Until I Find You

dug a groove through one of her eyebrows. Her partner was a husky white guy with a crew cut and pale-blue eyes; his eyes were as calm and unblinking as Lucy’s.

“Be sure to check her for evidence of bodily fluids,” Jack told the officers, “in case I’m lying.”

The black woman smiled. “Don’t you get in trouble, too,” she told him. “Behave yourself.”

“We’d like to have a look inside your house, just to corroborate a few things,” the husky policeman said.

“Sure,” Jack told him.

It was a long day. Jack kept looking out the window. He was hoping the paparazzo would come onto his property, but the photographer maintained his vigil at the foot of the driveway. After the police took Lucy away— Jack insisted on giving Lucy the bath towel—the photographer went away, too.

Jack was surprised that both police officers never once appeared to doubt his story, but the female officer had cautioned him about the photos of Alice’s breasts and her tattoo on the refrigerator. When Jack explained the history of the photographs, the policewoman said: “That doesn’t matter. If there’s ever any trouble here, you don’t want pictures like those on your fridge.”

He showed her the photo of Emma naked at seventeen—the one under the paperweight on his desk. “Ditto?” he asked her.

“You’re learning,” the female officer said. “I sense that you have real potential.”

After everyone had gone, Jack found Lucy’s thong in his bathtub; it was so small that the police must have missed it. He put it in the trash, together with the four photos of his mom and the old one of Emma.

If he hadn’t been leaving for Halifax in the morning, Jack might have been more careful about the trash. It would make sense to him later—how the magazine that bought the paparazzo’s photographs had sent someone to the house on Entrada Drive to sort through Jack’s trash. It made sense that the magazine would talk to Lucy, too —and that she would dismiss the incident as a “prank.”

All Jack said, when the magazine later asked him for a comment—allegedly for a follow-up story—was that the police had behaved properly. First of all, they’d believed Jack. Wasn’t Lucy the one they’d taken away? “You figure it out,” Jack said to the woman from the magazine, who called herself a “diligent fact-checker.” (He meant that the police hadn’t taken him away, had they?)

But Jack knew nothing about any of this when he left in the morning for Halifax. Given all the things that had happened to him—the bad choices he’d made, those years he would regret—the Lucy episode struck him as a virtual nonevent. He didn’t even call Dr. Garcia and tell her about it. (Let her wait; let her hear about it in chronological order, Jack thought.)

But sometimes even a nonevent will be registered in the public consciousness. Jack had done nothing to Lucy—except try to look after her, when she was four. But in a scandal-mongering movie magazine, complete with photos, the girl’s irritating “prank” would carry with it a whiff of something truly scandalous; it would appear as if Jack Burns had gotten away with something.

This would be hard to say to Dr. Garcia, when the time came, but—although it didn’t yet exist—a trap had been set for Jack. Lucy wasn’t the trap, but she was a contributing factor to a trap that waited in his future. That nice female officer had tried to tell him. Jack had thrown away the photographs, but the photos hadn’t been all she was warning him about.

“If there’s ever any trouble here—” Wasn’t that how she’d put it?

34. Halifax

Jack called Michele Maher’s office on his cell phone en route to the airport. It was very early in the morning in L.A., but Dr. Maher’s nurse answered the phone in the doctor’s Cambridge office; it was three hours later in Massachusetts. The nurse was a friendly soul named Amanda, who informed him that Dr. Maher was with a patient.

Jack told Amanda who he was and where he was going. He said he’d gone to school with Michele—that was as far as he got with their history.

“I know all about it,” Amanda said. “Everyone in the office wanted to kill her for not going to the Oscars with you.”

“Oh.”

“Are you going to have lunch with her?” Amanda asked. Jack guessed that everyone in the office knew about the letter Michele had written him; possibly Amanda had typed it.

Jack explained that he was hoping to see Dr. Maher on his return trip from Halifax. He’d booked a stopover in Boston. If Michele was free for dinner that night, or lunch the next day—that was as far as he got.

“So now it’s dinner!” Amanda said eagerly. “Maybe lunch and dinner. Maybe breakfast!”

Jack told Amanda that he would call later in the week from Halifax—just to be sure Dr. Maher had the time to see him.

“You should stay at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge. You can walk to the hospital and our office. I can reserve a room for you, if you want,” Amanda told him. “The hotel has a gym and a pool, and everything.”

“Thank you, Amanda,” he said. “That would be very nice—if Dr. Maher has the time to see me.”

“What’s with the Dr. Maher?” Amanda exclaimed.

Jack didn’t bother to tell Amanda to reserve a room for him at the Charles under a different name, although not only Michele but everyone in the office would know that Jack Burns was in town and where he was staying. As interested as Jack was in the Halifax Explosion, or the idea of making a movie in his birthplace, he was by no means committed to the role of the amnesiac transvestite prostitute in Doug McSwiney’s screenplay; in fact, the more Jack thought about the issues he had with McSwiney’s script, the less he felt like registering in any hotel as an amnesiac transvestite prostitute. (At the hotel in Halifax, he’d made the reservation in his own name.)

Jack thanked Amanda for her friendliness and help and gave her the phone number of his hotel in Halifax, and his cell-phone number—just in case Michele wanted to call him.

Jack had sufficient airplane reading for the trip, beginning with Doug McSwiney’s screenplay, which he read two more times. Called The Halifax Explosion, McSwiney’s script was purportedly based on Michael J. Bird’s The Town That Died—a chronicle of the Halifax disaster first published in 1967. Bird’s book, which was by far the best of Jack’s airplane reading, had been rendered a disservice.

On December 6, 1917, two ships collided in the Narrows—a mile-long channel, only five hundred yards wide, that connects Bedford Basin with Halifax Harbor and the open sea. A French freighter, the Mont Blanc, was bound for Bordeaux, loaded with munitions for the war effort. A Norwegian vessel, the Imo, had arrived in Halifax from Rotterdam and was sailing to New York. The Mont Blanc’s cargo included more than two thousand tons of picric acid and two hundred tons of TNT.

Upon impact, the Mont Blanc caught fire; less than an hour later, the ship’s lethal cargo blew up. People were watching the burning ship from almost everywhere in town; they didn’t know they were about to be blown up, too. Almost two thousand people were killed, nine thousand injured, and two hundred blinded.

The explosion leveled the North End of the city, which Bird describes as “a wilderness, a vast burning scrap yard.” Hundreds of children were killed. There was incalculable damage to other ships in the harbor, and to the piers and dockyards and the Naval College—in addition to the Wellington Barracks and the Dartmouth side of the Narrows, where the captain and crew of the Mont Blanc had swum ashore.

Jack thought that the character of the French captain, Aime Le Medec, was the most challenging for an actor. Bird describes him as “not more than 5 feet 4 inches in height but well built, with a neatly trimmed black beard to add authority to his somewhat youthful face.” A contemporary of Le Medec called the captain “a likeable