I.

The rain in Los Angeles doesn't wash anything clean. It just makes the dirt wetter.

I was sitting in my apartment on Ocean Boulevard, drinking bourbon that cost two dollars a bottle and tasting like it had been distilled in a garage, when the book fell open to a page I hadn't read before. The title was *And She Went with Two Cats*. The author was Evelyn Hart, who died in 1946, apparently by her own hand.

I knew she hadn't killed herself. I knew it the way I knew the difference between a lie and the truth—because I'd spent twelve years in military journalism learning to spot one.

The door was open. The rain was falling. And Evelyn Hart was standing in the doorway.

She was soaked through, water dripping from a coat that looked like it belonged to someone's grandmother. Her hair was dark and tangled. At her feet sat a bulldog I assumed was Rex, though the dog wasn't there—only the memory of a dog, the shape of one in the space beside her feet.

"I don't want to know how I died," she said. Her voice was flat, the way a woman's voice is flat when she's already heard everything she doesn't want to hear.

"Fair enough," I said. "Want a drink?"

I couldn't offer her one—she didn't drink—but I poured a glass anyway and set it on the windowsill where it could evaporate into nothing, the way she would.

II.

Evelyn Hart was a travel writer who operated somewhere between respectable journalism and outright scandal. In the 1920s and 30s, she'd travelled through South America and Southeast Asia, writing about things that people didn't want written about. Child labour in rubber plantations. Forced prostitution near treaty ports. The little-understood business of what happened to women when the warships left and the locals remembered they had nothing left to lose.

"In '46, I was putting together a piece," she told me. We were sitting in my apartment. The rain had stopped. The bourbon was still there, still full, still mine. "A big piece. About a network. They moved women during the war—sold them, really—and when the war ended, they just kept going."

"Who's 'they'?"

"People who have names that don't appear in newspaper bylines." She looked at me with eyes that were more glass than flesh. "I had evidence. Photographs. Letters. Names. I was coming back to publish it when I died."

"When were you coming back?"

"That's the question, isn't it?" She didn't answer it.

She appeared once a week. Every seven days, like clockwork, she'd stand in my doorway in the rain and tell me another piece of what she'd been working on. Each time, she was fainter than before—less texture, more outline. Like a photograph left too long in the sun.

"I need you to find out who did it," she said on the third visit. Her voice was like static. "Before I'm gone. Before I'm just a book on a shelf that nobody reads."

"I'm a columnist, not a detective."

"You're a man who knows the difference between a suicide and a murder. That makes you more than most detectives."

III.

I started asking questions. The kind of questions that make people who have names that don't appear in newspaper bylines nervous.

The bookstore owner on Sunset Boulevard—a fat Japanese man who knew too much and said too little—told me that Evelyn Hart's body had been identified by a coroner who'd never been seen again. The police report had been filed by a detective who retired the next week and moved to Arizona. The book had been bought at a thrift store by a man who couldn't remember the name of the street it was on.

The only thing that remained was the book and the woman inside it, fading faster with each passing week.

On her fifth visit, she was barely visible. A smudge in the doorway, a shape where a woman used to stand. The bulldog was gone entirely.

"His name is Harrigan," she said. "Colonel Harrigan. He was in my unit. We served together. I trusted him."

I'd heard the name. Everyone in LA who'd served had heard the name. Harrigan was now a city councilman, then a mayoral candidate, then—God help us—something bigger. A man with friends in places where questions went to die.

"Colonel Harrigan killed you," I said.

"He didn't mean to," she said. "He was scared. That's how murders usually happen. Not with malice. With fear."

IV.

I wrote the story. Not for the newspaper—I didn't have one anymore. I wrote it for an underground publication, the kind that gets distributed in bars and parked on street corners in envelopes with no return address.

It ran on a Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, Harrigan's campaign manager called my building twice. By Wednesday evening, someone had thrown a rock through my window.

On her sixth visit, Evelyn was a outline. A silhouette drawn in pencil, smudged by an indifferent thumb.

"Thank you," she said. Her voice was so quiet I could barely hear it over the sound of the rain.

"Don't thank me," I said. "You should have published it yourself."

"I couldn't. Not after."

She was gone after that. Not faded—gone. Like she'd never been there at all.

I sat in my apartment and drank bourbon and listened to the rain. The story had run. Harrigan's campaign was in crisis, though nobody outside our circle knew it yet. Evelyn was dead, truly dead this time, and the men who had names that didn't appear in newspaper bylines would keep sleeping at night a little more easily.

I picked up the book from my table. *And She Went with Two Cats*. I opened it to the last page.

There was nothing new to read.

I put the book on the shelf. I poured another drink. I listened to the rain wash nothing clean.

Somewhere in the building, a dog barked.