The Shining Girls A Novel

Kirby

12 JUNE 1993

The temperature is brutal, even worse in the basement where Rachel’s clutter seems to absorb the heat and swill it around with cloying nostalgia. One day her mother will be dead, and it will fall to Kirby to sort all this crap out. The more she can get rid of right now, the better.

She’s started moving boxes out onto the lawn so she can go through them. It’s bad on her back, hauling them up the rickety wooden ladder staircase, but it’s an improvement on being cooped up in there with towers of stuff threatening to cave in on her. This is her whole life of late, going through boxes of remains. She suspects that these will be even more painfully evocative than the broken lives documented in Detective Michael Williams’s defunct evidence files.

Rachel comes out onto the lawn and sits down cross-legged beside her, in a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt, like a waitress, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. Her long feet are bare, the nails painted with a glossy red polish so dark it’s almost black. It’s a sign of the times that she’s taken to dyeing her own hair, so the brown, more chestnut than usual, is shot through with gray.

‘Goodness, that’s a lot of junk,’ she says. ‘We’d be better off setting fire to it.’ She digs her rolling papers out of her pocket.

‘Don’t tempt me,’ Kirby says. It comes out with more venom than she intended, but Rachel doesn’t even notice. ‘If we were smart, we would set up a table for a yard sale and move it straight from the boxes onto display.’

‘I do wish you wouldn’t dig into all this stuff,’ Rachel sighs. ‘It’s so much easier to deal with when it’s packed away.’ She tears the end off a cigarette and sprinkles the paper with half marijuana and half tobacco.

‘Are you hearing yourself, Mom?’

‘Don’t play therapist. It doesn’t suit you.’ She lights up the joint and absently hands it to Kirby. ‘Oh, sorry, I forgot.’

‘It’s okay,’ she says, and takes a drag. She holds it in her lungs until it turns the inside of her head sweet and staticky, like switching the TV to white noise. If white noise turned out to be encoded signals from the CIA transmitted through treacle. She’s never had her mom’s tolerance for pot. It usually makes her paranoid and overanalytical. But then she’s never got stoned with her mom before. Maybe she’s been doing something wrong all these years, and she’s been missing out on some secret mother-daughter knowledge that should have got passed along years ago, like how to do a French plait or keep boys guessing.

‘You still banned from the paper?’

‘I’m on probation. They let me compile a list of some college sports awards but I’m not supposed to come in until I’ve met my class requirements.’

‘They’re looking out for you. I think it’s sweet.’

‘They’re treating me like a f*cking child.’

Rachel starts pulling a bunch of old board-game pieces and Christmas tree decorations out of a box, all tangled up in a menorah. Brightly colored dots of plastic Ludo pieces scatter all over the lawn.

‘You know, we never had a bat mitzvah for you. Would you like a bat mitzvah?’

‘No, Mom. It’s too late for that,’ Kirby says, yanking open the tape on another box that has lost its stick over the years but still makes a terrible tearing sound. Little Golden books and Dr Seuss. Dean’s Treasury of Cowboys, Where the Wild Things Are, Revolting Rhymes.

‘I’ve been keeping those for you. For when you have kids.’

‘Not very likely.’

‘You never know. You weren’t planned. You used to write your dad letters. Do you remember?’

‘What?’ Kirby fights through the drone in her head. Her childhood is slippy. Memory is curated. All this paraphernalia you collect to ward off forgetting.

‘I threw them away, of course.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Where was I going to send them? You might as well have been writing to Santa.’

‘I thought So-John was my dad for the longest time. You know. Peter Collier. I tracked him down.’

‘I know, he told me. Oh, don’t look so surprised. We stay in touch. He said you went to see him when you were sixteen and impressed the hell out of him, demanding a paternity test and insisting that he pay child support.’

Actually, Kirby remembers, she was fifteen. She figured out who he was by reassembling a passionately ripped-to-shreds magazine profile she’d found in Rachel’s dustbin the day after her mother went on an all-time epic crockery-smashing crying jag for three days.

