The Dark Room(14)

And he’d been noticing things lately. Small indications. This morning, for instance, there’d been a bar of handmade soap in her shower. It was the kind they sold at the farmer’s market in the Inner Sunset. Maybe someone had brought it to her as a gift—one of her students, or one of their mothers. But that was an intimate gift for a piano teacher, and he didn’t think Lucy’s grocery delivery service covered the farmer’s market. She couldn’t have ordered it online, because she had no computer and no cell phone. An Internet connection would be a window, one that commanded landscapes she had chosen not to see.

That left open another possibility: she might be going out. Putting on shoes, getting a coat if it was raining. He couldn’t imagine what that would cost her. The strength she must be calling upon to take her fear and carry it with her out the front door. It stung a little that she hadn’t told him. But maybe she was saving it. Maybe she didn’t want to get him excited until she was sure she could sustain the outings.



He set the bag with Redding’s sandwich on the desk and handed him a paper cup of coffee.

“Anything?”

Redding took the lid off the coffee and brought it close to his face to smell it.

“No luck on the woman,” he said. “But I think I know why. All you’ve got is the pictures, right? You don’t know when they were taken?”

“No idea.”

“They’re thirty years old, and she’s dead.”

“Explain that.”

“If she died in 1985, she wouldn’t have a footprint on the Internet. I can’t find what’s not there.”

Cain reached to the desk and turned the first photograph around so that he could study it. There was nothing that explicitly dated the photo, other than the fact that it was probably shot on black-and-white film. The woman could be walking on the street today. She wasn’t wearing jewelry or makeup, and her hair was pulled into a messy ponytail. There was nothing about her that announced itself as any particular decade.

“Ask me: Why 1985, Matt?”

“Why 1985?”

“First, the dress. It’s a Jean Patou design. You heard of him?”

“Is that even a real question?” Cain asked. “Come on.”

“Patou, he died in 1936. But in the mideighties, a couture house in Paris started licensing his designs. You know that word—couture?”

Cain looked up at him, then turned back to the photo.

“Thin ice, Redding,” he said. “Go on.”

“Look at her. At the dress.”

Redding took the third photograph and set it alongside the first. Now Cain had one shot of the woman backed against a brick wall, her hands held up in a gesture of panic. Next to it, in the third image, she stood against the nightstand, pain and fear on her face as she drank from the flask. Her dress was striking, though not as much as she was. It had a full-length sleeve on the right arm but didn’t even cover her left shoulder. To balance that asymmetry, there was a half-train coming down the left, hanging past the back of her knee. The hem on the right side didn’t reach the halfway point of her thigh. The dress was wrapped around her, the fabric gathered and held in place with a jeweled pin above her hip.

“It looks black in the photograph,” Redding said, “but it might’ve been green. See?”

He swiveled his computer screen so that Cain could see the website he’d been studying. It was a couture resale store, and the dress Redding had found was exactly what the woman was wearing. Cain could order it right now if he had sixteen thousand dollars.

“If they’re still selling them,” Cain said, “we can’t be sure of the year.”

“That’s not all, or I wouldn’t be sure.”

Redding lifted the second picture from the folder, the one showing the nightstand and its contents. He tapped the pile of pills.

“This is your crack in the door—enough to get your foot in, maybe,” Redding said. “You ever heard of benzyldiomide?”

Cain shook his head.

“Me neither, until fifteen minutes ago. How about Thrallinex?”

“Never heard of it,” Cain said. “What was it?”

“The trade name, here in the U.S. It came in five-and ten-milligram tablets. These are the tens.”

Redding passed the photograph up to Cain so that he could take a closer look at the pills. They were elongated ovals, pale white even in the underexposed image. Each one had a break-line indentation across the middle so they could be split into half-doses by hand. And along the edge, each pill bore the same imprint, but it was impossible for him to make out. He didn’t understand how Redding’s algorithm actually worked, how it could take such small details from a blurry image and produce accurate search results.

“Thrallinex went off the market almost as soon as it came on,” Redding said. “It got approval in Europe, then here. But five months later—I’m talking October 1985—they withdrew it worldwide.”

“They?”

“The manufacturer,” Redding said. He looked at a sticky note on the edge of his desk. “Raab and Weisskopf AG. A German company.”

“I’ve never heard of that, either.”

“It didn’t outlive the lawsuit.”

“What was it for?”