Diane had been on her way to liking Geoff, because of his strange decency toward her, but when he told her she would have to give that cell phone to the police officer in charge of the investigation, she wondered if that was his way of telling her he regretted his kindness. Couldn’t he see the problem? Couldn’t he understand how a police officer would view her, a killer in possession of a missing woman’s phone?
She had found her way back to this heartbreak home of hers for only one reason, and that was not so she could return directly to jail. Do not pass Go, because you are so pathetic you can’t even make it one time around the block without getting into trouble. Do not collect two hundred dollars, because you are worthless and undeserving of everything, including your measly hope.
Though true and familiar, the thoughts angered her as she sat at her little table in the warm corner of the bakery while customers came in and out, gossiping about the accident and finding excuses to linger. Then she decided that her anger was actually about the prospect that she would have to leave this place sooner than she wanted, while what she needed was directly upstairs. So close.
She wondered when the policeman might come inside. Geoff said he would come in to speak to them again before he left, but it seemed the man had already gone. It was after eight o’clock now, and still she had not worked up her nerve to run.
Would anyone believe her story, that she had seen the phone fall off the scooter and slide toward the street gutter several blocks away from the accident? Would a detective believe that she had picked it up thinking she could give it back? Would he believe that she didn’t even know how to use it?
Of course not.
Diane watched Geoff move back and forth between the kitchen and bakery, filling baskets and slicing loaves of bread. A cute little Mexican grandma ruled the kitchen as if it were her castle. Geoff’s son, a handsome athletic type, worked the register, and the wife Audrey made coffee, still wearing Diane’s bulky clothes.
Diane wondered about the wife, who had done something to the phone after realizing whose it was but then failed to wipe it off. Bright-shiny device like that was a fingerprint database! Her own prints were visible to the naked eye on the edges where she’d so gingerly handled it. Even Diane knew what to do about that. Geoff hadn’t touched the thing, then made the mistake of trusting that she would turn it over to the detective on her own.
When was the last time someone had trusted her?
Audrey had seemed startled by the discovery of the phone, and Geoff seemed to be anticipating a disaster he could not prevent. Whatever catastrophe those two were headed toward, she couldn’t afford to become entangled.
The detective’s failure to appear became a sign to her that she could choose her next steps of her own free will. She’d given him a fair amount of time to show up.
At eight fifteen there were half a dozen customers in the store. When she believed she could leave unnoticed, Diane picked up the phone and used the cotton T-shirt under her sweater to wipe down the edges where she’d handled it. She put her uneaten baguette into her backpack. The tissue liner in her basket was a tiny bit greasy. She shook out the crumbs and wrapped the phone in it, then set the bundle in the pack next to the baguette.
Without the clothes, her burden was light. She left the bakery quickly and slipped into the fog, which was less dense now. The moist air would do what it wished, and though science could explain some of it, no one could control it. She moved away from the scene of the accident. She had planned not even to look at it, but then she thought that ignoring it so totally might be more suspicious than a quick glance.
She looked without seeing. Counted one, two, three, then returned to her straight-ahead march.
Five doors down from the bakery storefront there was an alley access through a parking lot on the other side of the watch repair shop. At least it had been a watch repair shop when she and Donna last used the shortcut. Diane had no idea what it was now and didn’t care enough to look when she passed it. Her breathing and her pace were too fast. She needed to concentrate on measuring both, even if the fog did shield her somewhat from anyone who happened to be looking.
It was longer for her to go this way, but safer, farther away from the accident that the baker’s wife had caused.
Diane passed through the shadowy parking lot and made her way to the back of the buildings, where she emerged into the alley. In the center of the passage, halfway between where she was and the bakery, was a storm drain with a grate on it that had swallowed many of her precious quarters and Super Balls over the years. Once Donna had even crammed her sister’s ice-cream sandwich down the drain, petty revenge for Diane’s failure to return a favorite pair of jeans. A bully had ruined them when he ambushed her with a paint gun.
The grate was plenty airy enough to accept a cell phone that was smaller than a deck of cards.
