Dead to Me by Mary McCoy Page A

man’s face.”
    His voice was gentler than I’d ever heard it before, but there was a coil of steel running through it.
    The man started to make a nasty remark, thought better of it, lurched forward a step or two, regained his balance, and then stumbled off down the street.
    Otto shrugged his thanks. “No need for you to get involved. I had him.”
    Jerry winked at him. “I don’t doubt it.”
    Otto grunted, and went back to his sweeping. “You’re here to see her, I suppose.”
    Jerry nodded. “You seen her lately?”
    Was it my imagination, or did Otto’s face seem to droop as he shook his head?
    “Not for ages. If you see her, you tell her Otto is trying not to have hurt feelings that she doesn’t pay rent in person anymore. You tell her not to be a stranger next time,
okay?”
    Suddenly, Otto noticed me and grinned broadly. “And who is your lovely assistant?”
    “Nobody you ever saw,” Jerry said, touching a finger to the side of his nose.
    Otto returned the gesture as Jerry slipped a five-dollar bill into his palm. “Never saw her in my life.”
    We walked into the alley next to the shop, and Jerry led me up a rickety wooden flight of stairs that seemed to have been tacked onto the wall as an afterthought. The stairs creaked under our
weight, and I held my breath as we ascended to the second, third, and fourth floors. Finally, Jerry opened the landing door and we stepped into a comparably sturdy hallway. Jerry stopped in front
of the next-to-last doorway and opened it with a key he pulled out of his pocket.
    “She’d kill me if she knew I let you see this place,” he said.
    It wasn’t much of a place.
    Most of the floor space was taken up by a twin cot piled high with blankets, and a fiberboard chest of drawers. There was a small, rust-stained sink crammed into a corner beneath a window that
let in an anemic ray of sunlight. The cheeriest things about the room were the two coat hooks on the wall, as though years before some glass-half-full kind of tenant had installed them thinking
that if he had no place for his guests to sit, well, at least he’d have somewhere for them to hang their coats.
    Jerry sat down on the cot and gestured to the room in all its shabby glory.
    “Go ahead,” he said. “Have a look around. See if you can find anything I missed.”
    I pulled open the top dresser drawer and inhaled sharply. It was filled with blouses and sweaters and camisoles, all stacked in neatly folded piles. Annie’s things. I reached out to touch
them, carefully, as though they held some kind of magic, having been chosen by her, touched by her. A lump rose in my throat.
    But then the breath I’d taken registered in my brain, and I knew something wasn’t right. The clothes all smelled of mothballs. My eyes fell on a peach-colored sweater—Annie
loathed the color and never would have worn it. As I burrowed through the clothes, I saw that the nicest pieces were stacked on top. Beneath them were cotton shifts in indiscriminate sizes and
styles, stained slips, blouses with torn sleeves. Clothes that could have been bought cheaply and by the sackful for a quarter or two.
    I got on my hands and knees and peered under the bed. There, I saw a hot plate with a frayed cord, and a stack of paperback novels with the same mothball smell as the clothing in the dressers. I
paged through some of them, but found nothing except mildew in the bindings.
    Jerry was right. There was nothing here, and certainly nothing that had ever belonged to my sister.
    “Annie never lived here,” I said.
    “You’re a quicker study than me,” he said. “But this is the only address she ever gave me. Like I said, she moved around a lot. As far as I can figure, this was the
address she used when she had to give one out. She and Otto had some kind of arrangement—she paid rent on time, and he didn’t ask any questions, like why she never seemed to be
here.”
    “So, there’s just enough here to make someone who