What We Saw at Night

Rob picked me up around nine, after I was finished with what little school work I was going to do. It was June and junior year was a week away from becoming a memory. The gloves I’d bought for traction were already getting worn, but the light, grip-soled shoes were still good.

“Are we both insane?” I asked him, when I got into the front seat of the Jeep.

He smirked.

Without XP, Rob would have been able to run Iron County High. There would have been minions and maids hanging off him. Instead, he was a shadow presence, like the rumor of a spectacular guy. He supposedly had “friends.” We all supposedly had “friends.” I was on the yearbook committee. Once a month they met at my house. Nobody knew what to say to me. Melanoma yet, Allie? Or—did you hear that Kayla and Jeremy broke up? She was out for two weeks … she’s on antidepressants. Random gossip about strangers unknown to me.

They tried, at least the nice ones. When Juliet was still skiing, I’d mostly hung with Nicola Burns. I really liked Nicola, and we still did things sometimes—rarely, but enough that we could say we were “friends,” with quotes. The key: she never pitied me.

Regrettably, in eighth grade, I’d also briefly hung out with Caitlin Murray, who went through this brief period of trying to be a saint. I don’t know what inspired it. She’d been a horrible, spoiled child, a cosmetic surgeon’s daughter, and had matured into a horrible, spoiled teenager. But then her parents got divorced; her mom was briefly single before marrying a guy who had been a singer in some ancient band. Maybe for a while, Caitlin felt the cold wind blowing through the cracks of the universe and briefly identified with the doomed and the lost.

Then she did something to Juliet, and I never spoke to her again.

It was Homecoming Dance of freshman year, although technically we were never really “freshmen” or “sophomores.” Because we had tutors and because we did everything fast to get it over with, we were a year ahead of everyone else. There’s so much happy bullshit and plain old babysitting in school that it would otherwise take us two and a half years to get through all four. At least that’s my understanding.

Anyhow, our parents wanted us to try to have normal friends to the degree we could. We didn’t blame them. They had normal friends in high school.

We tried to do what normal friends do. Go to the dance. Stand by the wall. Watch the Daytimers e-lab-or-ate-ly pretend to not notice you, until one of them bursts into tears because, Oh! She just feels so bad for you, and all her girlfriends have to run to the bathroom to comfort her! Meanwhile, most guys stand there and do boob-feeling pantomimes like some kind of idiot puppets. I have to admit, these guys don’t bother me, because they don’t pity us, either. Then there are the guys who unwittingly pretend to be robots whose batteries have died; they stare into space with no emotion in an effort to convey a mysterious, hidden, deep soul that doesn’t exist. I’m not a violent person, but it would have been bad for me to have an automatic weapon just then.

This particular night also happened to occur during Juliet’s first year away from skiing.

She was miserable and restless, and was packing more attitude than usual. She said that the people on her ski team used to call her “The Great and Terrible.” I believed it. After that last winter, she’d returned home with a tiny tattoo just above her navel ring: the initials G.T. I don’t think that even Rob ever noticed it, although we’d all gone skinny-dipping many times. It was dark blue and hard to see in the dark, especially if you were distracted by the wink of the little piercing ring in the moonlight, which he would have been. But I saw why she’d earned the nickname that night.

The band started to play an old song from the distant past, with a chorus that repeated “more and more of you.” It must have struck a chord in Juliet, because she just got out there. We’d scoured our parents’ discarded jewelry (in lieu of being able to shop during business hours) and Juliet had picked out eight impossibly slender silver rings her mom, Ginny, used to wear as a kid. Juliet called them her “ringlethingles.” That night, she wore one ring on every finger.

Having balance like no one else, insanely agile in five-inch heels, she danced.

Danced.

The whole gym froze. It was as if someone had pressed a giant pause button. But the music played, even though the guys in the band stumbled over a few notes. No one came out to try to dance with her or even beside her. It was art: her hips in a perfect grind of a figure eight, her hands down at her thighs tickling an invisible piano, gradually working their way up to all that hair, her eyes closed in invisible ecstasy.

When the song ended, Juliet walked out of the spotlight and jerked her head at me. I had to snap out of my own trance. Passing Caitlin Murray and some of her coven, I heard a purr: “You know, there are ways you can make your living at night. On a pole.”

Juliet just kept walking. “Daytimers,” she said under her breath.

