Thin Air

I took a tour of the downstairs, looking in closets and cupboards. There was no sign of a purse. If she hadn't taken her purse, it was a good bet she didn't leave on her own. It didn't mean she had left voluntarily. But it was hopeful. Or not. I wasn't exactly sure what I should be hoping for. If she had simply walked out on him without a word, that would be pretty awful. If someone had forced her to leave, that would be pretty awful. Probably better just to find her, and when I did then I'd know.

I took the calendar with me when I left the condo and walked back to my car. There was still snow in some shadowed areas, and ugly mounds of it compacted by salt and sand and pollution squatted where the plows had tossed it in the winter. But there was also bird song and the ground was spongy, and somewhere doubtless a goat-footed balloon man was whistling far and wee. I drove back to my office with the windows down.

He had her dressed in a Southern Belle costume today, like Scarlett O'Hara. He himself was wearing some sort of riverboat gambler getup with a black string tie and ruffled-front shirt. There was some salad and some French bread and a bottle of champagne on the table. He poured her some wine and handed it to her.

"I don't drink anymore, Luis."

"Not even a little champagne?"

"I'm an alcoholic, Luis. I can't drink."

"You drank when we were together before."

"I was relapsing," she said, "in more ways than one."

"What does that mean?"

"It just means I can't drink," she said.

"I could force you," he said.

"I know."

"But I won't."

"Thank you," she said, and hated saying it as soon as it was out.

"There will be more for me," he said.

He drank. She stood silently in her ridiculous dress, thinking that she could use a drink now and how it would help her courage and knowing she was lying to herself as she did it. I won't go back, she said to herself. I won't be that thing again. The monitors were playing the scenes of her captivity and their early romance. This time it played against a background of music by stringed instruments that sounded like the stuff you hear in elevators. What a jerk, she thought.

"Luis, my husband is a cop," she said. "Sooner or later he'll find me. "

"He will not find you," Luis said.

"He will, Luis, and when he does you will be in a shitload of trouble."

Luis seemed almost serene.

"He will not find you," he said.

Chapter 7

Proctor was inland, well north of Boston, near the New Hampshire border, at a bend in the Merrimack River, where a series of falls and rapids had supplied power to the nineteenth-century textile industry, which had created the city. Before the war the city had belonged to the Yankees who ran the mills, and the French-Canadian and Irish immigrants who worked them. The Yankees had never lived there. Most of the mill management lived in company-built suburbs outside of Proctor. Now the name of the city was the only hint of its Yankee begi

I drove into Proctor over a bridge from south of the city, where the dirty water of the Merrimack snarled over the rapids below and churned up a yellowish foam. The mills were still there. Red brick, chain link, imposing, permanent, and largely empty. There were discount clothing outlets in some, and cut-rate furniture stores in others.

Everywhere there was graffiti-ornate, curvilinear, colorful, and defiant, on brick, on city buses, on the plywood with which windows had been boarded, on mail boxes, on billboards, swirling over the many abandoned cars, most of them stripped, some of them burned out, that decayed at the curbside. There were only Latino faces on the streets. Some old men, mostly adolescent boys, clustered on street corners and in doorways, hostile and aimless. The signs on the store fronts were in Spanish. The billboards were Spanish. The only English I saw was a sign that said: "Elect Tim Harrington, Mayor of All the People." I wondered how hard Tim was working for the Hispanic vote.

East along the river the factories thi

The receptionist was a young woman with sadistically teased blonde hair and lime-green sneakers. The rest of her outfit seemed to be a large black bag, which she was wearing like a dress. She had a gold nose ring, and six very small gold rings in her right ear. When I came to her desk she was working on her horoscope and chewing some gum. Both. I smiled at her, about half wattage. Full wattage usually made them rip off their clothes and I didn't want this one to do that. She put down the horoscope magazine and looked up at me and chewed her gum. Both, again. Maybe I'd underestimated her.

"My name is Spenser," I said. "I'd like to talk with the station manager."

"Concerning what?" she said. Her voice sounded like a fan belt slipping.

"I'm a detective," I said. "I'm looking for someone."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm a detective, a sleuth, an investigator."

I took out my wallet and showed her my license. She stared at it blankly. It could have said "Maiden Spoiler" on it for all the difference it made to her.

"Do you have an appointment?"

"Not yet," I said. "What is the manager's name?"

"Mister Antonelli."

"Could you tell Mister Antonelli I'm here, please."

She stared at me and chewed her gum. That was two things. I knew that calling Mister Antonelli on the intercom would be one thing too many. So I waited. I was hoping she'd get through staring in a while. Nothing happened. I pointed at the intercom and smiled encouragingly.

"What was your visit concerning?"

"Lisa St. Claire," I said.

"Lisa isn't in," she said.

"And I want to know why," I said.

"You'd have to ask Mr. Antonelli about that," she said. "I just work here."

"Okay," I said. "Give him a buzz."

She nodded and picked up the phone.

"A gentleman to see you, Mister Antonelli… No, I don't know… he didn't say. He's mad because Lisa isn't here… Yes Sir."

She hung up.

"Mister Antonelli will be out in a moment, sir."

"Thank you for your help."