Peter Collier, creative genius at a major Chicago agency, according to the puff piece, responsible for ground-breaking campaigns over the last three decades, loving husband to a wife tragically crippled with multiple sclerosis, and, the article did not mention, notable motherf*cker (literal definition) who had haunted much of her childhood.

She’d phoned his secretary, using her deepest and most professional voice, and made an appointment to discuss ‘new business on a potentially very lucrative account’ (vocabulary she stole from the article) at the swankiest restaurant she could think of.

He was at first baffled when a teenager sat down at the table, then irritated, then amused when she laid out her list of demands: that he resume seeing Rachel because she was miserable without him, start paying child support, and admit in print to the same magazine that he’d fathered a daughter out of wedlock. She informed him that regardless of said admission, she would not be changing her name because she’d gotten used to Mazrachi and it suited her. He bought her lunch and explained that he’d met Rachel when she was already five years old. But he liked her style and if there was anything she ever needed… She’d retorted with a stinging one-liner, something Mae West-y about fish and bicycles, and left with the upper hand and pride intact, or so she thought.

‘Who do you think helped pay your medical bills?’

‘For f*ck’s sake.’

‘Why are you taking this so personally?’

‘Because he used you, Mom. For nearly ten years.’

‘Grown-up relationships are complicated. We got what we needed from each other. Passion.’

‘Oh God, I don’t want to hear it.’

‘A safety net. Some kind of solace. It’s lonely out there. But it ran its course. It was lovely while it lasted. But everything is finite. Life. Love. All this.’ She waves her hand vaguely at the assorted boxes. ‘Sadness too. Although that’s harder to let go of than happiness.’

‘Oh, Mom.’ Kirby puts her head in her mother’s lap. It’s the weed. She would never do this normally.

‘It’s okay,’ Rachel says. She seems surprised. But not unpleasantly. She strokes Kirby’s hair. ‘These crazy curls. I never knew what to do with them. You didn’t get them from me.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. There were a couple of options. I was at a kibbutz in the Hula Valley. They farmed fish in ponds. But it could have been afterwards in Tel Aviv. Or on the road in Greece. I’m a bit foggy on the dates.’

‘Oh, Mom.’

‘I’m being honest. You’d be better off doing that, you know.’

‘What?’

‘Trying to hunt down your father instead of the man who … hurt you.’

‘You never gave me the option.’

‘I could give you names. Five at most. Four. Five. Some of them are first names only. But the kibbutzim would probably have a register, if it was one of them. You could do a pilgrimage. Go to Israel and Greece and Iran.’

‘You went to Iran?’

‘No, but it would be fascinating. I’ve got photographs in here somewhere. Would you like to see?’

‘Yes, actually.’

‘Somewhere…’ Rachel nudges Kirby off her lap and paws through the boxes until she finds a photo album, the red plastic printed to look like fake leather. She flips it open to a picture of a young woman with her hair whipping round her, in a white bathing suit, laughing and scowling into the sun that slices a sharp diagonal of contrast across her body and the concrete pier she’s scrambling up. The sky is a washed-out azure. ‘This was at the harbor in Corfu.’

‘You look annoyed.’

‘I didn’t want Amzi to take a photograph of me. He’d been doing it all day and it was driving me crazy. So of course that was the one he let me keep.’

‘Is he one of them?’

Rachel thinks about it. ‘No, I was feeling nauseous by then. I thought it was all the ouzo.’

‘Great, Mom.’

‘I didn’t know. You must have been there already. A secret to me.’

She flips ahead – the photographs aren’t in any kind of chronological order, because she goes past Kirby’s crushingly embarrassing punk prom photos to a picture of her as a naked toddler, standing in an inflatable paddling pool, holding a garden hose and looking impishly into the camera. Rachel is sitting in a stripy canvas deck chair beside the pool, her hair cut boyishly short, smoking a cigarette behind oversized tortoiseshell sunglasses. The glamorous malaise of the suburbs. ‘Look how cute you were,’ she says. ‘You were always a sweet kid, but naughty too. You can see it radiating out your face. I didn’t really know what to do with you.’

