He offers Ruby tea, coffee, whiskey, and she is tempted to go for the latter, though it is only 9 a.m. Noah sees the gleam in her eye, and decides, immediately, that he likes this Australian woman; anyone unfazed by the idea of liquor at this hour is okay by him. Franklin also gives his seal of approval, nosing at Ruby’s hand when she sits down, asking for a scratch. He looks for me still, the old mutt, and he finds me sometimes, too. But this morning I remain at a careful distance, anxious for this meeting to go well. For Ruby, yes. But for Noah, too, who is just as lonely as she is. My New York bookends, the man who let me stay with him, and the woman who stayed with me.
They talk a little about themselves, and then Ruby takes a deep breath, asks the question she has carried around since that morning by the river.
‘What was Alice like, Noah?’
He stares at Ruby for the longest time, knowing how important his answer will be. When he finally speaks, his voice has an uncharacteristic tremble.
‘Alice was rough around the edges. Uneducated, yet the smartest young woman I’ve known. She absorbed information like a sponge, and then she dripped what she learned all over the floor. She was beautiful, yes, but far too quick for loveliness. There was nothing lovely about her. She was raw and unfinished, and though it turns out no one had ever really let her be a child, she still behaved like one at times. Being around her was amusing and exasperating and, occasionally, illuminating. She was very easy to love.’
（I was? I have never before considered this.）
He tells Ruby so many stories, all the things he paid attention to. He talks about my mother, and my birthdays. About my growing love of photography, and how I treasured an old Leica. He’s now certain I stole that camera from that ‘no-good teacher’， the man I had told him about, but only just （I should have known Noah would comprehend what really went on between Mr Jackson and me）。 He says I loved the Chrysler Building with a passion, that I often sounded like an unpolished Joan Didion when I described New York, and that when he first saw me, I looked for all the world like the homeless waif I was. He even cries a little when he talks about the last time he saw me, how I was annoying him before bed, clunking around on the piano, restless in a way he should have noticed. More than anything, he wishes he had kept me up late, pushed harder to uncover my secrets.
‘If I had known …’
Noah trails off and Ruby, thick with everything she has been told today, reaches for his hand. When he doesn’t pull back, she squeezes her fingers around his.
‘How could anyone know,’ she says softly, and when she asks him if it would be okay for her to visit again sometime soon, he says yes.
It isn’t until much later that afternoon, as Ruby sits on her bed channel-surfing, and thinking about everything Noah told her, that something Tom said yesterday comes back to her.
She was out here, taking her pictures.
Ruby sits up, pushes her fingertips together, brings her hands to her mouth. Noah said something about a Leica, didn’t he? Amongst all those other startling, beautiful stories. She concentrates hard, hears Noah saying Alice loved her old camera and had planned to enrol in a photography school, so she could keep taking pictures of her beloved New York. Was this common knowledge, something already out there? In all the articles and forums and news bulletins she has scoured since the murder, Ruby can’t recall coming across anything about a camera. Turning off the TV, she opens her laptop, googles my name for the thousandth time. She finds no mention of a camera or photography or pictures in any of the news stories. Next, Ruby returns to her favourite sleuthing websites, scans post after post for discussions around why Alice Lee was out there by herself that morning in Riverside Park. Perhaps Tom has been here on these forums, too. Indulging his fascination with the dead girl from his neighbourhood, and that’s where he picked up such a specific piece of information. Clicking through the scores of entries, Ruby encounters the usual theories—prostitution, sleeping rough, online dating gone wrong—but once again, no mention of anything to do with Alice Lee taking pictures in the park.
A girl was murdered here.
Ruby’s heart begins to hammer.
She tries to pull other sentences to the surface. Thinks hard about Tom’s questioning of her, sees a flash of him snapping when that jogger came too close. It’s nothing, it has to be nothing. That kiss clearly unsettled her, and she’s been spending too much time on those damn forums, finding tenuous connections, potential matches—Snap!—where there are none. It’s just because she’s lonely again. Trying to fill up the absence of Death Club any way she can.