Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail by Bobbie Ann Mason

nowadays was perfectly appropriate, she thought.
    She was staying in a rent-free condo. The owner, a lawyer named Clayton Scoville, was white-water rafting on the Zambezi. She had never met him and didn’t know what he looked like. There were no photographs in the place, just undistinguished oil reproductions (a mountain, a waterfall, birds in flight). She wasn’t used to such luxury—Mexican-style tile, curvilinear cabinets, halogen lighting, bottomless carpet, two bathrooms. Red parrots cavorted in the emerald jungle print on the shower curtains. The lawyer used black bath soap, bright green towels. He subscribed to
Outside
and
Time
and
Smart Money.
A closet was crammed with sporting goods, mostly items that didn’t seem to belong here in Atlanta—ice skates, skis, ski clothing, a fur-lined cap with fold-down earflaps. She imagined he was a person who could pick up and leave, a person like her. She had arrived with two suitcases and within hours had bought a secondhand Honda Civic that had been repossessed by a finance company. In the car’s trunk were a pair of baggy-style shorts and a matching loud-pink floral shirt—size ten, too large for Annie—and a tattered copy of
Freaky Deaky.
    Tonight a fund-raising pledge drive on the public television station had delayed the late movie, so Annie turned on the classic-rock radio station she listened to in the mornings. The Rolling Stones were coming to Atlanta later in the month, and the station was sponsoring a contest for free tickets. The D.J.s urged listeners to construct and decorate a box, no larger than seven by four by three, to live in for twenty-four hours, in isolation. The best three boxes would be set up in a corner of the studio. Annie had been hearing Stones music all week, and its raunchy urgency made her feel important things were happening in this city. She liked Atlanta—its clean, busy beauty. She opened the sliding doors to the sundeck and finished her Coke out there. The deck—with a tub of gardenias, a cherry-tomato plant, and a clematis climbing a trellis—opened out into a cozy, fenced yard. It was a mild autumn night, and the lights over at the shopping center silhouetted the feathery palm trees outside the nearby T.G.I. Friday’s. The sound of the radio spilled out like light into the dim parking lot.
    Annie was a sort of undercover agent. She had been hostessing at a Chez Suzanne’s in Texas and had met one of the executives, Andrew Parrell, from the New Orleans corporate headquarters. She had drinks with him a couple of times, and he hired her to seek out irregularities at the chain’s Atlanta restaurant. He even found her this place to stay—Clayton Scoville was an old friend of his. So that the Atlanta management wouldn’t suspect, she had to interview for the job, which she got on the spot. Andrew wanted her just to observe, to find out if anything funny was going on. He suspected stealing. She wrote detailed daily reports on staff morale and telephoned Andrew every two or three days.
    Annie Rhodes, Girl P.I. It sounded like one of the juvenile mysteries she used to read. It had a nice ring to it. And she’d earn more money than before—even more if she got to switch to cocktailing. Andrew wanted her to stay a month or two, and then he would send her to another restaurant. She hadn’t minded leaving Texas, a place she didn’t really know anyway. It was just the place she landed after college. Most of her college friends had spread out, and a few of them were in the Southeast, so she jumped at the chance to come here.
    â€œJust be yourself,” Andrew said reassuringly. “And don’t get personally involved.”
    She was herself, for the most part. The lie was the guy she’d moved here to be near. Andrew said she had to have a cover. So she invented Scott. He was six feet tall, a runner, and he had dark hair with a little kink to it. His work had