*
I woke up in the big stuffed chair that sat in front of the apartment’s biggest window, again. A plate with the one remaining piece of toast on it sat on the floor at my feet. I’d been reading, watching streetlights, looking for circling cars or figures looking up at my windows. I might have refused Max’s advice to never stay here alone at night, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t watching for him. Waiting. I’d nodded off and when I regained consciousness I was tipped over on one side, the cushion under my face wet from drool.
A shower and three cups of coffee and I was off to work. I let a catering service representative and a consultant I talked to on the telephone think I was Lilly without correcting them. The consultant had called to discuss the seminar Lilly had hired her to run: “Love and Romance—Their Links to Sales.” My secretary left at the normal time but I kept on until around eight. I walked up the stairs to my apartment thinking about the way Max Luhrmann’s sentences tended to have solid-sounding ends. I decided I would try not to think about anything: not Lilly, not the growing disorder in my apartment, not Max. But you can’t control your mind. The triangle of exposed throat.
That night a storm whipped tree branches against the windows of the upper-floor apartment and I fell asleep in the chair, again. In the morning I walked through my usual routine: coffee, shower, clothes, keys, coat. I had an appointment with a new sales manager and so, instead of walking down the inside stairs to our offices I headed out the back door and the outside landing, the quickest way down to my car. I swung open the door and turned to lock it.
Hanging smack in its center was a little tail of blond hair, streaked through with a subtle highlight or two, bound at its root with the silver clip I’d given Lilly for her seventeenth birthday.
NEAVE
Move to the Rubber Duck
The officer who answered the call told me that cutting hair and putting it on a door was not a crime. I hung up and paced the apartment like an animal for perhaps an hour. Then I took the step I was probably waiting to take all along: I called Max. He hadn’t needed anybody to explain that ponytails nailed to doors were a very bad sign. He’d put me in his car and driven us to the police department, where he represented our concerns because at this point I wasn’t driving safely or speaking clearly. The uniformed officers at the desk suggested that someone had left part of a wig as a joke. Max then jumped over the divider and headed toward the door labeled PRECINCT CAPTAIN.
A very large patrol officer stepped into Max’s path. He was thickly muscled and about half a foot taller than Max. He moved deliberately, sure of himself, planting himself and crossing his arms. “You can’t come back here, bub.” Max stepped around him and shifted his weight quickly to evade an arm when the patrolman flung one out to stop him. He turned to face the cop who was advancing on him.
“You are not going to touch me,” Max said quietly. “I am not going to touch you.” He took my arm and led me past. “Excuse me,” he said coolly as we brushed by. We reached the back of the station unmolested, moving through a little pool of quiet all around us.
Ten minutes later the precinct captain had called in a detective and was agreeing that when somebody left a human ponytail on a door, that was bad. He was not reassuring. The husband, we told him, hadn’t been found or questioned, or, as far as we knew, even looked for. “It’s different now,” he told us. “The meat was a clear threat. You should avoid being alone in your apartment for a few days, Miss Terhune. We’ll nose around. Keep in mind that you actually don’t know who left it.” He asked us for every employer or address we knew for Ricky. He asked for a list of any employees who’d been fired or had quit abruptly. He asked about enemies. Did I have enemies?
Max was tightlipped as we walked to his car. “You can put some things together to last you a few days,” he said as he turned the ignition. “You don’t have a choice anymore, Neave. If you won’t go to the Rubber Duck, we’re heading for your sister’s house.”
But there was that clear image in my mind of Ricky trailing me to Jane’s, parked in a dark car outside her home, watching Annie move through the lighted rooms of her home. “I’m not going to Jane’s.”
“Then your brother’s.”
Again, I imagined Snyder opening the door and finding Ricky Luhrmann standing there, possibly with a large blunt weapon in his hand, some spittle at the edges of his mouth. “No,” I said. “Not Snyder’s either.”
“Then that’s it. The Rubber Duck.”
I could see the thick hank curving away from the nail. The silver clip. “I don’t know.”
“Neave. The ponytail.”
I was so tired—so flattened and beaten and scared. I could feel Max feel all those things on me and gather himself to bear down, right now, while I was vulnerable. He’d seen my face when I put that hank of hair in a brown paper bag to take to the police station. He’d seen the shaking hands and blank eyes.
We didn’t speak as we walked back up the stairs to the door, where a few strands were still snarled around the nail. We stood on the iron grate landing and looked at the silky twist of hairs. Something dark lapped up inside me.
“Max, what was your sister’s name?” I asked. “The one who died when she was little.”
“Pansy.”
“What did she look like?”
“A pansy. A pretty little happy thing.”
I plucked the stubborn remaining hairs from the nail and held them up over my head until a breeze took them.
“All right,” I said finally.
“You’ll move to the boat?”
“I’ll go there tonight. Maybe tomorrow. I don’t know about further than that. It’s no guarantee, Max. If somebody wants to find me, all he has to do is follow me when I leave the office at the end of the day and trail me to the boat.”
“He won’t go near you during the day when you’re surrounded by people. He’ll stay away until he can be sure the staff is all gone, but you’re going to start leaving before the office empties out—leaving when you’re still surrounded by people. He’ll wait until after hours before he cruises by, expecting you to be alone. If your car’s gone, he’ll wait for you to come back. But you won’t come back because you’ll be safely asleep on the Rubber Duck. You’ll get to the Duck a different way every night. Different routes. Sometimes you’ll take a bus. When you drive, you make the rearview mirror your best friend. You think anybody’s following you and you can’t shake them, go to your sister’s. Not the boat. I only wish I could tell you to come to my apartment, but we know he’s got a close enough interest in my comings and goings to make me an undesirable backup plan.”