The girl sitting across from Gulliver was striking. Thin but curvy, she had light-brown hair cut short in a kind of one-sided bob. She had a triangular face with a well-defined chin. Depending on the light or the angle at which she held her head, the color of her eyes seemed to shift from light blue to green. Her skin was pale and lightly freckled, and her nose was small and angular. She was dressed with great style.
Walking the block-long campus of the Fashion Institute of Technology, Gulliver had noticed it wasn’t like most college campuses. He had also noticed that the students didn’t look like most college students. None of them looked as if they had just rolled out of bed. When Gulliver was in college, everyone looked like an unmade bed. Then again, FIT did have the word fashion in its name. Its students seemed to take that to heart.
Niki Philipps brushed her hair back and gave Gulliver a cute smile. She hadn’t reacted at all when she saw him. That was unusual. Almost everybody but the blind reacted in some way to their first sight of Gulliver Dowd. Niki was Bella’s roommate, and she had been happy to accept Joey Vespucci’s offer to pay her rent. She said she hadn’t thought twice about the offer and didn’t see anything wrong with it.
She shrugged her square shoulders. “My folks don’t have a lot of money, and this makes it much easier for them. It also means I didn’t have to take out a loan this year. Even though I live on campus and have the food plan, it costs a lot to live in this city.”
Gulliver couldn’t argue with that. He asked her what she thought of Bella.
“I liked Bella when I met her, and I would have been happy to have her around all the time. She has a real sense of style that has nothing to do with fashion.”
“I don’t understand,” said Gulliver.
“A lot of the kids here are fashion kids. But Bella’s style seems to come from inside her. She’s serious and deep. When she looks at things, you can just tell she sees them differently than other people do. Like she can see inside them.”
Gulliver nodded. He got it. He had that knack too.
“I think we would have been friends if we had the chance. I would have learned a lot from her.”
“Maybe you’ll still have that chance, Niki.”
“I hope so. Are you going to find her, Mr. Dowd?”
“I usually do find who I’m looking for.”
She got a worried look on her face. “But not always?”
“No, Niki. Not always.”
She thought about that for a second. “How can I help?”
“How long did Bella live here before she stopped pretending?”
“About a week. Just long enough so that if anyone checked, she was cool. But even after she moved out, she would still hang out here sometimes between classes and stuff. We didn’t have the same schedule because we aren’t in the same major, but we would run into each other now and then. Why?”
“If someone was stalking her, it might have taken that person a while to figure out she wasn’t living here.”
Niki shuddered as if she had the chills. “Stalking her! That freaks me out.”
“Did she ever mention that to you? That there was someone hanging around her? Did you ever see anyone in the lobby or in the halls who didn’t belong or made you feel strange?”
Niki’s face changed almost at once, but she didn’t speak right away. It was as if she wasn’t sure if what she had thought of meant anything.
“Don’t edit yourself, Niki. Tell me anything, even if it seems foolish or unimportant. Let me judge it. Okay?”
“Well, there was this one time…” Her voice trailed off. She shook her head. “No, it’s silly.”
“You’re right, it’s probably nothing. Tell me anyway.”
“One day last term. In October, I think. There was a man just outside the entrance to the dorm. And when I was coming into the building, he walked up to me. He said he knew I was Bella’s roommate and that he had something for her.”
“Something?”
“A note for her,” Niki said. “He asked if I could please give it to her. He said it was important and that he would really appreciate it.”
“What happened?”
She made a face. Shrugged. “It was just a note in an envelope. I told him I would give it to her when I saw her. He thanked me and left. But she had already moved into her own place by then, so it sat on her bed for about a week. I wasn’t in the room when she picked it up. I don’t even know when she got it or if she read it. I just looked over at the bed one day, and the envelope was gone.”
“And she never mentioned it to you?” Gulliver asked.
“No. Never. But like I said, we only ran into each other now and then. She never asked me where it came from. She just never said anything.”
“Is it okay if I ask about the man who gave the envelope to you?”
Niki said, “Sure. Why not?”
“Old or young?”
“Older. Maybe sixty or a little older, I guess.”
“Hair?”
“Long and gray. Kind of straggly.”
“Eye color?”
Niki thought about that. “Blue. Dark blue. And his skin had lines in it. His cheeks were very thin. He was nice, though, Mr. Dowd. He wasn’t, like, crazy or anything. He was kind of like a nice grandfather.”
“Anything else?” Gulliver asked.
“He had stained teeth, like he smoked.”
“How did he—”
“Wait. His hands were stained too, but not yellow. They were speckled with paint maybe.”
“That’s great, Niki. You’re doing great. How did he speak? Did he have a foreign accent or a strange voice or anything like that?”
“No. At least, not that I can remember,” she said, almost disappointed.
Gulliver thanked Niki and got ready to leave, but he had one more thing he was dying to ask her. “Niki, can I ask you a question that’s not about Bella?”
“Sure, Mr. Dowd.”
“When you saw me for the first time, you didn’t react at all. Most people do, you know. When they see how small I am. When they see my body’s kind of strange. Most people’s eyes get big. Their faces change, or they force themselves to look blank. But not you. Why?”
She looked like she wanted to say something but was holding back.
“You can say anything to me, Niki. You won’t hurt my feelings, no matter what it is. I promise.”
“We’re all kind of freaks here, Mr. Dowd. We’re the fashion kids or the art kids. We all feel different here. To me you don’t seem so different.”
“Thanks for telling me that,” he said and turned to go.
“Mr. Dowd. There’s something else.”
“Something else?”
“About the man who gave me the note.”
“What about him?”
“He had style. Flair. He had a brown fedora on, with the front brim turned down, and a camel-hair coat, single-breasted. And he had a nice silk scarf. But none of the clothes were new. They looked…I don’t know. Lived in.”
“If I could show you a photo of him, would you remember him?”
“I would.”
“Thanks again, Niki.”
“I hope you find her. Will you tell me what happens, Mr. Dowd? No matter what?”
“I will. I promise.”
Gulliver left the dorm and headed back into Brooklyn. On the subway, he thought about the man and the note. He wondered if they had anything to do with Bella’s vanishing. He thought about how none of the people Joey Vespucci had hired had bothered talking to Niki. They’d just assumed since Bella had her own place that her “roommate” didn’t matter. It wasn’t always the little things that mattered. But it often was. You had to look at even the stuff that didn’t make sense.