“There they are.” Jane raised her hand, signaling Elaine across the student-crammed hubbub, glimpsing her face through the blur of beer bottles and clinking glasses, girls in skintight denim and even tighter tank tops, gyrating shoulders and echoing laughter. She saw the SAFE organizer blink, once, looking puzzled. Elaine finally broke into laughter, head back, when she recognized Jane, and pointed toward a back room, gesturing them to follow, still laughing. Fine, Jane thought. You’ll be old someday, too.
“Man,” Jane began. “Did we dance like that? Dress like that?” Jane shook her head, feeling the inexorable creep of impending fogeyness. “I sure hope this isn’t the way we looked in college.”
Fiola did not respond.
“Fee? You with me here? What’s up?”
“Nothing.” Fiola waved her off. “Memories.”
“Tell me about it,” Jane said. Then she stopped, put her hand on Fee’s arm. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Sometimes it—” Her producer took a deep breath, let it out. Adjusted the Levi’s jacket over her boho midi dress. “That’s why I didn’t bring it up. You have to just let me be. Let me work.”
Jane locked eyes with her. Making sure.
“Thanks, though,” Fiola said, her voice low. “Tonight’s not about me, okay?” Then, as Isabel turned back to them, she changed her expression. “Hey, sister. You two ready?”
“Ready,” Isabel said.
“Sure,” Jane said. “Let’s work the room. See who and what we can find. And come on, Isabel, there’s someone we want you to meet.”
The music surrounded them as they headed through the partying throng, Jane arm in arm again with Isabel, Fiola leading them toward the posse of SAFE women stationed beyond an archway in the club’s inner room. Pin spots twinkled on the zinc-topped bar, and the floor-to-ceiling mirror multiplied the array of glasses and multicolored liquor bottles lining the glass-shelved wall. Laughter, bare skin, dangly earrings, and exaggerated gestures, everyone vulturing for position at a long line of bar stools. In each person’s hand, and lined up along the bar, a stubby highball goblet, or a snifter with an orange straw, or a long-stemmed martini glass, drinks green and pink or colorless with a twist, nursed, sometimes ignored, always accessible.
It would be so easy, Jane realized, her unseen camera rolling, to drop something in one of those drinks. She wondered if that’s what Fee was remembering. Or Isabel.
The sound system’s incessant bass rumbled the wooden floor, and the exuberant bounce of the dancers kept the three women dodging and weaving their way ahead. It had been barely twilight outside. But here, with the flashing colored lights and shifting reflections and windowless walls, there was no time but now.
Jane pulled Isabel closer as they continued through the crush. “How’re you doing?” Jane asked, trying to connect over the music. “We don’t have to stay too late, okay? I’m here, long as you need me.”
“I’m fine,” Isabel murmured. Jane saw her scanning the room as they walked, eyes darting back and forth, nervous as a sparrow. “I just haven’t seen these people in a while. And I keep worrying that—”
“Hey, Jane. Hey, Fee.” Elaine, perched on a bar stool in jeans and black T-shirt, called out to them from a few yards away. Elaine then slid from her seat, acknowledging Isabel with an outreached hand as they approached. “I’m Elaine.”
ISABEL RUSSO
“Isabel,” she said. She shook the woman’s hand, trying to calm her racing heart. Was Elaine her lifeline? Or maybe she herself was the lifeline. Or maybe it was just a party, and she was merely a student. She tried to let the music take her away, as music always did, tried to become part of the real world again.
“Glad you came,” Elaine was saying. “Here, take my stool. And there’re some people here you should meet, if you’re interested. Okay?”
“Thanks,” Isabel said. What was she supposed to do? She knew Elaine’s “people” were other victims, Jane had explained that, but—
She turned, needing Jane. But all at once the colors of the room changed. The music turned to white noise. And the floor shifted, shifted, and it wasn’t from the music and it wasn’t from the lights, it was—it was him. Standing under the archway.
A room away, a hundred people between them, and she saw only a sliver of his smile, then a sliver of his shoulder, and then the top of that sandy hair, he was always a little taller, and a little bigger and—but it didn’t matter, she didn’t need to see any more, there he was, he was here and she was here, and she’d seen him, exactly as she had tried to stop herself from imagining, the worst possible thing, the worst, and she had to sit, no, she had to run, she had to get out of here, get OUT—
JAKE BROGAN
“Holy shit,” Jake said.
“Yeah,” D said.
They stood just inside the front door of the Spotted Owl, instantly deafened and sent into sensory overload. They’d entered, unquestioned, past the slacker so-called bouncer at the entrance. Now Jake couldn’t resist calculating the occupancy rate in this multi-roomed crush of college students.
“Fire code,” Jake said.
“Big time,” D answered.
“Underage drinking.” Jake sniffed. “And dope.”
DeLuca eyed the crowd, assessing. “Indecent exposure, too. Somebody oughta call the cops.”
“Want to see the photo one more time?” Jake took out the picture they’d copied from the yearbook, unfolded it, compared faces. “I don’t see him out there now, do you? There’s a back room, though.”
“Don’t see him,” D said.
They stood, keeping to the door’s lee shadow, assessing and dismissing one face after another. “You think those kids meant he was already here, or on the way here, or coming here later?”
“Who knows,” D replied. “Nobody’s paying attention to us, anyway, so we can stand here, stake it out, see what we see. Listen to this great so-called music. Maybe get a beer, so we don’t look outta place. Even have some popcorn.”
“Right,” Jake said. He’d love a beer, but duty was duty. “Speaking of popcorn. What’s up with the dog?”
“Bureaucrats,” D said, making it sound like an obscenity. “Animal Control made us sign some kind of foster bullshit, paperwork, so we shall see. But you know Kat. She’s all like, Oh, poor doggy. She changed its name to Rocco—dumb dog already answers to it. I’d have dumped the yapper.”
Jake took his eyes off the crowd just long enough to sneer at his partner. “Liar,” he said.
“As some have often noted,” D said. “Usually they’re assholes, though.”
“D,” Jake said.
“I didn’t call you an asshole,” D said. “I was merely—”
“Nine o’clock.” Jake clocked his chin to the left. “Couple of feet from the archway to the back. By the Sam Adams sign.”
D narrowed his eyes. “Ah…”
“Oh, yeah,” Jake said. “Gotcha.”