Our home in Logan Park was the kind of house you’d drive by every day and never notice. Blue siding. A modest front yard cut in half by a sidewalk. A fenced-in backyard with a garage off the alley. Small by most measures, it had always been big enough for the two of us. After Jenni died, the house seemed to expand and contract depending on the strength of her memory, inhaling and exhaling, breathing deepest when I missed her the most.
Jenni’s china figurines watched me from the fireplace mantle as I paced around the living room, mumbling to myself, debating my next move. The file that Boady had stumbled upon, the stolen file that now lay on my coffee table, had to be the key. Boady didn’t know how important his single contribution might be. How could he? He didn’t know about the other puzzle pieces that I was hiding in my house.
I went to a drawer in my bedroom and brought out my other file, a file I had secretly copied from the archive room at City Hall. I put it on the coffee table next to its new sister. As I stared at the two files, I became swept up in the hope that somewhere in those pages lurked the secret that would lead me to my wife’s killer, one file filling in the gaps left by the other, consonants and vowels finally joining together to give meaning to the noise.
My thoughts settled as the path ahead of me became clear. The time had come to toss aside half measures and shadow investigations. Like a base jumper committing to the leap, I would either succeed spectacularly or fail spectacularly. What I would no longer do, though, is waver.
With our master bedroom on the main floor, we rarely went upstairs, which held two small bedrooms and a bathroom. We kept one of the upstairs bedrooms nice for company to stay in. That room was also going to be the nursery when—if—that time ever arrived. Even before the wedding, we talked about having children, a plan that fell behind careers and the daily pressures of life. Then, one day, Jenni called me up to the guest room in the middle of a spring afternoon. When I walked in, I found her lying on her back, completely naked except for a bracelet on her left wrist. It was a piece of jewelry she had never worn before, her great-grandmother’s bracelet, an heirloom that carried over a hundred years of history.
Jenni had shown me the bracelet back when we were still dating, a simple chain with six golden charms on it, each about the size and shape of a dime. On each charm had been inscribed a name. Three of the names were those of Jenni’s grandmother and her grandmother’s two brothers. Two more names belonged to Jenni’s mother, Alice, and Jenni’s aunt, Helen. The sixth charm carried Jenni’s name. Great Grandma Mary had started the tradition of inscribing the names of her children on the bracelet, adding a new charm with each new birth. Now the tradition had fallen to us.
Jenni’s nakedness surprised me and was a happy interruption of my afternoon. When I had lain beside Jenni, she told me that she had made a decision. The time had come to have a child. We’d been risking the possibility for a while, but now, she said, it was time to get serious. She wanted to make me a father, and she chose to begin that journey in the room that would become the nursery.
I slipped the bracelet off of her wrist and hooked it on a nail above the headboard where a picture of ducks once hung. And there the bracelet would remain—for years, a symbol of what we lacked. We never made love in that room again, and, over time, we both stopped visiting the guest room all together. I think neither of us could take the daily reminder that not all trees bore fruit.
The second upstairs bedroom had been turned into a storage room, filled with everything from old textbooks and unused exercise equipment to boxes of clothing. I don’t remember being inside either of those rooms since Jenni’s death, but now, that time had arrived. I needed a war room, a place where I could immerse myself in Jenni’s case with no distractions, a place where I could release my inner Mr. Hyde and indulge in my own form of masochism, like those penitents who flog themselves into religious ecstasy. In this room, I would purge all other thoughts from my head and focus on one task—hunting down the people responsible for my wife’s death.
With that inspiration, I went to the guest room to begin my work.
Before anything else, I wanted to remove the bracelet from the wall. I didn’t need the weight of that history distracting me. When I went to pull it from its nail, it was gone. I hadn’t noticed before. Jenni must have packed it away with all of the other reminders of our broken dream. If I had looked for the bracelet, I probably would have found it in the storage room, in a pink sewing kit that also came to us as an heirloom, a box that held Jenni’s bronzed baby shoes and the hospital band they wrapped around her wrist on the day she was born.
I took a moment to let the memory pass and then went to work.
First, I took apart the bed, hauling its slats and rails out to the garage and leaning the box spring and mattress against the wall at the top of the stairs. I dragged the dresser to the storage room and emptied the bookcase of its books, throwing them into the dusty bathtub of the upstairs bathroom. Within a couple hours, I had emptied the guest room of all of its contents other than the bare bookshelf, which I figured I could use.
I would need lots of table space, which I didn’t have, so I popped the hinge pins off the doors of both bedrooms and the bathroom. They were cheap, hollow-core doors with flat, smooth surfaces. Laying them on boxes I’d taken from the storage room, I created three tables, which I arranged into a horseshoe.
Satisfied with my effort, I brought up my laptop, a dining room chair, and the two files. As I began organizing my investigation, I heard the pop of firecrackers in the distance, their lonely clap offering proof that, even in subzero temperatures, people can’t resist bothering neighbors when it’s New Year’s Eve. I looked at my watch and saw that midnight had just passed.
Thus began my fifth New Year’s Day without her.
I opened the first file, the thicker of the two—the file that led to my reprimand last year. Swiping it from the archive room was an act that would not have garnered a second glance, much less a reprimand, had it not been my wife’s case. I made a copy of the file, kept the clone, and returned the original to its home. The case was originally assigned to Detective Louis Parnell, who was given instructions not to pass anything along to me. There were rules against such things. I was the victim’s husband. If Jenni’s death had been anything other than a hit-and-run, I would be the top suspect. Nothing personal; that’s just where most spousal murders ended up.