Blackberry Winter: A Novel (9 page)

I spent the morning researching, and quickly realized that locating a lost boy from 1933 is no easy feat. The receptionist on the phone at the police department made that much clear.

“You’re looking for
who
?”

“A little boy,” I said. “He vanished in May of 1933. As far as I know, he was never found.”

“Ma’am,” the woman said, smacking her gum, “what is it that you want me to do? Are you calling to file a report?” I could imagine the exasperated look on her face.

“No, no,” I said. “I’m just hoping that you can check your records for a Daniel or Vera Ray. I’m working on a story, for the newspaper.”

She sighed, clearly unimpressed. “Our records don’t date back
that
far.”

“Oh,” I said, sinking back into my chair.

“Listen,” the woman finally said after a long moment of silence. “If
you want to do a little heavy lifting, come on down to the police headquarters. I can show you to our archives, and you’re welcome to take a look. You have press credentials, right? You’re from a newspaper?”

“Yes,” I said. “The
Seattle Herald
.”

“All right,” she said. “Just don’t make the department look bad in your story. The chief hates it when that happens.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, hanging up the phone and simultaneously reaching for my coat.

“I’m surprised you made it over here,” said a junior police officer. He escorted me down the long corridor that led to the basement archives, home to police records from decades past. “The forecasters are calling for at least another two inches this afternoon.”

I pointed to my boots, still caked in white, and smiled. “I almost didn’t make it.”

The officer grinned. “Guess you have a pretty important story, then?”

I nodded. “Yes. At least, I think I do.”

“It’s so weird, this storm,” he continued. “One of the officers got a call from his mother. She lives here in town, and she says that a storm just like this one hit in May back in the thirties.”

“I know,” I said.

“Oh, you got a relative who remembered it?”

“No,” I said. “But I’m writing about a little boy who went missing the day of that snowstorm.”

“I got three boys of my own,” he said. “Five, three, and one.” He shook his head regretfully. “Can’t imagine losing a child. But what it would do to my wife, that’s what I worry about most. She’d never get over it, I can tell you that.”

I nodded. “No mother should ever lose a child,” I said, staring at the door ahead. “I think it’s why this story is so important to me. As far as I can tell, this little boy was never reunited with his mother. I want to know what happened.”

We walked into a dark room, and the officer turned on the light switch. Fluorescent bulbs flicked and hissed overhead. “What year was he taken?” His voice echoed against the gray concrete walls.

I pulled my notebook from my bag, scanning my notes. “Nineteen thirty-three.”

“Right this way,” he said. “Homicides are down this aisle, and you can find everything else over by the wall.”

Homicides.

I eyed the shelves stacked with boxes, trying not to imagine the grim artifacts they might hold.
Bloodstained clothing. Murder weapons. Bones.
I shuddered. “Thank you,” I said, walking toward a shelf labeled
MISSING PERSONS
.

“I’ll be down the hall if you need anything,” the officer said, turning to the door. But a moment later he looked back at me. “You’re a good person to try to find that kid.”

I shrugged. “I’m just doing my job.”

With the assistance of a nearby ladder, I pulled a few boxes down from the shelf and thumbed through their files until I reached the R section. A thorough look produced nothing, and I climbed down the ladder disheartened.
How could he just vanish without a single record?

I eyed the top shelf. Had I missed something? I ascended the ladder again, scanning the shelf carefully for a box of importance. I shook my head. They were all alphabetical, and there was just one box for the letter R.
What if one was mislabeled?
I opened up the
next box, labeled S. Nothing. Then I tried the box with a Q on it. At the very back, two R records waited.
They must have been misfiled.
I pulled out the first, read it, then set it aside. But my fingers froze when, on the second record, I came across the typewritten name of little Daniel Ray.

How could they be so quick to write him off as a runaway? Children don’t run away at age three. He was only a baby.
No, there had to be another explanation.

I wrote down the address, then riffled through the file, eager to find more information, but after an hour, nothing turned up. I walked back out to the hallway, where the officer walked me upstairs. “Find anything?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, looking out the doors to the snowy street. “An address.” I could only imagine what might wait there.

I arrived back at the office at two, hoping to grab my laptop and make a few phone calls before visiting the former home of Daniel and Vera Ray. Before I could set my bag down, I nearly bumped into Cassandra.

“Oh hi,” she said, standing in the doorway of my cubicle. She wore a silk top, and the lace of her black camisole protruded through an unfastened button.

“Hi,” I said, wondering what she was doing there, but more
important, why she always looked so fresh-faced and perfect. I’d stolen a look at myself in the bathroom mirror earlier and had gasped at the dark shadows under my eyes.

“Ethan and I just got back from lunch at Giancarlo’s, and we brought you back a doggie bag,” she said.

