NaNo '10 - Ch. 9 (part 1)
longest chapter ever! I mean yet!
also WERE YOU EXPECTING MORE ACTION?? I was.
nine
This time, I knocked feebly on Tony's door. He answered in a robe, looked at me for little more than a second, and closed the door in my face. My mouth dropped open to hurl abuse at him, but the noise in his apartment thundered like a stampede of men, let alone a single one. He reappeared just as I had begun to look for my lock picks, breathing more deeply and buttoning his top button on his newly acquired shirt. His lips thinned, then he tried again for a smile.
“You're back.” He seemed genuinely surprised. But not at all annoyed.
“I was hoping-” I realized suddenly how forward I was being, especially when a young Chinese girl poked her head out of a nearby door. I lowered my voice. “Can I come in?”
“Oh, sure,” he stepped back and I quickly melted into his sitting room. The tea set was out on the table again, with only one setting. A tattered pulp adventure book was open beside it, dog-eared all to hell. He locked and barred the door after my entry and leaned back against the door to get a long, good look at me.
“I was hoping that I could convince you to let me stay.” It was an honest plea. I was used to living in discomfort, living on the street during the investigation wouldn't harm me much. It was the convenience of being in close contact with a man who could help me, work with me, find Knox.
He crossed his arms. “Stay here?”
“Just until we find Knox. Not a day longer, I swear. I don't take up much room.”
“Are you asking for my help?”
As smug as it was, as slowly as the smirk inched up his face, I didn't find any smugness at all. I knitted my fingers together in thought, then finally nodded.
“You know your way around, you have connections, you've already helped me.” Then, with a hopeful smile: “I can take the sofa.”
“Shut-up,” he said, shoving up off the door. “I'll take the sofa. Ladies first.”
I was incredibly tired, just now feeling the lead weight of the past day and a half pulling at my eyelids. If he let me stay or not, I'd have to shut them before any sleuthing. Maybe he saw.
“Not a day longer,” I insisted again.
“Yeah, all right,” he said, chuckling under his breath as he took the suitcase from me and somehow wrangled me out of my jacket. He'd thrown them aside and had guided me to the room I hadn't used the night before before I'd known. And I'd thrown myself down on the bed without a second thought, sleep coming more easily than it had in months.
When I woke, the light outside had gone dim and something had been shoved under the door. I inched catlike across the bed and reached for what appeared to be a note. It was in a handwriting I didn't know yet, but easily identifiable once I knew who it belonged to; the letters were large and blocky, almost like the man himself. It was a note from Tony, signed and in haste.
Eveline,
Looking into things, will be back when sun goes down. Food in cupboard, make yourself at home. If you skip off, leave a note this time.
Tony
So I decided to to a bit of investigating myself. Half-dressed, I slipped from Tony's room and poured over his apartment. I grabbed a tin of cookies from the cupboard, and as I ate I catalogued everything he had done since I had fallen into his bed.
The smell of a cat was emanating from somewhere, and it was only a short time before I saw a domestic cat purring in the armchair, curled into a gray ball. I hadn't remembered seeing it before, but relations had been intense then. Only now that I was settling did I manage to see the larger picture of Mister Natale. The pictures on his wall were of his mother and brothers, three of them, but all of them were either missing the father or he had been cut out of them. Nibbling the edge of a cookie, I wondered what sort of family life he'd had. Judging by the last name, he was Italian, but his hair and his mother's blonde-haired blue-eyed face were extraordinarily Nordic. But with her sad face immortalized in pictures, I could instantly tell that the man took after his father more than he wished he did.
He had taken my notes from my suitcase, including those I had taken while at the station with Ollie. They had been spread out on the table in the sitting room meticulously, and a dark ring from a tea cup had been left on the topmost.
I pulled this one aside and took a closer look at it. It was notes I had taken for myself in hopes of giving them to Ollie to help find Mister Caine. I had forgotten about them in favor of time-and feeling that I was completely wasting his with my increasingly unbelievable tales-but Tony had taken notice of them. He had written a handful of numbers on the page, and I realized quickly that they were telephone numbers. Again, I was tempted to use the machine mounted on the wall, but I resisted.
Below those telephone numbers, only one shorthand addresses had been added. I touched a hand to it; the ink was long from fresh. Backing into the kitchen, I tested the warmth of the water in the teapot. Not stone cold yet, could be that he was still there.
Tony had quite a lot to learn about how I operated. Though, with a low smirk, I wrote a single line under the address he'd left:
Coming to find you.
