Who was this woman? What was she to me? We had met just a handful of times. We had shared a bottle and memories of fathers useless and dead. We did not rank as friends, but even with her rifle trained on my chest, I could not really consider her an enemy. She was not Andrea Barbarossa, who had been a legend of the Westside night since before I was born. She was just a person, twisted by grief and greed into doing things that once she might have called evil. She was convinced that one of us would have to die. I, who had already killed that day, burned to find another way.

“Did you hurt her?” I said.

“Did I hurt who?”

“Mary Fall. The woman in the house on Washington Square. Did you hurt her?”

“Dear god, Gilda—are you really worried about your mommy? I thought we understood each other, that we were too mature to be restrained by the . . . the idiocy of the family bond.”

“Did you hurt her?”

“No. I hardly had the time for anything like that, and really, what would be the point? You see me as some sort of bloodthirsty maniac, Gilda, and that wounds me.”

Smoke burned my eyes. The ship lurched again, and from the pilot’s house stumbled the other Juliette, blindfolded and bound, and the Virgil Carr who was not my father, whose face was bloody, and who could hardly walk. I gripped the railing hard enough that I felt I could rip it free with a single hand.

“Set them free,” I said.

“What do you care about their lives, daughter of the bloody Lower West, detective of tiny mysteries?” said Juliette. “Have you come to arrest me? To—oh, what is that dime novel phrase—‘to bring me to justice’? That’s quite a concern of yours, isn’t it? Who killed whom, and why?”

She reached into her pocket and set Galen Copeland’s notebook on the railing of the ship. As we listed farther and farther, it slipped closer to falling into the water.

“You would have been quite interested in this relic of my papa’s,” she said. “It wasn’t shipping coordinates, but a journal written in code—a terrible outpouring of guilt and self-pity for every death the Westside ever suffered, from some nitwit named Alice Pearl right down to the formidable Virgil Carr.”

“He was right to feel guilty.”

“He certainly knew how to tell a story. He scratched out six pages on the night your father died. A moonlight cruise to Spuyten Duyvil—just your father, my papa, and Andrea Barbarossa. Wouldn’t you like to know what happened? Wouldn’t you like to hear whose name Virgil called as his throat was cut and whose hand held the knife?”

“That’s not why I came.”

“I’ll give you the book, I’ll tell you the story, if you just walk away.”