Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran Read Free Book Online Page A

explained. For some of us it’s a dream, sometimes an omen, sometimes one of those big famous life-changing moments—near-death experience, heart attack, loss of a loved one. When it’s over you know you’ve got to do what’s been in your heart all along and hang up your shingle as a PI. Whether you’re fifteen or fifty, once the call comes to solve mysteries, eventually you’ll have to give in.
    Constance was a detective since the day she was born. I like to think I was too, even though I had a long, bumpy road between my first bottle of fingerprint dust and my PI union card. But then again, so have most of us.
    I was eleven or twelve when someone gave my best friend Tracy the Official Cynthia Silverton Girl Detective Fingerprinting Kit. Something happened to us when we saw that kit; a déjà vu, a thrill of recognition even though we’d never felt it before. With our other best friend, Kelly, we spent weeks fingerprinting every surface of my parents’ big, crumbling mansion in Brooklyn, even the south wing, which was supposed to be sealed shut because of the hole in the roof. Kelly lived with her parents in a cramped apartment nearby; Tracy lived in the projects across the street with her father. My house was much better for exploring.
    Breaking in to the south wing was our first taste of crime, detection’s twin sister.
    Tracy, a born criminal, somehow broke open the lock that had been rusted shut for years. We each took a sharp breath when we got the door open and saw the sun streaming in on the broken wood floor, the rotting furniture still in place. Pigeons had moved in, and when I jimmied open the door the birds didn’t fly away but looked at us:
What are you doing in our house?
My parents had given us the same look minutes before as we raced through the parlor, where they read a ouija board with their “adviser,” Dr. Oliver.
Money coming soon
, Dr. Oliver promised, as always.
I see a windfall any day now
.
    But in the south wing my parents, and the whole rest of the world, were miles away. We trod carefully and kept quiet. We didn’t know the words for it, but we each felt it—a drop in pressure, a smell, a shudder in the
nadis
, the opening of an inner door.
    There was a mystery here.
    I put the fingerprinting kit down and carefully, gingerly testing each floor board before we put our weight on it, we crept around the room. The pigeons watched and cooed as we peeked under sheets draped over old furniture, carefully opened doors to closets full of chipped china and disintegrating linens. As faras I could tell it was like the rest of my parents’ house, full of old things and dust.
    But it was Tracy who knew better. It was Tracy who had the courage to creep around the edges, avoiding the rotted middle of the floor. It was Tracy who found the old dumbwaiter at the far side of the room. Tracy who somehow opened the rusted latch, Tracy who pulled up the old rope, unused for decades. And Tracy who found the mystery.
    A copy of Silette’s
Détection
, sitting on the tray of the dumbwaiter, waiting for us.
    Three years later Tracy disappeared. Kelly and I were the last people we knew of to see her, alive or dead. No one saw Tracy or heard from her again.
    Wherever she went, whatever happened to her, she took our copy of
Détection
with her.

8
    B ACK IN MY HOTEL I put on all the lights in the bathroom, the brightest spot in the place. Then I lay a cleanish pillowcase over a piece of wood I’d found on the street and put the wood over the sink, making a table. On the left side of the table I put a clean sample of Vic’s fingerprints, nearly complete, from his house. Next to it, on the right, I put a random print I’d taken from the house. I looked at them both under my magnifying glass. It was a match. I changed the second print and looked again. Another match. Again—a match. Again—this time
not
a match. But I was pretty sure it