“That woman is an absolute clotheshorse and she has impeccable taste,” he argued when I said I didn’t want to tip myself rear-end up into a trash can with him. “You don’t walk away from an opportunity like this—I don’t do this regularly anymore, Lilly. I’m discriminating and that woman’s castoffs are worth a serious look.”
He didn’t even glance over his shoulder to see if I was behind him, because he was too preoccupied by what he was imagining in that bag. I wasn’t behind him. Today the sun was bright, the office staff was streaming in and out the door looking purposeful, and all was right in our universe. Then some little clang rang inside me. It vibrated somewhere in my stomach—low in my stomach—and I whipped my head around to find out what had set it off and the ringing feeling pulled my eyes right to him.
He was in a parked car only feet from Be Your Best, watching the front door. He had a hat on and sunglasses, but it was him. His head was at that Ricky angle. His hands rested on the wheel and I saw a flash of wedding ring. I’d picked that ring out. I started walking toward him. The dog had tipped himself into the Dumpster at this point, pawing through the clotheshorse’s bag, but at almost the exact moment I felt the clang inside myself, Boppit’s head popped up and he let the bag go. He slid down from the Dumpster and moved to my side. He’d felt it too.
“There,” he said. We were already both looking in the same direction. “He’s so close,” Bop whispered. He started walking, and I walked right beside him because it felt like that was the right thing to do, all the way to the front of Ricky Luhrmann’s car. “Did you feel a weird kind of clang just before you saw him?” Boppit asked. “I thought I felt something clangy, kind of warning-ish.” Boppit was holding a shoe from the Dumpster bag. He tapped it thoughtfully against the knuckles of his free hand. “He’s never been this close, I mean, parked right here at the door.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
The dog shook his head back and forth in the I can’t say way. We were planted directly in front of the car’s grillwork. I didn’t expect Ricky to be able to see me, but I wanted to see him. We’d walked through the Be Your Best offices by Neave’s side a dozen times without a single reaction from anyone there, so I stood right in his line of vision and looked at him, sure he’d see nothing.
At first he stayed focused on the door of Be Your Best, shifting for a better view when someone came or went. He was waiting for her. Then he began to get uneasy, glancing around, trying to find the thing that was making him nervous. Boppit was leaning on his hood, looking straight through the windshield and directly into the man’s eyes. Ricky took off the sunglasses and rubbed his hand over his eyes and forehead, hard. He peered out his windshield, right past Boppit, who was almost directly in his line of sight, and to the left—to me. And then everything in his face changed because he saw me. There was no doubt about it.
He gunned the engine and drove right through us. I got twisted in a kind of sucking whirlpool of Ricky Luhrmann. Boppit was more collected, more quickly, than I was. He stood there breathing pretty normally but I was staggering, choking in the middle of the street.
“You scared him, that’s for sure,” Boppit said soberly.
“How could that happen? How could he see me?”
“I have no idea,” Boppit said.
“I know the man and I think I know where he’s going to go with this. He’ll try to get his head around the idea that he hadn’t seen me at all. But he’s going to fail. Then he’s going to look for something to hurt because he’s going to feel scared and he needs some relief.”
“Why wasn’t he that clear to you when you were alive?” Bop huffed. Then, “Something’s shifted, Lilly. Something’s going to get settled.” Boppit lifted his hand to show me the peep-toe swing-strap sandal he’d carried off from the Dumpster. “I’m going back to get this one’s mate. Look at this shortened vamp.” He held the shoe in silhouette so I could appreciate it. “Slim lines, beautiful wax finish on the leather. Not pigmented or veneered in any way.”
“Boppit, what can we do? Are you saying that what we’re doing isn’t working anymore?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe? Is that secret code for ‘yes’?”
“Maybe.”
“Boppit, how long are we going to be here, with Neave, as well as Where We Are Now?”
“Oh, we don’t control that.” He lifted the shoe. “Isn’t this color brilliant! How could a woman just toss these away? What is wrong with the world?”
“I don’t know, Bop,” I said. “It’s a mystery.”
It was a dark moment for me, truly.
BOPPIT
Snyder Gives Her Away
It was Snyder who undid all the layers of protection we’d put around her, Snyder who led him to her. Days, Neave was surrounded with colleagues. Nights, she had managed to evade him by sometimes using buses instead of her car, by keeping an erratic schedule, discovering different routes every night. Night after night he had arrived at the warehouse apartment hoping to follow her wherever she went. Night after night she was already gone when he got there.
All he wanted was to find her alone, no little niece or brother or hulking brother-in-law. No witnesses whatsoever. Could the sister be bullied into telling him where she was? Maybe. But there was that husband, that Todd guy. Todd was large. Ricky considered the boyfriend, that Helbrun guy, and dismissed that idea too. Touch a guy like Helbrun and you’d fall into a nest of lawyers.
But the brother, comic-book boy. There we go. The brother was a weak link. Kick a few grains of sand in his face and he’d do whatever you told him to do. And the brother was alone quite a bit in that studio of his. Very easy to find.
By this point Snyder’s studio had three telephone lines and a part-time assistant who answered the phone and mounted and framed posters. The Snyder Terhune Fantasy Art Company didn’t have a sign over the door because most of its sales were done at gallery shows and through the mail, but a person just had to call the number in the phone book to get directions and that’s what Ricky did. He lingered outside the door until the assistant was gone for the day and the brother was alone. Ricky knew a little about Snyder. He knew Snyder was nervous, that he ran to his sisters when he got scared. Ricky was confident that he could pull off the scaring part. Then the brother would run to Neave. Ricky congratulated himself, very pleased with the plan. He climbed the stairs to the studio, swinging open the door that the last assistant had left unlocked. Snyder froze into a block the instant he saw Luhrmann.
“What’s wrong, little man?” Luhrmann asked, crossing the room and positioning himself within a few inches of Snyder’s face. “No cause for concern. I’m not here to cause trouble. I’m here to find out where my wife is.”
“Lilly? I have no idea, Ricky. We’ve been trying to find you, to ask you.” Snyder took a firm grip on the glass cutting table so Luhrmann wouldn’t see his hands shake.