Chapter 2 - The Cold Table
"Get her bag," Julian said.
He didn't say it to his brothers. He said it to a short, bald man in a dark gray suit who had followed them through the door carrying two leather briefcases that looked like they were made of whale skin.
"Don't touch it," I said.
The voice didn't sound like mine. It sounded small, like the wind through the tin roof back home when the storm was almost over. My fingers tightened around the plastic handles of the bag until the cheap woven material dug into the red lines on my palms.
The bald man stopped two feet from my sneakers. He looked over his shoulder at Julian, waiting for a signal.
Julian walked over to the bench. He didn't kneel. He stood over me, his shadow cutting off the light from the fluorescent bulb directly above my head. When he breathed, he didn't smell like the rain or the station; he smelled like tobacco, cedar, and old paper—the kind of books they keep in rooms with leather chairs where you have to show a card to get in.
"Your name is Autumn," he said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes."
"The woman who died in Ohio," he continued, his voice dropping into a cold, flat cadence that felt like a chisel against ice. "Her name was Helen Vane."
"Her name was Helen Song," I said, looking up at him until my neck hurt. "She took her name back when she left New York. She told me she didn't want anything from your father except the right to keep me."
Behind Julian, the actor—Christopher—took off his sunglasses. His eyes were the same gray as his brother's, but they were wide, wet around the rims, like he was looking at an extra who had wandered onto his set without a script.
"Julian," Christopher said, his voice dropping into that smooth, chest-resonant tone people use when they're trying to sound important on television. "Look at her mouth. She has the same lip line as the old man's portrait in the library. It's her. We don't need the blood work."
"We always need the blood work, Christopher," Julian said without turning around. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small, heavy silver card case. He didn't offer it to me; he laid it on the wooden bench beside my thigh. "Inside that case is the address of an office on Park Avenue. A car will be outside this precinct in five minutes. You will get in it. You will go to the office. A technician will take three vials from your arm."
"And if I don't?" I asked.
The little gamer brother, Adrian, finally looked up from his screen. His eyes were bloodshot, surrounded by dark circles that looked like he hadn't slept since Tuesday. He looked at my old gray hoodie—the one with the frayed cuffs where I had cut the strings off because they got caught in the washing machine—and then he looked at my sneakers.
"If you don't," Adrian said, his voice high and sharp, like a guitar string that had been wound too tight, "Julian will have this whole block zoned for a commercial garage by midnight, and these cops will be working the traffic detail in Staten Island by Monday morning. Just get in the car, sis. It saves time."
Officer Miller didn't move. She stood by the desk, her hand resting near her holster, but her eyes were fixed on the floor. She knew he wasn't lying.
"I have my mother's letters," I said, reaching for the pocket of my hoodie where the notebook paper was folded. "She wrote down the dates. She wrote down the hospital in Queens where you were born, Julian. She told me you had a small scar behind your left ear from when you fell off the pier at the lake house when you were four."
Julian’s gray eyes narrowed until they looked like two slits of slate. His left hand—the one with the heavy gold signet ring showing a crest of a tree with three dead branches—moved a fraction of an inch toward his collar, then stopped.
"The letters stay with you," he said, his voice dropping another octave. "For now. Get the bag, Arthur."
May you like
This time, when the bald man reached down for my red, white, and blue checkered sack, I didn't stop him. I let go of the handles. The plastic gave a small, dry click as it left my fingers, and then it was gone, tucked under the arm of a man who looked like he handled millions of dollars before breakfast.
"Come on," Christopher said, his hand reaching out to touch my shoulder. His leather glove was soft—so soft it felt like skin, but colder. "The rain's getting into the seats."
