While in hindsight, these events seem inextricably linked, it is only with the benefit of hindsight that I can weave them together like that.

In the thickness of that early autumn, I was caught up in my writing, and the blossom of my career. Even the confusion with the landlord, and the extraordinary lucky break that she was paying me to live in those apartments faded into a mundane miracle. So too the issue of the five-year-old murderer sank into the back of my mind. With no lead to follow, and my focus fading, I needed a break to clear my head, of writing and of Tammy’s mystery, so I put down the problem altogether for a time.

In the interim, I occupied myself with exercise, and picking up around the apartment. I didn’t turn my mind back to the dark peak and the fire-lookout for weeks. I had been ready to forget it entirely, when a friend of mine, who was on the mainland, came across the bay to visit me.

I saw him in a small café on Mainstreet. I was passing by, on my way to the library when his face appeared at a window. I was so shocked to see him that I tripped and almost fell. When I recovered, Benji had run out the door, down the steps and crashed into me, much like a golden retriever. When he pulled away, he placed his hand on my chin and appraised me. He was tall, with a long unbuttoned coat, shopping bags hanging on his elbow, and a pair of raybans pushed back into his glossy black curls.

“You look timeless.” He smiled. “I tried calling you at work but the phones are down, and I don’t have your cell. And I don’t know anyone else who lives here, but I was passing through and you know I never come this way, so I had to see you. How are you? How’s the book?”

“The phones aren’t down. It’s a library—” I laughed. “I only put it as my work address because I didn’t want to put my own apartment. But it’s so old fashioned they don’t have any phones except a landline which hasn’t worked in years apparently. But what are you doing here? Why haven’t you visited before?”

“I’m on my way to Death Valley. And I can’t stay for long. In Stockholm I got a new telescope for the supermoon next month. There’s a crater in particular that I want to see called Shoemaker’s Crater, where a famous satellite crashed with the ashes of the father of astrogeology on board—what a grave to make! The moon will be close to see the wreck, at the bottom of the crater. There won’t be a bigger supermoon for years, and there hasn’t been one so big for decades. But tell me about your life. How are you How is Eliza Bailey?”

While he talked, he led me inside the café and silently beckoned a server, who later brought us drinks and biscuits. We talked late into the evening. Folk came and went, the door jingled, and from the small round window above our table, the dark crept into the café. The lamplight flickered, and a cool draft blew under the door, wind off the harbor. We slowly drained our drinks, and with warm food in our bellies, we finally took our coats, and pushed in our chairs. Benji scrawled his signature on the bill, and wrapped a scarf around his neck. I smoothed a few bills and laid them under my plate. They were warm from my pocket.

When at last we stepped out onto the quiet street, it was cold, and clouds hung over the moon, and the harbor glittered darkly. Benji stuck close to me in the street, and glanced up at the night sky and sighed. Patches of sky were visible between the clouds, and the stars were dazzlingly clear. Without a word, we started walking. A pace down the sidewalk, he spoke. “It’s always lovely to see you, Liza. I hope I didn’t keep you out too late.”

“No, not at all.”

“It’s my bad influence, isn’t it.” Benji cracked a faint smile. “You’re staying up later and later.”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to get to sleep.”

“Oh? Has something happened?”

“No, I just have a lot on my mind. There are some things that keep me up at night, but it’s more like—I almost brought it up over dinner, but I feel like the café—There’s something I want to tell you about.”

“It’s very us, to talk about what keeps us up at night, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” I smiled. “But it’s not psychological this time. And it involves someone else’s private information.”

“Ah…” Benji held up a hand while he thought for a moment. “Are you telling me—Be careful,” he said, seeing me start to speak. “Don’t spill anybody else’s secrets, if you think it might be dangerous to either of us.”

“No, I think it’s safe. I won’t tell you everything, but I want to tell you in general terms because I think I need your advice, now that I think about it.”

Benji paused. “Is there someplace we can sit down for a while?”

I looked around. We had come close to the park where I had looked over the bay, and the barren coast of the wasteland, the mainland. The yachts bobbed invisibly in the bay, their glossy white hulls invisible in the dark. But their lapping reached our ears, and the flicker of city lights reflected on their hulls reached our eyes. Across the expanse of ocean, the desert on the mainland was blue and distant.

“There’s a park up ahead. We can sit on a bench and talk privately. The wind will keep us from being overheard.”

Benji nodded and allowed me to lead him out off the street, onto the cool autumn grass of the park. A few maple trees stood bare in the dark, their ruby leaves crunching beneath our feet.

