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It was a picture of Henry, except it couldn’t have been. The weight of the old pocket-watch in her left hand tried to drag itself back down to the cold concrete. The detective’s right hand brushed over the worn creases in the picture, as if with a swipe of her thumb the familiar, tall figure would be replaced with someone else.
“Polaroids fade with time. Judging by the deterioration on this photo, I’d say it was actually taken in the 1970s.”
The picture wasn’t a polaroid. It was older than that. And unlike that other case, she wasn’t looking at a remarkable similarity between two different people. It was the same person. Except it couldn’t be, not if the picture was as old as it looked. The clothing, the hairstyles. Jo had a picture of her grandmother, a dashing 1940s bride in black-and-white. Same hairstyle. Same clothing style.
Crouched in a forgotten place of the subway, Jo suddenly pulled out her phone, flipping through the photo gallery. A colleague had sent it to her—she didn’t know why she had kept it, it was embarrassing for Henry and something about the situation had been bothering him—Henry sheepishly holding goggles and a Speedo. Different hairstyle. Different clothing. Same man. But it couldn’t be.
Jo put the phone and the picture side by side. It couldn’t be, but it was.
She stuffed her phone back in her pocket and looked at the pocket-watch. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 years old, nicely polished and well-kept so it didn’t look anywhere near its actual age. Jo gently pressed the knob on the top, watched the gold case flip cleanly open. Watched the second hand go around the face once, as it had for 300 years. It shouldn’t have, but it did.
People weren’t watches, though. Jo knew. A polish and a wind-up wouldn’t restart a lost heart, no matter how much she wanted it to.
Jo slowly got to her feet. Her knees protested after holding the extended crouch. She looked around the empty tunnel. There had been two gunshots, loud and full and closer to something she would have heard in one of her favorite period dramas. She’d spent enough time in the police gun range to know the difference. Jo searched all around, examining the supports and the far walls, looking for shell casings. Nothing.
Nothing about this situation made any sense. Two things that shouldn’t have been there, but were, and two things that should have been there, but weren’t.
Jo paced for a time and listened to the muffled commotion of the platform above. She thought she’d heard something down here when she walked down the stairs, a gurgle or a gasp. But no one was here. Had the pocket-watch and the picture not found their way into such an implausible location, Jo would have questioned her own perception of the world.
She could picture Henry’s face now: “Oh, goodness! I must have dropped it somewhere. Thank you ever so much for finding it.” Jo wanted to punch the picture of innocence that appeared in her mind. This thought startled her, and she took a deep breath. Yes, she was mad at Henry. He had lied to her, he had tricked and manipulated her in order to get at that damned dagger. But overwhelming that anger was a deep concern. She could count on one hand the number of times a case had agitated Henry to this point of panic and recklessness.
The taxi driver. The shipwreck. Abe’s mother. The dagger. Four things that shouldn’t have been connected, but were.
Except—the taxi driver. An old sword and an antique gun, two things that should not have been, but were. Tied to murder like the dagger.
Except—the shipwreck. Old, not nearly as old as the dagger. Hadn’t Henry been standing in front of a barnacle-encrusted gun when she went to see who he was talking to? And found one person where there should have been a conversation.
Except—Abe’s mother. Who had performed CPR, and why had she killed herself upon being revived? This case was recent and fresh. Henry had been frantic. Henry had made mistakes that Lucas corrected. This case flowed straight into the one with the dagger, and that same behavior had only worsened, until it was far beyond reason.
Jo’s fingers clenched around the pocket-watch, the metal warm now in her hand. Something connected everything, every eccentricity and curious statement. Her thoughts turned again to the taxi driver. To the stalker. Henry had been trying to leave—the passports and the suitcases weren’t what disturbed her. It was the speed with which everything had been packed and sorted. Painfully familiar. Practiced. Something that connected everything, something that made Henry run.
She realized at that moment that as much as she wanted to march up to Henry’s door right now and hold out the watch and the picture, demand an explanation, it wouldn’t work. Confronting him without trying to understand the deeper meaning first would be a mistake. Somehow, she felt that if she did, she would never see him again.