Rob was outside already. He hadn’t even witnessed the Juliet-Caitlin exchange. But he said something right, something I never could, even though I saw the same sea of parked cars. “Do you notice the irony in our society?” he joked. “Wannabe size-zeros in a crowd of beached whales. America is this obscenely fat society of self-deniers. It’s fried mayonnaise balls or death, and everyone buys into the hypocrisy. It’s sad. These moms need to get out of their cars and dance. Look how unhappy they are!”

Juliet beamed.

That night I knew Juliet had somehow united us in an unspoken belief: we had it over the Daytimers. We were smarter and funnier. And when Juliet whirled in a dizzying constellation over Gitchee Pizza, I knew this to be truer than ever. We could do things they could never do, but at night. Even most of the jocks with heads the size of fire hydrants couldn’t do Parkour. It was hard. Harder than hard. Demanding of body, in flexibility and strength. Demanding of spirit, in creativity and fearlessness.

Most of all, it demanded constant improvisation.

AS WE DROVE to Juliet’s house, I asked Rob, “Do you think she’s already tried this?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised at all, Allie-stair,” he said.

For Rob, it was “Allie-stair;” for Juliet, “Allie-Bear.” I could never figure out why neither of them had nicknames. It made me feel like a stuffed animal they tossed back and forth, like the little penguin on skis Juliet still slept with.

“Well, if she did, I’m glad,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because she’s still alive and that means it’s doable,” I said.

Before we even reached her house, Juliet was dashing out the front door with a sack that could have been Santa’s. Inside was a tripod plus a lot of power food, like bars and dried chili, as if we couldn’t have set everything up and then driven to the Gitchee for a meatball sandwich. We set up a camp in the little private beach park area about a quarter of a mile down the road from Tabor Oaks … and ended up eating a whole lot more than we needed.

“Stupid,” Juliet muttered after we’d finished, standing up and burping. She could make a burp both graceful and adorable. “Now what do we do? My stomach’s about to explode. It’s going to take hours to digest.”

“We have to wait hours anyway,” said Rob. “Why are we out here at ten o’clock? What the hell are we going to do except offer ourselves as a sacrifice to mosquitoes until everybody is nighty-night?”

With the mention of the word nighty-night, the combination of two power bars and bowl of mush hit me like a cloud of pixie dust. “I’m … just so … tired.…”

Juliet laughed. “Go ahead, Allie-Bear. We’ll wake you at the stroke of midnight.”

I WAS CURLED up in the back of the Jeep when Rob roughly shook my shoulder.

Apparently I’d been asleep for two hours. The first thing I noticed when I stumbled out of the door was that the wind had kicked up.

“That weather crap has nothing to do with us,” Juliet said. “Unless it’s pouring.”

I scowled at the waves. Mist tickled my cheeks. “Why didn’t you guys wake me up and tell me this was off?” I asked. “There’s no way we can trace now.”

“Of course we can.” Juliet laughed. “It’s fine. And we just got back. We went to Gitchee for pizza and hung around talking to Gideon. He’s getting married again, by the way. This makes five times, a Northern Minnesota record.”

I ignored her. You would never try anything on a wet surface or if you were sick or out of whack, even a little. David Belle—the son of Parkour’s creator and really the person who pioneered the sport—is no show-off. He says bare feet are the best shoes. And everything he did, he did with grace and safety. But I also knew I could calm those waves easier than I could stop Juliet going up that building.

A tall rock wall already had been built around the construction site, probably meant to shelter any cars there if the lake was feeling frisky. We could have walked around to the front entrance. Instead, Juliet sprinted to the wall, grasped the top, pulling up to a standing position, and dropped onto a vast concrete slab that would eventually become the parking garage. I glanced at Rob. He took off after her. I had no choice but to follow.

Juliet and I wore La Sportive Fireblades because they fit narrower feet. Rob had K-Swiss. That kind of shoe costs over a hundred, easy. Rob’s dad got the shoes for us for practically nothing, because of his job. He’d also bought us rock-climber gloves, with “sticky” pads on the fingertips and palms.

In less than a minute, we were up the side of the skeleton of that new building, though we’d agreed we wouldn’t make this a speed course. We adjusted our headlamps. Faces in the dark are always silvery, but Rob’s was lighter, almost glowing. The waves were slapping down now. I could see whitecaps in the black abyss. When I was really little, and we moved to the north shore, the waves used to keep me awake—until my mother told me that they were saying, “Shush. Shush.”

Years later, long after the time they had put me to sleep, I thought of them as saying, “Now? Now?”

