Out Cold by William G. Tapply Page B

“I’ll get a cab. Just be there when I get home, please. You and Henry.”
    â€œDumb?”
    â€œSweet,” she said. “But dumb.”
    After I hung up with Evie, I lay there for quite a while watching the muted television. I pictured Evie, sitting in some bar surrounded by men in white shirts and black suits and dark blue neckties, Evie laughing and drinking Margaritas, the men short-haired and smooth-faced, not smiling, sipping Diet Dr Pepper, watching her out of hooded eyes.
    She’d been gone for nearly a week. I’d almost gotten used to living alone again.
    Henry was pressing hard against my hip. He grumbled and twitched when he slept. I reached down and scratched his forehead. I didn’t think I could get used to living without a dog.
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    I spent Saturday morning tidying up our house. We have a cleaning lady who comes in every other week. Her name is Sammie. She takes the T over from Dorchester on alternate Tuesdays. She has her own key. Usually Evie and I are at work when she comes. We leave her a check for eighty dollars, made out to cash, on the kitchen counter. When we get home, the check is gone. That’s how we know she’s been there.
    Sammie vacuums the rugs and washes the floors and cleans the toilets, and she seems to do a decent job of it, although neither Evie nor I is the sort of person who notices a little dust or grime—or its absence. When Sammie unplugs something so she can plug in her vacuum cleaner, she never remembers to plug it back in when she’s done. So when we go to turn on a light or toast a bagel, it doesn’t work. That’s another way we know for sure that Sammie’s been there.
    We told her when we hired her that we didn’t want her moving anything, organizing anything, putting anything away, or throwing anything out. Evie, for example, hoards catalogs. I save old fly-fishing magazines. Any sensible cleaning lady would throw away last year’s Crate and Barrel catalog or some 1998 issue of American Angler . We didn’t trust Sammie’s judgment. We were worried that she’d be sensible.
    On the day Sammie’s due to appear, Evie suddenly becomes a whirlwind of housecleaning energy. Gotta get the place tidied up. Can’t have the cleaning lady go back to Dorchester and tell her friends that the white folks in the Beacon Hill townhouse are messy and sloppy and tolerant of filth, even though, basically, we are.
    That, I keep telling Evie, is why we need a cleaning lady.
    I wasn’t cleaning up for Sammie on this Saturday. It was for Evie. She’d be home tomorrow, and I’d been living like a bachelor. So I collected six days of newspapers from the coffee table and the bathroom and the floor beside the bed and piled them in their special box in the storage room behind the kitchen. I loaded the dishwasher with coffee mugs and frying pans and cereal bowls. I changed the sheets on the bed and the towels in the bathroom. I ran a load of laundry.
    While I was getting the house ready for Evie’s return, my mind kept swirling with thoughts about the dead girl in my backyard, bled out and frozen, and Sunshine, dead behind a Dumpster in Chinatown, her throat ripped out by a broken bottle. I was wishing that somebody would call me and tell me they’d figured it all out.
    I thought about the street girl, Misty, which I doubted was her real name, seeing my dead girl throwing up on the sidewalk the same night she came into in my backyard. That reminded me of the panel truck with the New Hampshire plates. Misty said the guy behind the wheel was looking for a young blonde. Most likely he was just another predator, hung up on young blond girls.
    But it was possible that he was looking specifically for my dead girl. Maybe he knew her. Maybe he was her father. Or maybe he was her high-school chemistry teacher, or her minister, or her soccer coach, or her uncle. Maybe he was the man who got her pregnant. Maybe