I had to forego Eveline. The young man at the riverfront could only serve as a warning, since he hadn't gotten his hands on me. Several parts of me wanted to go back to be sure that he and his bullies hadn't roughed-up any of my neighbors and friends, but I knew it was unnecessarily stupid and risky.
The face I'd taken today was a young redheaded girl, hair long and full of waves. The repertoire of clothing I had for disguises wasn't exceptional, but I had done my best with a full-skirted dress and a long brown winter coat I had shoved into my pack. Only after I found the sleeves too long did I realize that it was Knox's.
I wasn't quick enough to keep my lip from wobbling, and I clamped both hands over it to stop it immediately, as if someone might see. In dreams now, I could see him trapped by shadowy fingers, scrabbling to escape but pulled into an unseen pit of darkness. There was no sound, nothing but the scrape of his fingernails in the dirt when the dragged him away. I opened my eyes quickly, found they'd gone blue again, and forced them to hard, determined brown.
I wondered briefly if it wasn't safer to go as Roy, but the address was for somewhere on the west side of the river, usually a safe place for a young woman to walk alone. And I wouldn't be in Chinatown long. I'd save him for something special, or desperate.
The address was downtown, and in the middle of evening traffic with the sun turning every window of the high rises gold, I found myself feeling bright for the first time in a long time. It was almost like the sort of adventures Knox used to send me on in our early years. A note tacked on the wall with my name and a puzzle: Where am I? He would be waiting, legs crossed and perched atop a turnstile playing a half-broken violin for money. And he'd smile when I found him, tell me “Good job, Ev,” and I'd back him up with a warble in my throat, and we'd make even more money.
Tony made it far too easy for me, but it still had the tingle of excitement to it. And the cold winter air bit at the back of my neck and my ankles, bringing with it the special sort of lightness of heart. Even with the money drained out of the world, the streets were bright with strings of white lights pretending to be snow.
He was sitting as calm as could be at an outside cafe at the foot of a twenty-story building. At one elbow was a man in a suit, and in his hand was a tiny teacup. Tony's mouth was moving, but at the distance I was approaching, it was impossible to hear him over the traffic and the voices of businessmen returning home. So I decided to make it a game.
I took a table nearby, keeping my face from Tony on the off-chance he recognized the new features. It was far enough away, I hoped, not to arouse suspicion.
“The name is Caine,” Tony said after swallowing his tea. “One of yours?”
“Caine have a first name?” the man in the suit asked. He was older, with lines of white in his dark hair, but his voice still held great timbre. I tried to keep my eyes off of them and my ears on. The sound of rustling paper, and Tony sighed.
“No name,” he began, “but he's a short guy, not real distinctive. Wears a hat.”
The man in the suit made a few humming and hawing noises and finally spoke up again: “I have an Adam Cain, but he's a tall fella, redhead. Don't think I can help you out, Grosvenor.”
A brief glance over my shoulder saw Tony rub his face and finally shrug it off. “Worth a try.”
“What'd he do, get his fingers in one of your pies?” There was amusement in the older man's voice. I wondered who he was, other than someone important and monied-that much was obvious by the suit.
“Looking into something for a friend. Thanks, Andrew.”
They shook hands, the older man checked his wristwatch, and his chair scraped the bricks as he stood and left. Tony remained, sipping at his tea and, when no one was watching, propped his feet up on the table.
When he did finally get up to leave, he passed my table, and as a bit of fun I fluttered my eyelashes at him. He did a small double-take and took a second, harder look at me. He was about to move on when I spoke up.
“Shall we go back to your place?”
His eyes did something strange, and finally recognition sparked in the back of them. Perhaps it was the voice.
“Eveline,” he growled, and perhaps it was the dying pink light of the sky, but he appeared flushed. “Is that you in there?”
“Who was that?” I asked, dropping my act but keeping the face.
He gave a quick look around to be sure no one who might recognize him would see him taking the seat across from me, and once he was satisfied, he hunkered down into the chair.
“Andrew Banks,” he said in a low voice. He needn't have bothered, the chatter of diners was more than enough to cover conversation. “Let's just say he's a bit of a launderer.”
“You've got a lot of friends, Tony.”
“Don't,” he cut in quickly, “call me that.”
“Okay, Grosvenor. Are you out asking all your shady friends about the Mister Caine in my notes?” Something about the candid openness of the man's face-the inability to mask his thoughts in his expressions-was refreshing, and perhaps I enjoyed it a little too much. It was surprise, but it was mild.
