Joe was persistent, and he tried rapping harder. Down the hallway, a young woman poked her head out.
“Knock it off, buddy,” she said, then looked at the two of them and softened. “Sorry…I was just watching television. I didn’t mean to bite your heads off.”
“That’s okay, we’re sorry,” Genevieve told her.
“Do you know where Can—where Lori is?” Joe asked.
“No, I’m afraid not.”
Genevieve took a step forward. “Did you see her today? Did she say anything to you? I’m sorry to bother you, but it’s really important that we speak with her.”
The woman—who was probably only in her late twenties but already acquiring the pinched look of someone years older—took a long look at Genevieve. Then she smiled.
“Let me try to remember. I was just coming up from the laundry room when she was going out. She was all excited when she left,” the woman said. “Um…she did tell me that it was a great day, and that she was going to go see a man about a horse. Then she laughed and said it was a race horse and she was going to be in the money.”
“Really?” Genevieve said, frowning and looking at Joe.
Joe looked at Lori’s neighbor, and something about the way he looked at her clearly made her defensive.
“She wasn’t hooking,” the woman snapped.
“I didn’t suggest she was,” he assured her.
“You two cops?” the woman demanded.
“No, no,” Genevieve said quickly, and stepped forward, offering her hand. “I’m Genevieve O’Brian, and this is Joe Connolly. We just wanted to talk to Lori, that’s all.”
The woman’s shoulders sagged, as if she didn’t have the energy to be angry anymore. “She’s really a sweet girl. She deserves a break.”
“I’m sure she does,” Joe said, and he was surprised to realize he wasn’t being sarcastic. He had been stunned himself to feel that something about Lori Star’s words had felt real and that she really had seemed like a nice kid.
The woman smiled. “I’m Susie Norman, by the way, and I’m sorry I can’t help you.” She brightened. “Next time I see Lori, I’ll tell her you were here, though.”
“Thanks,” Joe said. He slipped a business card under Lori’s door, then walked over and handed one to Susie. “Here’s my number, in case you think of anything to help us find her. And thanks again.”
When they reached the street, Genevieve looked at Joe expectantly. “What now?”
“Now I have to check on some alibis.”
“Okay. Where do we start?”
He shook his head, looking at her with exasperation. “Genevieve, you hired me to do this job. That means I do the work, and you head on home and enjoy what’s left of your Sunday.”
“Joe, I’ve spent enough time closed up in my house. Where do we go from here?”
“I need to do some work on the computer and make some phone calls,” he told her.
“I have a computer.”
“And all my contact numbers and stuff are at my house.”
“I’m willing to bet your contact numbers are in your phone,” Genevieve told him.
No way out of it. He let out a sigh of vast exasperation. “Then you’re coming to Brooklyn,” he told her.
She smiled. “Fine.”
Sunday in New York. It seemed as if every dog owner in the city was out. A poodle took issue with a Doberman. The owners sounded as if they were barking right along with their dogs as they accused each other of causing the problem. A Maltese went trotting by with its owner, a shaggy-haired young girl. Both were oblivious to the shouting match as they walked by.
Joe hailed a cab for Genevieve’s apartment, where they retrieved his car. The Sunday traffic wasn’t bad, and she seemed to enjoy the ride, looking out the window, watching as they traveled over the Brooklyn Bridge.
Joe realized that although they had been friends for over a year, he’d kept his distance. She had never been to his place before.
He lived in an old brownstone. It was three stories, plus a basement, and he had the basement and the first floor. He even had a reserved parking space, which was something of a coup in his neighborhood, which was residential, but just a block off a commercial boulevard, where he could go for coffee, or great Chinese, Italian or diner-style American food whenever he chose.
But entering his place with Genevieve brought with it a stab of pain.
Leslie was the last woman he’d brought here.
And she had told him about the ghost in his basement, a Civil War era musician who had wanted the work he’d left behind to be found and performed.
Ghosts.
He’d spent his life being logical. He hadn’t believed in ghosts. But then he’d met Leslie and through her, a man named Adam Harrison and some of his employees, a group of people who found it as natural to talk to ghosts as it was to converse with strangers at a party.
But despite everything he had come to know about Leslie and, through her, Adam Harrison and his group of paranormal investigators, he had fought against believing in any of it.