I sat and ate in silence. Work always made me ravenous, if it didn’t give me headaches. I cleaned the plate of every crumb, trying not to think of Mr. Baker, of the sadness in his eyes. I wondered if I should buy a gramophone to break the silence. But no, the image of a girl alone listening to a gramophone seemed a lonely one.
After supper, I poured myself my first glass of wine for the night and took up my cigarettes. It was the first week of September, with summer just beginning to let go, and the cold and dark not yet arrived. Night had fallen when I stepped into my tiny back garden, and there was no breath of heat on the breeze, but the stars were clear, and the air that slid down the neck of my wrapper was warm enough to be soothing.
I lit a cigarette, and in the flare of the match, I saw a man at the back gate.
I stilled. He stood in the lane that ran behind the row of houses, the wrought-iron fence reaching barely to his chest. He was taller than I’d first noticed when he’d been in my sitting room.
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Baker.
I couldn’t see him in the darkness after the match died, but I didn’t hear him move any closer. “I can scream,” I said, my voice curiously calm. “There are neighbors in every direction.”
“I don’t mean to frighten you,” he said from his place in the dark. “Really I don’t. You needn’t scream.”
I took a drag of my cigarette, thinking. I was still close to my back door, close enough to duck inside if he came at me. I hadn’t been lying about the neighbors. I wasn’t friends with any of them, but they would at least come to investigate if I screamed. I felt horribly vulnerable in my wrapper and bare feet, the makeup scrubbed from my face. “Look,” I said. “Just leave. I don’t know how else to make this clear. I’m not selling what you’re buying.”
“Dear God, it’s nothing like that.” Even through his desperation, he sounded disgusted. “I apologize for what happened . . . in there. I was rather shocked. I hadn’t expected . . .”
“The truth? Of course you hadn’t.”
“I can explain all of it,” he said. “You’re right. The brooch was a lie. I had good reason. I had to see you for myself, see what kind of person you are. It was important.”
I sipped my wine. I still wanted nothing to do with whatever drove him, but I was a little curious despite myself. Perhaps I’d find out why a powerful man had taken the trouble to come to a paid psychic on a Tuesday night. “And did I pass?”
He made a hoarse sound that was almost a laugh; it was unpracticed, as if it was a sound he’d never made before. “You find lost things,” he said at last. “You really do.”
“It’s my specialty, yes.”
“You knew what I was thinking. Exactly what—” He seemed to cut himself off, and then he made the hoarse sound again, only this time it sounded like grief. “Ellie Winter,” he said. “You have to find my sister.”
I shook my head, a senseless weight of dread filling my stomach. “No. Oh, no. I don’t find people. I made that clear to you from the beginning. I make it clear to every customer.”
“I know. You told me.”
“No exceptions, Mr. Baker.”
“My name isn’t Baker,” he said. “It’s Sutter. George Sutter.”
There was a long beat of silence, in which I stared into the dark and hoped I was wrong and none of this was happening, not ever.
“My sister is—” The man at my gate stumbled over the words. “My sister was Gloria Sutter.”
My cigarette fell to the ground. “Gloria is missing?”
“Gloria is dead.”
My vision blurred, black circles overlapping black circles.
“She got herself murdered,” he said. “But before it happened, she left me a note. It said, Tell Ellie Winter to find me. Now what do you think that means?”
But I couldn’t answer. I was lowering slowly to the paving stones in my garden, my knees giving way almost gracefully, the wineglass clicking to the ground and rolling away. George Sutter said something else, but I didn’t hear it. I had raised my arms and locked my hands behind my head, squeezing my arms over my ears, blocking out the world and everything in it. I closed my eyes and felt the cool silk of my dressing gown against my cheek, and I never wanted to get up and feel anything else again.