The alley was a dead end. On one side was the river wall, waist-high concrete with the black water moving below it. On the other side was the back wall of the bakery, old red brick, and at the bottom of the wall, half hidden behind a rusted dumpster that had not been emptied in a decade, there was a hole.
It was not large. It looked like a place where a basement window or a coal chute had once been, and the bricks around it had crumbled or been knocked out, leaving a ragged opening maybe two feet wide and two and a half feet high. Someone had hung a piece of dark cloth over it from the inside, like a curtain. Through the gaps at the edges of the cloth came a faint, warm, flickering light.
And from inside, very softly, came the sound of his daughter's voice, singing.
"You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray."
Sam stood in the frozen alley with his hand over his mouth.
It was the song he used to sing to her. Every night, from the time she was a baby until she was eight or nine and declared herself too old for it. He had sung it badly, off-key, with ridiculous made-up verses about her stuffed animals and her toes and the cat they used to have, and she had pretended to be annoyed by it and then fallen asleep before the end. He had not sung it since the funeral. He had not been able to.
"You'll never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don't take my sunshine away."
A second voice joined in, very small and high and a little behind, on the last line. A child's voice. Much younger than Nora's.
Sam got down on his knees on the frozen gravel. He put his hand on the curtain over the hole in the wall, and he pulled it aside.
The space behind the wall was a basement, or part of one, a small low room with a concrete floor and stone walls and old wooden shelves along one side that must once have held sacks of flour. It smelled of damp and dust and, faintly, impossibly, of peanut butter. In the far corner, someone had made a nest. There was an old crib mattress on the floor, stained and sagging, and on top of it were blankets, a great many blankets, piled thick: an orange one, a pink one, a ratty brown sleeping bag, and on top of them all, the blue fleece blanket with the moons on it. A battery-powered camping lantern sat on an upturned milk crate, throwing warm yellow light over the walls. Beside it was the good flashlight from his junk drawer, and a stack of picture books from the Harlow Public Library, and an open box of granola bars, and a jar with a red lid.