Carefully I place the cover back on the box, look out the window.
I place my long flat palms on the top of the box, stare again at the number on the side of the box, written firmly, in black marker: 12.375.
I’m feeling it again—something—I don’t know what. But something.
“May I speak to Sophia Littlejohn? This is Detective Henry Palace of the Concord Police Department.”
There’s a pause, and then a woman’s voice, polite but unsettled. “This is she. But I think you folks have got your wires crossed. I already spoke to someone. This is—you’re calling about my brother, right? They called earlier today. My husband and I both spoke to the officer.”
“Yes, ma’am. I know.”
I’m on the landline, at headquarters. I’m judging Sophia Littlejohn, picturing her, painting myself a picture from what I know, and from the tone of her voice: alert, professional, compassionate. “Officer McConnell gave you the unfortunate news. And I’m really sorry to be bothering you again. As I said, I’m a detective, and I just have a few questions.”
As I’m talking I’m becoming aware of an unpleasant gagging noise; over there on the other side of the room is McGully, his black Boston Bruins scarf twisted up over his head into a comedy noose, going “erk-erk.” I turn away, hunch over my chair, holding the receiver close to my ear.
“I appreciate your sympathy, Detective,” Zell’s sister is saying. “But I honestly don’t know what else I can tell you. Peter killed himself. It’s awful. We weren’t that close.”
First Gompers. Then Naomi Eddes. And now the guy’s own sister. Peter Zell certainly had a lot of people in his life with whom he wasn’t that close.
“Ma’am, I need to ask if there’s any reason your brother would have been writing you a letter. A note of some kind, addressed to you?”
On the other end of the phone, a long silence. “No,” says Sophia Littlejohn finally. “No. I have no idea.”
I let that hang there for a moment, listen to her breathe, and then I say, “Are you sure you don’t know?”
“Yes. I am. I’m sure. Officer, I’m sorry, I don’t really have time to talk right now.”
I’m leaning all the way forward in my chair. The radiator makes a metallic chugging noise from its corner. “What about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, but it really is very important that we speak.”
“Okay,” she says, after another pause. “Sure. Can you come to my home in the morning?”
“I can.”
“Very early? Seven forty-five?”
“Anytime is fine. Seven forty-five is fine. Thank you.”
There’s a pause, and I look at the phone, wondering if she’s hung up, or if the landlines are now having trouble, too. McGully tousles my hair on his way out, bowling bag swinging from his other hand.
“I loved him,” says Sophia Littlejohn suddenly, hushed but forceful. “He was my little brother. I loved him so much.”
“I’m sure you did, ma’am.”
I get the address, and I hang up, and I sit for a second staring out the window, where the slush and sleet just keep on coming down.
“Hey. Hey, Palace?”
Detective Andreas is slumped in his chair on the far side of the room, tucked away in darkness. I hadn’t even known he was in the room.
“How you doing, Henry?” His voice is toneless, empty.
“Fine. How about you?” I’m thinking about that glistening pause, that lingering moment, wishing I could have been inside Sophia Littlejohn’s head as she cycled through all the reasons her brother might have had for writing Dear Sophia on a piece of paper.
“I’m fine,” Andreas says. “I’m fine.”
He looks at me, smiles tightly, and I think the conversation is over, but it’s not. “I gotta say, man,” Andreas murmurs, shaking his head, looking over at me. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“How I do what?”
But he’s just looking at me, not saying anything else, and from where I’m sitting across the room it looks like there are tears in his eyes, big pools of standing water. I look away, back out the window, just no idea what to say to the guy. No idea whatsoever.
4.
A loud and terrible noise is filling my room, a shrieking and violent eruption of sound rushing into the darkness, and I’m sitting up and I’m screaming. It’s here, I’m not ready, my heart is exploding in my chest because it’s here, it’s early, it’s happening now.
But it’s just my phone. The shrieking, the horrendous noise, it’s just the landline. I’m sweating, my hand clutched to my chest, shivering on my thin mattress on the floor that I call a bed.
It’s just my stupid phone.
“Yeah. Hello?”
“Hank? What are you doing?”
“What am I doing?” I look at the clock. It’s 4:45 a.m. “I’m sleeping. I was dreaming.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But I need your help, I really do, Henny.”
I breathe deeply, sweat cooling on my forehead, my shock and confusion rapidly fading into irritation. Of course. My sister is the only person who would be calling me at five o’clock in the morning, and she’s also the only person who still calls me Henny, a miserable childhood nickname. It sounds like a vaudeville comedian or a small addled bird.
“Where are you, Nico?” I ask, my voice gruff with sleep. “Are you okay?”
“I’m at home. I’m flipping out.” Home means the house where we grew up, where Nico still lives, our grandfather’s renovated redbrick farmhouse, on one and a half rolling acres on Little Pond Road. I’m cycling through the litany of reasons my sister would be calling with such urgency at this ungodly hour. Rent money. A ride. Plane ticket, groceries. Last time, her bicycle had been “stolen,” loaned to a friend of a friend at a party and never returned.
“So, what’s going on?”
“It’s Derek. He didn’t come home last night.”
I hang up, throw the phone on the ground, and try to fall back asleep.
What I’d been dreaming about was my high-school sweetheart, Alison Koechner.
In the dream, Alison and I are strolling with linked arms through the lovely downtown area of Portland, Maine, gazing through the window of a used-book store. And Alison’s leaning gently on my arm, her wild bouquet of orchid-red curls tickling into my neck. We’re eating ice cream, laughing at a private joke, deciding what movie to see.
It’s the kind of dream that’s hard to get back into, even if you can fall back asleep, and I can’t.
At seven-forty it is bright and clear and cold and I am winding my way through Pill Hill, the upscale West Concord neighborhood that wraps around the hospital, where its surgeons and administrators and attending physicians live in tasteful colonials. These days a lot of these homes are patrolled by private-duty security guards, gun bulges under their winter coats, as if all of a sudden this is a Third World capital. There’s no guard, though, at 14 Thayer Pond Road, just a wide lawn blanketed with snow so perfect and vivid in its new-fallen whiteness I almost feel bad tromping across it in my Timberlands to get to the front door.
But Sophia Littlejohn is not at home. She had to rush out early to perform an emergency delivery at Concord Hospital, a turn of events for which her husband is profusely apologetic. He meets me on the stoop wearing khaki slacks and a turtleneck, a gentle man with a trim golden beard carrying a mug of fragrant tea, explaining how Sophia often has irregular hours, especially now that most of the other midwives in her practice have quit.