The Guest Room(84)

“I bet you did not expect to find courtesan back here,” she murmured.

Awkwardly he rubbed her shoulder blades. He felt simultaneously that it was morally wrong to touch her, and morally imperative that he did.

“No,” he agreed, “I didn’t. I…”

She waited.

“I was afraid something had happened to you.”

“You thought I might be dead.”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

He felt the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. “Nope. Still here.”

“I’m very glad. I was afraid for you.” He wondered if she knew her partner was dead. Sonja. He considered telling her where he had been earlier that day, but then thought better of that idea. In time. Maybe.

“I couldn’t think of anyplace else to go,” she murmured.

“Well, I might have started with the police,” he said, a suggestion born more of paternalism, he hoped, than self-preservation.

Abruptly she pushed him away with her free hand and took a step back. “No. I am not going to jail.”

He wished he could see her eyes behind the sunglasses. Was this an admission that she had shot the Russian in the front hallway?

“They showed me the Rikers Island. They told me about prisons in America,” she went on, her voice a little louder now, a little more frantic. “I know what goes on there. I know what really goes on there.”

“Whoa,” he told her, putting his hands up, palms open. He wasn’t sure who they were, but presumed it was whoever had brought her to America and then, most likely, butchered her friend. “Let’s go inside. Let’s talk, okay? I want to know who you are. Who you really are. I want to know what you need—what I can do.”

“You won’t call police guys?”

He shook his head. “I can’t promise that I never will. But I won’t right this minute.”

“Look…”

“Go on.”

“I’ve come because Sonja might have left something here by accident. Something important. I need it.”

“I’m sure it’s long gone. The police were here for a couple of days. Anything Sonja left is in a police evidence locker somewhere. I mean it. They scoured the downstairs.”

“It was upstairs.”

He thought about this. He recalled what his wife had found in their daughter’s bedroom. “They were less thorough there,” he admitted. “What is it?”

“A phone number. It was hidden in”—and she seemed to grow almost shy when she continued—“a condom wrapper. Sonja went upstairs with a man.”

“I know.” He gazed for a long moment at the street and the houses around them “Okay, let’s go inside. We’ll look. We’ll talk there.”

“You worry about people next door?” she asked.

“Alexandra—and it is, Alexandra, right?”

She gave him a strange half nod that he couldn’t quite decipher.

“Well, Alexandra, the people next door are the least of my problems—and, I would wager, the least of yours.”

…

But the condom wrapper and the slip of paper weren’t there. They weren’t anywhere in the bedding, and they weren’t behind the mattress. Together Richard and Alexandra actually moved the bed, and they searched amid the clothing and books and video game discs that had wound up over time beneath the box spring. And Richard was relieved. He knew if he found the number he was going to give it to the police; he certainly wasn’t going to allow this girl to try and make a run for it with an illegal passport and fake credit cards.

It was only when he was making the bed once more, pressing the sheets under the mattress, that he understood what had happened: Kristin had thrown the bedding away Tuesday night. She hadn’t wanted to wash the sheets or the pillowcase; in her opinion, there was no water in the world hot enough to cleanse them for their little girl after a strange man and an escort had had sex in that bed. And the garbage had been picked up yesterday morning. If the number had ever been in this bedroom, it was long gone.

“I’m sorry,” he said, a white lie that he hoped would help console her.

She was leaning against Melissa’s bookcase. “It was my only hope,” she said, her voice flat. “That was it.”

“No, you’ll be okay,” he said. “You will.” He suggested they go downstairs and have a cup of coffee while he figured out what to do next.

…

They sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee. It was barely two-thirty in the afternoon; he doubted that Kristin and Melissa would be back for at least another couple of hours, which diminished any sense of urgency he might otherwise have been feeling. He could text Kristin to see what they were up to—make sure they were still somewhere in midtown Manhattan—but somehow that felt incriminating. Later, he thought to himself, a text like that could only come back to haunt him. He assumed by the time Kristin returned that either he would have brought the girl to the police station or the two of them would be sitting right here. He certainly wasn’t going to hide the fact that Alexandra had shown up at their house. He wouldn’t; he couldn’t. Still, that conversation was not going to be pretty.

She had taken off her sunglasses and knit cap, and brushed her hair with a white plastic brush she had pulled from her backpack. Now she looked more like the girl who had sat naked upon one of the beds upstairs, and less like the runaway waif who had been waiting for him outside on the stoop.