My pulse pounded as we stood silently on one of the construction workers’ platforms and studied the roof next door. It looked further than twelve feet away, the distance Juliet had assured us. (Later, I would find out it was twenty feet.) To me the roof appeared tiny, distant—as though we were going to try to jump from a mountaintop onto a dinner plate. Rob said, randomly, that the building was much nicer than the taller one upon which we were perched. Juliet sniffed. Of course the building was nicer: It was old, with thick walls, and the apartments were huge. Each took up half of one of the floors. Except the top floor. That was all one even huger apartment.…

“So we’re going to land on top of some rich person’s roof like a bunch of giant raccoons,” I said.

“Yeah, but one at a time,” Juliet said. “Remember, you drop and roll. No one will care. It’s two in the morning. And anyhow, the bedrooms are in the front bit, not back here.”

Only later did I wonder: How did she know?

“I’ll go first,” Rob said.

Before either of us could speak, he backed up and hurtled himself over the gap and down. We heard him land, but for a second, both of us were afraid to look. Then we heard a yell: “It’s good! The wind’s behind you and the drop helps.”

The waves were thrashing the shore now. His voice was almost lost.

Juliet turned to me. “I don’t want to leave you alone,” she whispered.

I could barely hear her over my thumping heart. What the hell were we doing?

“I know you think that I don’t give a damn if I live or die,” she added. “And maybe I don’t. But I would never, not ever, willingly hurt you.” She hugged me briefly. “So you go ahead, Bear.”

The moon burst from behind a mound of cloud and I didn’t give myself time to think. It’s just a jump, I said to myself. Then I was in the air, my back arched, my body poised to drop and barrel-roll. As I did, I expelled the air from my lungs.

My eyes bulged as Juliet landed, softly as a gull, several feet past me.

Parkour is not competitive. I would have been jealous otherwise. On the other hand, Juliet had saved me and bested me. I was jealous.

“Down,” she said.

We lined up at the edge. I could feel my heart pounding again. We would need to drop and hang from the edge of the roof and then swing, building up enough momentum to let go with one arm and grab the rail of the balcony below, about five feet to the right. After that, we’d grab the railing with our other hand and “muscle up” onto the balcony before the next drop—to another balcony, about five feet to the left.

The balcony of the penthouse apartment was long, with room to spare for the three of us.

Rob swung down first. But he shook his head in the shadows.

“It’s harder than it looks,” he hissed. “I can give you a hand.” Obviously, Juliet wouldn’t allow that. Her biceps were like little apples under her jersey. She copied his exact moves and scrambled up the railing onto the balcony beside him. When my turn came, I gave myself a boost by taking a few steps and swinging myself two-handed. I’d planned to grab the railing of the balcony with my free hand and pull up, but I ended up hurtling myself over the rail and into my friends’ arms.

At that moment, the sky above the lake split open.

Two crippled fingers of lightning reached down for the black water. Only a few seconds passed before a deafening thunderclap. The air sizzled with the smell of sulfur. I winced. That stink is probably why the ancients believed lightning and thunder were harbingers of all things demonic. Why not? My idea of Hell could easily include being exposed on a balcony as a Lake Superior tsunami kicks in.

We crouched together.

“Let’s see if there’s a fire escape,” Rob said. “And get the hell out of here.”

We looked back toward the town. Another blast of lightning blotted out what few lights there were above Oxford Street. To my shock, I realized I was high enough up to spot my house on Trinity. If the thunder woke my mother, she would be up roaming and accelerating into hysterics after realizing I wasn’t there.

I leaned over the balcony, looking for a way down that didn’t involve becoming a human lightning rod, when the lights in the penthouse came on.

Rob pulled me back. Juliet scrambled into the shadows beside us.

All I could see was white. One massive room: white walls, white carpeting, white woodwork. Except … right in the middle of the floor, next to the sliding doors, a young woman with dark hair—probably not much older than we were—was on her back. She wore only a bra. A man with his back turned to us was leaning over her. He seemed to be kissing her, then slapping her, then trying to pull her up.

Rob swore, softly, under his breath.

We stared for an instance in horrified silence as the man lowered his face to hers. He had short-cropped dark hair, darker than Rob’s, with a wide white streak of platinum blond down the back in what appeared to be a dyed slash of a lightning bolt.

Rob pointed to the fire escape: a sleek ladder that descended straight from the far side of the balcony. The glass doors were floor to ceiling but he pointed and guided me toward it. We dropped to the balcony floor and crawled past a potted pine to get to the edge of it. I was already ten steps down when I heard Rob say, “Juliet! Juliet! Come on.”