‘I can tell.’

‘Don’t be cruel,’ Rachel says, but without heat.

Kirby takes the album out of her hands and starts going through it. The problem with snapshots is that they replace actual memories. You lock down the moment and it becomes all there is of it.

‘Oh God, look at my hair.’

‘I didn’t tell you to shave it off. They nearly suspended you from school.’

‘What’s this?’ It comes out sharper than she intended. But the shock of it is terrible. Dread like a swamp.

‘Hmmm?’ Rachel takes the photograph from her. It’s mounted in a yellowed card with a looping friendly font: ‘Greetings From Great America! 1976’. ‘That theme park. You were crying because you were scared to go on the rollercoaster. I hated that we couldn’t go on roadtrips without you getting motion sick.’

‘No, what’s that in my hand?’

Rachel peers at the picture of the wailing girl in a theme park. ‘I don’t know, honey. A plastic horse?’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘Honestly, I can’t remember the genesis of all your toys.’

‘Please think, Rachel.’

‘You found it somewhere. Carried it around for ages until you fell in love with something else. You were always fickle like that. Some doll with turnaround hair, blonde and brunette. Melody? Tiffany? Something like that. She had the most gorgeous outfits.’

‘Where is it now?’

‘If it’s not in one of these boxes, then it must have gotten thrown out. I don’t keep everything. What are you doing?’

Kirby tears through the boxes, dumping the contents on to the overgrown grass.

‘Now you’re just being selfish,’ Rachel points out calmly. ‘It’s going to be much less fun cleaning that up later.’

There are cardboard poster tubes, a hideous tea set with brown and orange flowers from Kirby’s grandmother in Denver, who she tried to live with when she was fourteen, a tall copper hookah with the tip of the mouthpiece broken off, crumbled incense smelling of decayed empires, a battered silver harmonica, old paintbrushes and dried-out pens, miniature dancing cats that Rachel painted on tile blocks, which actually sold well for a while in the local craft shop. Indonesian bird cages, an engraved bit of elephant tusk or possibly warthog (real ivory regardless), a jade Buddha, a printer’s tray, Letraset, and a ton, probably, of heavy art and design books bookmarked with torn-off bits of paper, tangles of costume jewelry, a weaver bird’s nest and several dreamcatchers that they’d spent a summer making when Kirby was ten. Some kids have lemonade stands, Kirby tried to sell fake spiderwebs with dangly crystals.

And she wonders why she turned out like she did.

‘Where are my toys, Mom?’

‘I was going to give them away.’

‘You wouldn’t have got round to it,’ Kirby says, brushing the grass off her knees. She heads back into the house and down to the basement, clutching the photograph.

She finds the discolored plastic trunk, eventually, stuffed inside the broken freezer that Rachel uses for storage. It’s under a garbage bag full of assorted hats that Kirby once played dress-up with, half-crushed by a wooden spinning wheel that must be worth something to an antiques collector.

Rachel sits on the top of the stairs, resting her chin on her knees, watching her. ‘You’re still a secret to me.’

‘Shut up, Mom.’

Kirby pries open the lid, like an oversize school lunchbox. Inside are all her toys. A baby doll that she never really wanted, but everyone else at school had them. Barbies and their cheap generic cousins, in all kinds of career variations. Businesswoman with a pink briefcase or mermaid. None of them have shoes. Half of them are missing a limb. The doll with the reversible hair, naked, now, a robot that turned into a UFO, a killer whale in a trailer truck stenciled with the logo for Sea World, a wooden doll with DIY knitted plaits of red wool, Princess Leia in her white snowsuit and Evil Lyn with her golden skin. There were never enough girls to play with.

And there, underneath a half-built Lego tower manned by die-cast lead Indian braves, also from her grandmother, is a plastic pony. Its orange hair is matted with something dried and sticky. Juice, maybe. But it has the same sad-looking eyes and the goofy melancholy smile and the butterflies on its butt.

