"I ... I know you are, Wally," and now Wally could hear Claire"s throat tighten as she fought away the urge to cry. "I know you are. But I can worry, okay? I"m not going to stop that."
"I know."
"Do you need anything?" Claire asked. "Come home. You can do laundry, I"ll make you some food. ..." She paused. "Bring anyone. I know you have friends-of course you have friends. They need things too. Bring them."
Claire"s words were tumbling out quickly, running together. Wally could tell how desperate Claire was to strike just the right note with her daughter, but at the same time unsure how to achieve that.
"And you"re okay?" Claire asked again.
"I"m fine." Wally felt herself tensing. "How are you?"
"I"m fine, Wally. Everything is just the same. ..."
Wally sighed heavily. Here was the problem with all these calls: they pretty much screeched to a halt at right about that spot, after the chorus of "I"m fine"s" and Wally"s refusal of help.
"Honey," Claire said, hesitant. "Do you have a friend named Sophie?"
Wally was struck silent for a moment. There was no way in h.e.l.l that this could be a good thing. Wally knew-knew-that she had never mentioned any of her crew"s names to Claire.
"Why, Mom?" Wally tried not to sound impatient.
"Please. It can"t be so impossible to say yes or no."
Wally hesitated. "Yes."
"Sophia Manetti?"
Wally"s heart sank. The full name. So official sounding, so clinical somehow.
"What is it?" Wally demanded, feeling the dread.
"Have you ... have you heard any news about her?" Claire asked.
"Mom, tell me right now ..." Wally demanded.
"She"s gone," Claire said quietly. "I"m so sorry, honey."
"She"s ..."
"She was killed, Wally. She"s dead."
Wally"s legs suddenly felt unsteady. She sank down to the pavement, leaning against the outside wall of the library. When she hadn"t spoken a response after a few seconds, Claire"s voice, shrill and panicked now, filled the s.p.a.ce between them.
"I"m sorry. She was murdered. In Riverside Park. Over a week ago."
"What are you talking about, Mom? How did you-"
"Wally, do you see how crazy this is?" Claire cried. "Do you see how this ends? What in G.o.d"s name are you doing out there? I"m sorry! I"m sorry for whatever it was I did to make you-"
"Stop it!" Wally yelled into the phone, her head feeling like it was about to explode. "Stop apologizing for things! You didn"t do anything wrong."
"Yes I did."
"No! You didn"t do this to me. You didn"t do anything to Sophie. It"s just who I am. It"s how we are. There"s nothing to fix."
"But we can! Just come home ..."
"I have to go, Mom."
Wally hung up her phone. She felt sick to her stomach, but willed herself not to puke right there on the sidewalk. She wanted to cry, but her system was in too much shock to allow that kind of release. She needed to be with her crew, but the idea of facing them with this news was unbearable. What could Wally possibly tell them, other than the truth they already knew: she herself had sent Sophie away. She had done this.
"Oh my G.o.d," Wally whispered to no one. She rose and headed toward home, ignoring the subway stops that she pa.s.sed, determined to walk the entire five miles of cold pavement in a forced march, the city growing colder as the sun set behind the buildings to the west.
Wally found them in the break room of the bank, Ella"s mascara running with her tears, her face half-buried in Jake"s neck. Tevin sat alone, looking sh.e.l.l-shocked.
"What happened?" Wally asked, dreading more bad news.
The crew hesitated before saying anything.
"It"s not your fault, Wally," Tevin said. "You"ll say it is, but it"s not. ..."
"We went down to Washington Square to sell more phone cards," Jake explained. "James was there. Greta and Stoney. They all knew about it. Some cop has been down there making the rounds."
And Wally got it, even though the others couldn"t bring themselves to say it. They had heard about Sophie on their own.
"About Sophie ... I heard too," Wally said, and the crushing sadness of it came over her again, images flashing through her mind: Sophie broken and b.l.o.o.d.y. Sophie alone.
"I did this ..." Wally began to confess, but before she could say any more, Tevin moved in and wrapped his arms around her. Wally cried at the instant of his touch, just as she knew she would.
"No," Tevin said. "You were right, Wally. What you said before. It was Sophie who turned away from us."
"I sent her away-"
"We know," Ella said. "But you did all you could for her."
It was almost as if the others needed to absolve Wally first so they could also forgive themselves for any way they might have let Sophie down. They cried together in the group embrace for a minute, and then slowly peeled away from each other.
"I loved how Sophie danced," Wally said as she wiped tears away from her eyes, "even when it was embarra.s.sing."
"Which it usually was," Tevin said, managing a little smile.
"I loved how Sophie would be real quiet," Ella said, "then suddenly smile to herself out of nowhere. ..."
"And never say what it was she was thinking about no matter how much you"d bug her," Jake remembered.
"I loved that she was fierce," Tevin said. "Even if she was wrong." And Tevin thought about it some more. "I think that"s why she pushed us away."
They all considered this, and Ella began to cry again, softly, and the others drew her into an embrace again, tightly, until the sound of her tears could barely be heard.
Much later, when the others had settled in for the night, Wally went outside into the narrow alleyway by the rear exit. She dug deep into her bag and found the business card Lois Chao had given her at Harmony House. She held the card up to the streetlight and read the name-Detective Atley Greer, 20th Precinct. With all that had been going on, she had forgotten about the cop"s message until she heard the news about Sophie.