“Well, I just thought-he was in your notes, I thought he might be the sort of man to find.”
Tony meant well, I could see it in his eyes. He wasn't as smart as Knox, who could tell where you'd eaten by what you'd left on your fingers and could see stories in your face. But he tried, and he tried to do what he thought was right. He wanted to be helpful, and I think that he knew that he couldn't keep up with a fast-paced mind. Slow, but solid, dependable.
“Thank you,” I said, smiling and meaning it. “Being honest, I'm halfway dug into the ground in this inquiry, and I don't even know where to go from here. Finding anything with the White Dragons was luck, I don't know how long it'll hold out for me.”
I only noticed after our brief mutual silence that snow had started to fall. It wasn't the awful mush that I had run out into with Caine, this was soft and quiet. Even the street sounded muffled and far away. It always stole the sound from the world while somehow making it clearer and crisper. I brushed flakes from red hair and found my companion staring straight up into the darkening sky, flakes falling on his strong face. He wasn't unpleasing, I had to admit, though I rarely looked anywhere with the eye of an aesthetic. I wasn't sure why, but I suddenly fretted the state of my hair.
“Well,” Tony began, pulling himself from his reverie, “I know what Knox'd do.”
I perked up instantly. “How many times did you work together?”
“Not enough,” he said, and it was an odd answer. “He was brilliant, I couldn't help thinking I slowed him down.” He shook it off, dislodging snowflakes from his hair. “Anyway, follow me.”
He held out an elbow for me once we'd stood, and I was perplexed at first. I knew what it meant, but it had never been presented to me. But he didn't shrink back, and I slipped my hand into the crook of his arm. I'm sure that we looked like a pair of down-and-out lovers who had little else but each other left in the world. I smiled at the simple domesticity of it all. Me, of all people, on a stroll in the snow.
Our destination wasn't far. On the corner of the street, a man in a stand was selling newspapers. He waved one in our direction, and Tony paid without even looking the man in the eye. Steering me further down the street-toward the center of the city, not the bridge; perhaps we were headed for the subway?-he handed the paper to me.
“Never failed him,” Tony said. “The man'd pick up a paper and come away with some sort of lead nearly every time. Like I said,” he smiled, not unaffected, “slowing him down.”
“We'll see what we can find,” I replied. The ground was cold from the day before, and the snow was already beginning to stick. Maybe it would be best to be underground, no matter how hard it rattled my teeth.
I gave a glance to the police station as we passed on our way to the subway. I considered asking Tony to come in with me and see if Ollie had found anything on Mister Caine. My fingers itched to get hold of any pertinent information. But he likely wouldn't be in yet, it wasn't late enough for his shift to start, and I didn't like the idea of getting anything second hand from the boy DuBois. So we left it behind us and stepped into the warmth of the train station.
The great chandelier lit up the leviathan lobby, sparkling on the marble and turning the inside, in comparison to the silvery snow gathering outside, to warm gold. It was fuller now than when I had been in the morning, men and women coming home from a long day, chatting and walking briskly. The click of their shoes fluttered like bat wings in the atrium above.
Tony stepped away, leaving my arm empty, to buy us a pair of tickets. And I took a long sweep of the surrounding area to get my bearings and the feel of the people who were circulating around me as animate gusts. They hardly paused to look at the solitary standing girl, hauling their suitcases and briefcases and bags slung over shoulders. Scanned their faces to save them for further use.
And then one stood out from the crowd. She was sitting alone on a long bench, and by the look of her things spread out around her, she had been for several hours. She was familiar, something I had kept locked in the back of my head should I need it.
The girl on the subway. She was wearing the same clothes, the same floppy hat, the same tired expression. And she'd been crying.
I was beside her in a moment, and she started when I leaned down into her sight and murmured, “Hello.”
She pressed her handkerchief to her eyes and sniffled piteously, shying away from me. “I'm s-sorry.”
I knelt beside the bench. Tony moved up in the line.
“Is everything all right?” I asked, suddenly concerned that something was very wrong. A girl this age all alone in a place as big as The City could be extremely dangerous. But she nodded, removing her handkerchief once the shock had passed. “Are you all alone?”
“I don't need to be coddled,” she said quickly, as if she'd faced that subject many, many times before. And I sympathized instantly, even as her face drew back in surprise. “I'm so sorry, I don't even know who you are and I'm shouting at you.”
“I'm Eveline,” I said, “and it's perfectly fine. I understand.”
