Then, just as I heard the deadbolt click into place, I got it.
Jenny wasn’t trying to reveal anything. She wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of all those codes and obscurities if she were. She wanted to be found. She wanted somebody to look for and eventually discover that secret self of hers, the one she kept in the smallest, most hidden of her boxes.
She wanted somebody to find her, even if she had to lay out some of the clues.
So, what kind of a moron was I, thinking that she’d meant me to start the search from where I lived, from where I was safe? I hadn’t been meant to begin at my place. I was supposed to start at hers.
Again the city dripped and melted around me, shuffling into the background of my perception as I trudged the long way to the Charles family home.
I stood outside for an eternity of long minutes trying to decide if I had the stones to go through with it. I didn’t want India to be right any more than I wanted Jenny to be dead.
A light came on in one of the upstairs windows and I could just barely make out Queen Anne’s silhouette lurking by the drapes. Was that Jenny’s room? Was she lingering over a school photo or the scarf from her twelfth birthday and wondering what she could have done to save her child’s life?
Anne never really knew her daughter any more than I had. Didn’t she deserve to know what really killed Jenny, even if that meant me?
I pulled the crumpled notepaper from my pocket, checked the directions again, and started walking.
Follow me down the way...
As the structures blurred past me my mind went back to the playlist that had put me here. There was no way Jenny could have known, in advance, that I’d go on this journey, was there? Yet the songs had all seemed to have meaning beyond their titles and writers. It had felt like they were telling me dig here, go there, find out. So I had dug and gone and found.
But what if that was just my grief shaping things?
Worse, what if it was some kind of deeply submerged guilt, some basic knowledge that, if Jenny was dead, it was because I had failed her somehow?
Had I known, even before the cops showed up at my door in their over-worn shoes and drip-dry jackets? Had I already known that my friendship with Jenny had been too thin and rickety to keep her from falling?
Something’s wrong but it still feels true drifting in the ocean of you.
When I passed the statue of Socrates in Poet’s Square, I began to get sick. A clammy chill ran through me, across my skin, down into my lungs, and I had to stop for a minute to breathe.
KNOW THYSELF, the words were carved into the pedestal — English words cut to ape ancient Greek. KNOW THYSELF.
Shit, I thought. That can’t be good.
But it was right. I could feel it. This was the path Jenny had wanted me to walk, the one both India and I had been too stupid or self-obsessed or blind to see.
The chill subsided but didn’t leave. It hung on me and in me the way the dread draped across my mind.
I sucked it up and moved on, taking the lefts and the rights and the appropriate pauses until I found myself at another set of stairs.
DOWN 2, the note read. Down two, what, floors? Down two steps?
Suddenly I wasn’t sure. I stood there, staring at them, pretending not to but simply not wanting to know what lay at the bottom of these few flights.
They weren’t the same decayed hardwood and broken concrete as the ones that led to the dragon. These were metal, bronze that had been mottled green by a century of oxidation.
Down two, John, I could almost hear her saying. And, in the background, like a movie soundtrack, Yeah, there’s some trouble in the bubble tonight. Let’s dance.
Two flights.
Two long flights down through a thin little tunnel with walls polished to a stony shine. Two flights down to what should have been something underground but turned out not. The bronze gave way to steel, some turn-of-the-last-century filigree of iron gate that managed not to be locked.
I pushed it wide and moved into the next skinny corridor, this one going straight ahead instead of down. There was light at the far end, curling around what I realized was sharp corner as I got near.
I had the sensation of Jenny walking ahead of me, a ghost of herself, smiling, finally leading me to what I should have been able to find on my own.
Almost there, her ghost seemed to say. I envisioned her flitting around the corner, the edges of her jacket ties flapping in her wake. Come on, Johnny.
I wrestled with myself for another endless moment. Did I want this? If India was right about this, I’d turn the corner and see some kind of physical representation of Jenny. Her heart. Her soul (whatever that is). Maybe her life. It could be a tattered old movie one-sheet, taped to the inside of the tunnel wall, or another sculptured beast, or a billion other things that she might look at and think, “That’s me.”
Whatever it was, if India was right, it would prove that it wasn’t some screwed-up party boy or psycho killer who had pushed Jenny over. If India was right, the way I felt she was, what pushed her over was me.
Well.
I’d made promises about what would happen to whoever was responsible. No backing out now.
I turned the corner and found myself standing in front of a big steel safety door of the kind you find in the basement of libraries and museums. From the patina of rust on the hinges and handle, this one hadn’t been used in a long time.
In the center, held in place by equally ancient duct tape, was the cover for an old-style vinyl LP. I didn’t recognize the title, After Me, written in some kind of faux Sanskrit scrawl. There was nothing to indicate if it was the name of the band or the album, if it came to that. You could tell this was one of those things made by a small indy label that had started up but never went.
The photo was of an old street leading out of what I guessed was some desert small town into a lush green wilderness.
A small blot of red in the lower right corner caught my eye and I bent, squinting to get a look in the flickering neon light. The blot was words, six of them.
WORDS AND MUSIC BY JENNY CHARLES.
Cities have lives, you know — just like amoebas and horses and killer whales. They start as somebody’s little trading post or campsite and they grow in these sort of undulating lurches that last for decades. Things go up, they go out, they go down. Some bits last for the whole life of the city the way a particular giggle emerges in childhood and keeps popping up over and over till the grave. Some bits stick like scars.
Once in a while, when something old isn’t quite cleared away for the something new, what’s left is a chimney without a house or a wall with nothing to support but its own crumbing self.
I stepped through Jenny’s door and onto what had probably once been the linoleum floor of a sweatshop or second-rate dentist’s office. Someone had knocked down most of the building that housed it, leaving just a little paint-flecked lip of wood and brick.
I had a second of vertigo and several of complete panic as I tried to keep from plummeting the five stories down to the gravel and broken glass.
Then I looked up. I looked up and out across the thing that Jenny had meant me to see.
It was the city, our city, spread out to the horizon in every direction. Tall and twinkling, dark and screaming, moving and burning and blinking and still, the city seemed like a goddess wrapped in a shift of jewels and stars.