Twenty minutes later, I turned south off the expressway at Goethals Street and continued south in the shadows of the cloverleaf overpasses. The seedy photography studios and failing dress shops gave way to the high blank walls of the tanneries and breweries. I caught the odor of hops and the other, darker odor that came from whatever the tanners did in the tanneries. Dented, hard-worked vans lined the street, and men on their breaks leaned against the dingy walls, smoking. In the partial light, their faces were the color of metal shavings.
Goethals Street reverted to the jarring old cobblestones, and I turned right at a corner where a topless bar was selling shots of brandy and beer chasers to a boisterous night-shift crowd. A block south I turned onto Livermore Avenue. The great concrete shadow of the viaduct floated away overhead, and the big corporate prisons vanished behind me. I was back in Pigtown.
The places where the big interlocking elms once stood had been filled with cement slabs. The sun fell flat and hard on the few people, most of them in their sixties and seventies, who toiled past the empty barber shops and barred liquor stores. My breath caught in my throat, and I slowed down to twenty-five, the speed limit. The avenue was almost as empty as the sidewalks, and so few cars had parked at the curb that the meter stands cast straight parallel shadows.
Everything seemed familiar and unfamiliar at once, as if I had often dreamed of but never seen this section of Livermore Avenue. Little frame houses like those on the side streets stood alongside tarpaper taverns and gas stations and diners. Once every couple of blocks, a big new grocery store or a bank with a drive-through window had replaced the old structures, but most of the buildings I had seen as a child wandering far from home still stood. For a moment, I felt like that child again, and each half-remembered building that I passed shone out at me. These buildings seemed uncomplicatedly beautiful, with their chipped paint and dirty brick, the unlighted neon signs in their streaky windows. I felt stripped of layers of skin. My hands began to tremble. I pulled over to the empty curb and waited for it to pass.
The sight of my family's graves had cracked my shell. The world trembled around me, about to blaze. The archaic story preserved in fragments about Orpheus and Lot's wife says—look back, lose everything.
The yellow crime scene ribbons closing off the end of the brick passage behind the St. Alwyn drooped as though melted by the sun. I leaned as far inside the little tunnel as I could without touching the tape. The place where my sister had been murdered was larger than I remembered it, about ten feet long and nine feet high at the top of the rounded arch. Wind, humidity, or the feet of policemen had gradually erased the chalked outline from the gritty concrete floor of the passage.
Then I looked up and saw the words. I stopped breathing. They had been printed across a row of bricks five feet above the ground in letters about a foot high. The words slanted slightly upward, as if the man writing them had been tilting to one side. The letters were black and thin, inky, and imperfections in the bricks made them look chewed, blue rose, another time capsule.
I backed away from the crime scene tape and turned around to face Livermore Avenue. Imaginary pain began to sing in my right leg. Fire traveled lightly through my bones, concentrating on all the little cracks and welds.
Then the child I had been, who lived within me and saw through my eyes, spoke the truth with wordless eloquence, as he always does.
A madman from my own childhood, a creature of darkness I had once glimpsed in the narrow alley at my back, had returned to take more lives. The man with the ponytail might have assaulted April Ransom and imitated his method, but the real Blue Rose was walking through the streets of Millhaven like a man inhabited by an awakened demon. John Ransom was right. The man who called himself Blue Rose was sitting over a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee in his kitchen, he was switching on his television to see if we were in for cooler weather, he was closing his front door to take a stroll through the sunlight.
Tom Pasmore had said something about place being the factor that linked the victims. Like his mentor, Tom Pasmore never told you everything he knew; he waited for you to catch up. I went up to the corner and crossed when the light changed, thinking about the places where Blue Rose had killed people forty years ago.
One outside the St. Alwyn, one inside. One across the street, outside the Idle Hour, the small white frame building directly in front of me. One, the butcher, two blocks away outside his shop. These four were the genuine Blue Rose murders. Standing at the side of the Idle Hour, I turned around to look across the street.
Three of the four original murders had happened on the doorstep of the St. Alwyn Hotel, if not inside.
I looked across the street at the old hotel, trying to put myself in the past. The St. Alwyn had been built at the beginning of the century, when the south side had thrived, and it still had traces of its original elegance. At the entrance on Widow Street, around the corner, broad marble steps led up to a huge dark wooden door with brass fittings. The name of the hotel was carved into a stone arch over the front door. From where I stood, I could see only the side of the hotel. Over the years it had darkened to a dirty gray. Nine rows of windows, most of them covered on the inside by brown shades, punctuated the stone. The St. Alwyn looked defeated, worn out by time. It had not looked very different forty years ago.
Our old house stood four doors up the block, a foursquare rectangular wooden building with two concrete steps up to the front door, windows on both sides of the door, two windows in line with these on the second floor, and a small patchy front lawn. It looked like a child's drawing. During my childhood, the top floor had been painted brown and the bottom one yellow. Later, my father had painted the entire house a sad, terrible shade of green, but the new owners had restored it to the original colors.
The old house hardly affected me. It was like a shell I had grown out of and left behind. I'd been more moved at Pine Knoll Cemetery—just driving into Pigtown on Livermore Avenue had affected me more deeply. I tried to let the deep currents, the currents that connect you to the rest of life, run through me, but I felt like a stone. What I remembered about the old house had to do with an old Underwood upright on a pine desk in a bedroom where blue roses climbed up the wallpaper, with onionskin paper and typewriter ribbons, and with telling stories to charm the darkness: a memory of frustration and concentration, and of time disappearing into a bright elastic eternity.
Then there was one more place I had to see, and I walked back down South Sixth, crossed Livermore, and turned south.
From two blocks away I saw the marquee sagging toward the sidewalk, and my heart moved in my chest. The Beldame Oriental had not survived the last three decades as well as the Royal. Sliding glass panels crusty with stains had once protected the letters that spelled out the titles of the films. Nothing remained of the ornate detail I thought I remembered.
Two narrow glass doors opened off the sidewalk. Behind them, before a set of black lacquered doors, the glass cubicle of the ticket booth was only dimly visible through the smudgy glass. Jagged pieces of cement and smoke-colored grit littered the black-and-white tile floor between the two sets of doors. The paltriness, the meanness of this distance—the stingy littleness of the entire theater—gave me a shock so deep that at the moment I was scarcely aware of it.
I stepped back and looked down the street for the real Beldame Oriental. Then I went up to the two narrow glass doors and tried either to push myself inside the old theater or simply to see better—I didn't know which. My reflection moved forward to meet me, and we touched.
An enormous block of feeling loosed itself from its secret moorings and moved up into my chest. My throat tightened and my breathing stopped. My eyes sparkled. I drew in a ragged breath, for a moment uncertain if I were going to stay on my feet. I could not even tell if it were joy or anguish. It was just naked feeling, straight from the heart of my childhood. It even tasted like childhood. I pushed myself away from the old theater and wobbled over the sidewalk to lean on a parking meter.
Warmth on my head and shoulders brought me a little way back to myself, and I blew my nose into my handkerchief and straightened up. I stuffed the handkerchief back into my pocket. I moved away from the parking meter and pressed my hands over my eyes.