Ethan and I.

I stared at the little brown paper sack dangling from her manicured hand.

She set the bag on my desk, then noticed the vase of tulips from Ethan. “Oh, aren’t those just gorgeous? We passed them at the Market, and I told Ethan he absolutely had to get them for you.”

My heart sank.
So the flowers were her idea.

“Sometimes men just need a little encouragement,” she said, twirling a strand of her long hair around her finger. “Well, I’ll see you tonight, then? At the gala?”

“Right,” I said blankly. “See you tonight.”

“Claire,” she said, turning back to me. “You really should try that asparagus risotto. It was amazing.”

I nodded without turning around, tossing the bag into the wastebasket under my desk as soon as I heard her footsteps receding.

I had two hours before I needed to be dressed for the gala, so I hurried outside and tracked down a cab. I rattled off the address to the driver, wondering what I’d find when I got there. An old apartment building? Perhaps, if I was lucky, there could be an elderly resident with a memory of the storm—of little Daniel, even.

The cab skidded to a stop, and I was too distracted digging through my purse for a ten-dollar bill to notice where we were, until I reached for the door handle and looked up. “I’m sorry,”
I said, confused, staring out the window at Café Lavanto, its green awning dusted with snow. “I must have given you the wrong address. This can’t be right.”

“Forty-three ninety-five Fifth Avenue, right?” he said, looking up at the address placard on the café’s window.

I glanced at my notebook, shaking my head. “Well, that’s what I wrote down, anyway.” I paid the fare and stepped out onto the sidewalk. My breath turned to steam as soon as it hit the icy air.

The café was quiet, with just a single customer in an upholstered chair by the fireplace. I found Dominic at the bar. He wiped the counter with a dishcloth and flung it over his shoulder. “Late afternoon cocoa craving?”

I shook my head. “If I told you, you’d never believe me.”

“Try me.”

I pulled out the file folder in my bag and set it down on the counter, opening it up to a photocopied news clipping from 1933, with Daniel Ray’s haunting face in blurred black and white. “This little boy,” I said. “He used to live here.”

“Here?”

I looked up at the ceiling, imagining the building’s layout overhead. “Well, upstairs, probably. The apartments must have been built early in the last century, possibly even before that.”

“Makes sense,” Dominic said, having a closer look at the news story. “The floors above the loft are empty, just storage, but I think they used to be apartments at one point. Most of the buildings on this street were old tenement houses. Almost all have been converted into office space, or luxury condos.” He looked around the café with admiration. “I could never sell this building.”

I smiled. “You really love this place, don’t you?”

“I do,” he said simply. “It saved me, in a sense. I came to work
here when I thought I’d lost everything, when I didn’t know how to move forward. And now I’m the owner. I feel pretty lucky.”

I smiled, pointing to the door that led to the upper story. “The loft you told me about yesterday,” I said. “Would you mind letting me have a look? I wonder if that was the apartment Daniel and his mother might have shared?”

“Sure,” he said, leading me down the hallway and to the base of a little flight of stairs much too narrow to satisfy current building codes. I nodded, following him up, stairs creaking underfoot, into what might have been a small living room decades ago. It connected to a tiny, primitive kitchen in disrepair. The ivory cupboards looked tired, and cracks zigzagged through the old porcelain sink, yellowed from years of wear with rust spots near the drain.

I noticed another small staircase to the right. I looked at Dominic. “What’s up there?”

“Just a little room,” he said. “An attic, really. We keep boxes of paperwork there. It might have been a bedroom, I suppose.”

“Do you mind if I have a look?”

“Not at all,” he said.

The staircase seemed to bow with each step, and I felt Dominic’s hand on my back, steadying me just before I nearly slipped on the second-to-last step. Since the hospital stay, my balance had been off, and the deficiency made me feel like a little old lady at times.

“Thanks,” I said a little nervously.

I walked into the room and crossed my arms for warmth.

“Sorry,” Dominic said. “I don’t keep this floor heated. Got to save money where we can these days. Besides, the old owner put in baseboards and they’re energy hogs.”

I walked over to an old single-paned window, which looked out
over the alley and a large tree stump below, then turned back to Dominic and took a deep breath. “Do you ever get a
feeling
about a place? A certain vibe?”

He nodded. “To be honest,” he said, “this room has always given me the creeps.”

I studied the walls, with layers of peeling paint and remnants of wallpaper from decades past. “You can almost feel it,” I said.

“Feel what?”

I pulled the news clipping out of the folder again and stared at the little boy on the page. “You can almost feel the sadness. Something bad happened here.”

He nodded. “What do you think
happened
?”

I pointed to the page in my hand. “I think this little boy was abducted here in 1933.”