She nodded, dabbing her eyes for the last time. “My name is Ruby. Ruby Ballantine.”
also WERE YOU EXPECTING MORE ACTION?? I was.
nine
This time, I knocked feebly on Tony's door. He answered in a robe, looked at me for little more than a second, and closed the door in my face. My mouth dropped open to hurl abuse at him, but the noise in his apartment thundered like a stampede of men, let alone a single one. He reappeared just as I had begun to look for my lock picks, breathing more deeply and buttoning his top button on his newly acquired shirt. His lips thinned, then he tried again for a smile.
“You're back.” He seemed genuinely surprised. But not at all annoyed.
“I was hoping-” I realized suddenly how forward I was being, especially when a young Chinese girl poked her head out of a nearby door. I lowered my voice. “Can I come in?”
“Oh, sure,” he stepped back and I quickly melted into his sitting room. The tea set was out on the table again, with only one setting. A tattered pulp adventure book was open beside it, dog-eared all to hell. He locked and barred the door after my entry and leaned back against the door to get a long, good look at me.
“I was hoping that I could convince you to let me stay.” It was an honest plea. I was used to living in discomfort, living on the street during the investigation wouldn't harm me much. It was the convenience of being in close contact with a man who could help me, work with me, find Knox.
He crossed his arms. “Stay here?”
“Just until we find Knox. Not a day longer, I swear. I don't take up much room.”
“Are you asking for my help?”
As smug as it was, as slowly as the smirk inched up his face, I didn't find any smugness at all. I knitted my fingers together in thought, then finally nodded.
“You know your way around, you have connections, you've already helped me.” Then, with a hopeful smile: “I can take the sofa.”
“Shut-up,” he said, shoving up off the door. “I'll take the sofa. Ladies first.”
I was incredibly tired, just now feeling the lead weight of the past day and a half pulling at my eyelids. If he let me stay or not, I'd have to shut them before any sleuthing. Maybe he saw.
“Not a day longer,” I insisted again.
“Yeah, all right,” he said, chuckling under his breath as he took the suitcase from me and somehow wrangled me out of my jacket. He'd thrown them aside and had guided me to the room I hadn't used the night before before I'd known. And I'd thrown myself down on the bed without a second thought, sleep coming more easily than it had in months.
When I woke, the light outside had gone dim and something had been shoved under the door. I inched catlike across the bed and reached for what appeared to be a note. It was in a handwriting I didn't know yet, but easily identifiable once I knew who it belonged to; the letters were large and blocky, almost like the man himself. It was a note from Tony, signed and in haste.
Eveline,
Looking into things, will be back when sun goes down. Food in cupboard, make yourself at home. If you skip off, leave a note this time.
Tony
So I decided to to a bit of investigating myself. Half-dressed, I slipped from Tony's room and poured over his apartment. I grabbed a tin of cookies from the cupboard, and as I ate I catalogued everything he had done since I had fallen into his bed.
The smell of a cat was emanating from somewhere, and it was only a short time before I saw a domestic cat purring in the armchair, curled into a gray ball. I hadn't remembered seeing it before, but relations had been intense then. Only now that I was settling did I manage to see the larger picture of Mister Natale. The pictures on his wall were of his mother and brothers, three of them, but all of them were either missing the father or he had been cut out of them. Nibbling the edge of a cookie, I wondered what sort of family life he'd had. Judging by the last name, he was Italian, but his hair and his mother's blonde-haired blue-eyed face were extraordinarily Nordic. But with her sad face immortalized in pictures, I could instantly tell that the man took after his father more than he wished he did.
He had taken my notes from my suitcase, including those I had taken while at the station with Ollie. They had been spread out on the table in the sitting room meticulously, and a dark ring from a tea cup had been left on the topmost.
I pulled this one aside and took a closer look at it. It was notes I had taken for myself in hopes of giving them to Ollie to help find Mister Caine. I had forgotten about them in favor of time-and feeling that I was completely wasting his with my increasingly unbelievable tales-but Tony had taken notice of them. He had written a handful of numbers on the page, and I realized quickly that they were telephone numbers. Again, I was tempted to use the machine mounted on the wall, but I resisted.
Below those telephone numbers, only one shorthand addresses had been added. I touched a hand to it; the ink was long from fresh. Backing into the kitchen, I tested the warmth of the water in the teapot. Not stone cold yet, could be that he was still there.
Tony had quite a lot to learn about how I operated. Though, with a low smirk, I wrote a single line under the address he'd left:
Coming to find you.