‘Jesus,’ Kirby breathes.

‘That’s it, all right,’ Rachel shifts impatiently on the steps. ‘And now?’

‘He gave this to me.’

‘I shouldn’t have let you smoke. You’re not used to it.’

‘Listen to me,’ Kirby shouts. ‘He gave this to me. The f*cker who tried to kill me.’

‘I don’t know what you’re saying!’ Rachel shrieks back, confused and upset.

‘How old was I in that photo?’

‘Seven? Eight?’

Kirby checks the date on the card: 1976. She was nine. But younger when he gave it to her. ‘Your math is terrible, Mom.’ She can’t believe she hasn’t thought about it in all these years.

She turns the horse over. There are stamps under each of its hooves in all-caps. MADE IN. HONG KONG. PAT PENDING. HASBRO 1982.

Everything goes cold. The static from the weed cranks up the volume, buzzing in her head. She moves to sit on the stairs just below Rachel. She takes her mother’s hand and presses it against her face. Her veins stand out like blue tributaries amongst the fine hatched lines and first liver spots. She’s getting old, Kirby thinks, and this is somehow even more unbearable than the plastic pony.

‘I’m scared, Mom.’

‘We all are,’ Rachel says. She hugs her head to her chest and rubs her back as Kirby’s whole body racks and shudders. ‘Shhh. It’s okay, honey. It’s all right. That’s the big secret, don’t you know? Everyone is. All the time.’





Harper

28 MARCH 1987

First Catherine, then Alice. He broke the rules. He should never have given Etta the bracelet. He feels his control slipping, like a truck’s axle off a jack.

There is only one name left. He does not know what will happen after. But he has to do it properly. The way he is supposed to. He has to set things right, align the constellations. He has to trust in the House. No more resisting.

He doesn’t try to force it when he opens the door. He lets it open on to where it is supposed to be: 1987. He finds his way to an elementary school where he mingles with the parents and teachers moving between the displays in the hall under a hand-lettered banner that reads ‘Welcome to our Science Fair!’ He walks past a papier-mâché volcano, wires and crocodile clips on a wooden board that light up an electric bulb when you touch them together, posters illustrating how high a flea can jump and the aerodynamics of jet planes.

He is drawn up short by a map of stars, actual constellations. The little boy standing behind the table starts reading from a card in a shy monotone. ‘Stars are made of balls of fiery gas. They are very far away and sometimes by the time the light reaches us, the star is already dead and we don’t even know it yet. I also have a telescope—’

‘Shut up,’ he says. The boy looks like he might burst into tears. He stares, lip trembling, and then bolts into the crowd. Harper barely notices. He is tracing his fingertip over the lines drawn between the stars, transfixed. Big Dipper. Little Dipper. Ursa Major. Orion with his belt and sword. But they could just as easily be something else if you connected the dots differently. And who is to say that is a bear or a warrior at all? It damn well doesn’t look that way to him. There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can’t face the terror that it might all be random. He feels undone by the revelation. He has the sensation of losing his footing, as if the whole damn world is stuttering.

A young teacher with a blonde ponytail takes him gently by the arm. ‘Are you all right?’ she says kindly, in a voice meant for children.

‘No—’ Harper starts.

‘Can’t find your child’s project?’ The chubby boy is standing next to her, sniffing, his hand clutching her skirt. Harper holds on to the reality of that, the way he rubs his nose with the back of his sleeve, leaving a smear of snot across the dark fabric.

‘Mysha Pathan,’ he says, as if coming up out of a dream.

‘Are you her…?’

‘Uncle,’ he says falling back on the explanation that has always worked so well.

‘Oh.’ The teacher is thrown. ‘I didn’t know she had family in the States.’ She studies him for a moment, puzzled. ‘She’s a very promising student. You’ll find her project near the stage by the doors,’ she points helpfully.

‘Thank you,’ Harper says, and manages to tear himself away from the star map that is only a useless fetish.

