Some of the red lines tattooing his nose and cheeks were new. She was surprised at how old he looked. How long—a year ago?

His hair was still parted on the extreme left, carefully combed, oiled and full of bits of dry, flaky scalp he didn’t see when he looked in the mirror. She wondered for a moment what he did see.

He weaved toward the desk chair, bowing to her, and nearly toppling over, collapsing in the seat until he could assume a more professorial posture.

Miranda stared at him from the door, then slowly closed it and walked back to her desk. She was still holding the pistol.

“What the hell do you want?”

He gazed at her mournfully, shaking his head with disapproval. “Ah, Miranda. Your father comes down from th’ hill to see you, to make sure y’r all right, and you disappoint him. Not the first time. I taught you better than that.”

She sank heavily in the leather seat. “You didn’t teach me a goddamn thing. What do you want?”

The head-shaking intensified until he was close to falling over. Then he drew himself up like a Roman senator about to make a speech.

“I taught you English, young lady, the King’s tongue, and the language of Shakespeare. Made sure”—he waggled his finger—“made sure you had ’n education. An’ you choose to be vulgar, like those people you work for.”

His voice took on an exaggerated pitch, while he thrust his hand out and gestured at her. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth—”

“For fuck’s sake, drop the John Barrymore act. You only remember me when you’re drunk and desperate and want money. Is that what you’re here for?”

He dropped his hand slowly into his lap. She noticed his pants were dirty, and covered with ash and chalk dust. His eyes were large and brown. Her eyes.

“You will kindly r’frain from using the language of those whom I would call hoi polloi, if the very usage of Greek did not ennoble them far more than they deserve. Can I not see my own daughter—whom I named after that glorious, bright creat’re in The Tempest, and who has become my own Regan—can I not see her without stepping in her wasted life, her verbal trash?”

He was starting to work himself up, saw the look on Miranda’s face, noticed the gun in her hand, and burbled back down into less angry dramatics. He brushed off his suit, smoothed his hair.

She said, wearily: “You need money. I suppose you saw me in the paper.”

He made an effort to sober up. “I was reading my Hopkins, preparing for a class. I noted that you were involved with finding a missing girl. I was worried.”

Miranda leaned back in the chair. The laugh hurt her lungs.

“Worried? Who the fuck—excuse me, Cotton Mather, who are you trying to put one over? This is me you’re talking to. Your so-called child you haven’t seen or contacted since the Fair opened last year. And precious few times before that. The daughter you never wanted, a sensation you made perfectly clear to me, over and over again, in dactylic hexameter or fourteen-line sonnets, whenever you bothered to climb down from the Ivory Tower.”

She lowered the gun but didn’t let it go, pulling a cigarette out of her purse and lighting it one-handed with the Ronson lighter. Inhaled until the pain went away.

“You never wanted me. You didn’t like me as a child, and don’t like me now, except in some sort of Grand Guignol fashion where you can martyr yourself to your art and your writing and your teaching, and pretend to be King Lear. Oh, and there’s the money. That’s a new twist, I suppose, since my notoriety has caused you both discomfort from the fossilized old bastards at Berkeley … and comfort in the form of, shall we say, liquid assets? So let’s get down to business, Pops. How much do you want to go away?”

His face was blue with shock and repressed anger. Not drunk enough to hear the truth. Not yet.

“How … dare you. You at least have an eloquence you owe me. You could’ve gone to Berkeley or Stanford, married, and been a decent woman. You—and you alone—have chosen to live like this, wasting whatever gifts God gave you, unfit for decent company. Is it any wonder I don’t see you? Tenure doesn’t protect a man forever, not if his daughter’s no better than a who—”

“Watch your mouth, old man. You managed to kill off my mother. I’ve often wondered if I should return the favor for her.”

Miranda was halfway out of her chair, breathing hard, her eyes swimming. Very carefully, she laid down the .22 still in her hand. Calmed herself, checked her breathing. She opened the desk drawer, took out the half-empty bottle of Old Taylor, and handed it to him contemptuously.