The risen sun still hadn’t found its way over the tops of the buildings that shared the alley. But the light was gray enough and her memory vivid enough to allow her to proceed.
Her foot left asphalt and landed on metal exactly where she expected. She knelt, lowered her pack, and unzipped it before she realized that the sieve-like grate had been replaced sometime in the past two and a half decades by a solid manhole cover.
Diane swore.
The cover would not come up. Of course it wouldn’t. Not without a hook or a magnet or whatever newfangled thing they used these days to pry metal disks out of the street.
She swore again, and stood, then yelped when a soft weight pressed against her leg. A skinny old cat rubbed its body across her ankles and mewed. Diane shoved it away. “Shoo.”
The tabby’s affection vanished and he marched off, his erect tail snooty.
She had other options. There were plenty of Dumpsters bordering the alley, though some had locked covers or sat behind secure enclosures. But a Dumpster was not the brightest spot to leave evidence while police were still scrutinizing a scene, and she had no idea when trash pickup was.
She hated the idea of carrying the phone with her longer than she already had. She hated the idea of walking any farther with it and risking being seen, stopped, questioned.
When Geoff noticed she was gone, would he send the detective looking for her? Would he give the officer a description? Fat chick, dull red hair, middle-aged, ate all my bread and took off without paying me . . .
An idea came to Diane. A smart idea. She dropped the phone into her backpack and then proceeded down the alley, approaching the rear entrance of the shop adjacent to the bakery. It had something that the bakery did not: a flight of fixed metal stairs that led to its upstairs rooms.
When Diane and Donna were about fourteen, Donna started using that fire escape to sneak out of the apartment when it was necessary for her to be somewhere without their parents’ permission. Their own “balcony” had a rusted ladder that was too noisy for a rebel teen who needed to go undetected, but the gap between balcony to neighboring landing was only about five feet—easy enough for an agile teenager to bridge.
Donna was the agile one. Diane, fifty pounds heavier than her twin sister even then, had tried the route only once and nearly broke her neck. Today, in the gray morning light of neediness, a much older and heavier Diane thought the gap looked smaller than she remembered.
The exterior metal stairs were shaded with an orange hue from years of sitting in moist air. They complained about her weight, and her shoes made clumsy noises on the metal steps. Diane feared she’d be heard before she made it even halfway up.
And yet she reached the landing without anyone shouting at her, demanding to know who she was and what she was doing— the same demands bouncing around in her own head.
The moisture that had accumulated on the railing was more dangerous than her foolish ideas. She wiped it off with the sleeve of her sweater, then centered the backpack between her shoulder blades and climbed up on the skinny piece of metal, first one knee, then one slippery tennis shoe at a time. This would have been impossible without the rain gutter that ran down the side of the building. She held on to the hollow tube for balance and managed to get to her feet.
Her weight was hard to center. She had visions of herself slipping off the banana-peel rail and plummeting, or of managing to jump but slamming into the outside of the other balcony. Five feet was suddenly five miles.
Think about it, girl. You’re five six. All you have to do, really, is tilt.
She envisioned taking a hit to her midsection, which would be unpleasant regardless of her fleshy padding, or to her jaw, which would likely knock her unconscious. She imagined actually making it into the center of the balcony and then cracking her skull open when she toppled into the rail on the opposite side.
She never had been very good at the positive-thinking, motivational stuff.
Diane jumped without slipping but didn’t have enough vertical height to make it to safety inside the other rail. Her knees clipped the outside on her way down, and she felt her toes grab the rim and then pop off as she fell. Eyes closing, head snapping sideways, belly scraping, fingers clawing at air. One elbow hit the side of the building and then her armpits stopped her fall, a jarring emergency brake that brought her teeth down on her tongue. The reverberating noise was ridiculous. She hung there, the pain in her shoulder muscles oozing down her torso and her arms. She smelled the damp metal of the rusty rail. The chill of it stabbed through her clothes in time with her gasping.
Any second now, the spotlight of discovery would cut through the mist and shine on her incompetence.
