Chapter 4
The photograph of Nadia had been taken outside the Powell’s City of Books on West Burnside, which was four blocks from where I was sitting.
I pointed this out.
Declan nodded once.
“I’ve had someone checking Powell’s inventory for two years. There are three copies of the edition she had. None of them have her handwriting.”
“She donated it,” I said.
“Or sold it.”
“Or gave it to someone.”
“Or hid it somewhere in the store.”
I stood up.
Declan stood at the same time.
“Wren—”
“Powell’s closes at eleven,” I said. “It’s five-thirty.”
We went.
Powell’s City of Books was the kind of place that required a map and rewarded getting lost. Five floors, nine color-coded rooms, a system that had evolved over decades into something that made sense only to people who had surrendered to it. The romance section occupied part of the Rose Room on the second floor.
I went straight to the shelf.
The edition was a mid-nineties paperback with a specific cover — a woman in profile against a grey sky, the title in raised lettering that had mostly worn away on older copies.
There were three copies of the relevant edition.
The first two were clean.
The third had a small pencil mark inside the front cover. Not words. A symbol. And beneath it, in handwriting that Declan went completely still looking at, three numbers.
A storage unit. A facility near the waterfront. A locker number.
He looked at the handwriting for a long time.
“That’s hers,” he said.
I put the book under my arm and carried it to the register.
“I’m buying it,” I said.
“Wren—”
“She put it here for someone to find. That someone bought it.”
He did not argue.
—
The storage facility was a low concrete building near the Willamette, the kind that had no personality and no distinguishing features, designed to hold things without drawing attention to the fact that it was holding them.
Declan had called someone during the drive. Two men were already at the facility entrance when we arrived, standing with the particular stillness of people who had learned to be invisible at speed.
“Stay close,” Declan said.
“I’m not staying outside.”
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
The locker was in a back corridor, under low fluorescent lights that hummed at a frequency that felt slightly wrong. Declan had the code from the numbers in the book.
The locker opened.
Inside were three sealed boxes.
Declan crouched in front of them.
His hands were not entirely steady.
He opened the first box.
Files. Printed documents. Photographs. Bank statements with routing numbers annotated in Nadia’s handwriting. A USB drive. A small notebook.
He lifted the notebook.
On the inside cover, in the same handwriting as the storage locker numbers, was a note.
*Declan. If you’re reading this, you found the right person to help you look. Don’t make the mistake of protecting her from what you are. She already knows.*
He turned the page.
The next page was a letter to him.
I stepped back.
“I’ll wait outside,” I said.
“No.” He looked up at me. “Stay.”
I stayed.
He read the letter standing, and I watched the contained quality of his attention do something I had not seen it do before — absorb something that cost it, and not manage the cost away.
When he finished, he held the letter with both hands for a moment.
Then he looked at me.
“She’s in Portland,” he said.
I went still.
“She was moved six weeks ago. Brennan moved her when the anniversary approached — he always moves her before contact, in case I’ve found the location.” His voice was controlled but his face was not. “She left this here eight months ago because she believed I would eventually find it, and she wanted me to have the information before the next contact.”
“Does she say where in Portland?”
“She doesn’t know exactly. She knows the building structure, the general area, the number of people guarding her.” He folded the letter carefully. “She left me enough to find her.”
“Then we find her.”
“Wren—”
“Declan.” I looked at him directly. “She put a sentence in a book. The same sentence I wrote without knowing I was writing it. Whether that is coincidence or not, I am in this now. Don’t manage me out of it.”
The fluorescent light buzzed.
He looked at me for a long moment.
“All right,” he said.
—
What followed was not a story I can tell fully here.
Some of it belongs to the people who were inside it. Some of it involves specifics that attorneys advised me, very firmly, to leave in their current legal ambiguity. What I can tell you is that Nadia was found, and that she was alive, and that the process of finding her took eleven days and involved information she had spent three years collecting.
Brennan Fosse was arrested on a Tuesday morning, thirty-seven miles south of Portland, at a property that appeared in three different corporate registrations under three different names. He was accompanied by two men who had, it turned out, been employed through a foundation that Nadia had documented in the second box in that storage locker.
The documentation that made the case was Nadia’s.
The corroboration that made the documentation admissible came from sources that had taken Declan twelve years to develop in his effort to separate the inherited layers of his father’s life from the ones he had built himself.
Nadia came home in January.
She was thin and she moved carefully for the first few weeks and she had opinions about everything with the specific ferocity of someone who had been silent for too long and was making up for it.
The first evening she was home, Declan made dinner and neither of them said very much and Nadia kept looking around the kitchen the way people looked at things they had been afraid of not seeing again.
I was there. He had asked me to be.
“You’re the one who found the book,” Nadia said.
“He found the photograph.”
“He’s been staring at that photograph for three years. He needed someone who didn’t know what they were looking for.”
I looked at her.
“You wrote that sentence,” I said.
“In a margin.”
“I wrote it in a manuscript.”
She tilted her head.
“Where do you think sentences come from?”
I did not have an answer for that.
She smiled. It was a slightly exhausted smile, but it was real.
May you like
“Finish the book,” she said.
—