I had to forego Eveline. The young man at the riverfront could only serve as a warning, since he hadn't gotten his hands on me. Several parts of me wanted to go back to be sure that he and his bullies hadn't roughed-up any of my neighbors and friends, but I knew it was unnecessarily stupid and risky.
The face I'd taken today was a young redheaded girl, hair long and full of waves. The repertoire of clothing I had for disguises wasn't exceptional, but I had done my best with a full-skirted dress and a long brown winter coat I had shoved into my pack. Only after I found the sleeves too long did I realize that it was Knox's.
I wasn't quick enough to keep my lip from wobbling, and I clamped both hands over it to stop it immediately, as if someone might see. In dreams now, I could see him trapped by shadowy fingers, scrabbling to escape but pulled into an unseen pit of darkness. There was no sound, nothing but the scrape of his fingernails in the dirt when the dragged him away. I opened my eyes quickly, found they'd gone blue again, and forced them to hard, determined brown.
I wondered briefly if it wasn't safer to go as Roy, but the address was for somewhere on the west side of the river, usually a safe place for a young woman to walk alone. And I wouldn't be in Chinatown long. I'd save him for something special, or desperate.
The address was downtown, and in the middle of evening traffic with the sun turning every window of the high rises gold, I found myself feeling bright for the first time in a long time. It was almost like the sort of adventures Knox used to send me on in our early years. A note tacked on the wall with my name and a puzzle: Where am I? He would be waiting, legs crossed and perched atop a turnstile playing a half-broken violin for money. And he'd smile when I found him, tell me “Good job, Ev,” and I'd back him up with a warble in my throat, and we'd make even more money.
Tony made it far too easy for me, but it still had the tingle of excitement to it. And the cold winter air bit at the back of my neck and my ankles, bringing with it the special sort of lightness of heart. Even with the money drained out of the world, the streets were bright with strings of white lights pretending to be snow.
He was sitting as calm as could be at an outside cafe at the foot of a twenty-story building. At one elbow was a man in a suit, and in his hand was a tiny teacup. Tony's mouth was moving, but at the distance I was approaching, it was impossible to hear him over the traffic and the voices of businessmen returning home. So I decided to make it a game.
I took a table nearby, keeping my face from Tony on the off-chance he recognized the new features. It was far enough away, I hoped, not to arouse suspicion.
“The name is Caine,” Tony said after swallowing his tea. “One of yours?”
“Caine have a first name?” the man in the suit asked. He was older, with lines of white in his dark hair, but his voice still held great timbre. I tried to keep my eyes off of them and my ears on. The sound of rustling paper, and Tony sighed.
“No name,” he began, “but he's a short guy, not real distinctive. Wears a hat.”
The man in the suit made a few humming and hawing noises and finally spoke up again: “I have an Adam Cain, but he's a tall fella, redhead. Don't think I can help you out, Grosvenor.”
A brief glance over my shoulder saw Tony rub his face and finally shrug it off. “Worth a try.”
“What'd he do, get his fingers in one of your pies?” There was amusement in the older man's voice. I wondered who he was, other than someone important and monied-that much was obvious by the suit.
“Looking into something for a friend. Thanks, Andrew.”
They shook hands, the older man checked his wristwatch, and his chair scraped the bricks as he stood and left. Tony remained, sipping at his tea and, when no one was watching, propped his feet up on the table.
When he did finally get up to leave, he passed my table, and as a bit of fun I fluttered my eyelashes at him. He did a small double-take and took a second, harder look at me. He was about to move on when I spoke up.
“Shall we go back to your place?”
His eyes did something strange, and finally recognition sparked in the back of them. Perhaps it was the voice.
“Eveline,” he growled, and perhaps it was the dying pink light of the sky, but he appeared flushed. “Is that you in there?”
“Who was that?” I asked, dropping my act but keeping the face.
He gave a quick look around to be sure no one who might recognize him would see him taking the seat across from me, and once he was satisfied, he hunkered down into the chair.
“Andrew Banks,” he said in a low voice. He needn't have bothered, the chatter of diners was more than enough to cover conversation. “Let's just say he's a bit of a launderer.”
“You've got a lot of friends, Tony.”
“Don't,” he cut in quickly, “call me that.”
“Okay, Grosvenor. Are you out asking all your shady friends about the Mister Caine in my notes?” Something about the candid openness of the man's face-the inability to mask his thoughts in his expressions-was refreshing, and perhaps I enjoyed it a little too much. It was surprise, but it was mild.
“Well, I just thought-he was in your notes, I thought he might be the sort of man to find.”
