My mother had been a Methodist, of all things. Her family buried her as they buried all their people, but Virgil arranged a separate memorial at a Quaker meetinghouse. I don’t know why he chose it, but it was apt. I spent the Methodist funeral squeezed into another of those terribly fine dresses, enduring hours of platitudes about the wonderful place she’d gone now that she had died. At the Quaker service, there were no clichés. It was a long, peaceful silence, broken only occasionally by the words of someone who had known Mary Fall. There was no false comfort, and that suited me. I had lost my mother, and comfort felt wrong.

From then, Virgil went weekly to the Quaker meetinghouse. I don’t know what he did there; I was never invited. He had been drawn into the contemplation of truly large mysteries, cosmic and earthly, and they would consume the rest of his life. He began to ask the question that no one on the NYPD could bear: What was happening to the people of the Westside?

Even as the department refused to admit that the mounting disappearances were anything to be concerned about, Virgil plotted every vanishing, collecting hundreds of pounds of evidence that added up to nothing. Like all those who trouble themselves with big mysteries, as he failed to find answers, he let his mystery grow larger. The vanishings became a question of corruption at the highest levels of government. Every murder, every suicide, every death was part of the same question.

“This city is a cancer,” he bellowed at a particularly unusual press conference in 1910. “And the mayor and his cronies are so many vile, infected cells. The Westside is withering. Corruption has choked the life out of it, and that dead limb will putrefy. You take shelter on the stem. You take shelter in the light. But until the cancer is excised, all our heads are in the noose. Now—are there any questions?”

There were none.

It only takes a few such press conferences to end a career. Virgil was forcibly retired in 1912, and the V. Carr Agency was incorporated a week after his farewell banquet, which he marked with a particularly profane, drunken toast.

When the fence went up, his was the only detective agency remaining on the Westside, and he could have done very well solving the thousand puzzles of our blighted district. Instead, he assaulted the largest mysteries the city had to offer, emptying his bank account and withering his sanity as he barreled toward death.

Mary Fall had been gone nearly twenty years. Hellida and I were perhaps the only people in New York who remembered her name. To me, she was less a person than an idea—beautiful, perfect, funny, and fearless, and stronger than Virgil Carr. I would not let her be tarnished.