Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 141, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 858 & 859, March/April 2013

The Playlist by Geoffrey Thorne

Geoffrey Thorne is currently a writer-producer on the hit TV series Leverage; he has also written for Law and Order: Criminal Intent and other TV series. A successful career as a TV actor preceded his entry into the world of screenwriting, and as if those weren’t talents enough, his short stories have appeared in nationally distributed anthologies; he’s the author of the Star Trek: Titan novel Sword of Damocles; and he’s had several graphic novels out over the past couple of years in collaboration with artist Todd Harris.

Yeah. I didn’t buy it.

Oh, sure, I believed she was dead. They had the pictures — a pale, skinny brunette lying at the bottom of a stairwell in a pool of her blood. They had the name right — Jenny Charles, of the Harp Street Charleses. They had her age and address and a list of all her friends. They even knew where she’d been for all but two of the forty-eight hours that led up to her ugly end. They claimed they had a note.

It was Jenny, all right, and she was definitely dead.

But, a suicide? No. That wasn’t Jenny.

I was actually surprised when the cops showed up to interview me.

Just routine, they said. Just following up to make sure it really was what it looked like: Suicide brought on by depression and a lot of self-medication. Jenny. Closed book at twenty-two. Only, I didn’t buy it.

I mean, what was she doing in the Harkness Wing that night, by herself? She wasn’t a big reader of tomes and she sure as hell wasn’t the type to go for ancient Latin and Aramaic. Given that’s all the H-Wing had to offer, I just couldn’t see her going there alone, not even to do herself in, not with a knife or a gun or a rope and certainly not with a four-story jump.

The cops cleared me, of course. As far as they could tell I was just somebody on the periphery of Jenny’s little life — a casual notation in her to-do list. SEE JACK ABOUT THAT POSTER/WEDNESDAY, that kind of thing. Easy to track down and easy to rule out, right?

Wrong.

They didn’t know. Not about me and absolutely not about me and Jenny. Nobody did, really. I guess, in retrospect, she wanted it that way. I mean, I might not be as off-putting as I pretend to be (nobody could be that antisocial, right?) but that doesn’t mean people like her want it getting out that they actually like me. Or want to spend time with me. Or that they might find anything I’ve got to say worth saving.

But she did.

She caught me listening to an obscure live recording of Cannery Row’s “Vanishing” and just couldn’t believe somebody like me would be into their stuff.

“Somebody like me?” I said. I knew what she meant but I wanted her to say it.

“Yeah,” she said with that little twinkle. “You know: all gothy and mopey and grim.”

“I keep a summer place in Cancun, though,” I said. “So, you know, maybe you don’t know me as well as you think.”

“I guess not,” she said. Again with the twinkle. What is it with some chicks, anyway?

“So,” she said after just standing there on the other side of the counter long enough for me to get a whiff of her. Clean, sort of minty, that was her. “Any chance you could burn me a disc of that set?”

“Sure,” I said. “Come back on Friday.”

“Great.”

And that was the beginning of me and Jenny.

What, you were expecting some great love affair? Me and Jenny tearing up the secret sheets between her quartet recitals? Keep dreaming. We had a connection, that’s all. It was deep and she definitely kept it close, but not because of sex. I was a part of her life that she kept in a box. It happens like that sometimes.

Which doesn’t mean I didn’t love the little preppie; I did. You have to love a girl who swims in a world of Chopin and Brahms but dreams of thrashing to Bobby Crux and the Boonwillies every night.

Jenny. Jenny of the Secret Life. Jenny of the night. Jenny. Dead.

But not by her own hand. Never. No way.

Why was I so sure? How did I know that this girl I only saw when she had time, only to talk about unknown bands with tiny followings, couldn’t have done what everybody was saying?

Because of the lists.

We’ll get to that.

The point is, I knew something about her that nobody else knew and I had something from her that nobody else had. I couldn’t share it and it wouldn’t stand up in court, but it was enough for me to know. No way Jenny was a suicide. No effing way.

As soon as the cops crossed me off, but before her folks had a chance to plant her in the family plot outside Kenton Green, I decided I was going to look into whatever had left her at the bottom of those stairs in that ugly, lonely way.

And if it turned out to be a somebody other than herself who put her there...

Well.

There’s antisocial and then there’s antisocial.

When Claire Aprillo wrote “Drifting in the Ocean of You” she was talking about her ugly breakup with that actor whose name I can never remember. The one with the messy hair and the green eyes the girls all love.

She had this one line in the hook — Something’s wrong but it still feels true, drifting in the ocean of you — that makes the girls who listen go all teary and aggressive and the guys get tongue-tied and shifty.

Me, I just love the way the guitar trips along underneath the words, making you feel what a complete dick the actor must have been and all the lies he must have told her before she showed him the door.

Her lyrics were in my head for two reasons. One, the guy I was watching at the far end of the library looked a lot like the green-eyed actor. I could tell he knew it too.

He had cut his hair just so and had that accidental-on-purpose ruffle in his shirt and jeans that was supposed to sell the idea that he’d just chosen them at random instead of spending hours.

The other reason my mind went to “Drifting” and sort of the reason I tracked this guy down first, was that it was at the top of Jenny’s last playlist.

She didn’t want it getting out that she knew me, remember, so she started leaving me notes on the community board by the health-food store.

At first they were mostly just requests for rare books or vinyl recordings of obscure bands. Could I, please? Would it be a bother if? Et cetera.