“ I took a job,” I said as we crossed to the bench. “The landlord who used to own my apartment asked me to help her with a personal matter. She expressed to me privately that she wanted to hire a private investigator, but in the end she simply could not find any private detective with whom she was comfortable working. But for some reason she felt comfortable telling me her story.”

Benji nodded. His face was impassive, pointed over the harbor into empty space, but I knew how well he listened. First I gave him time to interrupt if he wanted, and then I went on.

“When Tammy was little, her younger brother Alexander murdered their step-father. The method of this murder is difficult to explain, because Alexander was five, but her stepdad was very sick when Alexander murdered him. Their mother sent Alexander away after that. He went with a man called Larry, a friend of Tammy’s, up a mountain where Larry was hiking that weekend, and Tammy never saw him again. Her mother wouldn’t speak about him, and young Tammy learned at a young age not to press her mother.”

Sensing I was done, Benji gave a rueful smile in the dark, still gazing over the harbor. “What’ve you got so far?”

“I know where Larry was working, but I can’t find anything else.”

“Where’d he work?”

“At a fire-lookout, the same fire lookout where he took the kid probably. He was fired later that same year, but no one at the company knows why.”

“So they say?”

“They told me he was probably fired because he broke a piece of equipment.”

Benji frowned. “You think he killed the kid, and they fired him to avoid a scandal?”

I shrugged. “It could be. Alexander was autistic, and it was the ‘50’s. Who knows what people would do to an autistic kid.”

Benji sighed, then shook his head. “You’re crazy. For taking this case, you’re nuts.”

“Any advice?”

He sighed. “Besides dropping it?”

“I can’t drop it.”

“Why not? What if Larry finds out you’re after him? Or what if the company knew all along, and covered it up. What if they find out that you’re going to expose some kind of scandal. You could be in real hot water before you know it.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’re right, but for some reason I don’t care. I have a chance to do some good here.”

Benji smiled. “For some reason. Maybe you should care. You’re a good kid. But you’ve got a lot of options. You could volunteer at a pantry, or make regular donations. I know you love stories, but you don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

“Neither do you, though. And I didn’t agree to help her because it was an interesting story. It’s a horrifying story. I want to help her because she asked me to. And if I don’t do it, who will? It happened more than sixty years ago. Who else would dig up the past for her?”

“A private investigator, for one. Or somebody with less to lose. You have work to do. This is a vital time in your career. You really want my advice, it’s this: get out before you’re in too deep.”

“But I can make a difference here. How can I just walk away?”

“Digging up the past. The truth might do more harm than good.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“That’s because you’re young. You have more years ahead of you than behind. Maybe you think digging up the past means digging up childhood traumas, birthday parties, and the way your parents raised you, or high school drama, your first broken heart. Stuff like that. In reality it’s more complicated.”

“But when am I going to have a chance like this?” I sighed, and slumped down on the bench. The wind blew through my hair. I shuddered.

Benji looked down at me. Then he looked over the bay. “When was the last time you met with Tammy?”

“About a month ago.”

“Why don’t you meet with her again. Tell her what you did find out. Maybe she can think of something new, or something that didn’t seem relevant at your first meeting. You might jog her memory.”

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

After that we sat in silence. I breathed in the deep night air, and thought uneasily about the fire-lookout tower. I began to feel like I had wandered into dark regions of my own mind, as if the tower lay in one of those regions. I shuddered. Benji laid a hand on my shoulder, and I flinched at first, but then I sighed.

“Good luck. I’m going to check on you in a week. Please don’t do anything stupid until then. You’re unsupervised, as a grown up. Don’t abuse the privilege.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Yes. I’ve got a plane to catch. At two A.M.. But let me walk you back to your apartment.”

He stood up, and I stood up with him, and we walked slowly back to my apartment under the train tracks. But my feet dragged.

At the door, I offered to show him inside, but he had to hurry up the flights of stairs to the train station, or he’d miss the plane. I watched him for a moment from the bottom as he sped up the stairs, coattails flying in the wind. Then I turned my key in the lock, and strode into the apartment lobby, and back to my room.

I didn’t see this, or know about it until later. When I had turned the corner from the lobby, a dark shape clove from the shadows and stopped the door with its palm, just in time to keep it from closing. Then it slipped inside and shut the door behind it.

