As he closes out the browser—and the thirty-some websites tabbed there—her inbox comes into view. Josh comments on the ten thousand unread messages listed there, and she says, “If I actually read and answered all those things, I’d be a professional emailer.”
“Your address must have gotten shared among some spambots,” he says, and scrolls through the inbox, pointing out the number of messages flowing in since last night, hundreds, all of them with attachments. He lingers a moment, as if tempted by their solicitations. Every attachment is indicated by the symbol of a black paper clip, stacked up on the screen like tarry hoof prints. The computer makes a strained, choked noise, and he breaks from his spell. “Don’t open any of this stuff, okay? It’ll just infect your computer.”
“The camera.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He plugs in the camera, and the computer takes a long minute to recognize it. He clicks on the external drive and opens up the storage. “There’s like fifty million pictures on this thing that you have obviously never backed up. How far back does this go? Birth? Is your mother’s ultrasound of you in here?”
“Open the most recent,” she says. “Not today, not the stuff from the farmers’ market or the race, but yesterday.”
He scrolls through and spots the date stamp on the photos taken at the Rue. He clicks on the first of them—and the image takes over the screen. The carved-out square, maybe thirty feet deep, of the construction site. Busy with workers who shovel and trowel and whisk away the dirt.
“Zoom in on one of those graves,” she tells him, and he magnifies by 200 percent, then 250 percent when she asks for more. He readjusts the frame so that the mound is centered. It takes a few seconds for the pixels to clarify. The screen is riddled with bones. Bones that do and do not appear human. Here are the long arms and legs of a man, but the fingers appear too long and the giant skull appears pointed, elongated, like that of a mastiff or cow.
She asks him to go to another mound, and he does. The skull is all teeth. And its vertebrae appear to extend into a tail. She notices markings along them. Runes and ciphers akin to those found on the skull in her purse.
Josh’s voice is barely a whisper when he says, “Dude . . . what is this?”
“I don’t really know.”
She tells him to pull up the next photo. This one focuses on a construction worker. Black-bearded. Minutes later he would be the one to chase up the ladder while she took the ramp. She remembers his face then—on its way toward rage—but here he appears smudged, indistinct, greased over with charcoal. The other photos are similar. Every face fogged. She asks Josh to clean up their faces if he can.
He can’t. “Must be something off with the focus.” Yet everything else remains clear. He calls up the final photo. Of the small man. His face, too, is nothing but a fleshy smear.
Lela leans against the desk and gnaws at her thumbnail, peeling away a sliver, sucking on it. Her mind retreats to the Rue, the way it felt shadowed even in sun. The bodies found in the apartment there—sawed-up in the fridge, treated into lampshades and curtains, dissolving in buckets of lye—and now more bodies buried beneath. How could one place nest so much darkness?
Josh gives up on the computer and leans back in the chair to study her. “My dad said that anyone who writes on the back of their hand is a moron.”
“Huh?” She holds up her hand, the edge of her thumbnail peeled away to reveal the angry red beneath. Her knuckles are always inked with reminders. But today there is only the one, BR12, whatever that referred to. “Oh yeah. I am my own notebook and calendar.” And that’s when she remembers. BR12. Benedikt’s Restaurant, twelve o’clock. Her sister and her niece. She was supposed to meet them there to celebrate Hannah’s eye surgery. The Mirage prosthetic that would supposedly restore her sight. She checks the clock—late by hours. “Shit.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” Every family has a terrorist—her sister, Cheryl, says—an emotional terrorist. And Lela is it. Lela ruins everything, drains and upsets everyone with her pessimism and selfishness, the whole world revolving around her job. Maybe her sister’s right, Lela thinks at moments like this, moments when she’s clearly screwed up, but it’s always been easy for her to move on, shrug off, forget, concentrate on the future, and forget about the past.
She’s already there—already looking ahead—saying to Josh, “That interview you have to transcribe? Forget it. I need you on this.” She taps the screen so hard that the monitor wobbles. “I asked you earlier to do some digging on the company that bought the Rue property. Undertown. What do you have on them for me?”
“Brandon told me not to—”
“Forget Brandon. He’s a shit-for-brains clown. I want Undertown. Everything you can find on Undertown. Dig deep on the Rue. Look at the site before it was the Rue. That address. And the surrounding blocks in the Pearl District. I know college students are lazy and like to do all of their research on Google. Forget that. Get your ass out of the chair and check the physical archives at the library, historical society, City Hall. Dig through the stacks, crank some microfilm.”
“What am I looking for? Do you think something happened there?”
“I have no idea. I’m following an itch. You feel an itch, you scratch till it bleeds. Understand, intern? This is me mentoring your ass.”
“I guess.”
She collects her purse, snaps her fingers for Hemingway to follow, and with the dog at her side, starts down the aisle of cubicles.
“Where are you going?” Josh calls after her.
“To apologize.”
Chapter 11
HANNAH LOVES THE HEAVY spiced sausages, the tangy shredded bundles of sauerkraut. Reuben rolls, pork shanks, baked onion soup, liver dumpling soup, potato dumplings. The German restaurant, Benedikt’s, has always been her favorite. It is a white-walled, dark-roofed, heavy-timbered building located at the edge of Forest Park. She and her mother come here on special occasions—birthdays, holidays—and today is a special occasion. The Mirage works. She can see.
But today is special for another reason as well, though they do not realize it before pulling into the parking lot and finding it nearly full. An Oktoberfest banner hangs across the entry. Outside, on the patio, a huddle of men and women raise their steins in a toast and laugh too loud. “Maybe we should come back another time,” Hannah says, and her mother says, “We will do no such thing. This is your day.”
Clouds scud across the sky, and the sun winks in and out of sight. The air still smells damp and minerally from last night’s storm, like a stone pulled from a river. The wind hushes and pushes the trees around. Tall firs rise around the restaurant and make it appear like a squat mushroom growing out of their roots.
Normally her mother leads her everywhere, taking her by the hand, maybe directing her by some pressure at the small of her back. On their way across the parking lot, they reach for each other out of habit, and then Hannah pulls away. “I’m okay.”