Eventually, after she got comfortable that I was as laconic as I seemed, she started with the lists. A lot of them were just random little things: collections of images or quotes from unnamed philosophers or places I had to go in the city because she felt that they meant something to each other.

I don’t know what our connection was, but it was there. I felt it every time I looked at a familiar building in a new way or cracked a book that I hadn’t known existed before.

It might not have been Love, but what it turned into was just as deep. It could even have been something completely fresh, some new way of enjoying another person that was outside holding hands or trying to get in their pants. Whatever it was, it was ours. Now it was gone.

The last note she posted, maybe the last contact she had with anyone before she died, was a list of songs without the artists’ names attached. It would have been my job to find those names, dig up the tracks, and burn her a disc with the music. Well. I wouldn’t be burning anything, but I would be digging.

The first song was “Drifting in the Ocean of You.” It was easy to peg, sort of a wink from her to me.

“That’s a gimme, Jack,” I could almost hear her say. “Just to get you started. The rest aren’t going to be so easy.”

So, after deciding to talk to some of her friends about the parts of her life I didn’t know, I found myself at the Capra Memorial Library staring hard at Joshua Sykes.

He didn’t notice me until I was right next to him. In fact he didn’t until he felt my breath on his neck as I looked over his shoulder at the book he was reading.

“Sorry,” I said after he nearly jumped out of his skin. “You’re Josh, right?”

He gave me a quick scan and I could hear the gears in his head clicking: Do I know this guy? What party was he at? Who does he know that I know? Can I afford to shine him on or do I have to be polite?

“And you are?” he said. Obviously he figured I was close to the brush-off level of his personal totem pole.

“John Red,” I said, smiling. Yeah. I can be charming when I want. “We met at India Pierce’s last thing.”

India was Number Three on my list of Jenny’s friends. She was one of those chicks who threw a lot of parties where attendance was mandatory if you expected to maintain your social life.

“Oh. Yeah,” he said after completing the social calculus in his head. “Hey.”

“I didn’t know you were a Lear fan,” I said, indicating his book. It was one of those leather-bound tomes that got churned out in the 1950s by upstart publishers trying to simulate Old World Credibility.

“What?” He blinked rapidly as if I’d asked him to solve a particularly knotty algebra problem, before remembering the copy of The Complete Edward Lear in his hands. “Oh. No. Just, you know, looking for something to say at the funeral.”

“Funeral?”

“Yeah,” he said as he resumed thumbing through the thing. “You didn’t hear about Jenny?”

“Jenny?” I said, as if tasting the name. “Jenny Charles?”

“Did you know her?” There was something like suspicion in his voice. For a second his face held the expression of somebody who’d just realized he wasn’t the only person with a map to the buried treasure.

When I said I didn’t know her, that I must have heard India mention her sometime or other, he relaxed again.

“How did she die?” I said in an intimate whisper. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

I watched him decide how much to tell me. I might be some peripheral friend of India’s and I’d served the purpose of letting him vent a little, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be the one to dump the details of her suicide into the rumor mill.

“She fell,” he said eventually. “Broke her neck.”

“What, like at a party or something?”

“No,” he said, still flipping pages. “She was by herself.”

“At home?”

“No. At some museum, they said.”

“ They?’ ”

“Her folks. Her brother. Maybe it was at the symphony. It was so sudden I actually had a hard time processing it all.”

“Sure,” I said. Then I waited a bit so he’d think I meant it as sympathy. “So, it was an accident?”

“Look,” he said, slamming the book shut, his perfect actor face all furrowed in the middle. “What’s with all the questions? You said you didn’t even know her.”

“Sorry,” I said, doing a little acting of my own. “It just seemed like, you know, you wanted to talk about it.”

“Well, I don’t.” For a second it looked like he was thinking about hitting me. This guy probably hadn’t smacked anything bigger than a tennis ball in his entire life, if that. So, even though he would’ve been on the downside of any scrap he might start with me, the fact that he considered it told me a lot.

His face shifted again, back to the mask of pretty-boy grief he’d been wearing when I walked in. He snorted something piss-offish and moved away.

I liked him a little better after that. The mask was for the ongoing stage play that was his life, but underneath it was some very real sorrow. Maybe Jenny should’ve moved him to the front burner.

As I waited for the muni-bus, I thought about the playlist. “Drifting” had been the first song and the few things Jenny had told me about Josh had instantly linked the two of them in my mind. The second track was “Trouble in the Bubble” by the Wavecats.

The ’cats were an obscure band — nobody ever went in much for punkabilly and, honestly, they weren’t very good at it — but that song was their one moment of actual inspiration. It bounced in the right places, scratched in the right others. It wasn’t overproduced, like the rest of their crap.

Yeah, there’s some trouble in the bubble tonight.

But the rhythm don’t care if you’re black or white.

Trouble in the bubble tonight.

Let’s dance.

See? Nice. If they’d written it in the sixties they might have actually gotten somewhere. The problem was, while “Drifting” fit Josh Sykes like a tailored jacket, “Trouble” didn’t fit anything. Not even the ’cats. It’s just one of those songs, no matter who you are, that makes you want to move when you hear it. Maybe that was Jenny’s point.

Track three was “Heavy Water” by Michael Thomson. Okay, not that obscure, obviously, just straight out, middle-of-the-road pop/rock. But Jenny specified the acoustic version from that network special in ’98.

The song’s about drowning, of course, but only in that oblique way that doesn’t depress you too much the first time you hear it. The second or third time is when the words, down under it all, under it all, under it all, pushing down, really sink in.