I decided to meet with Tamara the next day, if I could, and set about relaxing. For some reason talking with Benji reminded me of Tammy’s driver, Gunther, with his cowboy hat and his cryptic advice. I ran it through my head as I lit a candle and dragged a few blankets over to the couch. Sometimes in life, certain possibilities are removed. It is important to look at those possibilities, if you can remember them, because when the world changes, things that were previously impossible might come back into your life unexpectedly, and if you already ruled them out, then you will miss them, and they will pass you by, and then it really will be as if they were impossible all along, when in reality, you had a chance, and simply weren’t prepared to take it. That’s how I thought about it. I couldn’t make anything of it. But something did pop into my head, and it was not entirely pleasant, like a relative who visits unexpectedly. I remembered someone from my past, and felt—with the same sense that tells a person when they’re being watched—I felt that our paths had converged without either of us knowing, or being able to predict. If we hadn’t met already then we would, at some point in the future, but I had no way of knowing when, or in what manner we would meet, or under what specific circumstances. My instincts told me that somehow, we might recognize each other. And that our secret might have survived, the hidden feelings we had shared before the progression of life had torn us apart and set us on different, incompatible paths. The world might be changing. But what had caused this change? And was it a meaningful change, or simply the gradual result of the past events. I wondered, did the past lead me here? Did the past lead the world to its current state, or did something happen when we weren’t looking? I don’t know where that thought came from, but it seemed to enter my consciousness from a source other than myself, and it put me down a line of thinking that was not wholly pleasant, but rightly so. Things seemed to be moving in a bad direction. Even if we could meet, what would the price be? We, and our long delayed meeting would have to survive that world somehow, or wait things out, or escape it somehow. But how to escape the world? There is only one exit for each of us, and we cannot follow one another there. We endure together, or escape alone.

Somewhat contrary to the impression these chapters might leave, I didn’t spend that much time thinking over these events. They were blips in an otherwise busy time. For one thing, I still had no furniture, and I made a list of all the furniture I might need. Up until that point, I had only a bed, and a small writing desk. All my books sat in cardboard boxes. My clothes were in three duffle bags, and on my bead if I’m being honest. A few personal belongings nestled in my backpack, which hung off my desk chair.

I walked around my apartment to think about what furniture might look nice, but I grew pessimistic, thinking that my furniture would only have to be moved again when I moved, so I should get as little as possible. Then, the snarky but realistic voice said, that’s no way to live, and I couldn’t argue with that. What’s the point of depriving myself of comfort, just to dodge a day’s labor (or a moving assistant’s fee). By then I had wandered to the balcony. I could hear the wind through the glass doors, and the trains overhead. Across the quartyard I saw my neighbor’s balcony. This was cut in half by the shadow of the buildings. The right side was scorched and bright with sunlight. Shadows clung to the other half like ivy. Her blue cot sat half in shadow, one corner flapping in the wind, and the glass door behind it rippled with every movement of my head. There was some kind of shelf inside the glass doors, which left only a small gap for entering the balcony. On top of the shelf was a long fish tank, a reading lamp, and a stack of books. There might have been something small atop the bookstack, but I couldn’t make out what it was. Maybe a matchbox or a wallet.

“You shouldn’t leave a wallet inside the window,” I said. But I was thinking, what kind of person might she be? And as I wondered, I recognized two truths simultaneously; that my fascination was mixed with a vague, romantic curiosity, and that my fascination (and therefore romantic sensation) was merely the result of her unaccountable situation. Not that I—especially I—was in the position to judge her, but how exactly does a person wind up living in an abandoned apartment complex beneath train tracks, on a weird but beautiful little island off the coast of california, equidistant and far from San Diego and Los Angeles. I didn’t believe in signs, but I felt from that moment forward that we obviously had something in common, something that almost no one else could have experienced, and we should meet, we would meet inevitably. But I also knew that, for an entire month, we had lived in quiet proximity without ever noticing one another. Unless she had noticed me, and decided not to introduce herself, not to make herself known. I might have done the same. You don’t know what kind of person would choose to live in such an odd place. Possibly someone crazy, or someone mentally, emotionally unstable. Maybe she was waiting to see what kind of person I was. Had she watched me, quietly from afar, safe with the knowledge that I, oblivious fool, would not suspect anything? I suddenly felt ashamed for peeking into her apartment from across the way. In all likelihood, I had been the first one to notice, and I ought to introduce myself like a good neighbor. But something held me back. Several things. I had my own unpleasant business, and I was not in the mood for the social obligations of a neighbor, even if they might have helped me. And besides, I ought to get over my weird neighbor crush before introducing myself. Otherwise, I might say something foolish, or I might blush uncontrollably, or panic and run away only for her to open the door and see me scuttling down the hallway like a thief, or a kid playing ding-dong-ditch, and then she’d think I was childlike. That was obviously ridiculous, and I didn’t need to worry. But I ought to overcome the crush anyway, and greet her with an open mind. I owed her that. I mean I owed myself that too, but then again, couldn’t I hold onto my little swirl of emotions? No. I decided I should handle it like an adult, by which I meant, an emotionally mature person. But it might turn into something anyway, I thought.

