waitress to pack up the pad thai and rice I hadn’t touched and put it in a little white carton for me to take home.
I do remember being in the parking lot where Sally told the kids to go to her car and she walked me to my rental and handed me the brown bag of rice and pad thai.
“What is it?” she asked as we stood in the parking lot.
Some kids came running out yelling and laughing from the 7-Eleven at the end of the small mall. I looked at them and back at Sally.
I had been seeing Sally for a few months. We were friends. Well, maybe we were more than friends, but nothing intimate, not yet. I couldn’t. I hadn’t been able to find a safe place for the memory of my dead wife. I didn’t know if I ever would even with Ann Horowitz’s help.
And Sally had been a widow for more than four years, too busy for men, not interested in becoming involved, not really being pursued. We were friends. She was also a family therapist and at the Children’s Services of Sarasota. Adele had been and officially still was one of her cases.
“Adele,” I said.
I looked over at Michael and Susan quarreling over something in the backseat of her decade-old Honda.
“What happened?” Sally asked calmly.
“You know about her and Lonsberg?” I asked.
“What she told me. What Flo told me,” she said.
“Adele’s missing,” I said. “It looks as if she ran away with a kid named Mickey Merrymen. You know the name?”
“No,” she said. “What does this have to do with Lonsberg?”
“Adele and Mickey may have stolen a roomful of Lonsberg’s unpublished manuscripts.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it gets worse. I’m not sure you want to know the rest.”
“I’ve got to find Adele,” she said. “I need to know whatever there is to know.”
“You don’t have much free time to search for missing girls,” I said. “Not with your caseload.”
“I get a little help from the police when I need it,” she said.
“And from your friends,” I said. “Mickey Merrymen’s grandfather is dead. Murdered, I think. Ames and I found his body about an hour before I came here.”
“Which accounts for your lack of appetite.”
“Which accounts for my lack of appetite,” I agreed. “Can you forget this conversation for a few days while I look for Adele?”
“No,” she said, glancing over at Michael and Susan who were now looking at us impatiently.
“They thought you were coming over for Trivial Pursuit,” Sally said.
“Not tonight. Can you forget?”
“No,” she said. “But I can lie and say we didn’t have this conversation. I lie a lot. It’s part of my job. Sometimes, too often, you have to lie to kids to give them a chance to survive. Call me. If you don’t, I’ll call you.”
She moved forward and kissed my cheek slowly, the side that hadn’t been slapped by Bubbles Dreemer, and then she headed for her car.
I drove back to the DQ parking lot, the smell of Thai food battling with the odor of a decade of indifferent cleaning and those little yellow cardboard things that you hang from your mirror to override whatever has been dropped or invaded the upholstery.
It was definitely a Joan Crawford night. I was always ready for Mildred Pierce, but tonight I’d go for Woman on the Beach. I knew just where the tape was in the pile next to my television set.
The DQ was still open but I didn’t feel like doing any more talking. This had already been the kind of day I had been trying to avoid for the last five years. I told life to leave me alone. It refused to stop knocking at my door, calling me on the phone, and slapping me in the face.
I walked up the concrete steps and moved along the rusting metal railing on one side and the dark offices on the other. When I came to my door, I found an envelope stuck into it with a push pin. The only word on the envelope in penciled block letters was “ FONESCA.”
I dropped the envelope in my brown bag, opened the door, turned on the lights, and moved to my desk where I put down the bag and opened the envelope.
The single white sheet inside bore a simple, short message in the same block letters as my name on the envelope.
STOP LOOKING FOR HER. ONE INNOCENT PERSON IS DEAD AND GONE. LET IT BE AN END. LET THIS BE A WARNING.
It was unsigned. I put the brown paper bag on the ledge of my office window and went into my small office, which was really what passed for home, a single cot, which I made up every day with an old comforter and two pillows. A chest of drawers. A tiny refrigerator. A closet. A fourteen-inch black-and-white television with a VCR and a stack of tapes and a folding wooden television table. It had taken me minutes to move in three years ago. It would take me ten minutes to move out when the time came.
I found Woman on the Beach and did my best not to think, not to think about the murdered man, not to think about Adele, not to think about the pleading face of Marvin Uliaks. I succeeded when the tape came on. The dream world on the tube was mine. Swirling behind it in my mind, deep but hard and always ready to scream, was the image of my wife being hit by that car on Lake Shore Drive. I hadn’t been there but I had imagined, dreamed about what it had looked like, about what she might have had time to think, to feel. Each dream was just a bit different. I wanted one solid one to hang on to, but my imagination refused to cooperate, to tell me the truth or a lie I could believe.
Joan Crawford smiled, but there was a troubled look behind that smile. I knew why. I had seen this picture many times. It never changed. Only my dream changed.
I took off my clothes while I watched and hung them in my almost empty closet. I lay in my underwear. Joan was in for pain, lots of pain, lots of anguish. That was her job in film. She bore it well. Better than those of us who have to live it.
I couldn’t sleep. I listened to the whishing of cars going down 301. There weren’t many of them at this hour and I normally tuned them out, but tonight I listened. I lay there for a while in the dark, then got up and turned on the light.
I reached for one of Lonsberg’s books. Maybe a random passage would put me to sleep. When I married, when I had a wife, I always kept books at the bedside, books I could nip at randomly. The Holy Scriptures weren’t bad. Poetry, if it wasn’t too abstract, was fine. History, popular history, was particularly good. William Manchester was perfect, but I seldom went for fiction. I sat cross-legged in bed in my shorts, scratched my chest, and opened my battered book. I flipped to about the middle of the book and started to read:
Foreceman was angry. Foreceman was mad as hell. Foreceman was ready to tear off arms or heads, to take a bomb to the top of the Barnes Hospital, throw it off, and destroy all of St. Louis except the part and people he cared for. Luckily the Cardinals were out of town. Foreceman knew way down deep where even he couldn’t find it that he wasn’t going to tear off, blow up, or destroy anything but his own sanity. He had lost everything. Ellen, the factory, the house, the car, two fingers off of his right hand, and three toes, thanks to bad luck, diabetes, and some conspiracy between heaven and hell. He was on his own, a fat little man in a fat world.
He sat in his apartment looking out the window at the thin layer of snow on the street below and the snow that was still falling from a sky he couldn’t tell had a beginning or end.
Okay then. Why was he laughing? What was so damn funny? He didn’t own a television set. Not anymore. Not since Ellen and Vickie. He didn’t read the papers. He didn’t listen to the radio or records. His day was worked out. Get up, shave, eat two fried eggs and white bread. Wonder bread or Silvercup. It had no taste but he wanted no taste except the flabber of egg and the heavy muck of Miracle Whip.
Check the mail. Throw it away unless his check came that day. Walk, walk, walk. He was the fat walking man, hands in his pockets, serious look on his face or sudden unexplained smile. People avoided him. Store clerks didn’t meet his eyes. Eggs, hot dogs, cans of sloppy joe, bread, cucumbers, butter pecan ice cream. Walk. They