The Charles house — I won’t call it an estate because it was in the middle of the city and didn’t have any real grounds to speak of — was a four-story brick thing that took up a quarter of its block.

There was no way I was getting inside to interview Jenny’s folks directly, but there was nothing stopping me from playing Peeping Tom from the giant oak in the park behind the house.

The top-floor windows were all dark, though whether this was from curtains being drawn or from the lights actually being off, I couldn’t say.

There was some motion on the third floor. A willowy brunette, obviously Jenny’s mom, drifted in and out of rooms, sometimes lingering in a doorway or disappearing into a closet for long minutes.

She’d been a real stiffener once. You could tell. She had a lot of that same buttoned-up charm the girls in Jane Austen books made famous. But that was before. Now she looked like somebody had sucked twenty years of life out of her. Twenty-two, I guess. The whole of her daughter’s life.

At one point she startled me by jumping up from a chair she’d been sitting in and dashing out into the hall only to came back a couple of minutes later carrying a cordless phone. She talked for a few minutes in the window and then disappeared into the hidden parts of the house.

I know I shouldn’t have tried it. It was a total invasion of her privacy to approach the place, much less knock.

It took four hard thumps, but she eventually came to the door. The resemblance between her and her daughter was really striking that close up. It was as if I was looking at Jenny twenty years later.

“Yes?” she said in a voice that told me it really was a mistake intruding on her this way. Of course it was also too late.

The second she opened the door I was committed. I had a stack of questions for her, all about Jenny’s mood and activities up until the moment of her supposed suicide but, looking at her face, I just couldn’t dredge them up.

I stammered something about being a friend of her daughter’s and having just heard the bad news. I just wanted to pay my respects.

She looked at me a little sceptically at first, I mean, I was about as far from her daughter’s usual cronies as a Palestinian is from a card-carrying member of the JDL. But somewhere in my stuttery it’s-awfuls and jeez-that’s-terribles, her expression changed.

“You aren’t,” she started, stopped, and then took another run at it. “You aren’t Jack, by any chance?”

Turns out I wasn’t the secret I’d always thought. Jenny and her mom — Anne — were close. At least they were in Anne’s mind. Jenny hadn’t told her everything about me, not how we’d met or about the lists passing back and forth, but enough. I was Jack, Jenny’s one Low Society friend, made palatable to Mom by the fact that I ran a bookstore that specialized in obscure works.

She thanked me for my sympathy and segued into a rambling account of Jenny’s life, punctuated with silences and occasional tears.

She’d been a problem birth, too many hours of labor, too much work at the start to get her to breathe. She’d spent the first six weeks of her life in an incubator.

Then there were the ailments that took up most of her childhood — asthma, anemia, even a few scary months of leukemia that she’d thankfully managed to kick.

She eventually put the breathing problems away as well, but not before she’d developed what her mother considered an unhealthy fascination with death.

“She kept most of it from me,” said Anne. “She knew I didn’t like all those Mexican skeleton dolls. Now I think maybe all those years being so close to it made her more comfortable with the thought of dying than most people are.”

Made sense to me. Only Jenny hadn’t shown me any of that side of herself either. If not for this chat with Queen Anne, I would never have thought her capable of those kinds of shadows.

“But she seemed so happy,” I said. Trite, I know, but it’s what you say in times like that — especially if you want the other person to keep talking.

“Oh, did you think so?” said Anne, pouring me a little more of their imported French roast. “So did I. She had her music (thank God we pushed her toward the cello) and Chad, of course (such a sweet, sweet boy). Her father and I really thought she’d turned the corner. That she was truly embracing life.”

I nodded and asked if she’d left a note of any kind, any way to explain her suicide. It was difficult reconciling her version of her daughter with mine.

“Yes,” said Anne after thinking about it. Her eyes went flat, as if she was suppressing something and it was taking all her mind to keep it in check. “It was just a few lines of some poem by one of her little-knowns. At least I never heard of it before — before...”

After some tears, she got through the words of the note. After some more, I was at the front door, saying a quiet goodbye.

It wasn’t a poem. It was more song lyrics, this time from a short-lived Irish band called 1916. Their lyrics were strictly modem, mostly political, but their music was traditional all the way. Jenny’s “suicide note” was a snip from the last cut on their Walking to Inish Oisin CD: “Following Johnny” by Fergus Cullen.

I pictured the jacket art — a young girl in a thin white shift, walking across water towards some distant grey island — as Queen Anne’s words stumbled around my mind.

I can’t leave him alone,

I followed him from my home

All the way to Derry dome

We went flying.

That was the note they found in her fingers, written in her hand, when they discovered her at the bottom of those stairs. Of course they assumed she was a jumper.

Of course, her mom figured Jenny was just more nuts than she’d originally guessed. After all those years fighting and then being fascinated with death, there was a kind of symmetry in the idea that she’d finally succumbed to her demons.

It’s nobody’s fault, they would tell themselves. She was just too fragile to stay in the world.

They’d cry about it. Maybe Queen Anne would start up a foundation of some kind in her daughter’s name. Everybody would roll on down the highway until the whole thing was just a distant pothole in the rearview mirror.

Everybody but me.

I might not have known all that doom-and-gloom stuff was in Jenny’s head before she met me, but I knew for a fact it hadn’t been running her anymore.

What I didn’t know about Jenny might fill up the rest of my afternoon. What her family and friends didn’t know would fill up the rest of the year.

Obsessed with death? No. That wasn’t Jenny, not the one I knew. Queen Anne’s Jenny might have been nothing more than a pile of broken china, but mine sparkled. Mine laughed and dashed and dreamed herself out of the strictures of her caste. She was all about music and secrets and hidden moments. She was all about living and I had the proof. I got it about three weeks before she died in the form of one of her more cryptic lists.

