“This is the right place,” I said.
Fearless’s dog growled in anticipation. Fearless pushed him by the neck toward the front walk, and the mutt seemed to understand the command. He padded his way to the curb and stood there daring some phantom intruder to try and go by.
I went around the side of the house, testing windows. On the third try I was successful. Once inside I went straight through the gloom to where the front door should have been. It was there. Fearless snaked in, closing the door behind him. I found a lamp on a table and turned it on.
After making sure that the house was empty we decided to separate to make our search. The whole front of the house was the living room. It was just a couch and two chairs with a stand-up maple bar on top of two mismatched blue throw rugs. The rugs were ugly. One had a diamond pattern, and the other was covered in small white dots.
At either end of the living room was a door. One led to the kitchen, the other to her bedroom. Between these two rooms was the toilet.
Elana’s bedroom was simple enough. A single bed with pink sheets and a dresser with a mirror and chair. The window looked out on a fence cordoning off her three-foot-deep backyard. I went through the drawers of the dresser, the closet, the pockets of her clothes. I checked under the sheets and between the mattresses, on the window ledge and under the bed. There was nothing there. Nothing. She had three dresses in the closet and only one pair of shoes.
Fearless and I met in the bathroom. Two towels on a chrome rack, a half-used bar of white soap, and no floor mat. In the trash can there were a towel and a wad of cotton bandages clotted with a good deal of partially dried blood. I poked at the dressing with a handy toothbrush, but Fearless reached in and pulled out the bloody rags.
“Somebody been wounded pretty good,” he said.
“No shit,” I replied.
I went over the kitchen again because Fearless didn’t have the patience to search for anything smaller than an elephant. There wasn’t much to see there either. A jar of instant coffee, white bread, and an open can of condensed milk.
“I bet she only stays here now and then,” I said. “She probably only keeps the place in case her boyfriend of the week has a change of heart.”
“You think?”
“No clothes to speak of, no food,” I said. “And even a blind man wouldn’t have carpet like that under his feet.”
Fearless laughed at that. He was slender, but he had a fat man’s laugh. For a moment there I realized how much I had missed my friend.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get outta here.” I led the way through the kitchen door back into the living room. We were almost out of the door when I stopped.
“What is it, Paris?”
“I didn’t look under the kitchen sink. Did you?”
“No.”
“I better look.”
“You think she under there?” I couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking.
I FOUND a tin wastebasket beneath the sink drain and dumped the contents out on the kitchen table. There were tiny bits of paper, coated with once-wet coffee grounds, torn from several notes and at least one letter. I pulled up a chair and started sifting through the mess.
I had been working for all of five minutes when Fearless started yawning. “What you doin’, Paris?” he whined.
The letter was impossible to reconstruct in the time I had. It would have probably taken two or three hours, seeing that it was scrawled in small pale blue letters on both sides of at least three pages. To make it even more difficult, the words had blurred from the moisture of the coffee grounds.
The notes were written in black ink on white paper except for one that was written in pencil and another that was written on yellow paper. I concentrated on these two.
Fearless opened the front door and whistled for the dog, who came bounding in like the loyal family pet.
“Hey, boy. Hey, boy,” Fearless chanted from the living room.
I didn’t have to go far to see that the penciled note was a shopping list — scouring powder and Modess napkins
