photo was yellowed from being handled so much. Or maybe age had broken down the processing chemicals. She was standing in front of a Christmas tree. Will had been told the camera was a gift from her parents. She was holding up a pair of socks, probably another gift. There was a smile on her face.
Will wasn’t the type of man to stare in the mirror, but he’d spent plenty of time examining his features one by one, trying to find similarities between himself and his mother. They had the same almond shape to their eyes. Even in the faded photo, he could see the color was the same blue. His blond hair was sandy, shaded more toward brown than his mother’s almost yellow curls. One of his bottom teeth was slightly crooked like hers. She was wearing a retainer in the photo. The tooth had probably been pulled back into line by the time she was murdered.
Will lined up the photo to the edge of the front page, making sure to keep the paper clip in the same spot. He turned to the second page. His eyes couldn’t focus on the words. The text jumped around. Will blinked several times, then stared at the first word of the first line. He knew it by heart, so it came easy to him.
“Victim.”
Will swallowed. He read the next words.
“… was found at Techwood Homes.”
Will closed the file. There was no need to read through the details again. They were ingrained in his memory. They were a part of his waking existence.
He looked at his mother’s name again. The letters weren’t so crisp this time. If his brain hadn’t filled in the words, he doubted he’d be able to make them out.
Will had never been much of a reader. The words moved around the page. The letters transposed. Over the years, he’d figured out some tricks to help him pass for more fluent. A ruler under a line of text kept one row from blending in with another. He used his fingers to isolate difficult words, then repeated the sentence in his head to test for sense. Still, it took him twice as long as Faith to fill out the various reports that had to be submitted on a daily basis. That a person like Will had chosen a career that relied so heavily on paperwork was something Dante could’ve written about.
Will was in college by the time he figured out that he had dyslexia. Or, rather, he had been told. It was the fifteenth anniversary of John Lennon’s death. Will’s music appreciation professor was talking about how it was believed that Lennon had dyslexia. In great detail, she described the signs and symptoms of the disorder. She could’ve been reading from the book of Will’s life. In fact, the woman had basically delivered a soliloquy directly to Will on the gift of being different.