*Jazz Age*

The record arrived in a plain brown envelope with no return address, which was how things arrived in 1925 New Orleans — without attribution, without explanation, the way a rumor arrives at a cocktail party: carried by a man who heard it from a woman who saw it with her own eyes, or maybe didn't. Vincent Delacroix turned the envelope over in his hands, feeling the weight of something circular and rigid pressed against the paper, and knew immediately what it was. A disc. Seven inches, maybe. The kind of thing you played on a Victrola with the needle dropped in the right groove and the room darkened to the color of amber and the music — if the music was worth hearing — made you forget that you were sitting in a second-floor apartment above a on a street that smelled of river mud and magnolia and things decaying beneath the perfume.

He tore the envelope with his thumb. The record slid out, wrapped in plain paper, and when he unfolded it he saw that the label was blank — no studio name, no artist, no catalog number. Just a swirl of black lacquer and a center hole that caught the light from the single bare bulb overhead and threw it back in a small, trembling circle on the desk where he worked. Vincent picked it up, held it to the light, and saw that there was writing on the label side — writing so fine, so faint, that he had to hold it at arm's length and squint to read it.

*Maree — this is for you. Play it at the club. Play it when the band is done. Play it when you need to remember what we were before the money and the names and the lies about who we are. — V.*

Maree Thomas. Vincent's name for her had been Maree since the war — she had written it on a napkin at a club on Basin Street, and he had signed it Vincent and she had crossed out his name and written Maree in letters so bold they had gone through the paper, and from that night forward, to everyone in the French Quarter who mattered, she was Maree and he was Vincent Delacroix, former prosecutor, current ghost, a man who had traded the law for the space between the law and the men who operated outside of it.

He carried the record to the Victrola in the corner of his apartment — a good machine, mahogany, with the horn that could fill a room with sound if the needle was dropped with the right pressure. He had bought it the week after he left the DA's office, and he had never played a record on it. The needle had always felt too heavy in his hand, like a decision he wasn't ready to make.

Tonight it felt lighter.

He dropped the needle. The first sound was not music but something else — a voice, faint and distant, as though speaking from the bottom of a well, singing a melody that Vincent did not recognize but felt in his chest the way you feel a train approaching before you hear it, the way you feel a name on the tip of your tongue when someone you haven't seen in years walks through a door.

The voice was a woman's. It was not Elspeth — he had never been engaged to anyone named Elspeth, that was a life that belonged to someone else, in a story he was no longer certain he was living. The voice was Maree's. Or someone who sounded exactly like Maree — not in the way a recording captures a voice, the way a photograph captures a face, but in the way a memory captures a feeling that the memory itself cannot be trusted to be real.

She was singing a blues. Not the kind of blues you hear at the club, the kind that the band plays on a Saturday night when the crowd is drunk enough to believe that sorrow can be danced away. This was a different blues — slower, quieter, the kind that a woman sings to herself in a kitchen at three in the morning when the house is empty and the river is breathing against the levee and she knows, with a certainty that she cannot explain to anyone, that she is singing goodbye to something she cannot name.

Vincent sat down in the chair by the Victrola and closed his eyes. The address written on the sleeve — a street number, a district, a word that meant nothing to him until it meant everything — sat on the desk where he had dropped it, and he knew, with the same certainty that had brought him to this chair at this hour, listening to a record that should not have existed, that the address was the address of a place he had been told to forget and would now spend the rest of his life trying to find.