1
On the way to my old neighborhood, I realized that I wanted to go somewhere else first and turned Ransom's white Pontiac onto Redwing Avenue and drove past traces of the old Millhaven—neighborhood bars in places that were not real neighborhoods anymore. Blistering morning sun seemed to wish to push the low wood and stone buildings down into the baking sidewalks. Millhaven, my Millhaven, was thinning out all around me, disappearing into a generic midwestern cityscape.
I would have been less convinced of the disappearance of the old Millhaven if I had turned on the radio and heard Paul Fontaine and Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan announcing the arrest of the soon-to-be-notorious serial killer Walter Dragonette, the Meat Man, but I left the radio off and remained ignorant of his name for another few hours.
Two or three miles went by in a blur of traffic and concrete on the east-west expressway. Ahead of me, the enormous wedding cake of the baseball stadium grew larger and larger, and I turned off on the exit just before it. This early in the morning, only the groundskeepers' cars stood in the vast parking lot. Two blocks past the stadium, I turned in through the open gates of Pine Knoll Cemetery and parked near the gray stone guardhouse. When I got out, the heat struck me like a lion's breath. Rows of differently sized headstones stretched off behind the guard's office like a messy Arlington. Furry hemlock trees ranged along the far end. White gravel paths divided the perfect grass. Sprinklers whirled glittering sprays of water in the distance. Thirty feet away, an angular old man in a white shirt, black tie, black trousers, and black military hat puttered through the rows of headstones, picking up beer cans and candy wrappers left behind by teenagers who had climbed into the cemetery after the baseball game last night.
The graves I wanted lay in the older section of Pine Knoll, near the high stone wall that borders the left side of the cemetery. The three headstones stood in a row: Albert Hoover Underhill, Louise Shade Underhill, April Shade Underhill. The first two headstones, newer than April's, still looked new, bone-dry in the drenching sun. All three would have been warm to the touch. The grass was kept very short, and individual green blades glistened in the sun.
If I had anything to say to these graves, or they to me, now was the time to say it. I waited, standing in the sun, holding my hands before me. A few bright moments came forward from a swirling darkness: sitting safe and warm on the davenport with my mother, watching drivers wading through waist-high snow after abandoning their cars; April skipping rope on the sidewalk; lying in bed with a fever on St. Patrick's Day while my mother cleaned the house, singing along with the Irish songs on the radio. Even these were tinged with regret, pain, sorrow.
It was as if some terrible secret lay buried beneath the headstones, in the way a more vibrant, more real Millhaven burned and glowed beneath the surface of everything I saw.
2
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.
3
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.