“Here’s your mother’s milk, Pops. Suck down some of this, and I’ll get you what you came for.”

His hand shook when he reached for it, his eyes full of loathing and greed. He’d be on the stuff for a week, until he got sick. One of these days he’d die of it.

Miranda walked to the safe, while he quickly unstoppered the bottle and swallowed about four gulps of the bourbon. She fished out a hundred-dollar bill. The annual tax.

She thrust it at him and removed the bottle from his other hand, where it hung limply, his head drooping, his shoulders slouched. She put it back on the desk.

“I thought perhaps—perhaps there had been a reward … My salary has—”

“No explanations necessary, Pops. Go buy your brandy, read your Shakespeare. It’s my filial duty to make sure you’re in the clover. As you’ve explained before. Maybe it’ll help you shuffle off your mortal coil.”

He looked up at her, the eyes brown and large. “Miranda. A good Latin name.”

“So you’ve told me.”

He stood up, unsteady, grasped her arm. She flinched, then relaxed. Walked him to the door.

He stooped, the haze of the bourbon settling on him for a while, his face placid and dreaming.

“I’m teaching modern poetry. Hopkins reminded me of you.”

They were at the doorway. Miranda cocked an eyebrow. “In what way? He’s not vulgar.”

He braced himself on the door frame, and for a moment, his voice was that of the teacher, sonorous, charismatic, Henry Irving in front of the chalkboard, reciting verse like he lived it.

“The poem you liked a long time ago. Remember?”

She shook her head.

“We substituted your name. One Christmas, perhaps the only Christmas … ‘Miranda, are you grieving/Over Goldengroves unleaving?/Leaves, like the things of man, you/With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?/Ah! as the heart grows older/It will come to such sights colder/By and by, nor spare a sigh/Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie …’ ”

Her hand dropped from his arm. He turned to face her, eyes shining.

“It is the blight man was born for. It is Miranda you mourn for.”

He bowed, kissed her hand, and wavered back into the hallway, the hundred dollars in his pocket. Miranda watched him go, the cigarette burning its way toward her fingers, not feeling the tears on her cheeks.

The Old Taylor bottle stood empty and the Raleigh packs lay crumpled on the desk. Miranda smoked the last stick, letting it linger, finally stamping it out in the ashtray, rubbing the burned gray dust around and around the circular indentation.

No Memory Box, no sirree, don’t need one when you’ve got a bottle of bourbon and your old man stops in to grift a hundred bucks.

Christmas, 1918. Only Christmas she remembered with him. Snow in New York, the flurries swirling through the honking traffic and the rumbling trains, Miranda’s eyes big and wondering, staring at the men in the funny pants, the men missing a leg or an arm, back from the Great War, the War to End All Wars.

Marching. Yelling. People always yelling, fighting, never smiling, wrapped against the cold but breathing it out, never warm, never inviting. Old Mrs. Hatchett. Miranda thought the sour old woman would cut her head off if she disobeyed.

Pinafore dirty, shoes scuffed. Poor relation, they whispered, and she didn’t know what it meant, but she knew she didn’t want it to mean her.

His hair shining, voice mellifluous, preparing for the speech on Hopkins, Gerard Manley. He was always correcting Miranda, that peevish tone, that turned-down grimace, when she carefully said “Gerald” instead of Gerard.

Christmas Eve. Rum punch, and he didn’t correct her anymore. No tree to speak of, something small and wretched and more brown than green, something found by Hatchett and brought in with triumph, an ode to parsimony and a testament to thrift.

Miranda loved it anyway. Traced the dried and crackled branches with her fingertip, felt the life still in it. She sat by it on Christmas Eve, the only company in the house she liked, other than the cats in the alley behind the boardinghouse, and those she couldn’t smuggle in.

She saved them bones from the chicken leg for Christmas Day, ate her baked potato sitting under the tree. Her father didn’t notice. Speech over, time to celebrate. Another rum punch or hot toddy. Hatchett dipping into sherry, dropping a curtsy, nodding to sleep.

