I

The rain in Los Angeles doesn't wash things clean. It just makes the dirt slicker.

I was sitting in my office on Sunset Boulevard, nursing a bottle of rye and staring at the water stains on the ceiling, when she walked in. Red dress. Red lips. Red heels that clicked against the linoleum like a metronome counting down to something I didn't want to hear.

'Mr. Halloran?' she said. Her voice was smoke and honey.

'Depends who's asking,' I said.

She sat down without being invited and crossed her legs. 'My name is Lucia Vargas. But you can call me Lucy.'

'I don't call anybody anything I don't want to.'

She smiled. It was a sad smile, the kind of smile that had been practiced in a mirror a thousand times. 'You used to call me love. In another life.'

I laughed. Not because it was funny. Because if I didn't laugh, I might have done something stupid like actually listen to her.

'Listen, lady. I don't know what game you're playing, but I'm not in the mood.'

She didn't flinch. She just looked at me with those dark eyes and said, 'In 1347, in a village outside Dublin, your ancestor saved my ancestor from a group of witch-finders. He bled for her. He bled a lot.'

The bottle was halfway to my lips. I set it down slowly. 'How do you know about 1347?'

'Because I was there,' she said. 'In a manner of speaking.'

II

She came back the next day. Same red dress. Same smile. Same story.

I told her to get out. She came back anyway.

Day after day. She'd appear in my doorway like she had a key to the building, sit down, and tell me the same story. About a village outside Dublin. About a young man who had bled for a woman he barely knew. About a promise that had been passed down through generations, like an inheritance.

'Why me?' I asked her on the fifth day. I'd stopped telling her to leave. Partly because I was tired. Partly because something about her story had hooked into me and wouldn't let go.

'Because you're the one who's here,' she said.

I was thirty-five years old, and my life was a series of small failures strung together like beads on a broken necklace. I'd been a cop once, before the whiskey made me slow and sloppy. I'd had a wife once, before she realized she was married to a ghost. I'd been a detective once, before I stopped caring about the difference between guilty and innocent.

But this woman—this Lucy person—was talking about a promise that was four hundred years old.

She knew things. That was the problem. She knew things about me that no one should know. Like the fact that I'd buried a dead bird in my grandmother's yard when I was seven. Like the fact that my first kiss had gone wrong because my teeth had knocked against hers and she'd cried. Like the fact that when my wife left, I'd sat in my car in the parking lot of a Denny's and cried for two hours.

'How do you know that?' I said.

'I told you,' she said. 'In another life.'

'Another life doesn't count.'

'Doesn't it?'

III

I started digging. Not because I believed her. Because I needed to know she was lying.

I went to the library. I went to the archives. I found records of the Halloran family going back to the eighteenth century, maybe further. And then I found something in the back of a microfilm reader that made my hands shake.

It was a church record from County Dublin, dated 1347. It listed names of people who had been accused of witchcraft. And next to one of the names—a woman called Siobhan—it said: Delivered to the flames by Eamon Halloran, who claimed she was his friend.

Siobhan. The name hit me like a fist to the chest.

Lucy Siobhan Vargas.

She wasn't here to repay a debt. She was here to collect one.

I found her on the roof of my building. She was standing at the edge, looking out over the city, and the red dress was flapping in the wind like a flag.

'You found it,' she said. Not a question.

'You're not here to help me,' I said. 'You're here to hurt me.'

She turned to face me. The city lights reflected in her eyes, and for a moment she looked almost human. Almost.

'Is revenge hurt?' she said. 'Or is it just balance?'

'You're not a fairy. You're not anything. You're a woman in a red dress who's been lying to me for two weeks.'

She laughed. It was the saddest sound I'd ever heard. 'Two weeks, Jack. It's been a thousand years. Two weeks is nothing.'

IV

I drank the last of the whiskey that night. It was a cheap bottle, the kind you buy at a corner store, and it tasted like burning.

Lucy sat across from me in my office, watching me drink, and she didn't say a word. When the bottle was empty, I looked up at her and said, 'What happens now?'

'Now,' she said, 'I tell you the truth. The truth is that I don't actually know what I am, Jack. I've spent a thousand years looking for you, and maybe I thought that if I found you, I'd figure it out. But I haven't. I'm still just... this.' She gestured at herself—the red dress, the red lips, the face that hadn't aged a day since 1347.

'I don't know if I'm a fairy or a ghost or a crazy woman who's been walking this earth too long. I just know that I found you, and I told you my story, and you believed me for a little while, and then you didn't.'

She stood up and walked to the door.

'Where are you going?' I said.

'Where I always go,' she said. 'Away.'

She disappeared into the Los Angeles night, and I sat in my office and listened to the rain. It didn't wash anything clean. It just made the dirt slicker.

I picked up the phone and called Moretti. 'Frank,' I said. 'I need your help. I think I just let the most important case of my life walk out the door.'

There was a long silence on the other end. Then: 'Jack, you've been drinking again.'

'I think so,' I said. And for the first time in a long time, I meant it.

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