On the West Side, two boys had been playing near a storm drain when one was suddenly swept away. Police searched the area below the grate, shining flashlights in sewer lines. They found nothing except for the poor boy’s baseball and one of his shoes. But the surviving child insisted that it wasn’t the water to blame, for he’d seen an unearthly pale hand reach up from below and yank his friend down by his ankle, quick as a rabbit snatched by the strong jaws of a trap.
People disappeared. That wasn’t unusual in a city where ruthless gangsters like Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz, and Al Capone were as famous as movie stars. But the missing weren’t gangsters “disappeared” after a disagreement or turf war. Handmade signs appeared on lampposts and outside subway entrances, desperate pleas from frantic loved ones: VANISHED: PRESTON DILLON, FULTON STREET SUBWAY STATION. MISSING: COLLEEN MURPHY, SCHOOLTEACHER, AUBURN HAIR, BLUE EYES, TWENTY YEARS OF AGE. DO YOU KNOW: TOMAS HERNANDEZ, BELOVED SON? LAST SEEN ENTERING CITY HALL SUBWAY STATION. LAST SEEN IN THE VICINITY OF PARK ROW. LAST SEEN LEAVING FOR WORK. LAST SEEN. LAST SEEN. LAST SEEN…
But these were insignificant stories in a city full of them. These random accounts were pushed to the newspapers’ back pages, past flashy reports about Babe Ruth driving his new Pierce-Arrow touring car to Yankee Stadium or a shining picture of Jake Marlowe surveying the marshy ground of Queens for his Future of America Exhibition or exhaustive reports on what the Sweetheart Seer wore to a party with her beau, the dashing Sam Lloyd.
For the newspapers, it seemed, were typeset with dreams of their own.
“You write a lot of love songs. Have you ever been in love?” Ling asked Henry on the eighth night as they waited for the train.
“Yes,” Henry said and did not elaborate. “How about you?”
Ling remembered looking into Wai-Mae’s eyes.
“No,” she said.
“Smart girl. Love is hell,” Henry joked. He sat down at the piano and played something new.
“What is this song?” Ling asked. It sounded different from the other songs Henry had been playing. Those were forgettable. But the piece taking shape now was strange and lovely and haunting. It had weight.
“I don’t know yet. Just something I’m playing around with,” Henry said. He seemed embarrassed, like he’d been caught telling his deepest secrets.
“I like it,” Ling said, listening intently. “It’s a sad sort of beautiful. Like all the best songs.”
“Is… is that a compliment?” Henry put a hand to his chest in a mock-faint.
Ling rolled her eyes. “Don’t get cute.”
Sister Walker had been driving for twelve hours straight, so while she napped in her room back at the motel, Will kept a grip on his coffee cup and stared out the window of the Hopeful Harbor diner. Crepuscular light veiled the tops of the snow-dusted hills. The sky was a distant bruise. A bronze plaque in front of the courthouse across the street commemorated a spot where George Washington had once tasted victory. Quite a few Revolutionary War battles had been fought in this part of the country, Will knew, battles that turned the tide of the war and helped decide the fate of a new country, taking it from an exciting idea of self-governance to possibility and then reality. A government by the people, for the people.
America had invented itself. It continued to invent itself as it went along. Sometimes its virtues made it the envy of the world. Sometimes it betrayed the very heart of its ideals. Sometimes the people dispensed with what was difficult or inconvenient to acknowledge. So the good people maintained the illusion of democracy and wrote another hymn to America. They sang loud enough to drown out dissent. They sang loud enough to overpower their own doubts. There were no plaques to commemorate mistakes. But the past didn’t forget. History was haunted by the ghosts of buried crimes, which required periodic exorcisms of truth. Actions had consequences.
Will knew this, too.
“More coffee?” the waitress asked Will and poured him a fresh cup anyway. “Shame you’re here at such a miserable time of year. The road up into the mountains is awful treacherous just now.”
“Yes,” Will said. “I remember.”
“Oh, so you’ve been here before?”
“Once. It was a long time ago.”
“Gee, what you ought to do is come back in the spring, drive on up there to the old Marlowe estate. Beautiful grounds. It’s closed now, but they open it up in the spring.”
Will fished out a quarter and left it on the table beside the full, untouched cup of coffee.
“Thank you. I’ll do that,” he said.