What had put the cop on her in the first place? Wally remembered her missing ID. If Sophie had been found with Wally"s ID on her, Wally"s home address would have been on it. That"s how Claire had heard about the murder first. Wally dialed the cop"s number on her cell, determined to learn what she could about Sophie"s death.
"Yeah?" came the voice on the other end of the line, sounding busy and distracted.
"Detective Greer?"
"Yeah."
"This is Wallis Stoneman."
There was a pause. "Well. How are you, Wallis?"
"Fine."
"You"re fine? Is that right?" In that cop voice, right from the jump. Always questioning, always challenging.
"You called me."
"Over a week ago I called you," Greer said. "Do you know what about?"
"I think I do, now. I just heard about Sophie."
"Right. I"m very sorry about your friend. I"d like us to meet, Wallis. I"m doing my best to find who did this to Sophia, and I think you can help me. You could come in to the station-"
"Ha."
"Right. You still have standing warrants in family court, don"t you? I can promise you that I won"t try to-"
"Forget it."
"Okay, then. You name the place."
Wally thought about it for a moment. Anything she had to tell the cop she could tell him over the phone, but she considered it an advantage to know what he looked like, for future reference. If Greer was out on the streets, there was a chance their paths would cross.
"Fine. I"ll meet you at this address in thirty minutes," Wally said, and gave him a street address on 85th.
"Thirty minutes," Greer said, and hung up.
Atley Greer parked his unit on Columbus and walked west on 85th Street, looking for the address Wallis Stoneman had given him. It was almost midnight and the residential street was quiet; no sign of Wally, no clue why the girl had picked this random location for their meet. Atley was pa.s.sing by a small public garden-badly overgrown and untended-when a girl"s voice sounded his name.
"Greer?"
Atley was startled. He made a quick sideways step away from the garden fence and his hand was halfway to his holster when he made out a young girl"s face just behind the fence, almost hidden in the dense, overgrown garden. It was Wallis-an older version of the girl in the mother-daughter portrait hanging in Claire Stoneman"s apartment. Greer relaxed, and took a step closer to the garden fence.
"Wallis? You startled me there."
Atley looked the girl over. She was average height with short, tousled blond hair and formidable dark gray eyes that fixed on Atley and did not shy away. She was dressed the way many streets did in dark, practical layers and trashy makeup suggestive of an emo dance-club vibe. The look seemed natural on her.
Atley also made a quick visual reconnaissance of the overgrown lot; it was one of those odd-shaped s.p.a.ces that had been co-opted for use as a communal neighborhood garden-decades earlier, probably-but had been neglected and was now a wilderness so dark and dense that Atley couldn"t see through to its other side. The fence was high and overgrown with vines, and the gate was secured with a rusty padlock and chain. Atley had no intention of trying to grab up Wallis Stoneman on her family court warrants, but if he had, he would have been out of luck: even if he managed to scale the high fence, by the time he did so she would be long gone, presumably through a back entrance.
Atley smiled to himself. He was starting to understand why Social Services had no luck bringing Wallis in.
"You grew up around here," Atley said, putting together how she knew about this spot. The Stoneman apartment was just a block away, on 84th.
"Yeah," Wallis answered. "A friend of mine lived in one of these buildings, back in elementary. We used to sneak in here to smoke."
Atley nodded. "I"m sorry about Sophia. You were close?"
"We were family." The thought was sentimental, but Wally kept her emotions in check as she spoke to Atley. She would not allow herself to look weak in front of the cop.
"Family." Atley ruminated on the word. "Right. But not so much lately, I hear."
"Sophie had a problem with drugs. We have rules about that."
Atley gave her a look.
"Is that right?" he said. "You have rules against dope?"
"That"s a surprise? Why? Do you allow crystal meth in your family?"
"Uh ... well, I don"t have a family yet, but now that you mention it, Wallis, if and when I get one, I will definitely go for a strict no-meth policy, one hundred percent."
"Are you going to catch who killed her?" Wally asked.
"Yes, we will," he said. "Any thoughts about who that is?"
"Sophie bought from several dealers," Wally answered, surprising Greer with her immediate cooperation. "One was down near Washington Square Park; he calls himself Bright Eyes."
"Bright Eyes?" Atley rolled the name over. "Like Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes?"
"Huh? No. Bright Eyes, like the band."
"Oh." Greer got out his notebook and started taking notes.
"There"s a guy up in Harlem, too," Wally continued, "calls himself Rage. I think Rage is actually Bright Eyes"s supplier. For a user, Sophie was actually pretty reliable, and from time to time she muled for both those guys. That"s pretty much all I know."
Wally thought about giving up Panama"s name also, but as far as she knew, Sophie and Panama had been on the outs for months, their connection f.u.c.ked over by one of Sophie"s rip-off schemes. Besides that, Wally"s own business at the smoke shop was important to the survival of her and the crew.
"Bright Eyes, Rage. This is helpful, Wallis," Greer said. "So you think Sophia might have been moving drugs recently?"
"I don"t see why not," Wally said. "She was using again, so ... it would make sense."
"If she was holding," Greer said, following the line of reasoning, "that could be a likely cause of her getting attacked. Carrying a package could definitely bring some wolves to her door, so to speak."
"Yeah," said Wally. "That"s why we have the rule against dope. Who needs more wolves?"
"Ha." Atley Greer gave a little punctuating chuckle. "d.a.m.n right. "Who needs more wolves?" I"m gonna write that down. Maybe I"ll use that myself, if it"s okay with you."