When the truck pulled away, I looked up and saw old Bessie O’Brian leaning forlornly on her window pillow waving at her departing neighbor, and when the truck turned at the corner and was out of sight, she wiped the tears from her eyes, then saw me and put her sentry face back on again.
“When are you going, Bessie?” I called out.
“I’m ordering my coffin today,” she snapped.
“Come on, Bessie.”
She let her eyes roam the street, then said, “My youngest daughter is coming to get me.”
“From where?”
“Elizabeth, New Jersey. It’s across the river in the country.” She paused for a couple of seconds and added, “I hate the country. Damn, I don’t even like Central Park.”
“Why not?”
“There’s animals there.”
“Nah.”
“The hell there ain’t. People feed ’em peanuts and stuff like that there.”
“Those are just squirrels, Bessie.”
“I don’t care what they are.”
“Elizabeth is a pretty big city now. You’ll enjoy it. Besides, you’ll only be an hour away from New York. You can see all the big buildings with no trouble.”
Her face drooped a little and she asked me, “Why do we all have to move, Captain Jack?”
“The street is dying, Bessie. We don’t move out, we die with it.”
“Be all right with me.” She gave me a wry expression, said, “Watch out who you shoot, Jack. For a dyin’ street, it’s getting tougher around here all the time.”
I nodded, blew her a kiss and walked toward the corner.
Bessie was wrong. There was no more toughness on the street now. The tough stuff had gone someplace when the street got sick. It left completely when the street threatened to heave a post-mortem sigh.
At the incoming of the one-way street they had already put up a NO THOROUGHFARE barricade. The other end was open. You could go out but you couldn’t come in. Somebody had issued a quick exit move for the old station house troops and two city trucks were loaded with antique desks, swivel chairs, straight backs and coat racks. Another had nothing but file cabinets stacked from the cab to the tailgate of a rack-sided tractor-trailer.
The police personnel were all on duty, so they were holding down the telephones inside and collecting their personal items until they went off to other assignments. Bessie O’Brian would probably wave all of them off before they came and got her. Then the street would be dead.
But not yet.
I had to be the last to leave and that wasn’t yet. The street would be dead, but somebody would have to bury it, and that was me.
In my pocket the cell phone gave off a buzz and I switched it to TALK. Thomas Brice said hello and told me he’d pick me up in one hour for a trip to Staten Island. It was a trip I dreaded in one way, but had to make. I had to have every detail of that whole situation resolved in my head so there would be no errors. Twenty years of lost time could make for strange changes and I wanted nothing to hit me unexpectedly.
And Thomas Brice was right on time. We drove over the bridge and when I looked down I almost felt the sensation of falling that wild distance to the murky waters of the Hudson River. Traffic was thin at that hour and before long we were in that other, strange part of New York City that was like a different state to most Manhattanites.
The veterinary building was right on the edge of the Hudson itself, an old building from the eighteen hundreds, resurrected with concrete and brick and decorative wooden pillars, discreetly identified by a small sign over the main door and a pair of old oaken statues of a cat on one side and a husky on the other. Inside, behind the large glass windows, I could see a pair of white-robed attendants busy behind the main counter.
Brice said, “We’re here.”
I wanted to tell him tomorrow would be the
A couple of times Brice glanced at me to see how I was taking it. I wasn’t sweating. There was no catch in my voice. I followed him into the building, met the two attendants, then went through a pair of swinging doors into a neat animal hospital. But that wasn’t what Thomas Brice wanted to show me.
The bedroom was in the very rear of the building and the second I entered it I knew it had been hers.
There was a smell to it that belonged to her and the accoutrements on the wall shelves and the dresser top were exactly the same as she’d had in her own room years ago. That kind of taste apparently didn’t have to be reacquired. I opened the closet door and again knew exactly who the garments hanging there had belonged to. Even the light fragrance hadn’t changed.
Brice closed the door and turned to me. “You’re sure now, aren’t you?”
“Nearly,” I told him.
On the bed was an old-fashioned photo album. Brice thumbed open the leather snap fastener and there in 5?7 color snapshots was my dark-haired, hazel-eyed Bettie. She was beautiful and unmarked and smiling a huge smile right at me. At nobody else, just at me. All I could say was a softly heard “Damn!”
She was still young, beautiful beyond belief, plainly dressed, but a total knockout. And yet a strange blankness possessed her features.
Brice was saying, “This was taken a month and a half after she was washed ashore.”
“But...”
Brice interrupted: “She was like a newly born baby here. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t understand, but she showed emotions. She took to my father right away, like a newborn kitten responding to its parent’s teaching.”
My voice was barely audible. “Animalistic?”
“No,” Brice reassured me. “Very human, but a fully grown, well-developed newborn child.”
“There were no memories?”
“None at all.”
I turned the pages of the album and watched Bettie develop, little by little, characteristics emerging step by step. I noticed the date on the photographs and saw that they were taken at regular intervals and understood that this was a medical case study by a competent researcher.
When I glanced up at Thomas Brice, he explained, “Going by what the police had released to the press, we knew that her life was in absolute jeopardy if this information ever got out. However, there were no relatives to contact, no inquiries made about her health and if my father hadn’t seen a small blurb in the old
“But you didn’t contact me!”
“No. And I can understand your resentment. But the young woman you knew didn’t exist. My father knew that exposing the woman she had been in any way would be enough to get her killed. We gave her a fresh start.”
“Damnit, I could have—”
“Captain, I didn’t make these decisions, my father did. And if you want to take it up with him, I’ll direct you to the appropriate cemetery.”
I said nothing.
“Contacting you someday was always a possibility. Dad did a lot of probing before he realized the truth and knew you two had planned marrying. He watched your career and came to know you were one of the honest ones.”
“There are plenty of honest ones—”
“No offense, Captain. After all these years, I didn’t know how you’d feel about your... your lost love. But I found that you were still single, even after retirement, and decided to follow my late father’s wishes, and contact you.”
After looking at the photos, it was hard to speak.
Brice asked, “Are you comfortable with all this?”
“Not completely,” I told him.