Another steadying breath. She tucked the watch and the picture carefully into a pocket of her jacket and climbed out of the subway, back to the noise and bustle of New York. She got a taxi home, and sat on the top step in front of her door. She remembered the night Henry had appeared as if on cue, as if he knew she needed someone there to stop her from rewinding a video until dawn.
She dialed a number.
“Abe’s Antiques.”
“Hi, Abe—”
“Oh, Henry’s out right now.”
“Actually, I was hoping to talk to you.”
“Me?” Abe asked.
Jo’s grip on the phone tightened. “You know Henry better than anyone.”
“Yes?”
“You know his secrets.” She didn’t mean for the sentence to come out as a whisper, but it did.
There was a long silence on the other end, but she could hear Abe breathing. Finally, the voice that answered was calm and measured, but it had an odd tone as he said, “I suppose. Why do you ask?”
“I…found something,” Jo said. “Or, rather, I didn’t find someone where they should have been. I got something else instead.”
“When was this?” That calm voice again, but the question was sharp.
“A few hours ago.”
More steady breathing. Then, “Jo. I’m going to tell you something, and you’re not going to like it because it’s not the answer you’re seeking. But I need you to listen.”
Jo nodded, then caught herself and said, “All right.”
“You’re going to come over at some point and ask Henry a question, I bet. He’s not going to want to answer it. But it’s his secret, and his alone to share. I’m going to ask three things of you right now. First, come open-minded. Very open-minded. I know he trusts you, it’s just that this secret…well, it takes more than trust to share. Second, no matter what Henry says, do not leave before he finishes explaining, and reserve all judgment until the end. Third, and most importantly, be careful how you react to what he tells you. He’s…fragile, Jo.”
She had never heard Abe sound so serious.
“Thank you for telling me this.”
Jo was under the impression she wasn’t headed for a rabbit-hole, but rather a bottomless pit. She ended the call and rested her chin on the back of her hand, still holding the phone. Her imagination kept spinning, weaving countless explanations. Spies and action movies sprung to mind, but seemed so at odds with all that was Henry that the theories made less sense than the evidence.
One corner of her mind wandered off and stuck Henry in a horse and buggy and cravat, and she smiled because he seemed to fit in so well.
Then she remembered the old picture, with Henry in a different time, and the smile slipped.
Jo’s knowledge of how to use the library had faded from her college days, but she’d taken a couple history classes. Parked in front of a newspaper archive website, the detective chewed the inside of her lip for a moment, fingers over the keyboard.
It felt horribly like an invasion of privacy.
Jo steeled herself and quickly typed,
HENRY – MORGAN
1940+
Marriage Announcements
and hit the search button. The page was blank at first, then it began it fill in with several options, multiple incarnations of Henri, Henry, and Morrigan. Jo limited them to only showing one year at a time, and clicked through the first few without results.
She was beginning to feel silly. Of course Henry wouldn’t have had a marriage announcement in 1944, Jo thought with a roll of her eyes, but clicked through to the next few years all the same.
In the end, it wasn’t the full name and title of Doctor Henry Morgan that made her stop and clap a hand across her mouth to stop herself from screaming in the middle of the library. It wasn’t the digitally restored copy of the picture burning a hole in her pocket. It was the name of his wife.
Abigail.
And she knew Henry wasn’t playing some kind of joke. The pain in his eyes when he talked about Abigail, his aversion to the art museum, it wasn’t fake. Except that Abigail was alive in 1945, and Henry was alive in 2015.
The picture made sense now, except that it didn’t. She didn’t even want to think about the pocket-watch.
Jo printed out the marriage announcement of Henry and Abigail Morgan, and folded it in half the second it emerged from the printer. She stuffed the fresh copy into her bag, and walked back and forth between the high bookshelves to calm herself down. Henry would have an explanation. He always had an explanation. And it would be something like “Oh, those are my grandparents, and that little baby is my father. One in a million resemblance, isn’t it?” And when she asked about the woman, the answer would be “To find someone with my grandmother’s name, a pattern repeating across history…” Rational (in his own way), reasonable (sometimes), analytical (obnoxiously so) Henry.
Then there was Abe.
Come open-minded. Come very open-minded.
She bit back her smile at Henry’s response to presenting him with the watch, almost the same as in her imagination.
But the picture, the picture was different. “I was hoping you could explain it to me.”
