hadn’t told Shauf yet about the lunch with Baird and needed to tell her. Wasn’t sure why he hadn’t yet.
He checked the refrigerator. Empty, but the manager had told Marquez the Sacramento police had advised him to clear it out. There was a round dining table with a simulated wood top, a tired white sofa, a TV. The rest of the room was green-brown carpet and an aluminum sliding window without a drape. It was hard to picture a river rat like Anna living here. She’d told him the year she was twenty-six she didn’t sleep a single night under a roof. Either was in a tent in a national park or wilderness area or was under the stars, and that was the year her mother had died, the year she said she realized she had no one. Which in some ways was a connection between him and her, a feeling that he’d thought he understood. He’d once checked out of everything and hiked the Pacific Crest Trail alone, a long hike that hadn’t healed him but did give him the time he needed to figure out how to fit in again.
He walked back to the room with the sports equipment. Anna’s identity was in that room. There were trophies that he’d only glanced at on the first pass. Most of them were from playing in a softball league. He went through the contents of the backpackagain, a couple of empty suitcases, knelt on the floor and shined a flashlight down each end of each kayak. The stop at the end of the flotation compartment in the bow was a different color than the one at the stern. Probably no big deal and from a repair, but since he was here to check everything he prodded at the bow compartment. He couldn’t reach it to touch it, but after shining the light on it and then studying the edges and the proportion, comparing it to the stern, he began to wonder if there was a false piece there ahead of the real flotation compartment. Shauf walked in, and he found an oar they could slide in and poke at it. It moved but didn’t pop free.
“Let’s flip the boat over,” he said. “You hold the bow end up, and I’ll reach up there.”
“You’re too big, better let me do it, but you know all that’s going be in it is more gear. This girl has more gear than anyone I’ve ever seen.”
Marquez gripped the bow and felt her weight as she leaned in and reached toward the bow. He heard something give, a scraping, and she came out holding boat booties. But also a waterproof pouch and, inside it, a package of documents they opened up and started going through. Anna’s face on photos. A different name and her face on a Russian passport. Photos taken of her at nineteen or twenty, he thought. Snow on the ground around her, a man next to her, the same guy who’d been in the photo in her wallet. The passport name was Anastasia Illyach.
“So an alias,” Shauf said.
“Or maybe her real name, her father’s name.”
There was a pale blue ink handwritten letter in Cyrillic that he unfolded, then another and more small photos, a few that were black-and-whites, faces that could be relatives though, from theclothes and age of the photos, probably were long dead. He studied the photo of a small boy standing on snow, with Anna’s hand resting on his shoulder. The photo was black-and-white, and they were both looking directly at the camera. He opened the passport while Shauf turned another photo in her hand. Passport stamps indicated Anastasia Illyach left Moscow in September 1994. In December she’d returned. She’d flown to Tokyo twice and Stockholm once. He looked at the rest of the stamps, guessing that she’d traveled to Moscow on an American passport, then traveled from there under this passport.
“When did she and her mom immigrate here?” Shauf asked.
“In 1989, when Congress upped the amount of Russians who could come over.”
Marquez did the arithmetic, calculating years. “Look at this closely,” Shauf said. “What do you see? You see it, right.”
“Sure.”
“I bet she’s four and a half to five months.” She touched
He checked the refrigerator. Empty, but the manager had told Marquez the Sacramento police had advised him to clear it out. There was a round dining table with a simulated wood top, a tired white sofa, a TV. The rest of the room was green-brown carpet and an aluminum sliding window without a drape. It was hard to picture a river rat like Anna living here. She’d told him the year she was twenty-six she didn’t sleep a single night under a roof. Either was in a tent in a national park or wilderness area or was under the stars, and that was the year her mother had died, the year she said she realized she had no one. Which in some ways was a connection between him and her, a feeling that he’d thought he understood. He’d once checked out of everything and hiked the Pacific Crest Trail alone, a long hike that hadn’t healed him but did give him the time he needed to figure out how to fit in again.
He walked back to the room with the sports equipment. Anna’s identity was in that room. There were trophies that he’d only glanced at on the first pass. Most of them were from playing in a softball league. He went through the contents of the backpackagain, a couple of empty suitcases, knelt on the floor and shined a flashlight down each end of each kayak. The stop at the end of the flotation compartment in the bow was a different color than the one at the stern. Probably no big deal and from a repair, but since he was here to check everything he prodded at the bow compartment. He couldn’t reach it to touch it, but after shining the light on it and then studying the edges and the proportion, comparing it to the stern, he began to wonder if there was a false piece there ahead of the real flotation compartment. Shauf walked in, and he found an oar they could slide in and poke at it. It moved but didn’t pop free.
“Let’s flip the boat over,” he said. “You hold the bow end up, and I’ll reach up there.”
“You’re too big, better let me do it, but you know all that’s going be in it is more gear. This girl has more gear than anyone I’ve ever seen.”
Marquez gripped the bow and felt her weight as she leaned in and reached toward the bow. He heard something give, a scraping, and she came out holding boat booties. But also a waterproof pouch and, inside it, a package of documents they opened up and started going through. Anna’s face on photos. A different name and her face on a Russian passport. Photos taken of her at nineteen or twenty, he thought. Snow on the ground around her, a man next to her, the same guy who’d been in the photo in her wallet. The passport name was Anastasia Illyach.
“So an alias,” Shauf said.
“Or maybe her real name, her father’s name.”
There was a pale blue ink handwritten letter in Cyrillic that he unfolded, then another and more small photos, a few that were black-and-whites, faces that could be relatives though, from theclothes and age of the photos, probably were long dead. He studied the photo of a small boy standing on snow, with Anna’s hand resting on his shoulder. The photo was black-and-white, and they were both looking directly at the camera. He opened the passport while Shauf turned another photo in her hand. Passport stamps indicated Anastasia Illyach left Moscow in September 1994. In December she’d returned. She’d flown to Tokyo twice and Stockholm once. He looked at the rest of the stamps, guessing that she’d traveled to Moscow on an American passport, then traveled from there under this passport.
“When did she and her mom immigrate here?” Shauf asked.
“In 1989, when Congress upped the amount of Russians who could come over.”
Marquez did the arithmetic, calculating years. “Look at this closely,” Shauf said. “What do you see? You see it, right.”
“Sure.”
“I bet she’s four and a half to five months.” She touched
Similar Books
