Naturally, to me, this rarefied upbringing looked infinitely more at home around the bare and bony shoulders of Hannah Schneider than Sergeant Detective Harper’s contention that she’d been an orphan, raised at the Horizon House in New Jersey — a difference between a mink stole and a Member’s Only. If Ada Harvey was to be believed (and thus far, there was no reason not to), Fayonette Harper’s mistake was that she’d investigated the life of Hannah Schneider the Missing Person, the orphan whose identity Catherine Baker had apparently absconded with (the overcoat she’d donned and blithely strolled out of the store with, without paying). And yet, frustratingly, I couldn’t confirm Ada’s conjecture as fact or fiction; searching for “Hannah Schneider” and “Missing Person” yielded not a single result, which I initially found strange until I remembered what Hannah herself had said that night at her house: “Runaways, orphans, they’re kidnapped, killed — whatever the reason, they vanish from public record. They leave behind nothing but a name, and even that’s forgotten in the end.”
It had happened to the person whose name she’d taken.
As I read the first startling details about Catherine Baker’s life (www.greatcommierevolt.net/women/baker was particularly well researched, complete with bibliography and links to Additional Reading), I started sprinting like an Errand Boy all the way back to that conversation with her, when I was alone at her house, retrieving her every word, expression and gesture, and when I dumped that splintered cargo at my feet (something “night,” police officer, The Gone), I turned around and sprinted back for more.
Hannah had claimed it was the truth about the Bluebloods, when in fact, it was her own past she’d narrated between all those cigarettes and sighs. She’d assigned each of them a portion of her own history, neatly sewing it into them using an invisible appliqué stitch, garnishing it with a few erroneous, baroque details (“prostitute, junkie,” “blackouts”) in order to floor me, make it look so astonishing, it had to be real.
It’d been her father, not Jade’s, “from oil money, so he had the blood and suffering of thousands on his hands.” And it had been she who’d run away from home, from New York to San Francisco, and those six days of travel had “changed the course of her life.” When she was thirteen, she, not Leulah, had absconded with a Turkish man (“handsome and passionate,” she’d called him) and she, not Milton, had wanted something to believe in, something to keep her afloat. She’d joined not a “street gang,” but “something night”—The Nightwatchmen.
She’d cut out the police officer killing from her own past and tacked it onto Nigel’s parents as if dressing paper dolls.
“Life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming,” she’d said broodingly (so broodingly, I should have known she could only be talking about herself, a tenet of Dad’s Life Story principle: “People will always reserve The Brood, The Glower and The Heathcliff-Styled Mope for their own Story, never someone else’s — call it the narcissism that leaks out of Western culture like oil from an Edsel.”).
“Some people pull the trigger,” Hannah had said (a palpable glower on her face), “and it all explodes in front of you. Other people run away.”
Leading criminologist Matthew Namode wrote in Chokes Alone (1999) that individuals who suffer a serious trauma — a child who’d lost a parent, a man who’d committed a single brutal crime—“may often, subconsciously or no, obsess over a lone word or image that may be directly traced back to the incident” (p. 249). “They repeat it when they’re nervous, or idly doodle it in the margins of a piece of paper, write it on a windowsill or in the dust along a shelf, often a word so obscure it may be impossible for outsiders to discover the shattering ordeal at its root” (p. 250). In Hannah’s case, it wasn’t obscure: Leulah saw the word Hannah had unknowingly scribbled all over the notepad by the telephone, but in Hannah’s haste to hide the paper from her, Leulah had misread it. Perhaps it had not said, “Valerio,” but “Vallarmo,” the Texan town where Hannah had killed a man.
And then — at this point I had Box Office Mojo; if they’d stuck me on a track I would’ve broken some hurtling records; in front of the high jump, I’d have soared so high, spectators would swear I had wings — I realized the truth behind the camping story Hannah had told us.
Hip injury, hip surgery, one leg shorter than the other: the man whose life she’d saved on the camping trip, the man who’d injured his hip, was George Gracey. He’d been living in the Adirondacks. Or perhaps she’d invented that detail; maybe he’d been hiding along the Appalachian Trail or in the Great Smokies like the Vicious Three detailed in Escaped (Pillars, 2004). Perhaps this was why Hannah had become a seasoned mountaineer; it’d been her responsibility to bring him food and supplies, keep him alive. And presently, he was living in Paxos, an island off the western coast of Greece, and Greece was where Hannah had told Eva Brewster she longed to go at the beginning of every St. Gallway school year, so she could “love herself.”
But then — why had she decided to tell me her Life Story in such a roundabout way? Why had she been living in Stockton, not with Gracey in Greece? And what were the present movements of Nächtlich—if any at all? (Solving crime-related questions was like trying to rid one’s house of rodents; you kill one, blink, six more dart across the floor.)
Perhaps Hannah had decided to tell me because she sensed I, out of all the Bluebloods, had the wits to solve the riddle of her life (Jade and the others weren’t methodical enough; Milton, for one, had the mind — and body, for that matter — of a Jersey Cow). “Ten years from now — that’s when you decide,” Hannah had said. Obviously, she’d wanted someone to know the truth, and not now — later, after she’d staged her disappearance. The night I’d shown up on her doorstep, she’d undoubtedly known all about Ada Harvey, and had been uneasy about what that dogged and determined Southern Belle (desperate to avenge the death of Big Daddy) might uncover and reveal to the FBI: Hannah’s true identity and crime.
She and Gracey couldn’t be together for security’s sake; they were still wanted by the Feds and thus it was crucial to cut off all contact, reside on opposite sides of the globe. Or else, their romance had gone flat as uncapped Pellegrino; “The shelf life of any great love is fifteen years,” wrote Wendy Aldridge, Ph.D., in The Truth About Ever After (1999). “After that you need a serious preservative, which can seriously harm your health.”
The resounding belief was that, even today, Nächtlich was alive and well. (Littleton supported this claim though he had no evidence. Dad was more skeptical.) “Thanks to inspirational recruitment,” wrote Guillaume on www.hautain.fr, “they have more members than ever. But you can’t go and join. That’s how they remain unseen. They choose you. They decide if you’re suitable.” In November 2000, an executive at the center of an accounting fraud, Mark Lecinque, had unexpectedly hanged himself at his family home twenty minutes north of Baton Rouge, and a pistol — fully loaded, apart for a single bullet — was found on the floor next to him. His apparent suicide was a shock, because Lecinque and his lawyers had acted smug and haughty when interviewed on network television. It was thus whispered his death had been the vigilante work of Les Veilleurs de Nuit.