Part Three: The Locket
He reached the bench as the girl opened the locket.
It was old, the locket — he could see this even from where he stood. The kind of old that is not antique-store old but carried-old, worn-old, the old of something that has been in close contact with a human body for a long time and has absorbed the wear of that contact. The metal had been cleaned recently, incompletely, which explained what he had observed at the fountain.
Inside the locket was a photograph.
He could not see the photograph’s details from where he stood, but he could see the woman’s face when she looked at it, and the woman’s face told him everything he needed to know about whether the photograph contained someone she knew.
Behind the photograph — and he could see the girl’s fingers, small and careful, working at something — there was a piece of paper. Folded very small, impossibly small, the folding of someone who needed to hide something in a very limited space and had taken the time to fold it precisely.
The girl unfolded it carefully. Her fingers were still trembling from the cold water, and the paper was delicate, and she unfolded it with the specific concentrated care of a child who has been told that this paper matters and has taken the information seriously.
He crouched slightly, not approaching closer yet, not wanting to frighten her. “What does the paper say?”
The old woman shut her eyes.
The girl held the locket tighter. “My mom said only the lady with the ring could read it.”
He looked at the woman — at the trembling hand, at the ring that apparently meant something specific to someone who was not in this park, at the fear that was older than this moment and had been living in her for some time. “Then she knows.”
Vera Cassin opened her eyes.
For a moment she looked less like the composed, elegant woman he knew from the park and more like someone from whom a covering had been removed, someone seen without the arrangement they normally maintained between themselves and the world.
“She shouldn’t have sent you alone,” the woman said. Her voice was very quiet.
The child’s lips trembled. “She said if I saw the ring, I had to come fast.”
“May I?” He held out his hand gently, toward the locket.
After a hesitation — a real hesitation, the hesitation of a child weighing an instruction against a present situation — the girl let him take it.
He opened the tiny paper fully, carefully, on his palm.
The handwriting was cramped. Faded, as if the ink had been old when it was written, or had been exposed to moisture at some point. But legible.
If she is wearing the ring, they never stopped looking.
He looked from the note to the woman. The question that formed was the only question: “Who is ‘they’?”
