“Some criminal mastermind you turned out to be,” Katie said, but her heart wasn’t in it. Gina flinched, so Katie swiped one of her fries by way of apology. A brief but giggly scuffle ensued before Katie maneuvered the somewhat mangled fry into her mouth. She was chewing salt and starch when Melissa said, “Don’t you guys think this is all a little weird?”
Katie swallowed, leaving a slick of grease on her palate. “No,” she said, and slurped chocolate shake to clear it off. Her hair moved on her neck, and she swallowed and imagined the touch of a hand. A prickle of sensation tingled through her, the same excitement she felt at their pursuit of Doctor S., which she had experienced only occasionally while kissing her boyfriend back home. She shifted in her chair. “I think it’s plenty weird.”
She wasn’t going to ask the other girls. Melissa had a boyfriend at Harvard that she traded off weekends with. Gina was … Gina. She picked up whatever boy she wanted, kept him a while, put him down again. Katie would rather let them assume that she wasn’t all that innocent.
Not that they’d hate her. But they’d laugh.
“What are we going to do about it?” she asked, when Melissa kept looking at her. “I mean, it’s not like he did something illegal.”
“You didn’t see the body up close.”
“I didn’t. But he didn’t kill her. We know where he was when she fell.”
Gina’s mouth compressed askew. But she nodded, then hid her face in her shake.
Melissa pushed at her frizzing hair again. “You know,” she said, “he left in a hurry. It’s like a swamp out there.”
“So?”
“So. Do you suppose his office door sticks?”
“Oh, no. That is illegal. We could get expelled.”
“We wouldn’t take anything.” Melissa turned her drink with the tips of her fingers, looking at them and the spiraling ring left behind on the tabletop, not at Katie’s eyes. “Just see if he has a police scanner. And look for his address.”
“I’m not doing that,” Katie said.
“I just want to see if the door is unlocked.”
Melissa looked at Gina. Gina shrugged. “Those locks come loose with a credit card, anyway.”
“No. Not just no.”
“Oh, you can watch the stairs,” Gina said, sharp enough that Katie sat back in her chair. Katie swallowed, and nodded. Fine. She would watch the goddamned stair.
“You want to finish?” she asked.
Gina pushed her mangled but uneaten fries away. “No, baby. I’m done.”
The man’s name was Henry; he ate an extraordinary amount of fried chicken from a red paper bucket while Matthew crouched on the stoop beside him, breathing shallowly. The acrid vapors of whatever Matthew hunted actually covered both the odor of unwashed man and of dripping grease, and though his eyes still watered, he thought his nose was shutting down in protest. Perversely, this made it easier to cope.
“No,” Henry said. He had a tendency to slur his speech, to ramble and digress, but he was no ranting lunatic. Not, Matthew reminded himself, that it would matter if he was. “I mean, okay. I see things. More now than when I got my meds”—he shrugged, a bit of extra crispy coating clinging to his moustache—“I mean, I mean, not that I’m crazy, but you see things out of the corner of your eye, and when you turn? You see?”
He was staring at a spot slightly over Matthew’s left shoulder when he said it, and Matthew wished very hard that he dared turn around and look. “All the damned time,” he said.
The heat of the cement soaked through his jeans; the jacket was nearly unbearable. He shrugged out of it, laid it on the stoop, and rolled up his sleeves. “Man,” Henry said, and sucked soft meat off bones. “Nice ink.”
“Thanks,” Matthew said, turning his arms over to inspect the insides.
“Hurt much? You don’t look like the type.”
“Hurt some,” Matthew admitted. “What sort of things do you see? Out of the corners of your eyes?”
“Scuttling things. Flapping things.” He shrugged. “When I can get a drink it helps.”
“Rats? Pigeons?”
“Snakes,” Henry said. He dropped poultry bones back into the bucket. “Roosters.”
“Not crows? Vultures?”
“No,” Henry said. “Roosters. Snakes, the color of the wall.”
“Damn.” Matthew picked up his coat. “Thanks, Henry. I guess it was a cockatrice after all.”
What happened was, Katie couldn’t wait on the stairs. Of course she’d known there wasn’t a chance in hell that she could resist Melissa. But sometimes it was better to fool yourself a little, even if you knew that eventually you were going to crack.
Instead, she found herself standing beside Gina, blocking a sight line with her body, as Gina knocked ostentatiously on Doctor S.’s door. She slipped the latch with a credit card—a gesture so smooth that Katie could hardly tell she wasn’t just trying the handle. She knocked again and then pulled the door open.
Katie kind of thought she was overplaying, and made a point of slipping through the barely opened door in an attempt to hide from passers-by that the room was empty.
Melissa came in last, tugging the door shut behind herself. Katie heard the click of the lock.
Not, apparently, that that would stop anybody.
Katie put her back against the door beside the wall and crossed her arms over her chest to confine her shivering. Gina moved into the office as if entranced; she stood in the center of the small cluttered room and spun slowly on her heel, hands in her hip pockets, elbows awkwardly cocked. Melissa slipped past her—as much as a six foot redhead could slip—and bent over to examine the desk, touching nothing.
“There has to be a utility bill here or something, right? Everybody does that sort of thing at work … ”
Gina stopped revolving, striking the direction of the bookshelves like a compass needle striking north—a swing, a stick, a shiver. She craned her neck back and began inspecting titles.
It was Katie, after forcing herself forward to peer over Gina’s shoulder, who noticed the row of plain black hardbound octavo volumes on one shelf, each with a ribbon bound into the spine and a date penned on it in silver metallic ink.
“Girls,” she said, “do you suppose he puts his address in his journal?”
Gina turned to follow Katie’s pointing finger and let loose a string of Spanish that Katie was pretty sure would have her toenails smoking if she understood a word. It was obviously self-directed, though, so after the obligatory flinch, she reached past Gina and pulled the most recently dated volume from the shelf.
“Can I use the desk?” The book cracked a little under the pressure of her fingers, and it felt lumpy, with wavy page-edges. If anything was pressed inside, she didn’t want to scatter it.
Melissa stood back. Katie laid the book carefully on an uncluttered portion of the blotter and slipped the elastic that held it closed without moving the food or papers. The covers almost burst apart, as if eager to be read, foiling her intention to open it to the flyleaf and avoid prying. The handwriting was familiar: she saw it on the whiteboard twice a week. But that wasn’t what made Katie catch her breath.
A pressed flower was taped to the left-hand page, facing a column of text. And in the sunlight that fell in bars through the dusty blind, it shimmered iridescent blue and violet over faded gray.