ACT I — THE CALL

The phone rang at 11:47 on a Thursday night in November, 1954.

Miles Collier was sitting in his office above the alley behind Sunset Boulevard, nursing a glass of cheap bourbon and watching the rain hit the window like handfuls of gravel. He had been a detective with the LAPD until 1951, when he took a bullet in the shoulder at a warehouse in Long Beach and decided that the city was not going to pay for his mistakes and he was not going to wait around for it to try. So he bought a desk, a phone, and a license from the state and started doing for people what the police would not do for free.

Most of his clients were women. Most of them wanted to know where their husbands were going at two in the morning. Some of them wanted to know if their husbands were having affairs with other women. A few of them wanted to know if their husbands were having affairs with themselves— with the bottle, with the cards, with the dark spaces between one night and the next.

This call was different.

The woman on the other end of the line was speaking in a voice that was calm and precise and completely unhinged. "Mr. Collier," she said, "I need you to find a woman named Amy Walker. She died in 1931, and I need you to find out where she is now."

Miles put down his glass. "Ma'am, I think you have the wrong number."

"I don't think so," the woman said. "My name is Margaret Hale. I am thirty-four years old. I am married to Richard Hale. And three weeks ago, my husband came home from work and told me that he had met a woman named Amy Walker in his sleep. Not that he had dreamed about her. That he had *met* her. That she was standing at the foot of the bed, looking at him, and she said she was pregnant, and she said the baby belonged to a man she had not yet met, and she said he would understand when he was older."

Miles did not speak for a moment. The rain was still hitting the window. The bourbon was still warm in his stomach.

"Continue," he said.

"Three weeks after that night," Margaret said, "Richard came home from work and told me that Amy Walker had appeared to him again. This time, she was not at the foot of the bed. She was in the kitchen. She was sitting at the table, wearing a red dress, and she was eating an apple. And she told him that the baby she was carrying was not his baby. It was *someone else's* baby. And she said the father was a man who worked at a place called the Pacific Birth Control Clinic, and that she needed my husband to help her hide the truth because the man who would be the father's wife would kill him if she found out."

Miles picked up his glass. "Ma'am, are you asking me to investigate your husband's hallucinations?"

"I'm asking you to find a woman who has been dead for twenty-three years," Margaret said. "Because I don't think she's dead. And I think she's been using my husband to do something that she couldn't do herself."

ACT II — THE CLINIC

The Pacific Birth Control Clinic was not a clinic. Miles found that out within the first hour of walking into the building on East Broadway where the directory said it was located. The building was a four-story Victorian structure that had once been a private residence and had been converted into something else in the 1930s— something that was legal enough to exist in a directory but not legal enough to advertise itself on the front door.

The woman who answered his knock was not the kind of woman he expected. She was young, maybe twenty-five, with blonde hair cut in the style of the late 1930s and a face that was beautiful in a way that made Miles uncomfortable, because he had learned long ago that beauty in a woman who lived in a building like this was usually a weapon.

"I'm looking for information about a clinic," Miles said. "From the early 1930s. The Pacific Birth Control Clinic."

The woman's expression did not change. "There never was a Pacific Birth Control Clinic."

"According to a woman named Margaret Hale, there was."

The woman's eyes sharpened by a fraction of a degree. "Where did you hear that name?"

"Margaret Hale's husband told me."

The woman stepped back and let him into the building. The hallway smelled of mothballs and boiled cabbage. The walls were papered in a floral pattern that had once been fashionable and was now, twenty years later, faded to the color of old teeth.

"My name is Vivian Cross," the woman said, leading him up a narrow staircase to a small office on the second floor. "I was a nurse at the clinic. From 1930 to 1933. I left when it closed."

"Who closed it?"

Vivian sat down behind a small desk and looked at Miles with an expression that was part pity, part contempt. "The federal government. Prohibition was over, and the people who had been funding the clinic realized that making money off of women's bodies was no longer as profitable as making money off of their husbands. They pulled the plugs."

"What was the clinic's real name?"

"The American Women's Health League. We did what we could— counseling, contraception, referral to doctors who wouldn't ask questions. We also kept records. Names, dates, addresses. All of it."

Miles felt a cold feeling in his chest that had nothing to do with the rain. "Did you keep records for a woman named Amy Walker?"

Vivian's mouth opened slightly, then closed. "When was she last at the clinic?"

"1931."

"She was the last patient we had before things got complicated," Vivian said. "She came in November 1931. She was married, she said, to a man named Richard— no, not Richard. Something else. She said she was pregnant by a man she had never met. She said the baby wasn't hers. She said the baby belonged to someone she knew in her sleep."

Miles leaned forward. "Did she have a delivery date?"

Vivian reached under the desk and pulled out a thin file. "She didn't deliver. She disappeared. Two days after her last appointment, she was gone. No forwarding address. No phone number. Nothing."

"What happened to her records?"

"They were kept in the building. In a locked cabinet in the basement. I don't know what happened to them after the clinic closed. The new owners probably threw them out."

Miles took the file. It contained a photograph of Amy Walker: a young woman with dark hair and dark eyes, wearing a coat that was too thin for the season. The file listed her as twenty-eight years old, five feet four inches, 120 pounds, married, one previous pregnancy (miscarriage, 1927).