Tony meant well, I could see it in his eyes. He wasn't as smart as Knox, who could tell where you'd eaten by what you'd left on your fingers and could see stories in your face. But he tried, and he tried to do what he thought was right. He wanted to be helpful, and I think that he knew that he couldn't keep up with a fast-paced mind. Slow, but solid, dependable.
“Thank you,” I said, smiling and meaning it. “Being honest, I'm halfway dug into the ground in this inquiry, and I don't even know where to go from here. Finding anything with the White Dragons was luck, I don't know how long it'll hold out for me.”
I only noticed after our brief mutual silence that snow had started to fall. It wasn't the awful mush that I had run out into with Caine, this was soft and quiet. Even the street sounded muffled and far away. It always stole the sound from the world while somehow making it clearer and crisper. I brushed flakes from red hair and found my companion staring straight up into the darkening sky, flakes falling on his strong face. He wasn't unpleasing, I had to admit, though I rarely looked anywhere with the eye of an aesthetic. I wasn't sure why, but I suddenly fretted the state of my hair.
“Well,” Tony began, pulling himself from his reverie, “I know what Knox'd do.”
I perked up instantly. “How many times did you work together?”
“Not enough,” he said, and it was an odd answer. “He was brilliant, I couldn't help thinking I slowed him down.” He shook it off, dislodging snowflakes from his hair. “Anyway, follow me.”
He held out an elbow for me once we'd stood, and I was perplexed at first. I knew what it meant, but it had never been presented to me. But he didn't shrink back, and I slipped my hand into the crook of his arm. I'm sure that we looked like a pair of down-and-out lovers who had little else but each other left in the world. I smiled at the simple domesticity of it all. Me, of all people, on a stroll in the snow.
Our destination wasn't far. On the corner of the street, a man in a stand was selling newspapers. He waved one in our direction, and Tony paid without even looking the man in the eye. Steering me further down the street-toward the center of the city, not the bridge; perhaps we were headed for the subway?-he handed the paper to me.
“Never failed him,” Tony said. “The man'd pick up a paper and come away with some sort of lead nearly every time. Like I said,” he smiled, not unaffected, “slowing him down.”
“We'll see what we can find,” I replied. The ground was cold from the day before, and the snow was already beginning to stick. Maybe it would be best to be underground, no matter how hard it rattled my teeth.
I gave a glance to the police station as we passed on our way to the subway. I considered asking Tony to come in with me and see if Ollie had found anything on Mister Caine. My fingers itched to get hold of any pertinent information. But he likely wouldn't be in yet, it wasn't late enough for his shift to start, and I didn't like the idea of getting anything second hand from the boy DuBois. So we left it behind us and stepped into the warmth of the train station.
The great chandelier lit up the leviathan lobby, sparkling on the marble and turning the inside, in comparison to the silvery snow gathering outside, to warm gold. It was fuller now than when I had been in the morning, men and women coming home from a long day, chatting and walking briskly. The click of their shoes fluttered like bat wings in the atrium above.
Tony stepped away, leaving my arm empty, to buy us a pair of tickets. And I took a long sweep of the surrounding area to get my bearings and the feel of the people who were circulating around me as animate gusts. They hardly paused to look at the solitary standing girl, hauling their suitcases and briefcases and bags slung over shoulders. Scanned their faces to save them for further use.
And then one stood out from the crowd. She was sitting alone on a long bench, and by the look of her things spread out around her, she had been for several hours. She was familiar, something I had kept locked in the back of my head should I need it.
The girl on the subway. She was wearing the same clothes, the same floppy hat, the same tired expression. And she'd been crying.
I was beside her in a moment, and she started when I leaned down into her sight and murmured, “Hello.”
She pressed her handkerchief to her eyes and sniffled piteously, shying away from me. “I'm s-sorry.”
I knelt beside the bench. Tony moved up in the line.
“Is everything all right?” I asked, suddenly concerned that something was very wrong. A girl this age all alone in a place as big as The City could be extremely dangerous. But she nodded, removing her handkerchief once the shock had passed. “Are you all alone?”
“I don't need to be coddled,” she said quickly, as if she'd faced that subject many, many times before. And I sympathized instantly, even as her face drew back in surprise. “I'm so sorry, I don't even know who you are and I'm shouting at you.”
“I'm Eveline,” I said, “and it's perfectly fine. I understand.”
She nodded, dabbing her eyes for the last time. “My name is Ruby. Ruby Ballantine.”