“Who is it?”
I barely recognized the disembodied voice blaring out of the intercom. When I announced myself, I wasn’t sure what Abby muttered, or maybe she simply gasped. The electronic lock clicked open.
I stepped inside a dimly lit landing with soiled tan carpet on the floor and a bank of tarnished brass mailboxes on a wall paneled in Masonite. I remembered Abby’s fear about someone tampering with her mail. It certainly did not appear that one could easily get past the apartment building’s front door without a key. The mailboxes required keys as well. Everything she had said to me in Richmond last fall rang false. By the time I climbed the five flights to her floor, I was out of breath and angry.
Abby was standing in her doorway.
“What are you doing here?”
she whispered, her face ashen.
“You’re the only person I know in this building. So what do you think I’m doing here?”
“You didn’t come to Washington just to see me.”
Her eyes were frightened.
“I was here on business.”
Through her open doorway I could see arctic white furniture, pastel throw pillows, and abstract monotype Gregg Carbo prints, furnishings I recognized from her former house in Richmond. For an instant I was unsettled by images from that terrible day. I envisioned her sister’s decomposing body on the bed upstairs, police and paramedics moving about as Abby sat on a couch, her hands trembling so violently she could barely hold a cigarette. I did not know her then except by reputation, and I had not liked her at all. When her sister was murdered, Abby at least had gotten my sympathy. It wasn’t until later that she had earned my trust.
“I know you won’t believe me,” Abby said in the same hushed tone, “but I was going to come see you next week.”
“I have a phone.”
“I couldn’t,” she pleaded, and we were having this conversation in the hall.
“Are you going to ask me in, Abby?”
She shook her head.
Fear tingled up my spine.
Glancing past her, I asked quietly, “Is someone in there?”
“Let’s walk,” she whispered.
“Abby, for God’s sake . . .”
She stared hard at me and raised a finger to her lips.
I was convinced she was losing her mind. Not knowing what else to do, I waited in the hall as she went inside to get her coat. Then I followed her out of the building, and for the better part of half an hour we walked briskly along Connecticut Avenue, neither of us speaking. She led me into the Mayflower Hotel and found a table in the darkest comer of the bar. Ordering espresso, I leaned back in the leather chair and regarded her tensely across the polished table.
“I know you don’t understand what’s going on,” she began, glancing around. At this early hour in the afternoon, the bar was almost empty.
“Abby! Are you all right?”
Her lower lip trembled. “I couldn’t call you. I can’t even talk to you inside my own fucking apartment! It’s like I told you in Richmond, only a thousand times worse.”
“You need to see someone,” I said very calmly.
“I’m not crazy.”
“You’re an inch away from being completely unglued.”
Taking a deep breath, she met my eyes fiercely. “Kay, I’m being followed. I’m positive my phone is being tapped, and I can’t even be sure there aren’t listening devices planted inside my place – which is why I couldn’t ask you in. There, go ahead. Conclude that I’m paranoid, psychotic, whatever you want to think. But I live in my world and you don’t. I know what I’ve been going through. I know what I know about these cases and what’s been happening ever since I got involved in them.”
“What, exactly, has been happening?”
The waitress returned with our order. After she left, Abby said, “Less than a week after I’d been in Richmond talking to you, my apartment was broken into.”
“You were burglarized?”
“Oh, no.”
Her laugh was hollow. “Not hardly. The person – or persons were much too clever for that. Nothing was stolen.”
I looked quizzically at her.