The Drifter(41)

At the bottom of the long hill, she hung another right at the Steak ’n Shake, where three graveyard-shift employees were forced into the meat freezer at gunpoint by one lunatic last year while his crack buddy emptied the till. That prompted Caroline to announce “I’d kill for a steak burger!” every time they drove by and howl with laughter. It didn’t seem funny anymore. In this section of town, a few miles away from the nearest bar, the streets were entirely empty, and Betsy somehow felt safest riding in the dead center on the double yellow line. The slope of the hill, the arch of the tree branches that grew over it, were all so familiar to Betsy. Ginny and Caroline had been in their apartment in Williamsburg Village for three years, starting their day, every day, to a state-of-the-art CD alarm clock set to play “Superman” by R.E.M. at 7:30 a.m. sharp, the most optimistic song Ginny could find to rouse her for another day. Even though Ginny and Caroline wouldn’t be there, she needed to smell that faint popcorn scent mixed with Caroline’s Quelques Fleurs and feel the musty, deep, chintz sofa that practically grew arms to embrace her. So when she coasted into the parking lot, she ditched the bike between a couple of parked cars under a streetlight, just in case, and jogged toward the building, up the front stairs. With the building’s 1970s-era fake-colonial facade there to greet her like an old friend, she’d nearly forgotten about Weird Bobby and Channing, Mack’s apoplectic freak-out, attacking her in the woods, and Gavin—well, almost Gavin. She just wanted to sleep it off and wake up tomorrow with clearer eyes and start all over again. She would clean up her new apartment. She would buy a dresser at Goodwill and unpack her boxes. She would add a few more lines to her letter to Gainesville. She would start over, again.

Betsy was halfway up the steps when she felt something crunch underfoot, followed by the hissing and snarling of the neighbor’s cat, whose tail she’d apparently stepped on. She fell hard against the stair rail, heart racing with another adrenaline surge. A blur of matted gray fur disappeared into the darkness under the stairwell in a flash. She was still breathing hard from the last leg of her journey on the stolen bike and that hadn’t helped matters.

“It’s just me,” she hissed back, “you big, fat grouch.”

Once she was sure the cat wasn’t coming back for revenge, and that she hadn’t had a hash-fueled heart attack, she fished the key out of her front pocket and put it in the lock.

Betsy sensed that something was off immediately. There was a faint warm glow from the upstairs hallway casting a half circle of dim light on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. It was the light. She was definitely still high, almost certainly still drunk, but she knew that light shouldn’t be on. Caroline would have removed the bulb from the ceiling fixture, her profound hatred for overhead lighting capping the list of her many idiosyncrasies, if she hadn’t been too lazy to borrow a stepladder. You’re high, Bets, she told herself. Don’t freak out on me. Ginny left it on to make it seem like someone was home, and awake, and definitely not into being murdered. Still, her heart thumped against her sternum and she closed the door quietly behind her. She had taken about eight quiet steps down the long hall when she first heard the music, playing faintly, and started to panic in earnest. Standing in the dark, eyes trained on the soft light coming from the top of the stairs, her mind riffled through all of the possible sources of the music: an insomniac next-door neighbor, a party in the adjacent building, a clock radio alarm set for the wrong hour belonging to someone who decided to shack up elsewhere for the night. He’s in the house, the voice in her head told her. She remembered Caroline’s comment in the car. What are the chances? One in fifteen thousand? Then, when she heard what sounded like a footstep on a creaky floorboard, the reliable, slow, crackly groan of wood from the noisy spot at the foot of Ginny’s bed, she was convinced. He’s here. Get out. Get out. Get out. He, whoever he was, the he was in the apartment, waiting for her. Betsy turned so fast to head for the door that she ran into the wooden side chair they kept in the front hall and sent a stack of junk mail scattering to the floor and then fell to the ground on top of it. She scrambled to get to her feet, slipping on mailers and phone bills and delivery menus, and out of the apartment, reaching for the doorknob to help her up. She flung the door open and slammed it behind her, shot down the stairwell, past the parked cars, struggling for breath, too terrified to stop or turn around or find the bike that she’d abandoned just minutes before. She rounded the corner onto 16th Street and nearly lunged headfirst into the hood of an oncoming car, which screeched to a stop. She froze in the headlights, shielding her eyes from the beam, until she heard her name.

“Betsy? What the fuck?” It was Gavin. She hurried to the passenger side, sat hard in the seat, and slammed the door.

“Go! Go, go, Gavin, get out of here, now. I’m serious! We’ve got to go.”





CHAPTER 10


NEW ORLEANS


August 27, 1990

Once Gavin was a couple of blocks away from Williamsburg Village in the parking lot of the Steak ’n Shake, and Betsy calmed down enough to talk, she told him what had happened.

“I don’t know. I can’t know for sure. But I swear to God it felt like someone was in that apartment, Gavin,” she said, sensing his doubt about the details.

“Well, you said that there was a pissed-off cat on the stairs, Betsy. You don’t think that it could have made some of those noises? It’s not unheard of for people to be up listening to music at this hour, either. It could have been coming from a neighbor’s place.”