almost see a lightbulb appearing over her head, like in a cartoon. She reached out and
grasped the cube with one hand. I could never convey the depth of the dread I felt
when she did that, but what could I say? We were New Yorkers in a clean, well-
lighted place. For her part, she’d already laid down the ground rules, and they pretty
firmly excluded the supernatural. The supernatural was out of bounds. Anything hit
there was a do-over.
And there was a light in Paula’s eyes. One that suggested Ms. Yow, Git Down was in
the house, and I know from personal experience that’s a hard voice to resist.
“Give it to me,” she proposed, smiling into my eyes. When she did that I could see—
for the first time, really—that she was sexy as well as pretty.
“Why?” As if I didn’t know.
“Call it my fee for listening to your story.”
“I don’t know if that’s such a good—”
“It is, though,” she said. She was warming to her own inspiration, and when people do
that, they rarely take no for an answer. “It’s a great idea. I’ll make sure this piece of memorabilia at least doesn’t come back to you, wagging its tail behind it. We’ve got a
safe in the apartment.” She made a charming little pantomime gesture of shutting a
safe door, twirling the combination, and then throwing the key back over her shoulder.
“All right,” I said. “It’s my gift to you.” And I felt something that might have been
mean-spirited gladness. Call it the voice of Mr. Yow, You’ll Find Out. Apparently
just getting it off my chest wasn’t enough, after all. She hadn’t believed me, and at
least part of me did want to be believed and resented Paula for not getting what it
wanted. That part knew that letting her take the Lucite cube was an absolutely terrible
idea, but was glad to see her tuck it away in her purse, just the same.
“There,” she said briskly. “Mama say bye-bye, make all gone. Maybe when it doesn’t
come back in a week—or two, I guess it all depends on how stubborn your
subconscious wants to be—you can start giving the rest of the things away.” And her
saying that was her real gift to me that day, although I didn’t know it then.
“Maybe so,” I said, and smiled. Big smile for the new friend. Big smile for pretty Mama. All the time thinking, You’ll find out.
Yow.
She did.
Three nights later, while I was watching Chuck Scarborough explain the city’s latest
transit woes on the six o’clock news, my doorbell rang. Since no one had been
announced, I assumed it was a package, maybe even Rafe with something from
FedEx. I opened the door and there stood Paula Robeson.
This was not the woman with whom I’d had lunch. Call this version of Paula Ms.
Yow, Ain’t That Chemotherapy Nasty. She was wearing a little lipstick but nothing
else in the way of makeup, and her complexion was a sickly shade of yellow-white.
There were dark brownish purple arcs under her eyes. She might have given her hair a
token swipe with the brush before coming down from the fifth floor, but it hadn’t
done much good. It looked like straw and stuck out on either side of her head in a way
that would have been comic-strip funny under other circumstances. She was holding
the Lucite cube up in front of her breasts, allowing me to note that the well-kept nails
on that hand were gone. She’d chewed them away, right down to the quick. And my
first thought, God help me, was yep, she found out.
She held it out to me. “Take it back,” she said.
I did so without a word.
“His name was Roland Abelson,” she said. “Wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“He had red hair.”
“Yes.”
“Not married but paying child support to a woman in Rahway.”
I hadn’t known that—didn’t believe anyone at Light and Bell had known that—but I
nodded again, and not just to keep her rolling. I was sure she was right. “What was
her name, Paula?” Not knowing why I was asking, not yet, just knowing I had to