Out, L2, R6,1/4 around the Knight, L6, R4, Down 2.

It took me a little while to figure out that this meant I was supposed to walk out of my shop, go left two blocks, right six, walk a little way around the statue of Sir John Milton, go another ten blocks and down two flights of ancient crumbling stairs to find something I never expected to see in life.

Not ten miles from the Metropolitan Hotel, fairly near the heart of Downtown, buried and forgotten under a building that should’ve been pummeled to dust years before, was a dragon.

Black, massive, with wings the length of a city bus and jaws like every nightmare you ever had about sewer gators, this thing was just coiled there, waiting for me, at the bottom of those rickety stairs.

Of course, it wasn’t a live dragon. Not the kind that breathes fire and sits on a cool trillion bucks in coins and jewels while picking the bones of virgins from its teeth. But it was a real dragon just the same.

Somebody, some totally insane genius of a somebody, had carved the thing right out of a wall of rock that looked like it had to be part of a subway tunnel.

Who had done it? How long had it taken? Why would somebody so gifted carve something this startling and vibrant only to have it gather dust in the ass end of a building that would have to work its way up to qualify as a rat trap?

How had Jenny even found it?

I pondered those questions and all the others you’d expect as I hiked back to my shop.

I found a note there, in her handwriting, taped to the display window glass, right under the big gothic X so I couldn’t miss it. It contained just four words.

What did you think?

Maybe she expected me to sum up the experience in a couple of random quotes from obscure liner notes like we always had. If she did, she was dreaming.

Her leading me to that dragon, sharing it with me in that way, was like being given the keys to every secret treasure that had ever been lost and found.

There was no question that I had to see her face-to-face to give her a proper telling.

“That was the wildest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” I said. I think I startled her by stepping out from behind the community board. We hadn’t laid eyes on each other in person in weeks. “And I’ve seen a lot of wacky stuff.”

“Really?” was all she said after she recovered her composure. She was dressed for something formal and I could see her cello case lurking in the backseat of the cab behind her. I couldn’t read the expression on her face — something between puzzlement and amusement, I thought at the time — before she said, “Well. I’m glad I could share it with you,” and hopped back into her cab.

After that, it was back to the lists.

Three weeks after that, she was dead and I was digging.

Funny that particular encounter should pop up just at that time, with me leaving her mother’s place and hustling off downtown for my third interview.

There was nothing on her final playlist to point me back to that moment and yet, for some reason, I suddenly had a hard time shaking the image of her softly knit brow and over-large eyes from my mind.

“Who are you again?” said the intercom voice.

I was standing under the arch of a battleship-sized grey brick of a building on the southeast tip of the Shady Green, right where the residentials start mutating into the bowery. There was a big wooden sign nailed to one wall that read CODE: INDUSTRY in generic black and white.

“John Red,” I said for the third time. Rich people love their intercoms. Anything to keep the proles at arm’s length. In a few years all the occupants of Code: Industry would have shifted to one of the posh co-ops off Metro West, exchanging the intercoms for a burly doorman or two.

“And how do I know you?” said the voice.

“You don’t,” I said. “We both know Jenny Charles.”

“Wrong tense, Book Boy,” said the voice and I could hear the corners of her mouth curling.

Jesus. Even this close to her friend’s suicide, India couldn’t resist playing games.

Instead of one of those harsh buzzers to let us lowlies know the gates were being opened on our account, the occupants of Code: Industry had sprung for a very soothing bell.

“Take the back stairs,” she said as I heard the gate clang shut behind me.

There were only five stories, but they were bigger than average. This wasn’t an apartment building, it was a former factory that had evolved into something the classifieds called Live/Work lofts.

Maybe once upon a time people like Pollack and Basquiat had turned old sweatshops into kick-ass spaces where they could do their art and drugs. Maybe they’d even been cool.

Nowadays these joints were just excuses for the children of the top castes to comfortably slum while they worked out their issues with their folks’ money.

I’d never actually met India Pierce but, by the time I got to the top of those stairs, I’d already decided not to like her.

The second to last song on Jenny’s list was the remix of “Demonic” by Coil.

She don’t stroll, she struts

She don’t roll, she cuts

She don’t race, she ruts

Demonic.

Nobody liked Coil, not even the neo new-wave posers who bought their stuff in the nineties. They were a joke and I thought Jenny had only added them to the list to put a smile on my face.

Taking a look at India Pierce, curled on her imported Persian throw pillows like Hugh Hefner’s version of the Cheshire Cat, I was about as far from smiling as I had ever been in my life.

Her place was like a temple to India herself; everything about it advertised life above the glass ceiling and sex with consequences.

First-edition Fitzgeralds lay wrinkled and yellow over the latest copies of Look and It GiRL. The place smelled of rough cinnamon and was done all in deep reds and mahogany. There were tapestries on some of the walls and at least two Picasso pen-and-inks hung from thumbtacks on the others.

The one huge window, looking out on the city center and the mass of grey cubes in between, was the only remnant of the building’s original sweatshop life: a giant glass grid with cracks and spots you just knew had been allowed to remain for purely aesthetic reasons.

“Book Boy,” she said in that overly syrupy tone. “It’s about time I got a look at you.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” I said, letting the big steel door swing shut behind me. “Guess we just keep missing each other.”

“Guess we just,” she said. “Want a drink?”