The look on his face changed immediately. His smile froze, fixed and unnerving, but failed to hold even that. Jo bit back a wince. Instead, she forced all her sympathy and trust into her eyes, waiting for him without a word beyond what she had said when she held up the image.
Abe came up behind Henry and looked at the photograph with mild surprise and interest. Jo hadn’t told him over the phone exactly what she had found, but he appeared to have been expecting a similar situation.
Henry glanced slowly over his shoulder. His hands trembled around the damning piece of evidence. “Tell her.” The pleading note in Abe’s voice tugged at Jo’s own heart. Please, Henry, she prayed silently. Just trust me. Whatever it is, it’ll be okay.
“It’s a long story.”
“So is Pride and Prejudice.” Jo smiled, a tiny, encouraging curve at the corners of her mouth. Her quip caused a brief, terrified display of teeth to flash across Henry’s face.
A gust of wind blew down the street, between the tall buildings and into every open corner. It caught at Jo’s hair and pushed her further into the shop. Henry backed away. The door swung shut.
“In all honesty, Henry,” Jo added, “I’m ready to listen.” There was a reason she came back to Henry. There was a reason she didn’t leave him alone to his morgue and his secrets. He hadn’t been able to answer her when she asked if he trusted her. And maybe that was because of what Abe had told her, that this secret of his—it went beyond the ordinary boundaries of trust. Her own trust in Henry may have been shaken, but the reminder of why she didn’t want to lose his was fixed in the man’s haunted eyes.
Jo held out her hand to Henry, as a simple handshake or gesture of friendship and comfort. Henry stared at the proffered limb for a moment, and hesitantly stuck out his elbow at her. Jo stared back, and then realized what the gesture meant because it was Henry and his old soul nature again. She folded her arm around his, and the two walked side by side into the back of the shop, where the small den and its chairs waited. Abe followed behind them, making hardly a noise on the floorboards.
When they all finally sat down, nobody spoke for several minutes. Henry was beginning to look sick. Jo glanced at Abe, who glanced at Henry, who glanced at the ceiling.
Finally, he let out a deep breath. Jo could hear the anxiety shuddering through it. She remembered the case with Henry’s stalker, and how he had given in to the explanation in much the same way.
“I suppose,” Henry began, eyes still raised heavenward, “I should ask you what you were thinking when you saw the photograph.”
“I did some research, but it kept leading me in circles. Everything that was supposed to make sense made sense in ways it shouldn’t have.”
“Like the fact that it’s a picture of me and Abigail taken in 1945?”
Jo avoided the last part of the question for now. “My first thought, actually, was…wondering what happened to your family. You looked happy.”
“We were, for a time.” Henry’s voice turned fond rather than stressed, and his eyes wandered to rest on Abe. “My son—the baby in the photograph—we adopted him. A miracle of a child, rescued from Auschwitz. I love him with all my heart.
“But it is here that I shall admit, Jo, that I’ve lied to you. I can claim it was out of necessity, but that doesn’t change the fact that lies were told. You asked once how Abe and I met; we told you a concocted story about my father and his father and an old antiques trade partnership. The truth,” here Henry stretched out his hand to the small table set in the middle of their little circle of chairs, to where he had placed the photo, “is that the child in this picture, the living soul Abigail found amongst so much death and horror, the child is Abraham. Abe. My son.” His voice cracked on the last word, and Jo felt herself ignoring the impossibilities of the picture, ignoring every part of her brain that was telling her this can’t be true.
Instead, she watched Henry. She saw the way he stared at Abe, saw the overwhelming paternal joy in that expression, and it couldn’t be, but it was.
“I see it.”
The small sentence distracted Henry, and he returned his piercing eyes to hers. “Abe grew old. I did not. I cannot.” Another small breath to calm himself. “I thank you for not asking how it is possible, as I do not have an answer for you. I wish I knew myself, but this fact of my life remains a mystery no matter how hard I try to demystify it. Perhaps lightning struck at the right time, perhaps there is a quirk of some kind in my DNA, perhaps, perhaps.”
Oddly enough, Jo could accept this. Henry was a scientist, and from what little she knew about him, completely unreligious and lacking any kind of other spirituality. Someone making up a story would have an explanation, something equally fantastical to match the fantastical made real. Henry’s frustration at the absence of an answer came through in his words. He wanted an answer so badly, but did not supply any number of false ones.
