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There was more to it than that—there was a problem down by the river again, at practically the same place where the armory used to be—but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to speculate just yet. They were three distant stepping stones, Caroline’s ghost, the armory, and the North Shore apartments. But I couldn’t shake the idea that they were connected. It was simultaneously too unlikely and too obvious.
I was seized with the urge to call Nick, but I wasn’t sure what I’d tell him if I reached him, so I sat there with Lu and we watched the rain for a few more minutes. My mind kept wandering back to something else Caroline had said, and it too made me wonder.
They are coming for me. They are coming for all of us.
Who? But the answer was obvious. It was written all over Christ’s face when he sat in my car and tried to tell me about the things stalking the riverfront.
The more I thought about it, the more I concluded that it was no answer at all; it only raised more questions. Who were they—and what did they want?
And why did Caroline think it was all about her?
10
Dead on Market Street
I ended up calling Nick anyway, because who else was I going to tell? Christ didn’t know the whole skinny on Caroline’s haunting and I didn’t feel like catching him up. So, really it was a matter of mere convenience.
He said he wanted to meet up and compare notes again, if that was all right, so we planned to meet at the Starbucks downstairs at the Read House. It was centrally located, and Nick had scheduled an interview with the head of the cleaning staff later that afternoon anyway. After all, what would Caroline do? Come downstairs and kick my ass over a latte? I doubted it. I would have been astonished to find her out of her room, much less downstairs in the café.
Nick blew it, though. He called after I’d been waiting on him for fifteen minutes and had to postpone; there was an apartment fire somewhere in southside and he’d been the closest man with a camera. We agreed to reschedule and I threw away my empty coffee cup.
I let myself out of the café and stood under the overhang at the Starbucks. It was raining again. With the water came a chill I didn’t like, but there was nothing to be done about it except tighten my sweater and stamp my feet. It wasn’t worth complaining about.
Then I saw her out of the corner of my right eye, standing at the intersection of Broad and MLK.
She looked familiar, but she wasn’t a friend, so it took me a second to figure out who she was. I might not have looked at her twice except that the sight of her set my senses tingling. She was looking in my direction, at me, I thought, but she might have only been waiting for the light to change.
Her hair finally clued me in. It was soaked, drowned-rat style, and so were her clothes. It was raining, but it wasn’t raining that hard. She must have been standing there a long time to get so wet . . . unless she wasn’t standing there at all.
“Ann Alice?” I said, and even though the girl across the street couldn’t have heard me, she nodded.
I knew her from around town in the same way I knew a lot of people, by sight alone. If I’d ever exchanged two words with her, I couldn’t have told you what they were. But there she was, wet and staring.
And hers was the last name Christ had added to his litany of the missing.
And there she was, dead on Market Street.
Once she knew she had my attention, she turned away and dropped her skateboard from its position at her knees. She stepped onto it and kicked, scooting across the street against the light. There weren’t any cars. There wasn’t anyone else to see her anyway.
The Death Nugget was parked a block away, and with it I’d left the umbrella I’d made a point of putting in the back seat. The rain wasn’t so bad, though, and Ann Alice wanted me to follow her.
“All right,” I told her. “I’m coming. Wait. ”
She didn’t wait.
I ducked out from under the awning and went after her because I didn’t know what else to do. “Ann Alice?”
The back of her apple-red dyed head was retreating fast, and I stumbled trying to keep up. I hopped up onto the next curb and was on the sidewalk then, closer to her without being near at all.
I watched her duck and weave between the few people she met, and no one reacted at all—but no one ever did, even when she was alive. You keep your head down when the kids skate through, trying to get a rise out of you or bum money. It wasn’t strange at all that no one looked up. It wasn’t strange at all that no one moved to get out of her way.
Except this time they really couldn’t see her.
So I followed, but it’s hard to follow on foot when your quarry has wheels. “Slow down,” I told her, tripping over my own feet and the uneven walkway.
Down along Market she went, scooting in the general direction of the Choo-Choo, and I figured that was where we were going, maybe. But I lost her before we got there, at a corner where an old bank building squatted empty. She zipped around its side and vanished.
I ran up to the building and pressed myself against it. A small overhang let me hide from the worst of the water, so I stayed there and panted. “Ann Alice?” I called, but nothing and no one answered. “Ann Alice?”
