We were at Old Towne shortly after noon. The apartment complex where Jill and Elizabeth had lived was unremarkable, a honeycomb of buildings that all looked the same. They were brick with red awnings announcing block numbers over the main entrances; the landscaping was a patchwork of winter-brown grass and narrow margins of flowerbeds covered in woodchips. There were areas for cookouts with swing sets, picnic tables, and grills.
We stopped in the parking lot and stared up at what had been Jill’s balcony. Through wide spaces in the railing two blue-and-whitewebbed chairs rocked gently in the breeze. A chain dangled from a hook in the ceiling, lonely for a potted plant. Elizabeth had lived on the other side of the parking lot. From their respective residences the two friends would have been able to check on each other.
They could watch lights turn on and off, know when the other got up and went to bed, when one was home or not.
For a moment, Abby and I shared a depressed silence.
Then she said, “They were more than friends, weren’t they, Kay?”
“To answer that would be hearsay.”
She smiled a little. “To tell you the truth, I wondered about it when I was working on the stories. It crossed my mind, at any rate. But no one ever suggested it or even hinted.”
She paused, staring out. “I think I know what they felt like.”
I looked at her.
“It must have been the way I felt with Cliff. Sneaking, hiding, spending half your energy worrying about what people think, fearing they somehow suspect.”
“The irony is,” I said, putting the car in gear, “that people don’t really give a damn. They’re too preoccupied with themselves.”
“I wonder if Jill and Elizabeth would ever have figured that out.”
“If their love was greater than their fear, they would have figured it out eventually.”
“Where are we going, by the way?”
She looked out her window at the roadside streaming past.
“Just cruising,” I said. “In the general direction of downtown. ” I had never given her an itinerary. All I had said was that I wanted to “look around.”
“You’re looking for that damn car, aren’t you?”
“It can’t hurt to look.”
“And just what are you going to do if you find it, Kay?., “Write the plate number down, see who it comes back to this time.”
“Well” – she started to laugh – “if you find a 1990 charcoal Lincoln Mark Seven with a Colonial Williamsburg sticker on the rear bumper, I’ll pay you a hundred dollars.”
“Better get your checkbook out. If it’s here, I’m going to find it.”
And I did, not half an hour later, by following the age-old rule of how you find something lost. I retraced my steps. When I returned to Merchant’s Square the car was sitting there big as life in the parking lot, not far from where we had spotted it the first time when its driver had stopped to ask directions.
“Jesus Christ,” Abby whispered. “I don’t believe it.”
The car was unoccupied, sunshine glinting off the glass. It looked as if it had just been washed and waxed.
There was a parking sticker on the left side of the rear bumper, the plate number ITU-144. Abby wrote it down.
“This is too easy, Kay. It can’t be right.”
“We don’t know that it’s the same car.”
I was being scientific now. “It looks the same, but we can’t be sure.”
I parked some twenty spaces away, tucking my Mercedes between a station wagon and a Pontiac, and sat behind the wheel scanning the storefronts. A gift shop, a picture-framing shop, a restaurant. Between a tobacco shop and a bakery was a bookstore, small, inconspicuous, books displayed in the window. A wooden sign hung over the door, with the name “The Dealer’s Room” painted on it in Colonial-style calligraphy.
“Crossword puzzles,” I said under my breath, and a chill ran up my spine.
“What?”
Abby was still watching the Lincoln.
“Jill and Elizabeth liked crossword puzzles. They often went out to breakfast on Sunday mornings and picked up the New York Times. ” I was opening my door.