The rain began to fall, hard, cold drops on my hot face.

Rob said again, “Juliet! He’ll see you!”

Juliet didn’t seem to care who saw her. She descended languidly, almost like a ballet dancer, and leaped the last few feet to the ground. The rain began pounding. The inside of my eyeballs were wet.

After a fevered sprint, Rob and I threw ourselves into the car. Juliet ran around in the dark, picking up her tripod. When she jumped into the back, I turned to her. She was messing with the camera, dripping wet though not breathing as hard as either Rob or me.

“I think this stuff is okay,” she gasped. “I was scared it blew into the lake!”

I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. “Was that girl … what was wrong with her?”

Juliet lifted her shoulders. “She looked like she was passed out. And he was trying to wake her up.”

Rob didn’t even seem to be listening to our conversation. “We triggered some alarm when we landed on the balcony—which is why the lights came on … right?”

I said, “That girl looked dead.”

“Dead drunk maybe,” Juliet dismissed, drying her camera with her shirt.

“He was doing, like CPR, right?” I asked, mostly to myself.

“Good date gone bad,” Juliet replied. Her voice was flat. “It scared the hell out of me, though, when that light went on.”

The lightning crashed again. We heard a hollow boom—a tree or a light pole down. It happened all the time.

Then Rob said, “Who has a date in a room with no furniture?”

We all turned to the apartment. It was dark.





I woke up screaming, my sheets drenched with sweat.

At least Angie and Mom weren’t there.

You try to breathe through things like that. Out with the bad air. In with the good air. Out with the bad mind pictures, in with the good mind pictures. That girl’s face was slack and rubbery. She was a young person with an old person’s skin. A dead person’s skin. I felt my throat constricting.

My little sister has allergies. So we probably occupied the only house in Iron Harbor except the hospital and the assisted-living facility that had air conditioning. I rolled out of bed in my T-shirt and underpants and tugged at the window—panicking when it would not open, forgetting I had to slide the latch—then finally laid my face against the blackout screen and sucked in as much piney air as my lungs could hold. In the distance, I heard birds chirping. Back in bed, I began to text Rob.

Then I realized it was noon on a Saturday. Rob and Juliet were asleep.

As I should be. My mind raced, wondering why I didn’t have alternative, non-lethal pursuits and alternative non-criminal friends. Maybe I could stay away from Juliet for a little while. There was still Nicola. True, school was out for the summer, but she’d be on yearbook committee with me next fall, right? We could plan ahead. We could even do some non-yearbook stuff. We’d gone to the movies precisely six times in my life. Once I’d stayed over at her house, too. Plus her dad collected all these old pinball machines, all with horror themes, that were definitely fun. He also had the first edition of every single Stephen King book, signed. That was sort of cool.

Come to think of it, I would probably have been better friends with Nicola if Juliet hadn’t taken up so much real estate in my friendship pasture. But how could I call Nicola out of the blue? I hadn’t seen her for months. (Hi, Nicola! I just saw a girl who was possibly dying and I’m totally creeped out, so I don’t want to hang with my best friend.…) My thoughts wandered back to the penthouse.

The dead-looking girl probably was dead drunk.

Why wasn’t there any furniture in the apartment?

The guy was probably a construction worker. Maybe he’d snuck in there with his girlfriend and they’d gotten wasted.

Why was he trying to revive her?

They were just two innocent people looking for some privacy.

Why was her face bone gray like that?

Not for the first, fifteenth, or fortieth time, my friendship with Juliet disturbed my sleep—though I was sure, not hers.

I had knockout pills I could take. I only needed them once a month, when I had cramps. Some XP kids had to take them routinely because they could never get used to the reversed biorhythmic schedule.

I rummaged in the drawer and took two of them. Then I prepared to do my whole sleep ritual, which I had neglected the night before. I made my Goodnight tea with honey. I put fresh sheets on the bed. I jumped in and out of a dangerously hot shower, smeared myself with my one vanity—expensive cream that smelled of the Caribbean Islands I would never see—and pulled and pegged my blackout shades so the room was utterly lightless. Then I got out my big sleep mask, the one that was ten inches long and lay across my face like a soft log filled with flaxseed and lavender … and after all that, I still could not banish the lurid image: the guy with the platinum streak down the back of his head, jerking that girl’s limp body up off the white carpet.

