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.
“Relax,” she muttered. I don’t answer to you, buddy. At least I don’t think I do.
At last a man exited Tara’s building. He was tall, thin, wearing a Patriots jacket and light-wash jeans. He nodded a hello to the officer and popped his headphones in as he made his way down the brick steps. Alex trailed him around the corner. When they were out of view, she tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and she held up the mirror in her hand. It flashed bright sunlight over his face and he threw his hand up to block the glare, stepping back.
“What the hell?”
Alex snapped the mirror shut. “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I thought you were Tom Brady.”
The guy shot her an ugly look and strode off.
Alex jogged back to the apartment building. When she approached the officer at the door, she held up the mirror like a badge. The light fell on his face.
“Back already?” asked the cop, seeing nothing but the captured image of the guy in the Patriots jacket. Manuscript might have the worst tomb, but they had some of the best tricks.
“Forgot my wallet,” Alex said, making her voice as gruff as possible.
The cop nodded and she vanished inside the front door.
Alex pocketed the mirror and headed down the hall, moving quickly. She found Tara’s apartment on the second floor, the threshold marked by police tape.
Alex thought she might have to pick the lock—she’d had to learn the basics after her mom had gone all tough love and barred her from the apartment. There had been something eerie about breaking into her own home, slipping inside like she was herself a phantom, standing in a space that might have belonged to anyone. But the lock on Tara’s door was missing entirely. It looked like the cops had removed it.
Alex nudged the door forward and ducked beneath the tape. It was clear no one had been back to try to straighten up Tara’s apartment after the police had been through it. Who would? One of its occupants was in police custody, the other dead on a slab.
Drawers were pulled open, cushions removed from the couches, some cut open by the police looking for contraband. The floor was littered with debris: a framed poster that had been yanked out of its frame, a discarded golf club, makeup brushes. Even so, Alex could see Tara had tried to make it a nice place to live. There were colorful quilts pinned to the walls, all purples and blues. Calming colors, Alex’s mom would have said. Oceanic. A dream catcher hung in the window above a collection of succulents. Alex picked up one of the small pots, touching her fingers to the fat, waxy leaves of the plant inside. She’d bought one almost exactly like it at a farmers’ market. They required almost no care or water. Little survivors. She knew her plant had probably been thrown into the garbage or bagged as evidence, but she liked to think of it still sitting on the windowsill at Ground Zero, gathering sun.
Alex walked down the narrow hall to the bedroom. It was in a similar state of disarray. A heap of pillows and stuffed animals lay by the bed. The back of the dresser had been taken apart. From the window, Alex could just make out the peaked tower of the old Marsh mansion. It was part of the forestry school, its long, sloping backyard full of greenhouses—and all just a few minutes walk from Tara’s place. What did you get up to, girl?
North had paused in the hall by the bathroom, hovering. Something with effluvia, he’d told her.
The bathroom was long and skinny, with little room to move between the standing sink and the battered shower-tub combination. Alex eyed the items on the sink, in the wastebasket. A toothbrush or used tissues weren’t going to do it. North had said the item should be personal. Alex opened the medicine cabinet. There was barely anything left inside, but perched on the top shelf was a blue plastic box. A sticker on the lid read: Change your smile, change your life.
Alex popped it open. Tara’s retainer. North looked skeptical.
“Do you even know what this is?” Alex asked. “Do you know you’re looking at the miracle of modern orthodonture?” He crossed his arms. “Didn’t think so.”
North was a century and a half short of getting it, but most of the kids on campus probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought either. A retainer was the kind of thing people’s parents bought them, that kids never knew the cost of, that got lost on school trips or forgotten in a drawer. But for Tara this was important. Something she would have saved for months to get, that she would have worn every night and would have taken care not to lose. Change your smile, change your life.