I didn’t. She gestured toward a plate of something that looked like a small mountain made of bulgy triangle pastries. I could smell the meat and spices wafting off it, trying to pull me in, but I wasn’t there to eat either.

“You don’t stack up the way I thought,” she said. I rested a hip on the ottoman, placing the food between us.

I shrugged. “Seems like you were expecting me,” I said.

“I was.” She reached for another pastry. “From the way she made you out, I’m insulted you didn’t come to me first.”

“Jenny talked to you about me?”

“Surprised?” she said.

I was, a little, but I kept it off my face. People like India treated life like an ongoing hand of hold ’em. You blink or let your mouth twitch the wrong way and they own your ass.

She sashayed into a little speech about her and Jenny growing up together, bonding over boys and fashion and their mutual disdain for just about everybody else they knew.

They both chafed hard under the rules of conduct set down by their social caste but neither was willing to walk away from the cash. Jenny’s way of coping with that friction was to carve her life up into little boxes. It gave her control over who knew what about her and how much.

India preferred to make trouble.

She’d crushed dynasties between her perfect caramel thighs. A stray whisper from her in the right ear and reputations that had taken generations to build crumbled to dust.

“I figured you’d be the type to want to look into her death,” she said, winding down. “But anybody with any sense would definitely have come to me first.”

“I’m here now.”

“You are,” she said through her teeth.

“I just came to ask you some questions, is all,” I said.

“Okay.” She leaned back into her nest of pillows. “I’ll play.” The slight arch in her spine wasn’t exactly pornographic but it still took a second for the blood to flow back to my brain.

I grilled her the same way I’d gone at pretty-boy Josh; was she surprised about Jenny ending up at the bottom of those stairs? Did she have any idea why Jenny was in the dusty-tome section of the library that night? How long had it been since she’d seen her friend?

India just smiled. It was one of those grins that doesn’t quite make it to the eyes.

“You think she was murdered,” she said eventually. “So do I.”

“Any idea whodunit?”

“A guy,” she said. “I’m thinking it was one of her strays.”

“ ‘Strays’?”

“Jen was a collector, Book Boy,” she said, using her finger to stir whatever the sparkly liquid was in her glass. “But, you know that, right?”

That figured. Her life was a warehouse of boxes. She needed stuff to put in them. Stuff. People. Sure.

The songs on the list made even more and even less sense now. It was easy enough linking them up with the people in her life that I knew of but, if this day had told me anything, it was that there were acres more to Jenny Charles than you could see from the front gate.

“Any stray in particular?” I said as the bubbles in India’s glass finally got swallowed. She savored it for my benefit, letting her chest rise and fall in that way that tells anyone looking that the stuff you just drank had a nice kick.

“What do you actually know about Jenny?” she said. My face obviously gave away more than I wanted because she added, “Not as much as you thought, huh?”

No. Between the damned playlist and talking to Jenny’s mother — not to mention India — I realized I might be just as much in the dark about her as everyone else in her life.

“That’s how she wanted it,” said India. “It wasn’t just people she collected. It was clothes. Stories. Music. Puzzles (she was crazy for puzzles). She had at least one of everything, Book Boy. Trust me. She even collected other collectors like you and me.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to link what she was saying up with the thoughts that were swirling faster and faster in my head. Trouble in the Bubble was an understatement. “But what’s—?”

“I’m still talking,” said India, cutting me off. There wasn’t any seduction or mirth left in her voice. “We’ll get back to you in a minute.”

Her glass was empty and she had eaten enough of the little meat triangles. She got up and wafted through a break in the hanging drapes, disappearing into the darkness beyond. I heard some clinking of glass and something being poured and then she was back.

“It was how she kept it together,” she said, standing there halfway between the shadows beyond the curtains and the amber light of the sitting room. “There’re a lot of rules to this life, Book Boy. Where to live. How to talk. Who to sleep with. When. If. Jen kept us all in boxes so she could make the rules. So she could break them.”

“Hidden depths,” I said.

“Jenny was the Grand Canyon,” said India, still not moving from the space between the rooms. “And it wasn’t just the secrets and the control. She was looking for something.”

“Like what?”

“You’re slower than she said you were too,” she said, gliding over to the nest again. “Love, Book Boy. She was looking for love.”

It made sense in a way. If you think your life is a cage you’re going to do what you need to do to pick the lock.

“Stupid,” said India, not bothering to hide her bitterness. “That’s what she was. Just totally, massively poxy and stupid. Like there’s any such thing. Like there’s any point.”

“That the kind of friendly advice you gave Jenny?”

It was a shitty thing to say, but I was sick of her trying to wind me up and even sicker of her succeeding.

So Jenny wasn’t exactly who I thought she was. So what? Who is what they seem to be, really? Who doesn’t have a little Jack the Ripper inside them, right next to their personal Galileo?

So India Pierce thought the world was a pile of shit. Stop the presses. If I had a penny for every rich kid that felt like that, I’d be one.

“It’s the truth, isn’t it?” she said. “Did you give her anything better, Book Boy? Playing her stupid games with the lists and the quest for Music by Total Failures?”

“She seemed happy with it,” I said.

“Yeah,” said India. “You would say that. So sharp. So insightful. So quick.”

“Look,” I said, really heating up. This fencing game of hers stopped being fun in the first ten seconds. I had no idea how or why the guys in her set put up with this sort of shit but, “I’m not one of your party boys, okay, princess? I work for a living.”

“Call that living?” she said softly, still not turning my way. The egg timer in my head went off and I was halfway to the door. “Book Boy.”