But that’s what you did to revive someone. It wasn’t gentle.

Right?

And if he really was a guy who was working on that new apartment and in there with his wasted girlfriend, the last thing he’d want is for her to barf all over a pristine sea of total whiteness. Of course she wasn’t dead. If she was dead, there’d be blood. And gunk. Bodily fluids. I’d spent half my life in a hospital; I knew. That place was spotless. Still … living-but-passed-out people shouldn’t be that pale.

On the other hand, what was I basing this on? The number of passed-out-drunk people I’d seen in my life numbered zero.

I lay back on the bed. The best way to put yourself to sleep is to listen for a sound that’s almost outside your ability to hear. I closed my eyes and searched for the loon and finally found it, a sound as familiar to me as my own music after all these years, yet still, even during the day, lonesome and eerie. My legs began to tingle. Please, let the pills kick in, I thought. Please.

I woke up at eleven that night and quickly grabbed my phone.

Rob had texted: Sleeping in.

Juliet had texted nothing.

THREE DAYS PASSED. Then three more. I didn’t hear from Juliet once. She didn’t answer any texts or calls. Here we go again, I thought. Another vanishing act. Rob became oddly withdrawn too, claiming he wasn’t feeling well. I couldn’t argue with sickness. The nights seemed to grow longer, even though summer shortened them. This was supposed to be our time together.

I devoted myself to not thinking about Rob or Juliet. Not thinking about best friends is almost a discipline in itself. I tried to start a journal. Unfortunately, I’m no writer, and the entries kept coming back to Rob in ways that were at best embarrassing and at worst excruciating. I wondered if he was as shaken by what we’d seen as I was.

Of course he was. That’s why he was ignoring me.

On day seven, I decided to capitalize on our shaken-ness.

Spending as much time in a hospital as we do, you learn a few things—namely that certain ER admittances must be recorded by the police, and while names are never given, you can deduce an identity from certain details: age, ethnicity, and reason for showing up in the first place. Juliet taught me how to access the police records the night we pushed Henry LeBecque into that open grave. (Male Caucasian, 17 yrs old, intoxicated, admitted to Tabor Clinic ER for panic attack, 12:17 A.M., November 1. Released 3:45 A.M. after exam.) I scoured the records for any sign of the woman with the gray skin. But there were no matches. In fact, not a single woman had been admitted to the ER the night or morning of our little stunt. So if that guy with the blond lightning bolt had been trying to revive her, he must have succeeded.

On day eight, I found myself crying.

Why wouldn’t Juliet and Rob return my calls or texts? What had I done? Was I going to spend the entire summer—or worse, the rest of my life—without the two people who knew and understood me better than anyone in the world? That night, I even tried to sleep, which was a very weird feeling, trying to fall asleep without all the daytime sounds of Iron Harbor to provide my bedtime lullaby. I clung to the belief that Juliet and Rob were going through some variation of what I was going through, that both of them had to be missing me, but both of them were scared to talk about what we’d seen.

By that morning, crying felt like a job.

The word clicked in my brain.

It was summer. School was out. I should do what normal kids my age did. I decided to get a real job.

THE FUNNY THING: my own mother didn’t even need a job. We could have paid off our house and bought new clothes every season and gone to Italy in August on what my father sent. But for the very first time, I understood why my mother needed to work. She needed a goal, a distraction, a purpose.

Still, what could I do?

Literally, I had no talents. I could type people’s papers. I couldn’t work at Gitchee; Gideon lit the place like a hockey rink. I could be a server in a dark restaurant, like that one in California where the waiters were blind. None were dark enough here. I could clean houses at night. I was good at harassing my little sister.… A-ha.

I decided I was a babysitter. I made advertisements.

REST EASY!

EXPERIENCED BIG SISTER

CAN BABYSIT AND CLEAN 4 U NIGHTS.

AMAZING REFERENCES

Okay. “Amazing” was pushing it. Not counting my mom, I had two: Gina and Dr. Andrew. I could add Juliet’s dad. He was a cop, although he’d never seen me do anything that required talent except paint my nails while eating popcorn.

I pressed send. Then I waited.

I GOT TWO calls that day: two more than I expected. There isn’t a lot of demand for sitters who only work the graveyard shift. One came from a single dad who was clearly drunk when he left the message. I didn’t call back and neither did he. The other came from a young woman, Tessa—a nurse at Divine Savior, no less, who worked midnights—with an infant named Tavish. (I had to ask twice if I was pronouncing it right. TA-vish.) She’d just moved to Iron Harbor into a building on Lakeshore Road. Although it couldn’t be the same building, as in that building (could it?) I decided to go and talk to her anyhow. We made a date for the following Tuesday.