Mysha is a little girl with brown skin and metal in her mouth like a miniature railroad, not unlike the wiring that once held Harper’s jaw together. She is bouncing slightly on her heels, although she seems unaware of it, standing in front of a desk lined with potted succulents and a poster behind her head with numbers and colors that mean nothing to him, even though he looks at it very carefully.

‘Hi! Can I tell you about my project?’ she says, full of sparking enthusiasm.

‘I’m Harper,’ he says.

‘Okay!’ she says brightly. This is not part of her script and it throws her. ‘I’m Mysha and this is my project. Um. As you can see, I grew cacti in, um, different kinds of soil with varying acidity.’

‘This one is dead.’

‘Yes. I learned that some soil conditions are very bad for cacti. As you can see by the results that I marked up on this chart.’

‘I can see that.’

‘The vertical axis represents the amount of acidity in the soil and the horizontal—’

‘Do me a favor, Mysha.’

‘Um.’

‘I’m going to come back. Right away. As soon as I can. But it won’t feel like that for you. You have to do something for me, though, while I’m away. It’s very important. Don’t stop shining.’

‘Okay!’ she says.

Back at the House, it seems that all the objects are on fire in his head. He can still trace the trajectories, but for the first time he can see that the map leads nowhere. It folds in on itself. A loop he can’t escape. The only thing left to do is surrender to it.





Harper

12 JUNE 1993

He steps into the early evening 12 June 1993, the date displayed in the post office window. It’s only three days since he killed Catherine. He is pushing up against the edge of things. He already knows where to find Mysha Pathan. It’s printed clearly on the last remaining totem. Milkwood Pharmaceuticals.

The company is on the other side of town, deep in the West Side. A long, squat, gray building. He sits inside the window of a Dominos in the strip mall across the way, picking at the stringy cheese, and watches and waits, observing how the parking lot is mostly empty on a Saturday night, how the security guard is bored and keeps stepping out to have a cigarette, carefully disposing of the butts in one of the yellow fliptop trash cans at the side of the building. How he uses the tag around his neck to swipe himself back into the building.

He could wait. Until she comes out. Take her at home or en route. He could break into her car. The compact blue one that is the only one left, parked right next to the entrance. Hide in the back seat. But he is feeling edgier than ever, the headache burrowing through his skull and down into his spine. It has to be done now.

At 11 p.m., when the pizza place closes, he walks round the building, a slow circuit, timed to coincide with the guard’s smoke break.

‘Do you have the time?’ he says, walking up to him fast, already unfolding his knife one-handed, hidden behind the swish of his coat. The guard is alarmed by Harper’s pace, but the question is so innocuous, so ordinary, that he automatically looks down at his wrist and Harper stabs the blade into his neck and yanks it across, shearing through the muscle and tendons and arteries, at the same time spinning the man around so that the gush of blood splatters over the cans and not on him. He kicks him behind his knees so that he topples forward between the trash cans, which Harper pulls forward to hide the body. He snags the security tag and wipes the blood off on the man’s pants. The whole thing takes less than a minute. The guard is still gurgling slightly as Harper walks towards the glass doors to swipe the keycard.

He takes the stairs, up through the empty building to the fourth floor, letting the feeling lead him, like a memory, past rows of locked doors, until he comes to Lab Six, which is standing open, waiting for him. A single light is on inside, above her workbench. She has her back to him, singing loudly and badly, half-dancing to the tinny music leaking from the earphones half-tucked under her headscarf: ‘All That She Wants’. She’s pulverizing leaves and then delicately transferring bits of the mush with some kind of plastic syringe to conical tubes filled with a golden liquid.

It’s the first time he has had no understanding of the context. ‘What are you doing?’ he says, loud enough to be heard over the music. She jumps and fumbles the earphones off.

‘Oh my God. I’m so embarrassed. How long have you been watching me? Oh jeez. Wow. I thought I was the only one in the building. Um. Who are you?’

‘The new security guard.’