Under the tree was her space. She fell asleep, not dreaming of sugarplums, not dreaming at all.

She woke up on the floor, not in the attic room they usually confined her to. Opened her eyes to Christmas morning. Ten years had taught her not to hope too much.

There was a torn box, hastily wrapped with brown cardboard peeking through. She recognized it as a pair of used ice skates she’d seen in a pawn-shop window, and for a moment her heart was full, under the bent and brittle tree, as she carefully opened the box while her father lay stretched on the chaise lounge, snoring, a bottle near his hand.

Mrs. Hatchett from the kitchen, sherry still on her breath, making the disapproving noises she always made. No, you can’t go out. No, you can’t skate until your father wakes up. If you’re not quiet …

The threat stilled her, and she waited under the tree, staring at her father, willing him to wake up. Breakfast was cold toast and sausage, and lunch was tepid tomato soup and crackers. Still he slept, and the light was fading, and when they took the train back to San Francisco there wouldn’t be any snow to skate in.

The sighs and plaintive longing bothered Hatchett. Miranda sat and traced the scars on the bark, over and over. The old woman looked out the window at the growing dusk, and grasped at the tree, lifting it up, and taking it to the door. The crackle of the small dry branches sounded like screams.

Christmas, she said, was over.

Hatchett hurled it outside and down the front steps, the wood breaking and snapping like brittle bones. Miranda heard it crying, screaming, and didn’t know she was screaming, too, until Hatchett slapped her.

The noise woke her father, and he rubbed his eyes, and Hatchett apologized, explaining how naughty Miranda had been, what a fuss she’d made out of a dead Christmas tree. The old woman shoved her toward her father, to give him a curtsy and a kiss for the ice skates.

Miranda refused. All she wanted was the tree.

Her father looked at her, looked at Hatchett, looked at the empty bottle. And did what he always did. He quoted poetry.

Miranda, are you grieving …

He laughed, merry mood, funny child, such a strange funny girl, quite entertaining in her eccentricity, if unsteady in her manner. She’d probably grow up to disgrace him, the old woman offered, and he nodded, agreeing that it was very likely, given what her mother had been.

He jumped up, suddenly, full of energy and determination. Come, Miranda, let us skate. There are lights in Central Park.

The skates meant nothing to her without the tree. But she couldn’t explain it, not to him.

Over Goldengroves unleaving …

Hatchett forced the ice skates on her feet. They were too small, meant for an eight-year-old petite blonde, not the tall auburn girl with freckles and large hands. She tried to stand on them and stumbled, her father clapping and laughing.

On the way out the door she looked for it. Some boys had picked it up and added it to a fort two brownstones down. She was glad to see it again. It was dead now, and at peace.

He took her to Central Park, buying another bottle along the way, just a little for New Year’s, we must celebrate, he said to himself, never her.

He shoved her out on the ice, the darkness lifting with the moon and the lights of New York City, and watched her fall, telling her what she needed to do, telling her to start over again. Boys and girls, men and women, danced and glided past her, happy on the evening of Christmas Day, laughter and bells following them.

She learned to skate that evening. And never skated again.

On the way home, after the bottle had been opened for an early New Year, Miranda felt the trunks of the trees she passed, rubbed her hands over their roughness, feeling their souls. And she cried again, thinking of her own, her very own Christmas tree.

Her father laughed, shaking his head.

It is Miranda you mourn for.

The bells were tolling four o’clock. Teatime at Dianne’s, at all the finer establishments of the city.

She raised her head, looked at the empty bottle. Fragile dreams, funhouse glass, shattered, splintered. Over. Opened a desk drawer, searching for a cigarette. Hands shaking. No stick. No luck. No Miranda.

Something inside of her lashed back. Something deep, untouched, sacred. Not her father’s daughter. Not awash in the saline pools of self-pity, so plentiful in the swamps of academia. Not overly fond of her own voice, lecturing, lecturing, lecturing.