And almost as soon as I hung up—at least that’s how it felt—Juliet called.

She sounded as chirpy as though we’d just spent the previous night on an online body-butter-buying binge.

“Rob and I went to Duluth to scout,” she said all in one breath. “We found some good stuff for us.”

I blinked. My throat caught. “May you be happy always,” I replied.

“It’s a long drive though,” I heard Rob chime in from the background. “You take an hour or more to get there, you don’t have much time.”

“But once you find spaces for traces, you have places to go to,” Juliet added. “You don’t have to search. You just sing.”

“And you have the soul of the poet!” I managed. “What about me?”

“We didn’t think you’d be into it,” Juliet said.

Right, but you were into each other.

“So do you want to be into it?” Juliet said.

“Well, let’s see,” I said. “I’m busy. Cheer practice is Monday and Wednesday.…” Then I exploded: “It’s been ten days since we did that building but who’s counting and neither one of you bothered to do so much as text me more than five times, and that was only Rob! Why should I want to do anything with you?”

“We love you,” Juliet said.

I hung up.

THAT NIGHT, I found myself in the Jeep with Rob and Juliet. We weren’t going to do Parkour. We were going swimming.

Normally we’d borrow a boat from the snazzy side of Ghost Lake. But no one owned a boat that fit our needs: conveniently located and not very well tied up. We ended up in the bass boat owned by the gym teacher, Mr. Callahan—one of the few boats we used with the owner’s permission.

Once we were out in deep water, Rob and I jumped in. We gasped as we splashed. It’s never warm. It’s so cold in fall that you could die, like the people on the Titanic. In summer, it’s cold enough to be a shock. The water always smells of pocket change, like old nickels and dimes, because of all the minerals in it. Minerals are why there are beaches on Lake Superior that have inches of black sand on them, and agates and garnets and gold that old people are always finding because this was all once a volcano. There was also a lot of glacier action and earthquakes and such that, for me, it was God’s way of saying, This is not land meant for habitation, people! Move to the Twin Cities … but what do I know?

“I want to try Tabor Oaks again,” said Juliet, rocking back in forth on the boat’s little bench. Rob and I treaded water, teeth chattering, avoiding each other’s eyes. “They’ve put floors down now on the other building, to climb up.…”

“Forget to call me that night,” I said. “Like you have the last two weeks.”

“Fine,” Juliet said. “We’ll do it. It’s a good course.”

“Who’s we?” I spat, enraged. “Am I not part of ‘we’?”

“It’s good in a semi-sick way,” Rob said, ignoring me. “The course.”

“Somebody lives in that place now,” Juliet said. “It was probably just, like, the mover, or the new owner’s brother or something and his girlfriend.”

“How do you know?” I demanded.

She shrugged.

Again, later, long after, I would close my eyes in the dark, and see Juliet’s legs, the spokes of a starry-silvery-blue wheel, glowing in the dark that first night above Gitchee Pizza, and wonder, how-did-she-know-how-did-she-know?

“Maybe it was some crazy drifter who dragged some random girl into an empty apartment on a stormy night,” Rob said.

“How would he get in there?” Juliet answered, seriously.

“I was kidding,” Rob muttered.

Juliet shook her head. “Rape is a crime of opportunity.”

“It isn’t usually, in fact,” Rob said. “You should know better, Juliet. Your dad being a cop and all. Some rapists plan very carefully. The smart ones do. They stalk people for weeks and months. If they’re really crazy, they work up this whole thing where the girl is coming out of her house—”

“You read too many books, boy detective,” Juliet interrupted.

“It’s a fact,” Rob said. Their eyes met. They both smiled. “I deal just in facts, ma’am.”

He ducked under the surface. Part of me hoped he would stay there.

THE NEXT NIGHT, I had my job interview. I needed my mom’s car. It was eight o’clock, and there was still plenty of light left in the sky, so I wore a ball cap with my ponytail poking through the gap, and a long-sleeved shirt.

The speed limit in Iron Harbor is 30. My mother’s car is a six-seat Toyota mini-van. Very used. But very sturdy.

“Be careful,” Mom warned. “No speeding.”

“Not even any drag racing,” I said.

