Page 55 of Wrong Mail

"Like yourself?"

I smile. "If it's any consolation, I urged David to put an alarm system in within a month of us arriving. He said he'd handle it."

"And yet he didn't." Henry pauses. "You ever wonder why?"

I shrug. "Life. Business. It got away from us."

"You think that's why the Ericksons had theirs switched off?"

I stare at him, trying to work out what he's reaching for. "David's an open book. We both are."

“Really? An open book." He says it back to me without weight, and lets it sit. "So he's never kept a thing from you. Not once."

And there it is, the gun in its case at the back of a cupboard I never open, two years of not knowing. I feel the splinter go in exactly where he meant it to. I turn back to the case files, because the trail he's laid only leads to questions of my own.

It's Julia's voice that gets me to do it. Oh, sure. His sister. Have you confirmed that?

"Is she in here?" I ask. "Your sister."

Henry doesn't hesitate. That's the part I'll turn over afterward, that there's no moment where he decides whether to show it to me. He goes to the box file. He knows exactly where she is. He hands me a single plastic sleeve with one cutting in it, soft and furred at the folds from years of being taken out and put back.

It's from a local paper I've never heard of. Twelve years old, the dateline bled almost to nothing. A married couple killed in their home in a small town in Jackson County, Claire and Martin Doyle. No arrests. Just the same three sentences these pieces always run. There's a photograph, the two of them at somebody's wedding, a bad copy of a copy. Claire Doyle's face is a pale oval under a dark fall of hair, and there's little else to make out. I look for Henry in her face. I look for anything. There isn't enough of her left on the page to find it.

"Doyle," I say.

"Her married name." He takes the sleeve back when I offer it and sets it down exactly where it was. "I don't file her with the others. She was never a case to me."

And that's all there is. A surname that isn't his, a town I can't drive myself to, and a face the copier ate twelve years ago. I asked the question Julia told me to ask, and this is the answer. I let it go, glad to have been wrong to worry.

It's the last card that does it.

We're nearly done, the light almost gone, when Henry takes me back to the earliest cases. The beginning of it, before anyone knew there was a beginning. He taps a printout from a small county paper. A double funeral. A photograph of two coffins and a line of mourners in black against a white church.

"This is one of the first we know of," he says. "Or the first he was careless with. There's a name on it I've always wondered about. A cousin who talked to the press, said the family had felt watched for weeks. Nobody listened."

I lean in to read the name.

And the room I’m in vanishes.

It isn't a memory. There's no picture, no scene, nothing I could give Kane or a court. It's my whole body arriving somewhere ahead of me. The floor tilts, my stomach turns, and a certainty with nothing under it opens inside me.

I have seen this page before.

And if I look one inch to the left of the name, I will know what's there before I see it.

I can't breathe.

"Mallory?"

I look one inch to the left.

There's nothing there. A column of type, a photograph, an ordinary terrible story. Whatever opened in me is gone before I can reach it. The floor is a floor again. The room comes back in pieces. Henry's back room, the folding table, the dead laid out between us. My heart is going like I've run up stairs.

I pinch the bridge of my nose.

"Sorry. It's warm in here, and I haven't eaten since lunch."

Concern crosses Henry’s face. It lasts a half-second longer than it should.