conclusion that Lee and Jon had been in communication made the house ring with silence. She tried leaving the radio on, to defuse that first awful minute of coming home to rooms that had not breathed since she left, but the ruse did not work.
One day in mid-September, unpacking the bags after a desultory trip through the aisles of the supermarket, Kate discovered a box of cat kibbles in a bag between the packages of dried pasta and a jug of red wine. She held it up, a totally unfamiliar box she could have sworn she'd never touched before. The orange cat on the front of it grinned at her.
"My subconscious wants me to get a cat," she said aloud in disgust. She took the kibbles to the back door, poured half of them onto the brick patio for the birds, and left the box next to the door. No damn cat.
The next night, late, she was getting into bed when she heard a strange slapping noise down on the patio. Cautiously, she looked over the upstairs balcony and into the face of an obese and disgusted raccoon, who all but shook the empty box at her and tapped its foot. On her way home from work the following day, she stopped at the local corner store and bought five boxes of bone-shaped dog biscuits. The Vietnamese man who ran the cash register looked at her in surprise.
"You have dog now, Miss?"
"No, it's a payoff to the neighborhood protection racket, so they won't turn over my garbage cans."
The man smiled his polite incomprehension and gingerly held out her change.
In one of her long letters north, she told Lee about the raccoon, whom she called Gideon ("Rocky's friend," she wrote in explanation). She also told Lee about work, the neighbors' building project that filled the street with pickup trucks, Dumpsters, and lumber deliveries, the new owners of the exercise club, a rumor that the restaurant at the base of the hill was about to reopen, a phone call from a client of Lee's who had wanted to tell her that his HIV test was blessedly negative, about Al and Jani and Jules and a few mutual friends. She received a handful of brief notes in return.
She did not tell Lee everything - not how she hated opening the door when she came home, nor how she'd taken to sleeping in the guest room or on the sofa. She did not write Lee about her fruitless search for Dio through the shelters and the streets, the hot lines and church soup kitchens and crack houses, the continual rounds of her informants. She did not write Lee about the brief, bloody spasm of gang killings in late September, set off by a theft from a high school locker, that left three kids dead and four bleeding in the space of a few days. She did not write to Lee about these shootings because they proved to be the shock needed to begin the process of corning out of the drifting malaise she had been subject to since driving Lee north in August.
The youngest of the three students to be killed was a slight thirteen-year-old girl with a plait of long black hair that curved down her thin backbone and across the rucked-up remains of what had been a white blouse. When Kate arrived on the scene and pulled back the blood-soaked flowered bedsheet that someone had covered her with, her heart thudded painfully for two fast beats: Her eyes had seen the body as that of Jules Cameron, lying in a pool of crimson agony on the weed-choked sidewalk.
She went on with her job; she took her statements and began her paperwork for the case, forgetting that moment of shock in the familiar routine. She went home and had her dinner and put out the dog biscuits for the raccoon; she ran a hasty vacuum cleaner over the floor and bathed and went to bed half-drunk, and toward morning she dreamed. It was not a particularly nasty dream, just wistful, and in it she was talking to the kid sister who had been killed by an automobile when Kate was in college many years before. They talked about a book and a baseball game, and when the conversation ended and Kate was beginning to wake, she saw that the person she
One day in mid-September, unpacking the bags after a desultory trip through the aisles of the supermarket, Kate discovered a box of cat kibbles in a bag between the packages of dried pasta and a jug of red wine. She held it up, a totally unfamiliar box she could have sworn she'd never touched before. The orange cat on the front of it grinned at her.
"My subconscious wants me to get a cat," she said aloud in disgust. She took the kibbles to the back door, poured half of them onto the brick patio for the birds, and left the box next to the door. No damn cat.
The next night, late, she was getting into bed when she heard a strange slapping noise down on the patio. Cautiously, she looked over the upstairs balcony and into the face of an obese and disgusted raccoon, who all but shook the empty box at her and tapped its foot. On her way home from work the following day, she stopped at the local corner store and bought five boxes of bone-shaped dog biscuits. The Vietnamese man who ran the cash register looked at her in surprise.
"You have dog now, Miss?"
"No, it's a payoff to the neighborhood protection racket, so they won't turn over my garbage cans."
The man smiled his polite incomprehension and gingerly held out her change.
In one of her long letters north, she told Lee about the raccoon, whom she called Gideon ("Rocky's friend," she wrote in explanation). She also told Lee about work, the neighbors' building project that filled the street with pickup trucks, Dumpsters, and lumber deliveries, the new owners of the exercise club, a rumor that the restaurant at the base of the hill was about to reopen, a phone call from a client of Lee's who had wanted to tell her that his HIV test was blessedly negative, about Al and Jani and Jules and a few mutual friends. She received a handful of brief notes in return.
She did not tell Lee everything - not how she hated opening the door when she came home, nor how she'd taken to sleeping in the guest room or on the sofa. She did not write Lee about her fruitless search for Dio through the shelters and the streets, the hot lines and church soup kitchens and crack houses, the continual rounds of her informants. She did not write Lee about the brief, bloody spasm of gang killings in late September, set off by a theft from a high school locker, that left three kids dead and four bleeding in the space of a few days. She did not write to Lee about these shootings because they proved to be the shock needed to begin the process of corning out of the drifting malaise she had been subject to since driving Lee north in August.
The youngest of the three students to be killed was a slight thirteen-year-old girl with a plait of long black hair that curved down her thin backbone and across the rucked-up remains of what had been a white blouse. When Kate arrived on the scene and pulled back the blood-soaked flowered bedsheet that someone had covered her with, her heart thudded painfully for two fast beats: Her eyes had seen the body as that of Jules Cameron, lying in a pool of crimson agony on the weed-choked sidewalk.
She went on with her job; she took her statements and began her paperwork for the case, forgetting that moment of shock in the familiar routine. She went home and had her dinner and put out the dog biscuits for the raccoon; she ran a hasty vacuum cleaner over the floor and bathed and went to bed half-drunk, and toward morning she dreamed. It was not a particularly nasty dream, just wistful, and in it she was talking to the kid sister who had been killed by an automobile when Kate was in college many years before. They talked about a book and a baseball game, and when the conversation ended and Kate was beginning to wake, she saw that the person she
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