“Be back by—”

“Morning. Yes, Mother. Do you know how many other mothers are saying, now, ‘Miss, I don’t want you out one minute after sunrise!’?”

“Don’t change the subject Do you think you should put gloves on? I can still see everything. It’s light out.”

“I already look like some old lady in an English mystery novel, Mom.”

She started laughing. “You do. You look like that woman on an old TV show who was always solving mysteries by herself. I used to think, it was this little town in Maine and people were dying there like flies. How could there be a murder every week in a town that small?”

How, indeed?

I dumped my dinner plate in the sink, hugged Angie until her feet were off the floor and she was literally unable to breathe, and left my mother ranting at the beef stroganoff.

Out on Island Road, I turned off at Red Beach, just to look at the water, since I was too early for my appointment at 9 P.M. The young mom had a certifying class, and it ended late. I’d learned I was going to meet Tessa’s mother, too, also a nurse—and of course, Tavish, the baby boy. I stopped for a while and just breathed. I rarely do this, but Island Road is a little strip that leads to the natural turn onto Lakeshore Road. That night, the lake was too breathtakingly beautiful to miss. Any scrap of daylight counts if you’re protected.

Some of the beaches are black sand. Others, besides being black, have particles of red in them. The other half of the people who work in Iron Harbor—those who don’t work at the clinic—are on the boats, the ones that carry iron ore all over the world. The town tries to cover up the pit mines with fast-growing trees now, birch and maple. My mother says this once was a paradise with everything a person could want (especially if the person wanted mosquitoes). In any other country, Lake Superior would not be considered a lake, but an inland sea.

When I tried to pull away from Red Beach, some a*shole practically sideswiped me. So much for the peaceful feeling. I figured he had to be from Chicago, in the kind of Italian convertible guys use as metaphors for certain parts of their anatomy (or to overcompensate for the lack thereof). I took a moment to breathe, to collect myself. The moon was on the horizon, laying down a strip of gold.

Finally I drove to the address.

Looking back, I have no idea why I chose not to acknowledge the connection until I pulled into the parking lot. (Actually, I do. I was overwhelmingly obsessed with what was going on between my two best friends.) Just to make sure that there weren’t two vintage condo buildings on the bluff right next to a modern condo building under construction, I pulled into what would be the lot of the building next door.

It was Tabor Oaks, of course.

Just staring across the pavement at the small lighted address panel next to the foyer door—not even up at that balcony—my heart thumped again. I thought of the platinum streak on the back of that otherwise dark head of hair. Why would he dye his hair in such a weird way? Maybe he wanted to be a blond. Blondie, I thought.

Maybe Blondie was Tessa’s husband. Maybe he was having an affair.

Talking to myself, aloud, like a crazy person, I said, “Allie, chill. Calm down.”

At that moment, I had a disquieting thought. I didn’t want to be here, but I was here. What were the odds of ending up in the same place? (The odds were actually not that bad, given that Two Harbors has a permanent population of six hundred people.) But what were the odds I’d get a call from a person who lived at the place where I had seen something so creepy? I stared up at the penthouse. There was someone living there. That whole floor must have cost a big dime, given the private beach and astonishing view. I almost didn’t hear the voice calling.

“Hello!”

I didn’t move.

“Are you Allie Kim?” The voice floated down from above. “Ring at 4B.” I looked up. It was an older woman, with short silvery hair, waving from behind a screen on the third floor, holding a little boy, who was madly waving, too. She said, “Crier!”

Was she talking about the baby? Who was a crier? I should have trusted my instincts and bolted.

I glanced around the parking area. There were about six cars in the ten slots. I even recognized a few of them, although I couldn’t have named the owners. Finally I forced my wobbly legs to march up to the door. There were ten address slots; except for two handwritten names, all but two were printed in uniform type. One of the handwritten names, the one for 4B, read CRYER.

I almost giggled. Tessa had never bothered to tell me her last name, or if she had, I hadn’t remembered. I needed to focus a little harder if I was going to pull off this babysitting gig for real.

The name for the penthouse, scribbled on a piece of envelope, read RENALDI. The thought that I might come face to face with “Blondie,” if he lived there, filled my throat with hot and undigested Stroganoff. But I shoved the thought aside and pushed the glowing 4B. The front doors buzzed open in return. I forced myself to relax as the elevator ascended and I got off on the fourth floor. The door at the far end of the hall opened, and the woman with short silvery hair popped out, holding the boy—who was by then yelling his head off.

