Gone for Good by David Bell

missing, then you probably don’t want to bother your insurance company with it.’
    ‘I don’t have renter’s insurance,’ I said.
    ‘Then you should probably have your landlord get a locksmith over here,’ he said. ‘And have them put in a dead
bolt this time. That lock you had was pretty flimsy. Especially if you’re living here alone.’
    ‘There’s something else,’ I said.
    Both officers turned to listen to me.
    ‘My mother died – she was murdered this past weekend.’
    I’d managed to say it out loud. Murdered. My mother. All in the same sentence to complete strangers.
    Recognition crossed their faces. They must have heard about it. I was sure everybody in town knew.
    ‘Do you think the two could be related?’ I asked. ‘Someone kills my mother in her home, and then someone breaks into my apartment this way.’
    The two officers nodded sympathetically. They seemed to be taking my concerns seriously and giving them their full weight. But I don’t think they bought into it.
    ‘I understand this is disturbing,’ one of them said. ‘Especially in light of such a tragedy. But these meth heads break into apartments all the time. We’ve had a little rash of them around the edges of campus lately. It happens. I don’t think it was directed at you.’
    The other one said, ‘They were clearly just looking for something to sell to buy drugs.’
    I looked around too. I agreed with them about one thing: whoever that man was, he was definitely looking for something.

18
    Since I didn’t have a lock and not even much of a front door, and since someone seemed to think my home was a ripe hunting ground for whatever they were looking for – drugs or something else I couldn’t even imagine – I needed someplace to sleep. A call to Dan would provide the easiest solution. I knew he’d be only too happy to open his door – and his bed – to me. But easy didn’t always mean simple. And I worried about leading him on too much, making his life as well as mine more complicated.
    So I called Paul and asked if I could spend the night in his spare bedroom. He readily agreed, and it was only when I showed up on his doorstep and saw him again, still looking tired and hangdog, that I wished I hadn’t bothered him. The stress of my mother’s death hung from him like heavy chains. I felt as if I’d just added a couple more links.
    But I felt safe in his house. I locked the bedroom door when I went to bed and woke up every hour on the hour thinking someone was smashing the window to pieces and coming into the house after me. And once I woke up because I heard someone yelling from the other room. It was Paul, in the grip of some nightmare. I jumped up and went to his bedroom door, knocking lightly. When I called his name, he stopped yelling, but didn’t say anything else.
    I
stood there in the darkness, feeling very much like a lost and scared child. Two hours passed before I was able to fall back asleep.
    Paul, the perpetual early riser, sat at the breakfast table when I walked into the kitchen the next morning. He looked showered and shaved, and some of the colour and vitality seemed to have returned to his cheeks. He smiled when he saw me and pointed to fresh bagels and a dish of fruit.
    ‘I have cereal and oatmeal if you want it,’ he said. ‘And there’s coffee made.’
    ‘Thank you.’
    The bagel and coffee brought me back to life. I needed it. My eyes were raw and aching from a lack of sound sleep. My landlord was supposed to have the new lock – a dead bolt – installed early in the day. I hoped so, so I could take a nap later – if I could manage to sleep in my apartment again.
    ‘Sleep okay?’ Paul asked, although I suspected he knew the answer.
    ‘Could have been worse,’ I said. ‘How about you?’
    ‘Not too bad,’ he said.
    I told him about his nightmare, and how I’d gone to his door and knocked until he stopped yelling. He listened to my story, his smile turning wry.
    When I was