EIGHTEEN
THIS IS WHAT I WAS WEARING THE MORNING I WAS MURDERED. Grey sweatpants, fluffy on the inside, with frayed ends and an elastic waist, so I could wear them comfortably low on my hips. Powder blue Victoria’s Secret briefs, cotton, with a little heart and pink VS on the front. The kind of underwear you buy in a set of five for twenty dollars. Everyday underwear. A black bra under a purple T-shirt. A purple parka, light and downy like a quilt. Purple jacket, purple T-shirt. Blue cotton briefs, a plain black bra, and an old pair of sweats. And near-new sneakers, dirt-caked from climbing down onto the rocks, and the struggle. They found me in the bra and the T-shirt. Catalogued me in the bra and the T-shirt. Made an assessment of my social class, my occupation and my intentions that morning, based on my hair and my orange nails, and these few items of clothing he left behind.
The missing clothes are in a backpack, stored in a private locker. In the basement gym of a building downtown. People, hundreds of them, walk past this locker every day. Some have even read about me, followed the Riverside Jane case. One or two went to the vigil that night. Wondering who could do such a thing to a young girl. Looking askance at men on the subway whenever they travelled uptown, walking past that downtown locker twice, five, ten times, a day. Sweats, blue underwear, a pair of sneakers, and a jacket, the blood stains I left behind more like rust these days. And a camera, a vintage Leica. Film and Summar lens missing. An object stolen twice in just a few weeks, now wrapped in plastic inside a basement locker, code: 0415.
Every riddle has an answer. No matter how long it takes to solve, the answer was created at the exact same time as the question. This is what Detective O’Byrne thinks, as he sounds out my real name for the very first time, starts putting the small facts of my life together, with the help of Tammy’s stories, and the results of Gloria D’s DNA test （‘I thought she was with Tammy,’ my former guardian cries, over and over. As if this explains her carelessness）。
‘Alice Lee,’ O’Byrne says, thinking about all the people who let me down. ‘Who did this to you, kid?’
I thought my name would be enough. That my identity was the riddle they were all trying to solve. But for O’Byrne, it is just the beginning. My name was only ever a clue. For him, the real puzzle is what happened down there by the river.
At least it’s me the Detective directs his next question to. As if I have a say in the matter:
‘How do we find the bastard, Alice? What is it we’re missing?’
Unlike O’Byrne, Ruby generally tries not to think about him. Has stopped jumping at loud noises, makes an effort to smile back when men say hello as she shops for snacks at the grocery store or purchases another bottle of vodka over on Broadway. She doesn’t want to be the one looking askance at strangers, not in a city where she only needs the fingers of one hand to count the people she actually knows. But he hovers at the edge of her thoughts, all the same. Casts his shadow, slips around the corners of her consciousness, so that she always seems to catch the back of him, disappearing.
She tries not to think too much about him. But, deep down, Ruby knows she is as tied to my murderer as she is to me. That something is unfinished between them. And, sometimes, she wonders what would happen if she followed him around those corners. If she came face to face with the man whose terrible crime she discovered.
I’ll admit, now that O’Byrne has put the idea in my head, this is something I have wondered, too.
Josh is the first member of Death Club to say my name.
Alice Lee.
Tongue against teeth, he sounds out the syllables, tries to draw me out from the scant details he has managed to uncover before they hit the news. My life makes for a small list on this day I am officially identified: small town girl from the Midwest, parentless, no known occupation or address in New York. Nothing yet to help determine motive, nothing to suggest what I was doing in the park alone that morning. But there is a name, and a beginning. This is something. Riverside Jane is in fact Alice Lee.
Alice.
Josh looks at the photograph that will soon be shared with the public. Sees a beautiful young girl with blue-sky eyes and a freckle-dotted nose. Tries and fails to reconcile this with what happened to me. It seems impossible—but then, it’s always unfathomable, isn’t it. What we don’t know of the future when a happy picture is taken.
Josh got the tip from a friend at the Daily News. A woman he slept with once or twice after 9/11, when the whole city was shaking. ‘They’ve identified that girl you’re so interested in,’ she told him on the phone. ‘Some kid from Wisconsin. I’ll text you the photo they’ve sent out. Feel free to thank me over dinner some time.’