Memory and Dream

on his desk—and a woman introduced as Sharon Hooper, who proved to be an assistant DA. Neither of them stood up when Alan was brought in. By the grim looks on their faces, Alan realized that whatever the detectives had told him in his apartment, he hadn’t been brought in to answer some routine questions.

Kent had the look of a man who rarely smiled anyway—and considering all he would have seen after his years on the force, that didn’t particularly surprise Alan. He appeared to be in his late forties, a lean dark-haired man, greying at the temples. Obviously a career officer. The ADA was another matter. From the laugh lines around her eyes, Alan assumed Hooper was normally a cheerful woman. The grim set to her features seemed more out of place and only served to increase the nervousness that had begun when the two detectives showed up at his door.

A tape recorder was produced and turned on. After he waived his right to counsel at this point, the interrogation began.

Two hours later, they were still at it. At one point the larger of the two detectives left the room to speak with Marisa. He returned, confirming that Marisa could corroborate his story. Then they made him go through it all again. Finally, Lieutenant Kent sighed. He looked resigned, if no less grim.

Hooper pushed her blonde hair back from her temples before leaning across the lieutenant’s desk to hit the Off button on the tape recorder.

“That ... is that it?” Alan asked.

“You’re free to go, Mr. Grant,” Kent told him. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

They were letting him go, Alan realized, but they didn’t believe him. The only reason he could walk out that door behind him was that they couldn’t prove anything against him. At least not yet—that message was plain from the tense atmosphere in the office. He could go, but they weren’t finished with him. They’d be watching him, pushing and prodding, waiting for him to make a mistake. But he didn’t have any mistakes to make. He hadn’t done anything.

“Why won’t you believe me?” he asked.

“No one said anything about not believing you,” the ADA replied. “But you don’t.”

“We have to keep our options open,” the lieutenant said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Grant, but going on all the information we have to date, you’re the only one with a plausible motive.”

“I ... I understand. It’s just, I’ve never been in any kind of trouble like this before and I ...”

His voice trailed off. Why was he even bothering to explain? The only person in this office who cared about what he was going through was himself. He had no allies here.

The lieutenant leaned forward, a brief look of sympathy crossing his features. “We’re certainly taking that into consideration, Mr. Grant. But look at it from our point of view. If you didn’t kill her, then who did?”

Not me, Alan thought as he finally stepped out of the Crowsea Precinct with Marisa holding his arm.

He was surprised to find it was still daylight outside. It felt as though he’d been in that office the whole day, but it was still early afternoon. He blinked in the bright September sunshine. It was a perfect autumn day, the air crisp, the sky a startling blue. Up and down the street, the maples and oaks were bright with color. None of it really registered for Alan.

“What did they want?” Marisa asked.

She’d asked him that same question when he joined her outside the lieutenant’s office, but he’d shaken his head, a wordless “not yet, wait until we’re outside.” No one offered to drive them back to his apartment. No one had apologized for what they’d put him through.

“Margaret Mully was killed last night,” he told Marisa now as they stood there on the precinct steps.

“They think I did it.”

Marisa’s eyes widened with shock. “No.” She gripped his arm. “How can they even think that?”

“I’m the only one they’ve got with a motive,” Alan said.

“But they let you go, so they’re not accusing you anymore, are they?”

“They just haven’t got anything to hold me on.”

“But—”

Alan turned to her. “I won’t say I’m sorry that she’s dead, but I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill her, Marisa.”

“I know that, Alan. I would never believe that of you.”

He put his arm around her and held her too tightly, but Marisa didn’t flinch. “The way things are shaping up at the moment,” he said, “you’re the only one.”

Alan thought he’d gotten through the worst, back there in the lieutenant’s office. But then he saw them, gathered there at the bottom of the precinct’s steps like a pack of vultures. The reporters. More tape recorders. Photographers. Live feeds back to the studio.

“Mr. Grant, can we have a word with you?”

“Why did the police want to speak to you?”

“How do you feel about Margaret Mully being out of the picture?”

“Do you still intend to go ahead with the book?”

Oddly enough, all Alan could think of at that moment was that anyone watching the news was going to see him standing here on the steps of the Crowsea Precinct with his arm around Marisa Banning, a married woman who wasn’t his wife. Her husband George could see it. Or Isabelle. Anyone at all. And he didn’t care. He didn’t care at all.

“No comment,” he said over and over again as they made their way through the crowd.

He held on to Marisa’s hand until they managed to flag down a cab and he didn’t let go of it the whole way home.

VI

Nobody could run as fast as her, that was for sure, Cosette thought as she sped away from the Newford Children’s Foundation. Nobody at all. Maybe that was what happened when you had a red crow beating its wings inside your chest. Maybe it slowed you down. People like her new friend Rolanda and Isabelle never seemed to want to run and dance and skip and simply toss themselves about for the sheer fun of it. The whole body could make a music that they so seldom played. Handclap, the stampa-stamp of feet on a wooden floor. Click and clack, whistle up a wind, cheeks puffed out, expelled air tickling the lips. Or the tip-tappa-tappa-tip of Paddyjack playing wooden fingers against his wooden limbs.

She paused in her headlong flight to think about that. Up she perched on a low wall and watched the slow parade of pedestrians go by. The day was perfect, perfect, perfect, but so few of them were smiling. Maybe having a red crow inside you took too much energy and you didn’t have enough left over for fun. Maybe it made you so tired that you couldn’t even see how perfect a day it was and how much it deserved a smile and a laugh and a dance in return for the gift of it.

And dreams, too. Did you have to think them up, or did they just come to you? How much energy did they take?

But being real was important—not just the real that Rosalind claimed they were, but the kind of real that made everyone you happened to bump into pay attention to you, the kind of real that said, yes, you had a red crow beating its wings inside of you, too. Most people only saw her when she wanted them to.

Otherwise she was no more than a vague flicker of movement caught out of the corner of an eye, something that seemed more likely to be a flutter of leaves or debris tossed up by the wind.

Sometimes she liked the surprise of popping up out of nowhere and the silly looks on people’s faces when they couldn’t help but notice her. Like back at Rolanda’s house, where her gateway hung. That had been fun. It didn’t matter where she was in all this world, it took only a thought and she could find herself standing in front of it. Usually she was careful that no one saw her—Rosalind was always saying, be careful, be careful, be careful, so Cosette was. But not always. She didn’t endanger her gateway, but she liked to pop in there from the island and then make her way back home, secreting her way, peeping into houses, listening to the lives lived by those who could dream and bleed, appearing and disappearing right in front of people’s eyes and then didn’t they look foolish.

But sometimes she would stand for hours in front of her painting and wonder if the gateway opened both ways. Could she go back through it into the before the way she’d come across? Nobody knew.

Not Rosalind or Paddyjack or Annie Nin. Not even Solemn John, who was the cleverest of them all, even more clever than Rosalind, though much too serious, that was for sure. Nobody knew and nobody wanted to try. Nobody dared. It was probably so awful—why else would they have come across the way they all had instead of staying