Page 44

"It's not useless. It's just not searchable." He pulled the elastic off the folder with a snap. "You can't run a shape through a records system. There's no field for it. I spent the first day trying and I want you to know that Ernie now thinks I've lost my mind."

"So how…"

"I stopped looking for him." Davon looked up at me. "I looked for your mother."

The air around us got very quiet.

"You said she met him here. In this city, twenty-six years ago." He said it gently, and he kept his hands flat on the folder while he did so. "I stopped chasing a man with no name, and I pulled every document in Cuyahoga County with the name Byrne on it between 1997 and 2000. There were four hundred and six."

I couldn't say anything. My throat had closed up like a fist and I realized my hands were shaking after River took them in his larger ones.

"Leases. Utility hookups. A parking violation on Detroit Avenue that I'd bet money was your grandmother, because whoever it was contested it and won." A ghost of something crossed his face but I was shaking and too slow to catch it. "And then there's this one."

He took out a photocopy and turned it around on the tailgate so it faced me.

It was a lease agreement.

That's all. A one-year residential lease for the upper unit of a two-family house on West 44th, dated March of 1999, on a form so ordinary it made my chest hurt. Rent, two hundred and ninety dollars. Utilities not included. A landlord's signature in blue ballpoint, looping and bored.

And two tenant signatures at the bottom.

The first one said Lyra Byrne in handwriting I had never seen in my entire life, and my hands went cold looking at it, because I have never once seen my mother's handwriting. Nobody kept anything. There were no letters, no lists, no birthday cards in a drawer. Danika burned her daughter out of that house like a disease.

The second signature wasn't a signature.

It was two lines curving away from a third, with a dot underneath.

I stared at it for a long time.

"That's it," Davon said quietly. "That's your mark, isn't it. Same one you described to me over the phone, and I drew it wrong four times on a Walmart receipt before I got it right. I found it on a lease agreement in that basement on West Third."

"He signed a lease." My voice came out strange and flat. "He signed a lease with it."

"He signed forty-one things with it." Davon pulled out the rest of the stack. "Once I had the shape I could go looking. Gas account. Water. A library card. A dentist's intake form from 2001 where somebody wrote patient declines to provide surname in the margin and then just let it go, because it was a dentist visit and who cares about proper names on those, right?" The sarcasm was thick on that last part.

I put my hand over my mouth.

"He lived here, Hazel." He was watching my face very carefully now. "He paid a water bill. He had a library card and he took out three books on Ohio wildflowers and he returned two of them."

"Two," I said.

"Two."

River had gone completely motionless beside me. The rain sitting on the tailgate between us had gone to ice while I wasn't looking.

"Twenty-six years." It came out of me like a cough. "She had every seer in Europe on retainer. She has an archive with a room in it that eats people. She bribed a man in Prague at Christmas, Davon, I remember it, I was twelve and I got a snow globe out of it." My hands had started shaking again and River tightened his hold on them. "And this whole time he was on a lease. In her own city. With a library card."

"Yeah."

"Four hundred and six documents."

"Four hundred and six."

"How long did it take you?"

Davon looked out at the highway.

"Since your phone call," he said.