The Car Beneath the Lamp

The dark blue car was still running when I reached the cemetery gate.

I should have let it go. Mara had already given me one warning, and the shadow at my feet had thinned enough that every new danger felt like a hand closing around its throat. But the car had been waiting outside Auden’s grave while we spoke. It had watched me ask him to stay.

I stepped into the road.

The driver’s door opened at once.

A man got out, tall and broad-shouldered beneath a black wool coat. I could not see his face clearly. The streetlamp behind him turned his features into a blur of pale skin and darkness.

“Who are you?” I called.

He did not answer. He looked past me, toward the cemetery, and then down at my shadow.

The shadow stretched across the road between us.

It had no strength left for warmth. It gathered anyway, flattening itself over my shoes and reaching toward him like a warning written in ink.

The man took one step back.

“You shouldn’t keep doing that,” he said.

His voice was unfamiliar, but not entirely. I had heard it somewhere among the low conversations and murmured condolences after Auden’s funeral. A voice from behind me. A voice that had stopped speaking when I turned.

“Doing what?”

“Calling him.”

The words were almost identical to Mara’s. That frightened me more than the car had.

“What do you know about Auden?”

The man looked at the shadow again. “Enough.”

He got back into the car.

I ran for the passenger side, but the door locked before I reached it. The engine surged. Tires hissed over wet asphalt, and the car swung away from the curb.

I saw the license plate as it passed beneath the lamp: three letters, two numbers, then mud obscuring the rest.

Perrin.

I did not know whether that was what the plate said or only what my mind supplied. Auden’s uncle had always seemed to belong to a different species of family than the rest of them—less tender, less willing to admit that grief could make a person foolish. At the funeral, he had stood beside the chapel doors and watched everyone as if waiting for someone to confess.

The shadow remained on the road after the car disappeared.

For a moment, I thought it had followed him.

Then it dragged itself back to me.

I slept badly. Or tried to. The car’s engine stayed in my dreams, idling outside the flat while Auden sat somewhere inside it, unable to open the door.

By eight the next morning, I was standing at Heskett & Daughters with his scarf wound around my throat.

Heskett looked up from the reception desk. “You came back.”

“I need the names of the people who received Auden’s ribbons.”

Her expression tightened, but she did not ask why. She found the file in a cabinet behind her and opened it beneath the yellow desk lamp.

“Auden’s parents, Mara, his uncle Perrin, and you,” she said. “The three colleagues were Niall Vey, Sella Dorr, and Ivo Cask.”

I wrote the names in the back of an old receipt.

“Did Perrin drive a dark blue car?”

Heskett paused. “A dark blue Volvo. Older model. Why?”

“Was he at the funeral home after the service?”

“He came in twice.” She turned a page. “Once to collect the clothes Auden was buried in. Once to ask whether you had taken the black ribbon meant for you.”

I stared at her. “Why would he ask that?”

“He said he wanted to make sure everyone had received what they were given.”

“That sounds like something he would say.”

“It sounded like something someone says when they don’t want to explain themselves.”

Heskett closed the file. “Tamsin, I know you’re looking for the person who threw the stone. But be careful about assuming the person watching you is the same person.”

“I’m not assuming.”

“No,” she said gently. “You’re hoping the shapes will fit. Grief does that.”

The rebuke should have angered me. Instead, it followed me out into the street.

Perrin lived six blocks from the river in a narrow brick house with a brass number nailed crookedly beside the door. The dark blue Volvo sat beneath an awning, its bonnet beaded with rain.

I stood in front of it until the door opened.

Perrin March had Auden’s mouth and none of his softness. His hair was white at the temples, and he wore a gray cardigan buttoned to the throat.

“You saw me last night,” I said.

“I saw you walk into the road.”

“You were watching the cemetery.”

“Yes.”

The directness unsettled me. I had prepared myself for denial, for outrage, for the cold family politeness Mara had warned me about. Not for agreement.

“Did you throw the stone through my window?”

“No.”

“Did you leave the one at Auden’s grave?”

“No. Mara told me she had done that.” He looked toward the car. “I told her it was a bad idea.”

“She said you wanted him gone.”

“I do.”

The shadow beneath me stirred.

Perrin noticed. His face changed—not with surprise, but recognition.

“You can see him,” I said.

“I can see the absence he makes.”

It was a strange answer. It sounded like something Auden might have said if he had been trying to describe the shadow without frightening me.

“Why have you been following me?”

Perrin looked past my shoulder toward the wet street. “Because I saw someone outside your building the night the window broke.”

My hand closed around Auden’s scarf.

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“You followed me to the cemetery because you don’t know?”

“I followed you because the person I saw was wearing Auden’s coat.”

The cold came quickly, slipping beneath my collar.

“That’s impossible.”

“I thought so too. Then I saw the same coat outside the cemetery last night.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you were already looking at every shadow as if it might be him.” His voice hardened. “And because I wanted to know whether the thing attached to you would react.”

The shadow recoiled from the house.

Perrin saw that too. “It reacted to me.”

“It reacted because you were watching me.”

“No.” He reached into his cardigan and took out his phone. “It reacted before I came near you.”

He showed me a photograph.

The image was grainy and washed blue by night. It showed the alley behind my building. A figure stood beneath my broken window, one hand lifted toward the glass. The coat hung open. The face was turned away.

But the sleeve was clear.

A silver-edged black ribbon had been tied around the wrist.

The shadow moved across my feet, thin as smoke.

I enlarged the image until the pixels broke apart. Beneath the ribbon, at the edge of the hand, was a small pale mark shaped like a crescent.

I knew that mark.

Auden had had it on his right thumb, a white scar from a childhood accident with a kitchen knife. I had kissed it once while he was cooking, and he had complained that I was distracting him.

My breath caught.

The figure in the photograph had the scar.

Perrin’s hand tightened around the phone. “That’s why I followed you. I wanted to know whether you were seeing a ghost or whether someone was using his things to make you believe you were.”

The shadow leaned toward the screen.

It did not warm me. It did not recognize the photograph. It only trembled, as if the shape on the screen had reached into a place where even Auden’s name no longer held.

I looked at the black ribbon around the stranger’s wrist.

“Who had access to his coat?” I asked.

Perrin’s eyes shifted toward the river.

“His colleagues,” he said. “And one of them lied about where he was the night Auden died.”