“I still don’t see why the fuss. Someone must’ve gotten a hold of your papers and made a copy of that chapter.”
“They couldn’t have.”
“Why not?”
“Because when Ferris, Ledoux remaindered
For once, Meg didn’t have a snarky, sharp-tongued answer. “I don’t know, Kip,” was the best she could do. “Did anyone see who delivered it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, maybe you better make sure before you get fitted for a straitjacket and reserve a padded room at Kings County.”
“Okay, Meg.”
“This probably isn’t a good time to ask, but how did things go with-”
“Not now, Donovan. I can’t talk about Amy now.”
I hung up before she could ignore me. I put the pages back into the envelope and walked down the backstairs to the first floor. Isaac’s daughter, Rachel, was in her mid-thirties and like her dad, she had a friendly demeanor. She was cute in a chubby, earth mama kind of way, but raising her kid on her own was taking its toll on her and she was fraying around the edges.
“Mr. Weiler,” Rachel said, pulling back the door, her daughter clutched tightly to her leg. Her daughter stared up at me with skepticism and disdain. Sharp kid. Rachel immediately started finger combing her dyed blond hair. “My goodness, I’m a mess. Sara, say hello to Mr. Weiler.” Sara shook her head no. “Sorry, she gets shy with people.”
“That’s okay.”
“What can I do for-” she cut herself off, noticing the yellow envelope in my hand. “I found it on the porch yesterday, but you were out.”
“Your dad told me. I wanted to thank you.”
“Not a problem. All I did was take it in off the porch.”
“I wanted to ask you, did you happen to see who delivered it?”
“I’m sorry, no. I was in the kitchen and heard something on the front steps, but by the time I got outside … ”
Sara started tugging furiously at her mother’s faded Brooklyn College sweatshirt.
“What is it, honey?”
Sara waved to her mother that she had a secret to tell and Rachel leaned over. When she did, Sara cupped her hands around her mouth and whispered into her mother’s ear.
“Thank you, honey. Is it okay if I tell Mr. Weiler? It might be important to him.”
Sara thought about it for a second and then nodded a reluctant yes.
“Sara says the girl who put the package on the porch had hair like Mommy’s. So I guess that means she was blond.”
“A girl. Was she a little girl like you?” I asked in a quiet but serious voice. I was often terrible with adults, but I was good with kids. Amy used to say that was because I’d never actually grown up. I repeated the question. “Was she a little girl like you?”
Sara clamped her mouth shut and shook her head no. The girl who had delivered the package was not a kid. This was progress of a sort.
“Was she a grownup lady like your mom?”
Same response.
“Was she pretty like your mom?”
Rachel blushed and even Sara’s disdain abated a bit, but she didn’t answer. Instead, she ran into the apartment and came back holding a magazine. She held it out to me. It was a woman’s magazine like
I asked, “The girl who put the package on the porch looked like this?”
Sara nodded yes, finally smiling with pride.
“Sara, if I showed you a picture of someone I think might be the girl, would you recognize her?”
“Uh huh.” She spoke directly to me for the first time.
It took me about fifteen minutes to dig through the boxes and find what I was looking for. It was a copy of the
“Listen, Sara, I really appreciate this. You’re a smart girl. I’m going to show you a picture from a newspaper. If you see the girl in the picture, point to her. But if you don’t see her, that’s okay too. I mean it. You’ve done a great job whether you see her or not.”
I folded the front page in half to hide the headline and held it out to Sara. Without any hesitation, she pointed at the picture.
“That girl,” she said, tapping her finger on the paper.
Indeed, it was the girl, the St. Pauli Girl.
“Thank you, Sara. Thanks, Rachel. I really appreciate the help.”
“Is anything wrong?” Rachel asked.
“Not at all,” I lied. “Just an old friend playing a practical joke on me.”
“Okay, then, is there anything else we can do for you?” There was both hope and disappointment in Rachel’s question.
“Not right now, no. Thanks again.”
My walk back upstairs was a long and shaky one. So I hadn’t been imagining things. Well, at least not everything, though I wasn’t sure that was necessarily a good thing. Renee was here. Maybe Jim, too, and I was being followed. Their presence suggested all kinds of questions that were making my head pound, but the questions worried me a lot less than their potential answers.
Forty
A week had come and gone since the chapter arrived and only I seemed to have taken notice. The world kept spinning and no one, as far as I could discern, was losing sleep over the yellow envelope on my kitchen table. After three days of frying my brain with wild scenarios and conspiracy theories, I too moved on. What choice did I have, really? I’d finally unpacked all my boxes and set up shop like a man who meant to stay put for a little while. I had cable TV and Internet installed. The snowstorm that had paralyzed the area for days was no longer a subject on everyone’s lips. All that remained of the two feet of snow were soot-blackened lumps where great mounds of it had been piled up and compacted by the plows. The rest of the snow had melted away, Jim and Renee receding along with it.
It’s not like I hadn’t searched for them at every turn and around every corner. God, my neck was sore from snapping my head about to look behind me. Sometimes, usually after a few hours of writing, I’d purposely go for long, leisurely runs to make myself an easy target for prying eyes, but it was a wasted effort. I didn’t hear the scrape and rattle of Jim’s truck or catch sight of a mysterious blond lurking in the shadows. No one on the street or in Prospect Park particularly reminded me of anyone else.
I’d nearly convinced myself that Sara had gotten it wrong and that she’d picked Renee in the newspaper
