don’t know if steamy is the right word. Maybe wicked.”
“Oh, do please tell. I love wicked stories.”
“Another time. Though I do like your faith in the things you believe to be true. It’s very youthful.” He smiled. “I’m slightly less youthful.”
At the diner after they sat and ordered, Lily said, “I remember what I wanted to tell you.”
“Is it something about Amy?”
“Yes. She took two years off between high school and college. Right after high school she went traveling cross country with some friends of hers from Port Jeff. Eventually I think she got tired of the whole thing and came home.”
Spencer became interested in Amy’s sabbatical. He asked about the people she traveled with. Lily told him what she knew which admittedly wasn’t much. Paul might know more, having gone to the same high school.
“What happened to them all? Did they come back to Long Island, like Amy?”
Lily wasn’t sure. The only thing she thought she knew for sure was that one committed suicide, one OD’d, one was killed in a drunk driving accident, smashing their traveling van, and two were still at large. But she wasn’t sure.
Spencer stopped eating his stuffed cabbage.
Lily coughed. “Amy was evasive when she talked about this period in her life. She told me some anecdotes, of Kansas, of New Orleans, but she barely volunteered information other than to tell me a little about her friends, and to caution me against using drugs.” Lily looked into her cold cabbage. “She was like you with Dartmouth. Cagey.”
Spencer tapped on the table to get her attention. “You better hope she wasn’t like me at Dartmouth. But are you telling me that of the six people that went in one beat up van—three of them are dead?”
“If you put it like that.”
“How would you put it?”
“Just life, detective. Car accidents, drugs, suicides. What else kills the young these days?” Lottery tickets?
Spencer quietly studied Lily. “Aren’t you wise. I’ll tell you what else kills young people. Unlawful killing. Homicide. Manslaughter. Killing with depraved indifference to human life. Murder. But two more people missing? Paul must know these kids. They all went to the same high school. Tomorrow you and I will go talk to him.”
“Spencer—I mean Detective O’Malley …” Lily turned red. He smiled. “I don’t know if Paul knows anything. But these kids aren’t the important thing.”
“You don’t think so? Six people in one car meeting with extreme fate? Not important?”
Lily wondered if their birthdays or significant digits were 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1. But why would she wonder that? What did her six numbers have to do with six people she did not know?
She knew Amy. Amy was 24.
Lily was 24, too.
This was a stupid line of thinking. Lily wished Spencer hadn’t led her to it with his talk of fate.
When he went to pay and took his cash out, a stash of lottery tickets fell out of his wallet. She laughed. “Aren’t you an optimist. Are you collecting them?”
“Yes, when I get to twelve, I check them all at once. But what, you just collect the one on your wall?”
Her heart skipped a beat, another. “So is there anything at all that you don’t notice, Detective O’Malley?”
“Obviously, Miss Quinn, or I wouldn’t still be looking for your roommate.”
They met the next afternoon in the downstairs reception area of the precinct to go see Paul at the salon. Spencer had on a suit jacket in which he looked boiling hot, while Lily had practically no clothes on at all, and still had glistening arms and legs and neck. New York City in July. Hot.
“A little warm in that jacket, detective?”
“I am, yes. But who’s going to take me seriously if I wear skimpy shorts and a tank top, Miss Quinn?”
Lily squinted. Another tease from Spencer? She didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that he noticed her summer outfit. He didn’t seem to be the kind that noticed that sort of thing. He noticed everything, as an officer of the law, but not that sort of thing. Yet he said skimpy shorts. When she walked in front of him to cross the street she wondered if he was watching her.
“Your partner doesn’t come with you?”
“On little errands like this? Nah. You’ve seen Detective Harkman. He likes to save himself for the big trips. Most of the day, he’s just a housemouse.”
Lily laughed at the terminology.
At the salon, Paul declared that he knew “nothing about nothin’.” That period of Amy’s life, he told Spencer, was a two-year hole from which Amy emerged intact, as if the two years had never existed. She graduated high school, she disappeared, she went to find her wild and new self, she came back, her wild and new self found, and re-entered life. She enrolled at Hunter, became a waitress at a cocktail bar, transferred to City College where she met Lily, re-established her friendships, and did not talk about the two years on the road.
“I’m not asking about the two years on the road. I’m asking about the people Amy traveled with.”
Paul didn’t know them.
“You and she weren’t friendly in high school?”
“Best friendly.”
Spencer waited.
“We lived on the same block but we didn’t hang out with the same people, all right. She hung out with some real losers, and I didn’t. They weren’t musicians, they weren’t jocks, or nerds, or in choir. I don’t know who they were. I don’t know them, don’t know their names, don’t know what happened to them. Like I said, we didn’t travel in the same circles back then.”
“I see. Could you point them out in your high school yearbook?”
“God! I don’t see what it matters. It was six years ago. What does high school matter now?”
“Could you point them out in your high school yearbook?” repeated Spencer.
“No, I don’t think I could.”
“Did they belong to a club?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Were they political maybe?”
“Maybe. I don’t know about them. Political! They were just a bunch of going-nowhere potheads.”
“Amy too?”
“No, not her! She just got mixed up with the wrong people, all right?”
“Well,”