“That’s enough of that,” I said. All of a sudden I was back on her side of the room, pushing toward her, toppling the towers of books in my way.

I was the monster now, tearing through Lit City. It wasn’t like I meant to do anything harsh. I didn’t even plan to touch her. I’d just had enough of the Blanche DuBois bullshit.

“My name’s John, okay?” I said, coming up on her. “Cut that Book Boy crap.” My hand was on her wrist before I knew it, pulling her towards me. When somebody’s trying to screw with my head I prefer they look at me. “I didn’t haul my ass all the way down to freaking Babylon so you could play Psycho Word-Association. I’m here for Jenny, okay? Jenny.”

Then, without remembering when I’d actually decided to do it, I was shaking her. India-effing-Pierce of the South Richeston Pierces. She was vibrating in my hands like a kite in a tornado.

I realized what I was doing about five seconds too late. Before I could stop on my own, India’s knee was slamming into my crotch, giving me other things to think about than rattling her fillings.

She sat beside me on the floor, watching me from behind her ropes of thick black hair the way leopards watch anything smaller and slower than themselves.

“Feel better?” she said when I finished unclenching.

“Great,” I said, slowly sitting up. “Thanks.”

“We mostly keep our hands to ourselves around here.”

She sat quiet again for a few long moments. A warm little breeze skipped briefly through the place, making the curtains flutter.

“So,” she said, watching them dance. “About that list.”

“Yeah?”

“What’s on yours?” she said. “Novelty shot glasses or handmade books or what?”

“Music,” I said and then, thinking of it for the first time, “dead music.”

India smiled. It was a pretty little thing, delicate; kind of like that string of pearls your grandmother only takes out on special occasions.

All the songs on the list were done by obscure bands that never went the distance. Even Michael Thomson’s try for a comeback was a dismal failure. Nobody remembered any of them anymore except nutjobs like me and Jenny.

“You get through them all yet?”

“One left,” I said.

“ ‘Epochsy’ by Canto,” said India. Again I must have had trouble hiding my shock. She was giving me the cat’s eyes.

“How do you know that?” I said.

India sort of unfurled to a standing position; everything she did was choreographed for effect. Then she went to one of the towers of books that I hadn’t knocked down and grabbed the one on top.

“Jenny only ever played that game with two people, Book Boy,” she said, returning with the giant hardcover of The Incomplete Lear. “You and me.”

Canto was a girl group. They were pretty good, actually, but they fell into that crack between the end of the rule of the Riot Grrls of the nineties and the rise of Lolita pop.

They cut only one CD, Invert 96, before falling back into the dark. There wasn’t a bad cut on the album and anybody who hears it now wonders what happened. Why aren’t they huge now? Where did they go? Was it drugs? Was it men? Women? Who knows? They came, they took a shot, they fell off — same old story. But they made some great music and, of that great music, “Epochsy” was the best cut of all.

“Follow me down,” it goes. “Follow me down the way.

Follow me through the ghosts of woe. Follow me through the day.”

And there’s the slow guitar underneath it, hinting of small-town Texas back roads, decaying honky-tonks, and shots of whiskey drunk after-hours.

I’m one of the few people who actually owns Invert 96. One of the only people who knew I had it was Jenny. As soon as I saw it on the list I knew it was a clue to something. Now it was ringing cathedral bells inside me. And inside India too, from the look on her face.

“Love,” she said, though I think she was really talking to herself. “Jenny never felt like she got enough. Or it wasn’t the right kind.”

“Never is,” I said.

She laughed a little at that. It was the first honest sound that had come out of her since I’d been there. “That’s true.”

“So she didn’t get it and she was looking for it,” I said. “And the lists were part of that?”

“Sure,” she said. “Of course. Obviously.”

It wasn’t obvious to me and I said so. They were just random collections of other people’s art. Sure, Jenny put them together according to whatever theme struck her at the moment, but that was it. I was supposed to believe that all of that random stuff was actually part of some master plan of Jenny’s?

“Of course, you don’t want it to be true,” said India. “You want Jenny to be some kind of waify little sexpot, right? Something to smile about when you’re drinking your lattes?”

“I just want her to be alive,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Well. She’s not. And she wasn’t what you thought of her either. She was relentless.”

“You said she did the list thing with you and me only?”

India nodded.

“And she played with you first?”

Again she nodded.

“So, what, you failed?”

“I screwed up one of the lists,” said India, dropping the words like little pebbles from her mouth.

“Which one?” I had an idea forming that I didn’t much like. Everything she said made sense as long as you stuck to the lists. But they weren’t all lists, that was the thing. One of them was something else. “Which one did you screw up, India?”

“Same as you, Book Boy,” she said. “Only she didn’t give me a second chance.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I never dropped one of them.”

“Yeah,” she said, looking into my face. Her eyes were like penny candles shining through the lattice in a priest’s confessional. “You did.”

“Which one?”

“You found the dragon, didn’t you?”

“I was supposed to find the dragon,” I said. “She gave me the directions.”

“You sure about that?” said India.

I was. I told her so. She laughed. It was an ugly sound, bitter, that had nothing to do with humor.

“I can’t believe she thought you were the one,” she said.

I was really uncomfortable suddenly, wanting out of there. “So, just tell me who you think pushed her off that landing and I’ll go find them.”

“And what?” she said again with the strange, flickery light in her eyes. “What will you do?”

“You point me to whoever did Jenny and I guarantee nobody else will have a reason to point that way again.”

I watched her chew it. I watched the million little clockwork gears she kept running in her head spin and click. The process took all of two seconds.