“You’re immortal,” Jo said. She didn’t mean for her voice to be as shaky as it was. What exactly was she afraid of? Saying such a ridiculous sentence out loud? “You can’t be…but you are.”
Henry darted a quick look at Abe and shifted uncomfortably in his seat, uncrossing his legs and leaning forward with all the tension of an Olympic sprinter before the gunshot. Jo reached across the table and placed her hand palm-down beside the picture. “Henry, calm down. Please keep going.”
“I’m afraid the next bit I have to say is the unbelievable part.” His voice was faint, his entire body rigid, his eyes beginning to waver and flicker between various objects in the room. Anywhere but her. “I have to correct another lie, the first I ever told you.”
Henry’s flickering gaze suddenly locked grimly on her. He tilted his head to one side, as if he could see her future reaction from the right perspective. “Both of us fell off that roof,” he said.
Jo’s mind whirled. What was he talking about? Cases mixed around in her mind, art galleries and trash piles and the roof of—oh—
“Koehler and I. On the roof of Grand Central Station, the first case you ever worked with me. He shot me first, but that’s not important as the fall killed me regardless.”
“You were in that subway car,” Jo said, answering his impossible tale with her own. “You died in that subway car. I heard one of the guys say it—no survivors in this car.”
“Check my arrest record, and you’ll find out where my body went.” Henry sounded like he had something wedged in his throat, forcing every word out with a hoarse rasp.
Jo’s mind was still stuck on Henry died, and yet he’s sitting right here telling me about it. He shouldn’t be, but he was.
A horrified thought occurred to her.
They had laughed.
They had taken pictures.
Henry hadn’t been okay.
Jo had seen it in his eyes, the haunted expression that lurked on his face now and then.
She lifted both of her hands to her mouth.
“The river.”
“ ‘Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water’,” Henry quoted. Jo had no idea what that was supposed to mean, but it suited the situation.
She couldn’t believe she was believing any of this. And yet, it was Henry. Everything he said, every additional piece of the revealed secret, it all made sense in a way it shouldn’t.
“Every time I die, my body disappears and I awake in the nearest large body of water—natural, I believe, as I have yet to appear in a swimming pool. My clothes…vanish. I’ve lost many a good scarf that way.”
Jo wanted to laugh, but at the same time felt disturbed by the basis of the humor.
“How does The Empress of Africa fit into all of this?” she asked. She knew it did, somehow. It was one of those four cases where Henry acted stranger than usual.
Henry’s facial expression slipped, as if she’d managed to dig up something even more unbelievable than the picture.
“I died on it,” he said quietly. “For the first time. Ever since that day, I’ve been stuck like this. I never knew what happened to the ship until the case. I thought it sank along with everyone on board. In 1814, the ship’s captain shot me in the chest with his pistol and threw my body overboard. In that year, I was 35, making my actual year of birth 1779.”
Jo leaned back in her chair. “Well,” she said. “I was right.”
Henry’s eyes widened, his breathing stopped. “Pardon?”
“Your hang-up with that ship was indeed deeper than Rick Rasmussen’s murder.” Jo laughed, and found she couldn’t stop. Abe made some distressed hand motions in her direction in an attempt to get her to stop, as Henry became more and more agitated by her behavior. She held her sides, laughing away all of her disbelief and fear, and looked up into Henry’s worried brown eyes.
He let out a nervous little noise of relief.
When she managed to restrain the last hysterical bursts, Jo straightened in her chair and cleared her throat. She motioned with her hand at Henry to continue.
“That’s the basics of it,” he said. “I am over 200 years old yet do not look it, I cannot die permanently and merely reemerge from water. Now you know as much about my condition as I do.”
“That’s…” Jo trailed off. That’s the saddest sentence I’ve ever heard. She mulled over the story, each of the few details, from The Empress to Abe. Jo found that she couldn’t take her eyes off of the older—older-looking man. It took a moment for her brain to catch up and connect the bits and pieces. Then, “Abe’s mother?”
“Abigail.” Henry’s posture changed, hands suddenly white-knuckled around the arms of his chair. Jo felt like she could see a version of herself through a distorted mirror, fingers clutched around a phone, waiting for someone else to call and say it was all a miscommunication.