She smiled as she closed the door behind her. “Are you from New York?”

“What?”

“You’re wearing a hat and sunglasses at night.”

I pulled them off. “No, I …” Try the truth, my mother once said. It catches people off guard. “I have XP. It’s a genetic thing.…”

Her eyes widened.

“You’re Jackie Kim’s girl.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Yes.”

“I know her from work.”

“Oh, wow! Well, maybe you know then XP isn’t contagious. Parents of kids with XP insist that they wear the seven veils if they go out—”

“I apologize,” said the woman. “I acted like I was from New York. That was very rude! My name is Teresa Kaminski. I’m Tessa’s mother. And this is his majesty, Tavish.” The little baby abruptly reached for me and started to giggle. Without thinking, I let him come into my arms and pull my ball cap off my head.

A moment later, a younger woman burst into the apartment. She was practically a clone of the older woman, minus the gray hair. When she saw me, she slumped against the door. “Are you from Heaven, then? That’s the first time he’s stopped crying all day.”

“I’m from not from Heaven or New York,” I said. “I’m just a local, like you.”

The baby smiled up at me, all gums and soft cheeks.

After that it was a whirlwind of re-introductions and explanations. Grandma was Teresa Kaminski; the young woman was Tessa Kaminski-Cryer. Tessa met her husband when they were little kids; both their families spent summers in Two Harbors. Tessa’s husband sold insurance to hospitals. He was on the road a lot, and she was freaking out because she was going to start doing two midnight shifts on top of a class and needed someone to babysit from eleven to six, when her mother (who had just started doing private duty) got off work and came to stay with the baby. Tessa finished with an exhausted “I’m desperate. I only have a week to find somebody.”

“I’m a good babysitter,” I lied.

The truth was, I was already smitten with Tavish. I had taken care of Angie before. But taking care of your own siblings requires no skill, only the willingness to follow through on your threat to punch a cute little Chinese girl with an arm the circumference of a broomstick. I had never changed a diaper. I assumed there were package directions for the diaper and a quick manual of sorts you could get for the baby, with the parts labeled.

“You can ask anyone at the hospital about me,” I added.

We had a cup of tea. The baby never stopped smiling and cooing at me as I told Tessa about the hot spots in Iron Harbor. She knew about most of them, including Gitchee Pizza. She showed me around the apartment: the décor was exquisite, very sparse and Pottery Barn. “This is a great place,” I said, in a voice that clearly signaled, how can you own a place like this if you’re thirty at most and working the midnight shift?

“It belongs to my husband’s family friend, Steve. The whole building does. Dr. Tabor? Steve Tabor?” Tessa said.

I nodded. Of course I knew Dr. Steve, although not as well as Dr. Andrew, obviously. I didn’t hang around accidents and crime scenes and examined deaths of any kind. But I felt a warm rush of relief. Mentally, I slapped myself. I was a paranoid idiot. Juliet was right. It would take someone even dumber than me to use this property as a private crime den: the medical examiner’s property.

“So, Allie, can you start next week?” Tessa asked. “Or for a practice, paid of course, on, like, Sunday? How about … ten, no eleven dollars an hour—if you do a little cleaning?”

I had been thinking she’d offer me six or seven. Life brightened. I began to see visions of my own car. Lime green. A Beetle. I said goodbye to young Tavish, who immediately burst into tears again. “One-year molars,” Tessa said wearily. “They start six months after six-month molars.”

WHEN I REACHED the parking lot, it was full dark, no moon—but I saw him right away.

Blondie hopped out of a little red sports car and slammed the door.

I froze in the dull light of the foyer. It was the same car that had nearly sideswiped me. I stared, petrified, as he yanked a large sack from his trunk and hobbled over to the edge of the parking lot, disappearing over the bluff to the lawn at the water’s edge. In the shadows, it looked like a sailboat’s canvass, rolled up like a rug. So I did the only thing I could think of. I ran to mom’s car and grabbed my Maglite.

When I returned to the parking lot’s edge—and aimed the spotlight at the spongy grass below—I saw nothing.

Since that night, many times, I’ve tried to imagine this moment from an outside perspective. You’ve seen a guy (whom you’ve suspected of doing something horrible). You’ve seen him carry a suspicious looking package over a bluff. And when you’ve decided to chase him down, he’s gone. No rolled-up sail. Nothing except the lake demanding softly, “Now? Now?”

So what do you do?

You drive seventy in a thirty, all the way home.