After a few seconds of frantic jerks, her dangling feet found the balcony’s lip and her quivering legs received enough adrenaline to get her up and over into safety, gracelessly as ever. She fell onto her side, her fleshy cheek imprinted by the metal grid of the platform. The backpack shifted.
She heard a tumbling, and a clatter, and got onto hands and knees in time to see the liner-wrapped phone shoot out between two of the bars, chased by The God of Small Things. Diane grasped for the backpack behind her to keep the money from falling out too.
A Dumpster beneath the balcony received the phone, barely catching it at the front corner beside a flour sack recycled as a trash bag. The noise startled the tabby cat, who was nosing around the bakery’s back door. He made a four-pawed jump to dodge the book, which bounced off the rim of the bin and slapped closed where he’d been standing.
Diane stared, trying to assess what her separation from these two items might mean and whether she needed to get them back. No one knew the book was hers. It didn’t even have her name in it. If the phone were discovered, though, Geoff and Audrey would know that it had been in her possession. The Dumpster outside the bakery was the worst possible place for that to have ended up.
Worst for whom? For the Bofingers, not for her. She was merely an innocent bystander. They were the parties who were truly involved in the mess on the intersection. Should she care about that? On some level, some selfish level, she had to. She needed the Bofingers to be her friends, so she would try to remedy the latest problem she’d created as soon as she could. In the meantime, she’d focus on this window, which led into the room she and Donna had shared as children. It was an old wood window with so much dry rot in the sash that the lock had fallen out of it, yet one more convenience for Donna’s adolescent comings and goings. Their parents had never felt the urgency to replace the lock, considering the window’s location.
The morning traffic rose in volume on the street. She heard conversations and police radios.
Donna lifted her fingers to the screen.
She groaned.
This window never had a screen, this . . . vinyl window . . . these sliding panes . . . with not one but two locks.
God, will you never answer any prayer that I have ever prayed? Will you never make a way for me to undo the things I wish I’d never done? Are you so heartless that you’ll keep sabotaging me every step of the way?
Diane sagged, not expecting God to answer at all, but certainly not to answer in the voice of grinding gears and shifting hydraulics. At the far end of the alley, the lights of a commercial trash truck were jostled as the beast tipped a Dumpster into its upturned mouth, filling the narrow passage with the sounds of bouncing cans and breaking glass.
It wasn’t God, of course. Not really.
Her attention snapped back to the waist-high window. She lifted her foot to the side not covered by the screen. She had enough room to hit the pane square on, and forcefully. She had enough body weight to put some power behind a good kick. She’d spent enough time in prison to know what a good kick was.
The truck would need a minute to arrive. She had only one chance, maybe two, to make this work.
Diane reached into the backpack and transferred the few remaining items from the center compartment into the smaller surrounding pouches. Then she shoved her foot inside the bag and zipped the sides up to her thick leg to prevent it from getting cut. She waited for the truck to arrive beneath her, hoping that the driver would stay put in his cab while the automated arms did their work, oblivious to her.
The truck’s complaints were louder directly under her than they had been down the street, so loud that she considered kicking even before the dump. The Dumpster creaked as it came off the ground. She failed to make up her mind in time for a decision to matter.
When she heard bags starting to slide, she kicked dead center in the pane of glass.
And bounced off.
Trash was raining into the truck. She stole a look downward. The old Dumpster was rusted through the bottom in three spots.
She focused her mind on her heel, instructed it to go through the glass.
Diane kicked again and the pack penetrated. Glass daggers fell into her old bedroom and snagged the backpack as she withdrew her leg. She thrashed a little, losing her balance and falling back against the balcony rail. A few pieces of glass fell to the ground below, shattering.
Two more swift kicks took out most of the shards before the Dumpster was set again to rest. By this time Diane had her leg out of the backpack and her hand inside it. She used the leatherlike reinforced seat of the pack like a glove and swiftly wiped out the remaining glass before the trash truck pulled out of the alley onto Main Street and turned left.
The sour smell of neglect rushed out of the closed-up space, trying to get away.