And beneath that, in handwriting that was not Vivian's: *Patient reports contact with deceased female, approximately 50 years old, claiming pregnancy. Dismissed as hysterical. Patient cooperative. Recommended no further intervention.*

ACT III — THE GRAVEYARD

The cemetery was on the east side of the city, past the rail yards and the warehouses and the rows of small, neat houses that belonged to the people who worked in them and dreamed of escaping them. Miles found Amy Walker's grave by looking through the cemetery directory in the gatehouse, where an old man named Mr. Tanaka kept the records in a leather-bound book that smelled of dust and time.

"Amy Walker," he said, flipping through the pages. "Walker, Walker, Walker... Ah. Here she is. Amy M. Walker. 1903 to 1931. Buried next to her sister."

Miles walked through the rows of headstones until he found the one Mr. Tanaka had described. It was a modest stone, gray and unadorned, with the names and dates of two women: Amy M. Walker, 1903–1931, and Clara E. Walker, 1898–1930. Sisters. Both dead in the same decade. Both buried in the same plot.

Miles stood over the stone for a long time, listening to the sound of trains passing in the distance and the wind moving through the bare branches of the trees that lined the cemetery path.

Then he walked back to his car and drove to the address listed in Vivian's file for Amy Walker's husband: a man named Robert Delaney, who lived in a small apartment on Temple Street in the Bunker Hill district.

Robert Delaney was not home. But his wife, Lillian Delaney, was. She was a small woman with a tired face and a voice that trembled slightly when she spoke, as if she were holding back words that she was not sure she wanted to say.

"Mr. Delaney," she said, standing in the doorway with her hand on the knob. "I don't know what you're looking for."

"I'm looking for Amy Walker," Miles said. "And I'm looking for the truth about what happened to her in 1931."

Lillian's hand tightened on the doorknob. "You can't prove anything."

"Maybe not. But I can ask questions."

She stepped back and let him in. The apartment was small and clean and smelled of lavender and boiled eggs. There were no photographs on the walls. No personal items visible except for a small stack of books on the coffee table— novels, mostly, with paper covers that had been read so many times the spines were cracked and the corners were bent.

Lillian sat down on the edge of a chair and looked at Miles with eyes that were red but dry. "Amy was my cousin," she said. "She came to live with us in the fall of 1931. She said she was running from something. She didn't say what. She was quiet. Polite. She helped me with the cooking and the cleaning and the laundry, and she never complained, even when I gave her the worst room in the apartment—the one that faced the alley and got no sunlight."

Miles waited.

"One morning," Lillian said, "she was gone. Her bed was made. Her things were gone. Her suitcase was gone. Everything was gone except for a red dress that she had left hanging in the closet. We never saw her again."

"Did you ever find out what happened to her?"

Lillian looked at Miles for a long moment. Then she said, very quietly: "I think she was killed."

"By whom?"

"By the man her baby belonged to," Lillian said. "And by the woman who was his wife. And by everyone who had something to lose from the truth getting out."

ACT IV — THE ACCOUNT

Miles sat in Margaret Hale's living room on a Saturday afternoon, six weeks after the first phone call, and told her everything he had found out.

He told her about the clinic. About Vivian. About the file. About Amy Walker's grave. About Robert Delaney's wife and the red dress that had been left hanging in a closet.

Margaret listened without interrupting, her hands folded in her lap, her face expressionless in the way of a person who has been holding something inside for a very long time and is afraid that if she lets it out, it will never stop.

When he finished, she said, "My husband has not been dreaming."

Miles did not respond.

"He has not been dreaming," Margaret repeated, louder. "He has been *talking*. He has been talking in his sleep, for three weeks, in a voice that is not his voice. A woman's voice. A young woman's voice. And the words she says are not random. They are *specific*. They are names, dates, places. They are the details of a life that my husband has never lived."

She stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the garden behind the house— a small, tidy garden with rose bushes and a stone path and a bench where Margaret used to sit in the morning with her coffee and her newspaper.

"I want you to find the woman who was his wife," she said. "The one who killed Amy Walker. I don't care what her name is. I don't care where she is. I just want to know that she is gone. That she is dead. That she will never hurt my husband again."

Miles thought about this. He thought about the red dress in the closet. The empty grave. The woman who had been dead for twenty-three years and was still, somehow, walking the streets of Los Angeles and sitting at kitchen tables and eating apples.

"I'll find her," he said.

He drove home through the rain-slicked streets of Los Angeles, the windshield wipers clicking back and forth like a metronome keeping time with something that did not want to be measured. He thought about Amy Walker and the life she had been living in the spaces between sleep and waking, in the places where memory and imagination blurred into something that might have been truth or might have been something else entirely.

And he thought about Margaret Hale, sitting at her kitchen table with her coffee and her newspaper, wondering if the woman who had been dead for twenty-three years was standing at the foot of her bed, waiting for her husband to wake up and understand what she needed from him.

Miles pulled into his driveway, killed the engine, and sat in the dark for a long time, listening to the rain on the roof of his car and the silence of the room beyond the windshield.

Then he opened his desk drawer, pulled out a fresh sheet of paper, and began to write.

OTMES Code: OTMES-v2-c9d5e3-003-M0{5.0/6.0}-0{195°/225°}-003 E_total: 32.1 | V: 0.65 | I: 0.70 | C: 0.55 | S: 0.30 | R: 0.25 TI: 55.0 | M_vec: [5.0, 0.5, 6.0, 3.0, 3.0, 9.0, 3.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0] Style: Film Noir/Hardboiled | Period: 1954 Los Angeles