Mystery

He moved beside her and looked down. At his feet was a square brass plaque on which the raised lettering had been rubbed away to near illegibility, like the letters on an old headstone:

ELYSIAN COURTS

DESIGNED BY THE PHILANTHROPIST MAXWELL REDWING

BUILT BY GLENDENNING UPSHAW

AND MILL WALK CONSTRUCTION CO.

FOR THE GREATER GOOD

OF THE PEOPLE OF THIS ISLAND

1922

“LET EACH MAN HAVE A HOME

TO CALL HIS OWN”

“See that?” Hattie said. “That’s what they said—‘Let each man have a home to call his own.’ Philanthropists, that’s what they called themselves.”

1922: two years before the death of his wife, three years before the murder of Jeanine Thielman and the construction of the hospital in Miami. Elysian Courts had been Mill Walk Construction’s first big project, built with Maxwell Redwing’s money.

Maxwell’s Heaven looked like a small city. Crooked little streets twisted off the court, which was lined with a jumble of bars, liquor stores, and lodging houses, connected overhead by the wooden passages that reminded Tom of freight cars. Through the lanes and mazelike passages, he saw an endlessly proliferating warren of cramped streets, leaning buildings, walls with narrow doors and wooden stiles. Neon signs glowed red and blue, FREDO’S. 2 GIRLS, BOBCAT’S PLACE. Laundry hung on drooping lines strung between windows.

“Look out below!” a woman yelled from above them. She was leaning out of a narrow window in a building across the court. She overturned a black metal bowl, and liquid streamed down, seeming to dissolve into the air before it struck the ground. A barefoot man in torn clothes led an exhausted donkey and a ragged child through one of the passages into the maze.

Hattie took them toward the passage from which the man with the donkey had come. White letters in the brick gave its name as Edgewater Trail. It led beneath one of the suspended wooden freight cars.

Hattie said, “Old Maxwell and your grandfather thought that street names from your part of town would be a good influence on the people in here—over there’s Yorkminster Place, and where we’re going there’s Ely Place and Stonehenge Circle.” Her black eyes flashed at him as she led them into the passage.

“Doesn’t the mail ever get mixed up?” Tom asked.

“There’s no mail here,” Hattie said from in front of him. “No police, either, and no firemen, no doctors, no schools, except for what they teach themselves, no stores but liquor stores, no nothin’ but what you see.”

They had emerged into a wide cobbled lane lined with high blackened wooden walls inset here and there with slanted windows. The same white inset letters, some of which had fallen off or been removed, gave its name as Vic or a Terrace. A crowd of dirty children ran past the front of the lane, splashing in a stream that ran down the middle of the street. Now the odor was almost visible in the air, and Sarah held an edge of the cape over her nose and mouth.

Hattie jumped over the stream and led them up a flight of wooden steps. Another crooked flight, marked Waterloo Lane, led upward toward darkness. Hattie scurried down a murky corridor, and began to move quickly toward the next set of stairs.

“What do they do here?” Tom asked. “How do they live?”

“They sell things to Percy—their own hair, or their own rags. Some get out, like Nancy. These days, most young ones manage to get out, soon as they can. Some of ’em like it here.”

They had come to a wide space where wooden walkways spanned the fronts of the buildings on all sides. Rows of doors stood on the far sides of the walks. A man leaned against the railing of the second walkway, gazing down at them and smoking a pipe.

“You see,” Hattie said, “this here is a world, and we’re in the center of it now. Nobody sees this world, but here it is.” She looked up at the man leaning on the railing. “Is Nancy home, Bill?”

The man pointed with his pipe at a door farther along the walkway.

Hattie led them up the wooden steps to the second walkway. “How is she, Bill?” she asked when they had come near to him.

The man turned his head and looked at each of them from beneath the brim of his soft cap. His face was very dirty, full of hard lines, and in the grey light of the Courts, his cap, face, and pipe all seemed the same muddy color. He took a long time to speak. “Busy.”

“And you, Bill?”

He was staring at Sarah’s hair, and again took a long time to respond. “Good. Helped a man move a piano, two days ago.”

“We’ll go along and see her, then,” Hattie said, and Bill turned back to the railing.

The three of them walked down the creaking boards until they had nearly reached the end of the walkway. Tom looked over the railing, and Sarah asked Hattie, “Is Bill a friend of yours?”

“He’s Nancy’s brother,” Hattie said.