‘Oh. You’re not wearing a uniform.’

‘They didn’t have my size.’

‘Right,’ she says, nodding tightly to herself. ‘So, um, I’m working on seeing if I can grow a drought-resistant strain of tobacco, based on a protein from a flower in Namibia that can resurrect itself. I spliced in the gene and I’ve been growing the tobacco for a month, and now I’m checking to see if the protein I’m looking for is in there.’ She carries the conical tubes over to a flat gray machine the size of a suitcase and opens the flap to insert them into the tray. ‘Pop it in the Spectrophotometer for analysis…’ She taps at the controls and the machine starts whirring. ‘And if the protein has been expressed successfully, then the substrate will turn blue.’ She smiles at him, pleased. ‘Did I explain that well enough? Because we’ve got a group of tenth graders coming in next week and – oh.’ She’s seen the knife. ‘You’re not a security guard.’

‘No. And you’re the last one. I have to finish it. Don’t you see?’

She tries to move so that there is a bench between them, scanning for things she could throw at him, but he has already cut her off. He has become efficient. He does what he needs to. He punches her in the face to get her down. He ties her wrists with the cords of her earphones because he has left his binding wire behind at the House. He stuffs her headscarf in her mouth to muffle her screaming.

But there is no one to hear her and it takes her a long time to die. He tries to be more elaborate to make up for the lack of joy this brings him. He unspools her intestines in a spiral around her. He cuts out her organs and places them on the desk where she was working under the lamplight. He stuffs tobacco leaves in the gaping wounds, so it looks as if the plants are growing out of her body. He pins the Pigasus badge to her lab coat. He hopes it will be enough.

He washes off in the women’s bathroom, soaking his coat and stuffing his blood-soaked shirt into the feminine hygiene products disposal bin. He pulls a lab coat over his bloodied jacket and walks out of the building, wearing her name-badge turned around so that the ID is obscured.

By the time he is done, it is four in the morning and there is a different security guard, standing behind the desk, looking baffled and talking into his radio. ‘I told you, I already checked the men’s bathroom. I don’t know where—’

‘Well, good night,’ Harper says cheerfully, walking out straight past him.

‘Good night, sir,’ the guard says, distracted, registering only the coat and the badge and raising his hand in automatic greeting. The uncertainty kicks in a second later, because it’s really late and how come he didn’t recognize the guy and where the hell is Jackson? That will shift to crushing guilt in five hours’ time when he is sitting at the police station, reviewing the pharma lab’s security-camera footage, after the young biologist’s body has been discovered, and he realizes that he let her killer walk right out past him.

Upstairs in the lab, a bloom of blue is spreading through the gold in the conical tubes.





Dan

13 JUNE 1993

Dan spots her crazy hair right off the bat. Hard to miss, even in the clamor of the arrivals hall. He seriously thinks about getting back on the plane, but by then it’s too late, she’s spotted him. She half-raises her hand. It’s almost a question.

‘Yeah, okay, I see you, I’m coming,’ he grumbles to himself, pointing at the conveyor belt and miming lifting a suitcase. She nods, vigorously, and starts navigating the hordes towards him; a woman in a chador, like her own personal palanquin with the curtains drawn, a harried family scrambling to keep themselves together, a depressing number of obese travellers. He’s never understood the thinking that airports are glamorous. People who believe that have never had to route through Minneapolis–St Paul. Taking a bus is less tedious. Better view too. The only miracle of flight is that more passengers don’t strangle each other out of boredom and frustration.

Kirby materializes at his elbow. ‘Hey. I tried to call you.’

‘I was on the plane.’

‘Yeah, the hotel said you’d left already. Sorry. I had to talk to you. I couldn’t wait.’

‘Patience never was your strong point.’

‘This is serious, Dan.’

He sighs, heavily, and watches a dozen not-his-bags inching past on the conveyor. ‘Is this about the junkie artist girl from a couple of days ago? Because that was an ugly thing, but it’s not your guy. The cops already nailed her dealer for it. Charming fellow called Huxtable, or something like that.’

