Her phone vibrates with a text as she carries a long-handled garden rake and sharp spade to the peony bed. Probably Keith, checking in from the office. It can wait. This can’t.
There are three broad, waist-high clumps of glossy foliage, one in front of each basement window. Back in May, their huge pink blooms would have scented the entire garden. Now she breathes in cedar mulch and damp mineral compost, raking layers away from the plant’s base.
She begins to dig, grateful this spot along the house’s brick foundation is relatively free of thick tree roots, rocks, and perhaps centuries-old war weapons scattered beneath the rest of the yard. She grunts softly with every thud of the shovel. Sweat trickles and tickles along her hairline, and she pauses to blot it against her upper arms.
At last, the large root ball lifts from the ground, the tangled network of threads snapping far below. Almost . . . almost . . .
She angles the shovel beneath the plant and rocks her body weight on the handle. The blade makes contact with something solid. Panting hard, pausing to get a better grip, she wonders if it’s a fieldstone, or perhaps another cannonball. . . .
She pries the plant loose, heaves it up, and plunks it down in a hail of dirt. Peering into the hole, heart pounding, she sees a severed worm oozing slime, a crumbling of loam, and beneath, a broad patch of flat, uniform, and thus man-made surface.
In that moment, her phone rings. She straightens, yanks off her glove, and answers the call.
But it’s not Teddy’s voice that responds to her breathless “Hello?”
“Nora? Everything okay?”
“Who . . . ?”
“It’s Jules. I’ve been texting you, and when you didn’t answer I figured I’d call.”
“Oh! Sorry, I’ve been busy in the garden since the girls left for school.”
“Great, then you haven’t had lunch yet.”
“I—no.”
“I’ll be right over.” She sounds so decisive, as if they’d made plans that slipped Nora’s mind.
But she’s not the one who has problems with memory. That’s Jules.
“I figured you might be lonely today, so I made a big salad. And I just baked a double batch of carob chip cookies. First day of school tradition in our house. Yeah, maybe they don’t taste exactly like chocolate, but our kids love them and yours will, too. See you in two minutes!”
Nora hangs up, returns the phone to her pocket, and looks again at the object in the hole.
Two minutes.
She bends down and with a trembling hand, brushes the dirt from a rectangular metal box.
Jacob
After Sunday’s encounter with the neighbor across from Anna’s house, Jacob had avoided Glover Street.
It wasn’t difficult yesterday. His in-laws were hosting their annual Labor Day pool party on Long Island—attendance mandatory. They live so far out east that you have to take two subway transfers and two train transfers to get there. Three and a half hours each way, lugging bags of outdoor gear and the casserole Emina insists on making every year, though it stinks up the trains and no one, not even her parents, eats steaming cabbage pie at a picnic.
Meeting them at the station, his father-in-law predictably mentioned that if they’d driven, they could have made it in half the time, even with traffic.
“I don’t understand why you don’t just get a car,” he said in his Slavic-accented English.
“And I don’t understand why you never even taught your daughter to drive,” Jacob returned as Emina climbed into the back seat with the kids.
“Because the man drives. He buys the car, and he drives it.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” she told her father. “We can’t afford a car, we have nowhere to park it, and we can get anywhere we need to go using public transportation.”
She, of course, doesn’t know the truth about Jacob’s felony conviction, driver’s license revocation, prison time. No, his wife believes what he tells her. Or if she doesn’t, she knows better than to question him. She was raised in an old-fashioned household; respects her husband and maybe fears him a little, even after a decade of marriage.
“You could have gotten here hours ago if you had driven,” her father went on. “That is all I’m saying.”
No, it wasn’t all he was saying. Maybe to his daughter, but the old man’s eyes narrowed at his son-in-law.
Jacob ignored the glare and settled back in the passenger’s seat. He had other things to think about.
Anna.
This morning, he’d left home before dawn and walked by her house once, twice, three times, before the shades opened downstairs and lights came on. By that time, the rest of the block was stirring and he retreated to a bus stop bench on Edgemont Boulevard. From there, he could keep an eye on the subway entrance on the opposite corner, watching for Anna, just in case . . .
Having convinced himself that he’d imagined her, Jacob didn’t expect her to appear. When she did, he leapt to his feet, jostling the woman beside him.
“Hey! What the hell is wrong with you?”
He ignored her and raced across the street against the light, dodging the rush-hour traffic crawl.
Anna was wearing a school uniform and carrying a backpack, accompanied by one of the blond strangers. He followed them, joining the throng plodding through the turnstiles and down to the Manhattan-bound platform.
When the train came in, he boarded the same car she did, on the opposite end. It was crowded. He stood against the door, forcing disgruntled passengers to push past him at every stop.
He kept an eye on Anna as they rumbled into Lower Manhattan, prepared to disembark wherever she did. She was plugged into earbuds and lost in a private world, eyes half-closed as she clung to the overhead pole.
The blonde nudged her as the train screeched into the Houston Street station. Anna shook her head and held up her index finger. At the next stop, she nodded and they got off.
So did Jacob, along with enough other passengers that Anna wouldn’t have realized she was being followed even if she’d looked back over her shoulder. Yet he found it disturbing that she didn’t.
You’ve changed. You’ve let your guard down. How could you, after what happened to you?
But then, how could she be here at all, after what happened to her?
Out on the street, the girls paused, getting their bearings. They seemed to argue, pointing in opposite directions and then consulting their phones before heading west.
Jacob trailed them at a distance, all the way to a beige brick building with tall windows and a sign: Notre Dame School.
Now he remains on the sidewalk staring at the building long after Anna has disappeared inside.
What can she be doing here? The uniform indicates that she’s a high school student, but she’d been a college freshman when they met. When she died.
So . . .
All these years later, she’s not dead, and . . . and younger? Still in high school, living in her house with strangers?
He must have missed something—some detail that will make the pieces fall into place.
“Sir?”
He turns to see a police officer. She’s Black, sturdily built, and looks like she means business.
“What are you doing here?”
“What?”