Miranda felt her face, tracing her cheekbone carefully. Swelling down. She was cold, on the clammy side. But she had a license in her wallet and a dead friend to avenge and a live girl to find, and oh yeah—Eddie Takahashi. He started it.

Her stomach growled with hunger, but she couldn’t face a crowd just yet, not tonight, not Valentine’s Day. Too many fucking holidays—Rice Bowl Parties, and Chinese New Year and Valentine’s Day—blending into one, and San Francisco, gaudy old biddy that she was, loved to celebrate. New Orleans didn’t have the corner on the musical funeral—hell, every day was somebody’s funeral, and listen to the bells and the cars and the sound of the foghorns. That’s a jazz symphony for you.

She stood up, tossed the bottle in the black metal trash can that usually held cigarette wrappers and ashtray contents. Walked to the window, threw it open to the sounds of chaos below.

It hit her with the force of the wind and the fog, left over from yesterday’s rain. It always rained in San Francisco. Fog was just rain without determination.

Miranda closed her eyes and breathed in, feeling her head clear, that writhing knot of life and stubbornness growing stronger with every breath.

Allen would be there soon, Allen with information, the privileged kind that belonged to police and Pinkertons. She thought about Gonzales, shoved it aside along with the memory of his lips. No time for cops. And that’s what they all were, cops, Gonzales and Phil and Rick, too many goddamn cops.

No. She’d figure it out, find the girl, save Betty’s name. Who gave a fuck if it didn’t belong to anyone else? It was her name, and it was a good name, and Miranda would make sure that’s how the record read. Even if no one was around to read the fucking record.

A loud blaring honk made her jump. Taxi blocked by a White Front. Gotta get home, gotta hurry, flowers will melt and the chocolate will wilt. Hectic, harried, rushing to whoever and whatever they called a lover, throwing themselves into traffic only to be spewed out again, spent, part of the mating ritual, honey, you don’t know what I went through to buy you this red rose …

She shut the window, drifted back to the desk. Flipped on the radio. Took a solid minute for the vacuum tubes to warm up. Miranda tapped her foot, and then remembered the dress.

She pulled the bag out from under the desk, laid the gown out on top. Evening style, low-cut. Small size, petite. The right size for Betty. She wondered if the maid at the Pickwick would recognize it.

And it was still dirty, smelled of sweat. Whatever Herbert or Robert had done with it, they hadn’t cleaned it.

A clarinet squeal from the radio made her turn around, heart pounding. Goddamn Artie Shaw. Shouldn’t he be out somewhere banging Lana Turner, child bride? She turned off the radio, not needing it anymore.

Miranda walked slowly around the desk, looking at the dress from every angle. Someone had sent her the receipt. Someone wanted her to have this. She fingered the thickly embroidered material, felt the heft of the skirt and the bodice.

She began from the bottom. Slowly fingering the cloth, inch by inch, methodical and slow. She reached the waistline, turned it inside out, checking the lining for any rips or tears. A seam had been sewn in a different colored thread—but it was an old repair, nothing new, nothing there.

Narrow waist. Not much room. Started up the bodice. Reached the slightly expanded breast cups. Felt something besides fabric.

She quickly turned the dress inside out from the top, flattening the bodice on the desk with both hands. Traveled back to the lining, slightly thicker for better support. And yes, something was there, something small, in the right breast cup.

Miranda opened the desk drawer, grabbed a pair of scissors, looked again. The lining had been recently stitched in a small location, under where the breast would be positioned.

Cursing the clumsiness of the large blades, she carefully cut the threads. A three-inch line opened and restitched … same color thread, just a little brighter than the others.

She set the scissors down, took a deep breath. Wished she had smaller hands. Inserted two fingers into the gap, made contact with something dry and crinkled. Grasped it with her fingers, pulled it smoothly through the opening.

A small brown envelope, folded tight.

She unfolded it, spread it out on top of the dress.

It was addressed to her.