She brushed past me, heading for the nearest of the little mahogany end tables she had all over. She opened the drawer and pulled out a small metal frame. I was expecting a picture, some kind of candid photo of people at a party, one of whom would be Jenny’s murderer. Maybe he’d even have a bull’s-eye drawn around his head in India’s burgundy lipstick.

She came back to me and held the thing up so I could see it clearly.

“That’s him,” she said.

It wasn’t a picture she was holding in front of me, framed or otherwise; it was a mirror.

By the time my brain started working again I was out of her place, back on the street, running in a direction I didn’t remember choosing.

India’s words were still in my ears, making me so sick I knew if I stopped running it would only be to empty my stomach onto the pavement.

“You killed her, Book Boy,” they said. “You failed and you killed her.”

I remembered screaming at her that it wasn’t my fault about Jenny. All I’d found was what she wanted me to find. I’d run her stupid mazes like a lab rat, like there was treasure waiting for me at the end instead of that hideous, beautiful, ravenous monster squatting, almost alive, in the city’s guts. But somehow, according to India, I’d spiked it. Somehow finding the dragon was the wrong answer to the puzzle I hadn’t even known I was supposed to solve.

My head was splitting. My brain was still working on the whole big mess — list after list, map after map, book after book, song after song — all of it adding up to some kind of test, some way Jenny expected to sift out the gold from the world she lived in and leave behind the dross.

The puzzles were her way of pushing me to see if I was the one who would know her.

The one who could love her.

And the sick bit, the awfulness that wrenched my guts, was the realization that I did love her.

I was so full of murder for her killer, so ready to make whoever the sonofabitch was that pushed her take that last step down to the dark ugly places where meat and bone make hash of each other. But that whoever-it-was was me. I had failed the test. In failing that one, I’d failed them all.

Jenny worked it all out, had her picture of how it should be, and we’d kicked the thing to shreds. We failed Jenny, but she was the one who lost. She would never be seen. Never be known. Never be loved the way she wanted. Never. Ever.

Faced with that, who would want to stick around? Not me, man. Definitely not me.

Eventually I found myself back at the shop. The distance between Ex Libris and India’s loft was just a watercolor blur. The time between was a ghost.

I was in a panic — what my mother would call a state. I could barely get the keys in the lock. The door whipped open with a harsh click and I was a hurricane moving through to the back rooms, the places where I kept my bed and my kitchen and all the things that were important to me in the world.

I don’t remember tearing into my closet, shoving the boxes and winter coats aside. I don’t remember the desk drawers screaming as I tore them off their tracks. I only remember the storm of paper floating around me as I sat in the eye, looking at the little note.

Jenny’s directions.

Simple. Straightforward. Barely even a code once you understood what the notations meant.

Out (my front door), L2n (two blocks up to Doyle), R6 (six across to London), 1/4 around the Knight, L6 (up to Stevenson), R4 (to Poe), Down 2.

Simple. Simple as stepping off a curbside into the street.

But somehow I’d got it wrong.

It hit me as I was locking up again. Just as I was turning the key in the front door I realized my mistake. I’d planned to retrace my steps to see if somehow I really had misunderstood the whole thing. Maybe I’d missed a hidden alley or side street and turned or climbed too soon.

Then, just as I heard the deadbolt click into place, I got it.

Jenny wasn’t trying to reveal anything. She wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of all those codes and obscurities if she were. She wanted to be found. She wanted somebody to look for and eventually discover that secret self of hers, the one she kept in the smallest, most hidden of her boxes.

She wanted somebody to find her, even if she had to lay out some of the clues.

So, what kind of a moron was I, thinking that she’d meant me to start the search from where I lived, from where I was safe? I hadn’t been meant to begin at my place. I was supposed to start at hers.

Again the city dripped and melted around me, shuffling into the background of my perception as I trudged the long way to the Charles family home.

I stood outside for an eternity of long minutes trying to decide if I had the stones to go through with it. I didn’t want India to be right any more than I wanted Jenny to be dead.

A light came on in one of the upstairs windows and I could just barely make out Queen Anne’s silhouette lurking by the drapes. Was that Jenny’s room? Was she lingering over a school photo or the scarf from her twelfth birthday and wondering what she could have done to save her child’s life?

Anne never really knew her daughter any more than I had. Didn’t she deserve to know what really killed Jenny, even if that meant me?

I pulled the crumpled notepaper from my pocket, checked the directions again, and started walking.

Follow me down the way...

As the structures blurred past me my mind went back to the playlist that had put me here. There was no way Jenny could have known, in advance, that I’d go on this journey, was there? Yet the songs had all seemed to have meaning beyond their titles and writers. It had felt like they were telling me dig here, go there, find out. So I had dug and gone and found.

But what if that was just my grief shaping things?

Worse, what if it was some kind of deeply submerged guilt, some basic knowledge that, if Jenny was dead, it was because I had failed her somehow?

Had I known, even before the cops showed up at my door in their over-worn shoes and drip-dry jackets? Had I already known that my friendship with Jenny had been too thin and rickety to keep her from falling?

Something’s wrong but it still feels true drifting in the ocean of you.

When I passed the statue of Socrates in Poet’s Square, I began to get sick. A clammy chill ran through me, across my skin, down into my lungs, and I had to stop for a minute to breathe.

KNOW THYSELF, the words were carved into the pedestal — English words cut to ape ancient Greek. KNOW THYSELF.

Shit, I thought. That can’t be good.

