She’d be at her job now, I figured. Managing the Laundromat. I didn’t know which one, which was probably just as well. If I had, I might have found myself concocting some lame excuse to drop by.
I could just imagine what my mother would say if I headed out the door with a basket of dirty laundry. “What are you thinking?” she’d say. “You are not taking that out to be done! You leave that with me right now!”
Add it to the list of reasons I needed to move out.
What I didn’t expect, as I rolled past Samantha’s place, was that she would walk out the front door.
And look right at me.
Shit.
I had an instant to decide how to handle it. I could speed off, pretend I hadn’t seen her. Except it was pretty clear I had. I could still speed off, but she’d be left with the impression that I was up to something, that I had something to hide, that I was stalking her.
Which I was not.
Okay, maybe driving by here the night before was a little suspect, but this was legit. I was just passing by going from point A to point B.
I could wave and keep on going.
But that would look stupid.
I hit the brakes. Not too hard. Not hard enough to squeal the tires. But a nice, even slowdown. I brought the car to a halt at the opposite curb and powered down the window.
I said, “Hey, I thought that was you.”
She walked to the sidewalk, talked to me across two lanes. She grinned. “You got me under surveillance?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Right here in broad daylight. Just heading back to my folks’ house from a job thing.” Kind of a lie, although I had just been talking to Finley. “You off today?”
Samantha shook her head. “No. But like I said, I can leave the place unattended for short periods of time. I came home for some lunch. Heading back now.”
“Thanks again,” I said.
“For what? The watch, or not shooting you?”
I smiled. “Take your pick.” I still had my foot on the brake. “I should let you go.”
“Listen,” she said, “do you have two seconds?”
I moved the gearshift into park, but the engine was still running. “What is it?”
“My wifi is out, and I think it’s the modem, but I never know how to reset the thing, and when Carl gets home he’ll want to go online and won’t be able to.”
I nodded, put the window up, killed the engine, and locked the car. I waited for a blue pickup truck with tinted windows to pass, then ran across the street.
“You sure you don’t mind?” she asked. “I could call someone.”
“No, you don’t want to do that,” I said. “Usually all you have to do is unplug it, wait a few seconds, plug it back in, and wait a couple of minutes. You bring a cable guy out to the house and he’ll charge you a hundred bucks.”
“I really appreciate it,” she said, leading me back to her front door. She had her keys out, unlocked the door and swung it open.
“Where’s the modem, Samantha?”
“Sam,” she said. “Call me Sam. It’s right there, under the TV, with the DVD player and the Nintendo and all that stuff.”
I was in a small living room the moment I stepped into the place, with the entertainment unit on the side wall. I got out my phone and went to the settings to see whether I could detect any wifi signal. I wasn’t getting anything.
I got down on my knees, took hold of the modem, pulled out the wire on the back that led to a power bar.
“Can I get you anything?” Sam asked. “A Coke, a beer?”
“I’m okay,” I said. I was counting to ten in my head. When I got there, I pushed the wire back into the jack. “Okay, let’s see what happens here.”
The row of lights on the modem started to dance.
“That looks promising,” Sam said.
“See if you can get on.”
She had a laptop on a table in an L off the living room. She sat down, tapped away. “Hang on. Okay, yeah, it’s connected. Oh, that’s great. Thanks for that.”
I stood, positioning myself on the opposite side of the table. “No problem.”
“I Googled you,” she said, glancing down at the computer. She laughed. “That almost sounds dirty, doesn’t it?”
But her smile faded when I said, “Why’d you do that?”
“Don’t be mad. I mean, mostly what I found were lots of stories with your byline on them, that you wrote for the Standard.”
I guessed they hadn’t shut down the Web site yet.
“But there were also stories about you,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I do that with people I meet all the time. Google them, I mean. I just, you know, was just curious.” Her face became more serious. “I had no idea what I’d find. I’m really sorry.”
I said nothing.
“Your wife, Jan?”
I nodded.
“That was terrible. Really tragic. It wasn’t like I was expecting to find anything like that. Mostly I was just checking to see that you weren’t a serial killer or anything.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“Yeah, well, if you are, the Internet doesn’t know about it. It has to have been hard these past few years.”
I shrugged. “You deal with what life hands you, I guess. There’s not really much else you can do.”