“I’m so sorry, Henry.”
Henry didn’t seem to hear her, and instead got to his feet and started pacing back and forth. “Abe, where’d you put our family album? It has more pictures—no, pictures are pictures. My laboratory has ways of providing proof, I could just—”
“Henry!” Jo interrupted, to prevent him from completing that sentence. She had a bad feeling she knew where it was headed. Henry halted in his tracks and spun back around, marching on Abe.
Abe got to his feet. “Dad, sit back down before you do anything reckless.” His voice was gentle, but the words firm and clear. He gave Henry a small push towards his chair, and the immortal collapsed into it.
“Henry, I believe you. What part of anything I’ve said makes you think I don’t?” Jo asked.
“You saying that you believe me.”
The answer was automatic, and it twisted into Jo’s heart with its painful implications. Henry may have told her the basic summary of his life, but that was nothing compared to the details every day brought. It was hard enough to get through one normal lifespan unscathed; what sort of hell must it be to face far more of those difficulties than was fair?
“Henry, you are a ridiculous man,” Jo said. “You are eccentric and rash and annoying sometimes and you’ve scared the life out of me on more than one occasion. You’re also so unimaginably sincere and have the deepest, strongest emotions of anyone I’ve ever met.
“I’m a detective. I’m not really supposed to take things on faith. I’m supposed to look for evidence, I’m supposed to do my research and wait for backup. But this, here?” Jo gestured to the room around her. “If you think I’m here as a detective, you’re wrong. I don’t need you to prove yourself any more than you already have. I should, but I don’t. That’s been the way of things today, and who am I to deny what is just because it shouldn’t be. It’s there, it’s not going away. I’m not going away.”
“You’re not going away,” she added as an afterthought. “You’re not ever…oh god.”
“How is he?”
“How are you?” Abe countered. “I was afraid you might pass out.”
“You ever jump off a high dive, then realize halfway down what you’re doing and panic?”
They were in Henry and Abe’s kitchen, leaning against the sink with cups of tea in their hands. Jo’s still quivered. It was one thing to sit there and believe Henry when he said he wasn’t going to get any older, ever, and another for the full understanding of that statement to sink in. If it was her, if things were different, she could have had an entire lifetime with Sean and he would still have died and left her. And a small, irrational part of her mind was angry, because what made Henry so special and Sean so painfully mortal? Was her husband not good enough, not worthy? And she knew it was wrong to even think that, because if anything Henry had it worse, if anything she would take the grief of one lifetime over having it happen again and again and again.
“We all look for meaning in our life because it’s short, because we need to make it count for something before it’s gone,” Abe said, joining her in her thoughts. “But Henry’s the opposite. I have to keep telling him that doesn’t make the search any less important.”
Jo glanced over to the den, where Henry’s chair was occupied by a bowed form, elbows on knees and hands pressed together against his lips, staring at nothing. He looked like he might have been praying, or preventing himself from screaming.
She walked into the other room, and held out a hand to the immortal who looked for all the world like a frightened young man. “Let’s walk. There’s still daylight left.”
She pretended their end destination was a surprise, as if she hadn’t known that’s where Henry’s feet would lead them.
The park by the river was relatively quiet, even with the noisy streets right across from it. The water slid by past the pier and the rocks, empty and deep. Jo knew Henry was still nervous, and that any second now he was going to start explaining the exact temperature and salinity of the water.
Jo had mercy on him and the hanging silence between them before that happened. “Abe said you honestly like it here, despite everything?”
Henry searched the wide expanse. “Mm, yes, so long as I’m not in the river. There used to be a field; whether it was here or on the other side I can’t quite tell you. A friend reminded me of the beauty of the world there, even as he was suffering from the ugliness of it.”
Jo looked out at the late afternoon sunlight, glinting gold off of the ripples and the skyscrapers. All of a sudden she felt overwhelmed by some emotion she couldn’t name, but described anyway in the dying sun and the chill gust of the wind and in the water that dragged so many secrets to its bottom and beside her in the man who watched it all grow and age and fade and leave without him and “It really is all so beautiful, isn’t it?”
It shouldn’t have been, but it was.