I want to be the private investigator. He couldn't bring himself to tell her this. "I'll look into it," he said.
In t h e morning Gavin returned to the police station.
"I'm surprised to see you again," Daniel said. He had kept Gavin waiting for an hour. His fingers tapped almost silently on the side of his coffee cup, a nervous flicker. "Aren't you hot? Wearing a fedora in this heat?"
"It's a summer fedora," Gavin said.
"And here some of us make do with baseball caps."
"I went to visit our multitalented piano and saxophone player yesterday," Gavin said. "You remember Jack? He speaks highly of you."
Daniel sighed and his face softened a little. "Sure," he said, "I try to keep an eye on him. He's been arrested a couple times."
"I asked him about Anna," Gavin said, "and he said to ask you."
"Me? Why would I know anything about your high school girlfriend?"
"Well, she hung out with us at school, with the quartet. We were all friends."
"I don't know that you were much of a friend to her. Was there some reason you wanted to see me, Gavin, or is this strictly a social call?"
"What do you mean by that comment? How was I not a friend to her?"
"I'm pretty busy," Daniel said. "You know, doing police work and stuff. I'm going to get back to work now."
"Okay, look, the main reason I came is, Jack's staying in this house on Mortimer Street—"
"Eleven ninety-six Mortimer," Daniel said. "I've been there. Lovely home, isn't it?"
"A girl answered the door when I knocked. No older than thirteen or fourteen, maybe twelve, stoned out of her mind. Jack said she was his roommate's sister or her stepsister or something, just staying there for a while. I came to see you because I thought maybe she was a runaway."
Daniel took a slow sip of coffee. "I'm getting the strangest sense of déjà vu," he said. "Have you talked to a shrink about these phantom girls you've been seeing?"
"I knew you wouldn't believe me. I took her picture." He passed Daniel his cell phone and Daniel studied the image for a moment. The phone looked very small in his hand. "Her name's Grace."
"Wait here," Daniel said. He pushed himself up on the edge of the table and left the room. Gavin waited alone in the interrogation room for twenty minutes, listening to the hum of central air conditioning and staring at the fine cracks in the paint on the opposite wall until Daniel returned.
"Thanks for the photo," Daniel said. He was awkward now, looking away. "The tip might be useful to us."
"A runaway's got to be worth a couple of questions, right?"
"Gavin—"
"Two minutes of your time."
"Fine," Daniel said. "A couple of questions."
"Do you know what happened to Anna after high school?"
"She left town after the eleventh grade and went to live with her aunt in Georgia. I thought everyone knew that."
"You know what's funny? She was my girlfriend for two years and we spent half our waking hours together, and she never so much as mentioned that aunt in Georgia."
"I've really got an awful lot of work to do," Daniel said. He opened the door.
"You said two questions."
"Thanks for stopping by, Gavin."
"My cell phone?"
"See, now there's your second question. It's at the front desk."
Gavin walked back out into the heat with his fedora in his hands.
Part Two
Sixteen
Jack was good but not good enough for Juilliard. He auditioned after high school and didn't get in, but what he found strange— and in retrospect this should have been a warning sign, he thought— was that he was almost relieved. In the September after high school he packed up his car and drove north to South Carolina. His roommate at Holloway College was good enough for Juilliard, but he saw New York City as an inevitability and wanted to stay in the South a little longer. Jack's roommate was from the suburbs of Miami. He was going to play every major city on the continent no matter where he studied, because he actually was that impressive. Jack liked him, though he was prone to grandeur in his drunker moments.
"My name is Liam Deval," he would say, raising a glass of beer or introducing himself to someone in a bar, or sometimes, when he didn't know anyone else was around, quietly to his reflection in the men' s-room mirror, "and I am going to be famous."
When he did this at bars everyone would laugh and buy him another drink because his delivery was hilarious. Everyone knew he wasn't really kidding, but it didn't matter because he was the best guitarist any of them had ever heard. "The only real difference between me and Django Reinhardt," he said once when very drunk, "is that Django did it first."
"Well, yes," Jack said. "Exactly."
Deval only laughed. Just as they both understood that Deval was going to be a star, they understood that Jack's days were numbered.
Jack had been on his way out almost from the moment of arrival. He couldn't have said how he knew this. He couldn't even have explained what exactly was wrong. He had been touched lightly by synesthesia; mostly it was a small matter of sounds being attached to colors— the impression of red left by car horns, for example, the dandelion-yellow sounds of his parents' doorbell— but music was brilliance, music was light moving through the air every time he heard it.
Playing with the quartet, switching back and forth between piano and saxophone, practicing for endless hours with Gavin and Sasha and Daniel, traveling to competitions— in short, all the things he loved— none of these things seemed to relate in any way to the sudden grind of Holloway College, the evenings when he played piano alone in a small white practice room and got lonelier and lonelier by the hour, the clinics, the harshness of teachers. Music had always been bright and now it was dimming. He knew his teachers only wanted him to be the best pianist he could possibly be but they all knew he was missing something, whatever it is that carries a musician over the gap from merely proficient to outright spectacular, and sometimes he wanted to pack up his car and drive back to Florida when he thought about the things they'd said to him.
The pills helped. He could float a little. In the weeks leading up to the winter break he started to take them more frequently. His skill was unlessened but nothing seemed quite real.
"You seem more relaxed these days," Deval said. They were in their room at the end of another day. Deval was on the edge of his bed, listening to music. Jack had been toiling in a theory workbook earlier, but now he was staring into space.
"It doesn't have to be stressful," Jack said.
"I envy you. I'm more stressed than I thought I would be." They'd been here a few months and Deval's bravado was becoming a little threadbare. Holloway College wasn't Juilliard, but it also wasn't easy.