But it was right. I could feel it. This was the path Jenny had wanted me to walk, the one both India and I had been too stupid or self-obsessed or blind to see.

The chill subsided but didn’t leave. It hung on me and in me the way the dread draped across my mind.

I sucked it up and moved on, taking the lefts and the rights and the appropriate pauses until I found myself at another set of stairs.

DOWN 2, the note read. Down two, what, floors? Down two steps?

Suddenly I wasn’t sure. I stood there, staring at them, pretending not to but simply not wanting to know what lay at the bottom of these few flights.

They weren’t the same decayed hardwood and broken concrete as the ones that led to the dragon. These were metal, bronze that had been mottled green by a century of oxidation.

Down two, John, I could almost hear her saying. And, in the background, like a movie soundtrack, Yeah, there’s some trouble in the bubble tonight. Let’s dance.

Two flights.

Two long flights down through a thin little tunnel with walls polished to a stony shine. Two flights down to what should have been something underground but turned out not. The bronze gave way to steel, some turn-of-the-last-century filigree of iron gate that managed not to be locked.

I pushed it wide and moved into the next skinny corridor, this one going straight ahead instead of down. There was light at the far end, curling around what I realized was sharp corner as I got near.

I had the sensation of Jenny walking ahead of me, a ghost of herself, smiling, finally leading me to what I should have been able to find on my own.

Almost there, her ghost seemed to say. I envisioned her flitting around the corner, the edges of her jacket ties flapping in her wake. Come on, Johnny.

I wrestled with myself for another endless moment. Did I want this? If India was right about this, I’d turn the corner and see some kind of physical representation of Jenny. Her heart. Her soul (whatever that is). Maybe her life. It could be a tattered old movie one-sheet, taped to the inside of the tunnel wall, or another sculptured beast, or a billion other things that she might look at and think, “That’s me.”

Whatever it was, if India was right, it would prove that it wasn’t some screwed-up party boy or psycho killer who had pushed Jenny over. If India was right, the way I felt she was, what pushed her over was me.

Well.

I’d made promises about what would happen to whoever was responsible. No backing out now.

I turned the corner and found myself standing in front of a big steel safety door of the kind you find in the basement of libraries and museums. From the patina of rust on the hinges and handle, this one hadn’t been used in a long time.

In the center, held in place by equally ancient duct tape, was the cover for an old-style vinyl LP. I didn’t recognize the title, After Me, written in some kind of faux Sanskrit scrawl. There was nothing to indicate if it was the name of the band or the album, if it came to that. You could tell this was one of those things made by a small indy label that had started up but never went.

The photo was of an old street leading out of what I guessed was some desert small town into a lush green wilderness.

A small blot of red in the lower right corner caught my eye and I bent, squinting to get a look in the flickering neon light. The blot was words, six of them.

WORDS AND MUSIC BY JENNY CHARLES.

Cities have lives, you know — just like amoebas and horses and killer whales. They start as somebody’s little trading post or campsite and they grow in these sort of undulating lurches that last for decades. Things go up, they go out, they go down. Some bits last for the whole life of the city the way a particular giggle emerges in childhood and keeps popping up over and over till the grave. Some bits stick like scars.

Once in a while, when something old isn’t quite cleared away for the something new, what’s left is a chimney without a house or a wall with nothing to support but its own crumbing self.

I stepped through Jenny’s door and onto what had probably once been the linoleum floor of a sweatshop or second-rate dentist’s office. Someone had knocked down most of the building that housed it, leaving just a little paint-flecked lip of wood and brick.

I had a second of vertigo and several of complete panic as I tried to keep from plummeting the five stories down to the gravel and broken glass.

Then I looked up. I looked up and out across the thing that Jenny had meant me to see.

It was the city, our city, spread out to the horizon in every direction. Tall and twinkling, dark and screaming, moving and burning and blinking and still, the city seemed like a goddess wrapped in a shift of jewels and stars.

I saw her hips in the curve of Clemens Boulevard; I saw her hair in the steam from the Central Station. Her legs curled around the giant stacks of the Bowery Ironworks, warming themselves in the smoke.

And, in the goddess’s flesh, the thousand, thousand boxes — windows, doors, co-ops — every square with a square inside and, inside each, a story.

People and animals and machines moved and spun, sang, and died, loved and killed and lived out there, all of it in little boxes.

It was Jenny I was seeing, the real one, the one I’d missed and in missing, killed.

It was my fault, just as India had said.

It wasn’t just that last list or the cryptic note that had finally led me here. Everything Jenny had ever shown me had been a clue. Every note, every structure, every scrap of pleasure we’d shared had been meant to pull the veils away. She’d tried to show us, in that crazy corkscrew way, the path through her personal maze. We’d both missed it but I was the fallback, the last chance. When I failed, it killed her.

So I stood there, cold and shaking from the rush of grief. I stood there as the sun dipped slowly away and the sleeping goddess became a range of mountains made of stars. I watched the people milling and doing in their little boxes of light.

Follow me, her ghost seemed to say. Follow me down.

I wanted to. For a lot longer than I care to admit, I seriously considered stepping off that ledge. But when it came to actually moving my feet in that direction, I couldn’t.

Stepping off was the quick payment for what I’d done to her, the cheap way out. I owed her more than that.

I edged back into the dank little hallway and closed the door behind me.

Then I peeled After Me off the ugly steel door. Yes, there was an album inside the yellow-speckled cover. Vinyl, of course, probably the only one ever cut.

Mine now.

Mine for her.

It went home with me.

How often I play it is my secret.

And I’m keeping it.