"I believe you," Alexander said, and found that he did. "Caleb — listen to me. You can't sleep 'around.' Not at nine years old. Let me get you something to eat, and then we'll call someone whose whole job is children in your situation. Not the police. A person. Her name — " He glanced up; Theo was already on the phone, already three steps into solving it, because that was what Theo was for. "Her name will be somebody kind."
"I don't want a person." The boy's voice cracked. "I want — " His eyes went up, helplessly, to the letters above the canopy, gold on black stone, MERIDIAN, and above them, smaller, the family name that the hotel group's founder had insisted on a century of letterheads: VANE. "She said if anything ever happened, I should find the name. She said the name would know me. She said — about the ring — she said the ring would tell."
The ring would tell.
It was a child's sentence, a dying woman's shorthand passed through nine years of understanding, and it lit nothing in Alexander yet except pity and a strange, rising unease he could not account for. Rings did not tell. Rings were metal. But the boy was looking at him with an expectation so complete that it had the weight of a legal document.
"Tell me your mother's name," Alexander said. "So the person we call can write it down properly. Her full name."
For the first time, the boy hesitated — and Alexander understood, with a small, cold clarity, that the hesitation was not ignorance. It was custody. The name was the last thing the boy owned outright, and he was deciding whether to spend it.
Then he spent it.
"Elena," he said. "Elena Mercer."
The rain kept falling. The quartet kept tuning. The city, indifferent, went on about its evening.
Inside Alexander Vane, everything stopped.
Elena.
There are names that are only names, and there are names that are doors, and behind this one stood a girl of eighteen laughing on a staircase in Greenwich with her shoes in her hand; a girl of twenty-one standing in a library doorway with her suitcase packed and her chin at exactly the angle this boy's chin had been at, not ten minutes ago, on the steps; a name spoken in that house for the last time twelve years ago, in his father's voice, in a sentence that had ended the world they had all been living in.
Mercer. He turned the second word over like a stone. Mercer was not a name he knew. Mercer was a made-up name, a taken name, a married name — a name a woman might carry away with her into a life her family was not permitted to see.
His sister's name had been Elena Vane.
"Mr. Vane?" Theo's voice came from very far away. "Sir — the Hartwell car."
Alexander could not move. He was looking at the boy's face with new eyes, the terrible eyes of recognition groping for itself: the bones of the face, the particular grey of the irises — Vane grey, his own grey, the grey of the portraits in the Greenwich hall — the dark hair that fell the way Elena's had fallen—
"How old was your mother when — " His voice failed him and he began again, roughly. "Caleb. The ring. Let me see the ring."
"No!" The word was a shout. The boy recoiled a full step, both fists at his chest, suddenly all animal, all cornered. "It's mine! She said never let — she said it's the only — you can't — "
The movement did something to the crowd on the steps. Doyle stepped forward on reflex — one step, no more, hands open and harmless, but it was enough. A camera flashed, once, from the early photographer, thoughtless as lightning. And the boy saw the flash and the uniforms and the tall stranger rising from his crouch with an expression on his face that a child who has survived on reading faces could only read as danger.
He ran.
He ran the way deer run, without decision, all at once and utterly — down the wet steps, between the arriving cars, across the avenue in a gap in the traffic that made Theo cry out and a taxi brake in a long scream of wet rubber, and into the crowd on the far sidewalk, and he was gone. Nine years old, in the rain, in the dark, gone like water through fingers.
"Find him!" Alexander was already moving, shouting, absurd in his soaked suit at the edge of the avenue. "Doyle — Theo — find him, he can't have gone far, he's nine, he's — "
But New York at night in the rain is a machine for losing children, and the machine was very good at its work. They searched for an hour — Alexander himself searched, up the avenue and down, through the arcade and the side street and the steaming mouth of the subway, calling a name that strangers turned at and then forgot. His security team searched. Theo, who had called the precinct and three shelters before Alexander had finished his first circuit, searched with his tablet glowing in the wet.
At eight o'clock, Theo stood with him under the canopy of the Meridian Grand, where the opening night was rearranging itself around its missing host, and said the words in the tone of a man delivering a verdict on himself.
"He's gone, sir. For tonight, he's gone."
Alexander looked at his hands. They were empty, and wet, and shaking slightly with cold, or with something else.
"Elena Mercer," he said, to no one, to the rain, to the gold letters above his head. "Theo. Find me everything in this city with that name on it. Everything. Tonight."
Chapter 3: Elena
He did not sleep.