Rubicon Beach by Steve Erickson

glass down and glanced at me wondering if I was going to buy her a drink. I bought her a drink with the rest of my money. “Aren’t you going to have one?” she said.
    “No.”
    “I don’t like that.”
    “We’ll share this one.”
    “I don’t like that either,” she said, but we did share it when it came, at least for a while; then it became her drink.
    “I’m looking for someone,” she finally said after it had been her drink for a while.
    “Yes?”
    “Yes,” she said. The camera sat in her lap and for the first time she seemed completely unaware of it.
    “Are we getting to the primary purpose now?”
    “Yes,” she said, “we’re getting to the primary purpose now. Do you know where he is?”
    “Who?” I said, surprised.
    “Who I’m looking for.”
    “Who are you looking for?”
    She didn’t believe me in the least. “You don’t know?”
    “No.”
    “He hasn’t made contact with you?” And then she thought a moment and answered her own question, in a mumble, “No, perhaps he wouldn’t have,” and finished the drink.
    “Who is it?” I said.
    “Why don’t you tell me who you’re looking for?”
    “Did I say I was looking for someone?”
    She shrugged. “My mistake.”
    I shook my head. I said, “Actually, I am looking for someone.”
    “I know,” she said. “I saw her.”
    “What?”
    “I said I saw her.”
    I adjusted myself in the chair and put both my hands flat, palms down, on the table. I must have sat there with my mouth open for half a minute. “You saw her?”
    “That night,” Janet Dart or Dash said calmly. “I was by the library and she was in the door, or it was more on the steps I guess. Right there outside the library. I remember the light of the library behind her, so the door must have been open.
    “I don’t think,” I slowly shook my head, “we can be talking about the same—”
    “Oh hell,” she said suddenly in exasperation. “I’m talking about the dark girl, she looked like she was from one of the southern annexes. Maybe South America. Brown skin and black hair and she had a light-brown dress and no shoes. There was something all over her and I thought it was mud, but later of course I realized it was the blood. She had something in her hand that was hard and bloody too. You know we mean the same person.”
    “You got it from the police report,” I said, but I knew there was something wrong with that: the light-brown dress and no shoes, I hadn’t told the police that because I’d seen her in a dress that had no color and, incredibly, I hadn’t noticed the shoes or no shoes. Except now in my mind I saw her on the beach and then I saw her in the back room of the archives and I still wasn’t sure about the color of the dress, but there was no doubt about the shoes. In my mind she was plainly barefooted now. How could I have not noticed that before? So the police couldn’t have known about it unless they knew about her all along; this might, I suddenly thought, be part of a plan to keep me unhinged. “You’re in with the feds on this,” I said to the woman across the table. “It’s part of a plan to keep me unhinged.” She looked at me as if I were already unhinged. “There is no such woman,” I said, but I didn’t believe that either. It didn’t go with the look on Wade’s face that night in the archives. It didn’t go with all the blood.
    “All right,” she just said.
    “What happened when you saw her on the steps of the library?” I said.
    “She went back in.”
    “Back in the library?”
    “I think I frightened her. I think the camera frightened her.”
    “The camera?”
    “When I took her picture.”
    I stood up from the table. “You took her picture?” I said.
    “Perhaps it’s Indian superstition, about cameras. Are lndians superstitious about cameras?”
    I came around the table and stood in front of her chair. “You took her picture?” It must have appeared a little threatening; she looked around the room