I opened the window and wind swept into the apartment. Papers flew off my desk. The curtains lifted and streamed like banners close to the ceiling, and I stood by the open door, my eyes watering from the wind. Despite the view of stone bricks, and no sign of nature apart from small patches of moss on the sunny half of the walls, I could hear the sea, which rolled on constantly even when the trains lulled overhead. For a moment, it seemed that the courtyard contained all of it: the trains, the passengers, the gulls, the sea, her depth, her breadth, her shores. The wind carried them here, and I was their sole observer, keeping the day watch over this atmospheric phenomenon while my foil, across the courtyard slept, so she could watch over them all by night. Did the wind bring us here too?

I jumped when the phone rang.

“I found him,” said the flat voice on the line.

“Argo?”

“It is I.”

“How’d you get this number?”

“This island was once a Greek colony.”

“What does that mean?”

I heard him shrug. “The roots linger. Today, you are the golden fleece. I am the cyclops, and this receiver is my one eye, watching over you, counting the sheep as it passes under my gaze.”

“The cyclops goes blind,” I reminded him. I don’t know why. He was being ridiculous. And he still hadn’t told me how he got my number. Somehow I wasn’t surprised.

For a moment he said nothing. “Do you read often?”

I shrugged. “I read when I can. The last book I handled was the yellowpages from the 1940’s.”

“But you can read.”

“Of course I can read,” I was getting angry. He had disturbed me from a pleasant (if maybe useless) line of thought.

“There’s a book you might find, if you look hard enough. Two Atmospheric Phenomenon: What We Learn from Anecdote. It was taken out of print before it went to the printer, but a miscommunication between the publisher and the printer let a few advance review copies slip.”

“What do you mean it went out of print before it went to the printer?”

“Well the book was in a newspaper listed as going out of print, and the newspaper came out before the book’s scheduled release date.”

“So it was never printed.”

“Not apart from the advance review copies.”

“Where did they go?”

“The printer sold them to a boutique bookstore in LA.”

“Why would I want that book?”

“Your Larry saw One of the Two Atmospheric Phenomenon. His name is on the cover.”

“What? He didn’t seem like—well, I mean I didn’t get the impression that he was a writer. But maybe he was interviewed.”

“The author seems to have known him quite well.”

“And what does Atmospheric Phenomenon mean? You wouldn’t happen to know where I should look, would you?”

“I only count sheep.”

“Has it occurred to you that people aren’t like that? You don’t own these people just because you can pay enough to stalk them online, or find them. They aren’t your sheep.”

“Maybe you want to repay me, but I don’t need your advice. Keep it.” The line went dark.

It rang again. “Now what,” I snapped.

“Ehem. Hi,” said a voice.

“Oh god. Benji. Sorry. What’s going on? Did you make it okay?”

“I am fine,” he said, laughing.

“No, no. I’m okay too. I just made some progress actually. I was mad because I had to talk to this guy, who lives on a yacht and talks a lot about ancient Greece.”

“I wish you took care of yourself the way you take care of business.”

“Benji, I would stab my own eyes out from boredom taking care of myself.”

“Really? It’s a lot of work.”

“Ok stop quipping back and forth with me. It’s annoying. What’s up?”

“I had a feeling. Are you sure everything’s okay?”

“I am okay.”

“Fine. Talk soon?”

“Okay.”

I set my phone on the table. I picked it back up immediately. My thumb went automatically to check messages, but I put the phone down again. I was restless. I needed guidance. No. I needed to think. I needed to clear my head and banish any thoughts about Argo. He never said how he got my number, for one thing. I felt watched, but I needed to focus anyway.

Pulling the curtains, went to the lounge chair and curled up. I guess I did have one piece of furniture. Pulling my knees up to my chin, I took in the quiet shade of my apartment. The windows were bright billowy squares with the drapes pulled. I ought to shut the windows too, but the fresh air washed over me, and the rumble of the trains, and I needed for a moment to drown out some thought or tone in my mind. I closed my eyes, opened my senses to the trains, and let their rumbling rock me to sleep.

I dreamed I was riding the train somewhere. In my dream, I saw Benji next to me on the train. He was thinking about the moon again. The biggest supermoon in years. He was going to Death valley. No, he was going to the airport. That’s where the trains went. You had to fly to get to Death Valley. When I woke up, I was also thinking about the moon.