Getting Off

to set off on another bus ride. But she weighed that against her desire to get out of Arizona, and decided she ought to cross a state line as soon as possible. She thought about heading north and west to Vegas, but decided to go east instead. There was a bus for Albuquerque in two hours and change, and that would give her more than enough time for a proper meal, her first food since breakfast.

The bus station in Flagstaff was really just a large gas station and mini-mart where they kept schedules and sold tickets. She used the rest room to freshen up, and wanted to drop her plastic bag full of dirty clothes in the trash can. There wasn’t any risk in that, was there? She was a long ways from Phoenix, and the Phoenix police had already missed one chance at her, choosing instead to grab the crystal freak with all the ink.

But it was the bus station, or as close as Flagstaff came to having a bus station. If they traced her to the bus, mightn’t they check out the trash in the ladies room?

Why take a chance?

So she walked in a direction that struck her as most likely to yield a decent place to eat, and on the way she passed a parking lot, and toward the rear of the lot she spotted a corrugated steel bin the size of a privy, with a sign next to it reading GOODWILL. She was a few yards past it when she realized what it was — a collection box for Goodwill Industries.

She lowered the little door and emptied her plastic bag into the bin, then tossed the bag in after it. And hoisted her suitcase and walked on.

The restaurant she found was Mexican. She had salsa and chips and a combination plate with a taco and two enchiladas and something else she couldn’t identify. The food and service were good, and the only aggravation was the three-piece mariachi band, which insisted on serenading her. They probably knew another song in addition to “Cielito Lindo,” but you couldn’t prove it by her.

She made her bus with time to spare. In Albuquerque she stayed the night in an inexpensive downtown hotel. She took a shower when she got there and another before she went to bed. In the morning she took another shower, then walked around the corner for a bowl of red at an unprepossessing cafe on Gold Street. She wiped the bowl with the last tortilla, finished her coffee, and took a cab to the airport.

She caught a direct flight to O’Hare and let public transportation convey her to the Near North Side, where she’d spent enough time over the years to know her way around. She picked a mostly residential hotel on North Wells and took a shower right away, because she always preferred to sluice away that stale airplane energy once she was off a flight. But this shower felt less urgent than the others she’d taken recently, because somewhere between Albuquerque and Chicago she’d stopped smelling Steve. His reek had outlived him, but only for a little while.

NINE

There was no Graham Weider listed in the Chicago white pages.

That was annoying, but couldn’t be said to amount to a dead end. He was some sort of corporate executive, and she seemed to remember a wedding ring, so he’d be more likely to live in a suburb than within the city limits.

A branch library had all the suburban phone books. No Graham Weider there, either. But there were two G. Weiders, one in Lake Forest, the other in Naperville. “Hello, is Graham there?” And he wasn’t, and neither party knew anything about a Graham Weider. The G in Naperville stood for Gloria, and the one in Lake Forest wasn’t saying.

Hmmm.

Well, all that meant was that his number was unlisted. Or listed in his wife’s name, as there were plenty of Weiders scattered throughout Chicagoland. Should she call them all?

The library had computers available, but you had to sign up, and there was a long list ahead of her. She found an Internet cafe and searched for Graham Weider Illinois and came up empty.

A guy hit on her in the Internet cafe. Her frustration must have been showing, because his approach was, “You know, whatever you’re looking for, I bet I could help you find it.” He had a couple of piercings, along with a rattlesnake flag tattoo with the traditional Don’t Tread On Me updated to Don’t Y’all Fuck With Me. Not an improvement, she thought, but maybe it was supposed to be ironic. He was the sort of young man for whom irony was a sort of default setting.

“We’ll never know,” she said, and his expression suggested that he enjoyed the put-down more than anything an acceptance might have led to. That was almost enough to make her change her mind, but not really. Better to take the tattoo’s advice.

If only she knew something about Graham Weider besides his name.

His employer, for instance. It was a corporation, and he must have mentioned its name, but if it had ever registered on her memory, time had long since pressed the Delete key.

And she couldn’t just call firms at random. Even if she limited herself to Fortune 500 corporations, how many of them had Chicago offices? Four hundred? Four-fifty?

No, that wouldn’t work. But his New York hotel would probably have his business address on file, and that would let her know where he worked.

If only she could remember the hotel.

Well, it was somewhere in New York, specifically somewhere in midtown Manhattan. And it was a first-rate hotel, not some budget bargain spot. But which one?

Why the hell couldn’t she remember? She’d been there, for God’s sake, and not once but twice — once when he took her to his room and fucked her, and another time when he stood her up and she went to the front desk looking for him. And he’d left a note for her, on a piece of hotel stationery, but of course she hadn’t kept it.

Dammit anyway. She could remember standing in the lobby, reading the note. She could even recall the supercilious look on the face of the desk clerk.

Or was that some other snotty clerk, in some other hotel on some other occasion? Or was it all just her imagination trying to fill in the blanks?

Graham Weider, she thought. Graham Weider from Chicago, not Joe Blow from Kokomo. Why was he giving her so much trouble?

She tried the phone again, working her way through the Weiders. More often than not she’d get a machine, and rang off without leaving a message. The Weiders she managed to reach had never heard of a Graham Weider. “How does he spell it?” one of them asked her, and she started in: “G, R, A—” and was interrupted. “No, Weider,” the woman said. “There are different spellings, you know.”

And that sent her off on a whole new tangent, checking all the area phone directories, looking for Wieder and Wheider and Weeder and Weidter and every other permutation she could think of. A couple of them had the initial G, which triggered some fruitless phone calls, but nothing led anywhere useful.

She gave up on the Weiders, however they spelled their names, and thought about giving up on Graham altogether. Then she remembered something she’d read about Thomas Edison, and how he’d invented the lightbulb. It didn’t just form over his head, as in a cartoon; it took hundreds upon hundreds of experiments, in which the inventor and his assistants employed one material after another in an effort to find a workable filament, one that would glow when electric current ran through it without burning up or out in the process.

At one point, someone consoled Edison for his lack of progress. And he replied that he was making wonderful progress, that he had already discovered umpteen hundred substances that would not work.

That was inspiring, all right, but she couldn’t see that it led anywhere. She went out and walked for a while, stopped for a late-afternoon cappuccino at a little coffeehouse that billed itself as “the anti-Starbucks,” and sat there wondering how she’d come upon the Edison anecdote, and whether or not he’d actually ever said it.

And then, remarkably, a lightbulb, complete with tungsten filament, formed above her own head.

There were a great many Weiders, spelled one way or another, living in or near Chicago, and most of them didn’t answer the phone, and the ones who did were no help at all. And how many Fortune 500 companies were