‘Huxley Snyder. No history of violence.’

Finally his suitcase emerges from the plastic curtain and thumps down the chute onto the belt. He scoops it up and shuttles Kirby towards the exit to the El.

‘History has to start somewhere, right?’

‘I spoke to the girl’s dad. He said someone had been phoning the house asking for Catherine.’

‘Sure. I get people phoning my house asking for me all the time. Most of them are insurance salesmen.’ He starts digging in his wallet for CTA tokens, but Kirby has dropped enough for both of them into the slot.

‘He said there was something sinister about him.’

‘There’s something sinister about insurance salesmen,’ Dan retorts. He’s not going to encourage her.

There’s a train waiting, already packed. He lets her take the seat and leans up against the pole as the doors-closing bell goes. Hates touching the thing. More germs on hand rails than toilet seats.

‘And she was stabbed, Dan. Not in the gut, but— ’

‘Have you enrolled for the new semester?’

‘What?’

‘Because I know you’re not talking to me about this shit again. You’re practically under a restraining order.’

‘For f*ck’s sake. I didn’t come here to talk to you about Catherine Galloway-Peck, although there are similarities and…’

‘I don’t want to hear it.’

‘Fine,’ she says coldly. ‘The reason I came to meet you at the airport was because of this.’ She swings her backpack round onto her lap. Battered, black, anonymous. She unzips it and pulls out his jacket.

‘Hey, I’ve been looking for that.’

‘That’s not what I want to show you.’

She unfolds the jacket like it’s some sacred bloody shroud. He’s expecting proof of the second coming at least. Jesus’s face imprinted in a sweat stain. But what emerges is a kids’ toy. A plastic horse, the worse for wear.

‘And this now?’

‘He gave it to me when I was a little girl. I was six years old. How was I supposed to recognize him? I didn’t even remember the pony until I saw a photograph.’ She hesitates, uncertain. ‘Shit. I don’t know how to say this.’

‘Can’t be worse than anything else you’ve said to me. All the crazy theories, I mean.’ Not the moment when she turned on him in the Sun-Times boardroom, raw with the betrayal that ripped right through him, leaving a residual ache every time he thinks about her. Which is all the time. ‘This theory’s the worst one of all. But you have to hear me out.’

‘Can’t wait,’ he says.

She lays it out for him. Her impossible pony, which ties in to the impossible baseball card on that World War Two woman, which somehow ties in to the lighter and a cassette tape Julia wouldn’t have listened to. He struggles to hide his mounting dismay.

‘It’s very interesting,’ he says, carefully.

‘Don’t do that.’

‘What am I doing?’

‘Pitying me.’

‘There’s a reasonable explanation for all of this.’

‘F*ck reasonable.’

‘Look. Here’s the plan. I’ve had six and a half hours in airports and on planes. I’m tired. I stink. But for you – and really, you’re the only person in the world I would do this for – I am going to forego heading home to have the simple and very necessary joy of a shower. We’re going to go straight to the office and I’m going to phone the toy company and clear this up.’

‘You think I didn’t do that already?’

‘Yeah, but you weren’t asking the right questions,’ he says, patiently. ‘Like, for example, was there a prototype? Was there a salesman who might have had access to them in 1974? Is it possible that the numbers “1982” refer to a limited edition or a manufacturing number rather than a date?’

She’s quiet for a long time, staring at her feet. She’s wearing big clunky boots today. Half the laces are undone. ‘It is crazy, huh? Jesus.’

‘Totally understandable. That’s a weird set of coincidences right there. Of course you want to try to make sense of them. And you’re probably onto something big with this pony. If it turns out there was a salesman with a prototype, that could lead us straight to him. Okay? You done good. Don’t sweat it.’

‘You’re the one who’s sweating,’ she says with a small tight smile that doesn’t make it to her eyes.

‘We’ll sort it out,’ he says. And until they get to the Sun-Times, he actually believes it.