28

Roz was in the kitchen stoking her fires with peanut butter when I slammed the kitchen door by way of hostile greeting.

She didn’t bother to turn. She held the refrigerator door open, using it for air-conditioning while she fingered peanut butter directly from jar to mouth. I got a good view of her butt, clad in skin-tight black leggings. I busied myself at the sink, which was laden with dirty dishes. I never do the dishes; that’s Roz’s job.

“You’re gonna break those,” she ventured finally when the clattering got too much for her nerves.

“Yeah,” I muttered, “but at least they’ll be clean.”

“Leave it I’ll do ’em.”

“This year?”

“Oooh, bad day, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe I can—”

I turned to face her. She was out of the fridge by now, licking her index finger.

“You can try to explain about Paolina,” I said. “But I doubt if you can. Shit, Roz, you let me spend the whole damn night wondering where she was, worrying—”

“She swore she’d run away if I told anyone. Anyone including you. I figured—”

“You should have figured out a way to tell me.”

“I wanted her to trust me. She needed to trust somebody. She’s all screwed up.”

I shook water off some silverware, shoved it into a drawer without bothering to sort it, and banged the drawer shut.

“Well, where is she?” I demanded.

“I don’t know,” Roz said sheepishly, staring down at the floor. If she looked at the linoleum more often, I thought, she might get inspired to mop it.

“You’re lying,” I said. “She told you not to tell me.”

“Honest, I don’t have a clue,” she maintained. “I’d tell you if I did.”

“Like last night.”

“You want to pick a fight, go ahead, but I don’t know where she is.”

“Do you know when she’ll be back?”

“I don’t even know if. She was gone when I got up.”

“You didn’t even feed her?”

“She was gone, Carlotta. Christ, what do you want me to say?”

“Shit.” I dropped into a chair at the kitchen table.

“What’s going on?” Roz asked.

“Good question.” I ran my hand over the tabletop. It was gritty and sticky. Roz and I were overdue for a housework confrontation. I’m not fussy, but things were getting out of control. Maybe Roz was planning to do a series of acrylics featuring kitchen slime. “She overheard her mom say some nasty things about her. But there’s something else. She’s been cutting school a lot, ever since she got back from Colombia.”

“Drugs?”

The minute you say Colombia, people think drugs. “Hell, no,” I said. “She’s ten years old.”

“Since when did you get naïve?”

“Look, Roz, anything you can tell me—”

“Carlotta, I can’t tell you about the kid. Not won’t, can’t. She didn’t confide. I just figured better here than on the streets. That’s all. But I can tell you something about the other business. That lawyer, the ritzy one from the Cambridge Legal Collective, called with the stuff you wanted, about the apartment building on Westland Avenue. Negative. She hasn’t got any clients who claim to live there. Or on the whole block. And I read up on Hunneman Pillows. It’s closely held, with stock owned in three names: mostly by a James Hunneman, but his wife has a chunk under the name Lydia Canfield, and then there’s some under Blair Jeffries.”

“Canfield,” I repeated, drumming my fingers on the table.

“Yeah,” she said, “sorry I didn’t come up with anything else.”

“If Paolina comes back, keep her here, for chrissake. I don’t care if you tie her up.”

“Where will you be?” Roz started to ask. But by then I had checked the phone book and was slamming the front door.