“Okay, let’s go.”
We pushed out into the snow again. It seemed to be lessening, but the wind was whipping it around so much it was hard to tell. A half-block up Beacon Street Julie took my arm, and she hung on all the way up over the hill and down to Marlborough. Other than, two huge yellow pieces of snow equipment that clunked and waddled through the snow, we were all that moved.
When we got to my apartment, Susan was on the couch by the fire reading a book by Robert Coles. She wore a pair of jeans she’d left there two weeks ago and one of my gray T-shirts with the size, XL, printed in red letters on the front. It hung almost to her knees.
I introduced them and took Julie’s coat and hung it in the hall closet. As I went by the bathroom, I noticed Susan’s lingerie hanging on the shower rod to dry. It made me speculate about what was under the jeans, but I put it from me. I was working. I got a pad of lined yellow paper, legal size, from a drawer in the kitchen next to the phone and a small translucent plastic artist’s triangle and a black-ballpoint pen, and Julie and I sat at the counter in my kitchen for three hours and diagrammed her mother’s house—not only the rooms, but what was in them.
“I haven’t been there in a year,” she said at one point.
“I know, but people don’t usually rearrange the big pieces. The beds and sofas and stuff are usually where they’ve always been.”
We made an overall diagram of the house and then did each room on a separate sheet. I numbered all the rooms and keyed them to the separate sheets.
“Why do you want to know all this? Furniture and everything?”
“It’s good to know what you can. I’m not sure even what I’m up to. I’m just gathering information. There’s so much that I can’t know, and so many things I can’t predict, that I like to get everything I can in order so when the unpredictable stuff comes along I can concentrate on that.”
Susan made a large plate of ham sandwiches while we finished up our maps and we had them with coffee in front of the fire.
“You make a good fire for a broad,” I said to Susan.
“It’s easy,” Susan said, “I rubbed two dry sexists together.”
“This is a wonderful sandwich,” Julie said to Susan.
“Yes. Mr. Macho here gets the ham from someplace out in eastern New York State.”
“Millerton,” I said. “Cured with salt and molasses. Hickory-smoked, no nitrates.”
Julie looked at Susan. “Ah, what about that other matter?”
“The shadow?” I said.
She nodded.
“You can go home and let him spot you, and then I’ll take him off your back.”
“Home?”
“Sure. Once he lost you, if he’s really intent on staying with you, he’ll go and wait outside your home until you show up. What else can he do?”
“I guess nothing. He wouldn’t be there today, I wouldn’t think.”
“Unless he was there yesterday,” Susan said. “The governor’s been on TV. No cars allowed on the highway. No buses are running. No trains. Nothing coming into the city.”
“I don’t want to go home,” Julie said.
“Or you can stay hiding out for a while, but I’d like to know where to get you.”
She shook her head.
“Look, Julie,” I said. “You got choices, but they are not limitless. You are part of whatever happened to Rachel Wallace. I don’t know what part, but I’m not going to let go of you. I don’t have that much else. I need to be able to find you.”
She looked at me and at Susan, who was sipping her coffee from a big brown mug, holding it in both hands with her nose half-buried in the cup and her eyes on the fire. Julie nodded her head three times.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m in an apartment at one sixty-four Tremont. One of the girls at the agency is in Chicago, and she let me stay while she’s away. Fifth floor.”
“I’ll walk you over,” I said.
The day after the big blizzard was beautiful, the way it always is. The sun is shining its ass off, and the snow is still white, and no traffic is out, and people and dogs are walking everywhere and being friendly during shared duress.
Susan and I walked out to Boylston and up toward Mass. Ave. She had bought a funky-looking old raccoon coat with padded shoulders when we’d gone antiquing in New Hampshire in November, and she was wearing it with big furry boots and a woolen hat with a big pom-pom. She looked like a cross between Annette Funicello and Joan Crawford.
We’d been living together for two and a half days, and if I had known where Rachel Wallace was, I would have been having a very nice time. But I didn’t know where Rachel Wallace was, and what was worse, I had a suspicion where she might be, and I couldn’t get there. I had called Quirk and told him what I knew. He couldn’t move against a man of English’s clout without some probable cause, and we agreed I had none. I told him I didn’t know where Julie Wells was staying. He didn’t believe me, but the pressure of the snow emergency was distracting the whole
