and Thursday night. But hey, some poor, desperate soul will find me in the end. That’s the thought I can cling to. And then you get into all the drama of having to be nice to people … who, me?”
“Lily …” he said soothingly, reaching over to touch her hand.
“I admit I’m a little bit stuck. But what about you, detective?”
“What about me? I’m not the point. I have a grown-up life. I’m not twenty-four. I haven’t won eighteen million dollars.”
And Lily wanted to say that she didn’t feel like she was twenty-four either.
49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1.
“Is it because of her that you haven’t claimed it?”
“Not really.” She didn’t want to look into his face.
“Why then?” he asked. “It goes against human nature. It goes against everything I understand about human beings and I make my living off my gut feelings.”
Lily couldn’t tell him that at the moment she was having some small spiritual difficulties, and she refused to muddle further her already muddled free choices by the temptation of an unsought—and unwanted—miracle. She did not know what kind of life she was supposed to, or even wanted to live but claiming the lottery would remove the choice from her, and even though she was wallowing and foundering and maybe even a little drowning, she didn’t want her Grandma-given, God-given freedoms trampled on in this way. An enslaved heart could not choose wisely—or unwisely. So even though these days she was mostly sleeping—she still wanted to reserve her rights for the just in case.
That is what she was thinking, but to Spencer what she was saying with a careless shrug, was, “I don’t know what to tell you. I just didn’t, that’s all.”
“Why would you not collect your money?”
Lily said nothing.
“Answer me, why?” He raised his voice.
Lily touched the cup of coffee. It was now cold. She motioned the waitress for another cup. But Spencer was still waiting for an answer. “Why are you yelling at me?” she said quietly.
“I want you to give me an explanation I can understand.”
“Detective O’Malley,” said Lily, “no matter how much you want it to, the lottery ticket is not going to figure into Amy’s disappearance.”
Undrunk coffee, uneaten soup, Odessa, August, numb legs, humid heat, noise, feebleness.
And Spencer leaned across the table, and said, “I’m just trying to talk to you, and you’re completely missing my point. Do something besides work and fret. Claim your money, move to another city, give it to the downtrodden, pour it into your brother’s senatorial campaign—anything—” He broke off suddenly, stopped talking, stared at her.
Lily didn’t know how she got up every morning. She had no idea how she was going to make good on her words to Andrew back in spring, when she said she would help him with his campaign.
Spencer was still considering her intently, his mouth mulling.
“What’s the matter?” she said, so tired.
He blinked, came out of it. “Nothing. I have to go. Get back to the precinct ASAP.” Standing up and taking out two twenties, he threw them on the table. “I thought we were a little bit friendly,” he said coldly, “could talk about things.” He walked out, leaving Lily alone at the diner.
The next morning, Friday, August 13, Lily was still asleep when the phone rang. She didn’t pick it up. It was Detective Harkman. He called again five minutes later. She didn’t pick it up.
Half an hour later, her door bell rang. That was just unfair. Through the intercom, Harkman’s voice sounded, “Miss Quinn, can we talk to you a moment?”
Unbelievable. She asked him to wait downstairs, while she quickly (molasses slow) got washed and dressed.
Outside, Spencer and Harkman were both waiting for her. Spencer didn’t look her way. Harkman said they needed to talk to her at the precinct. They drove her back in their patrol car. She sat in the back like a perp.
Back in room Interrogation #1, she was across the table, but from Harkman this time. Spencer stood in back of her with his arms crossed. She didn’t understand what was going on. Spencer was silent and cold.
“Miss Quinn,” Harkman said brusquely, his little eyes beading into her. “Something Detective O’Malley and I wanted to talk to you about, something we needed to ask you. Just a couple of questions really about a tiny inconsistency.”
Spencer said nothing. Lily wondered why he was letting Harkman question her, as if he were deliberately removing any personal connection between them, as if he were saying to her, fine, you treat me like I’m nobody, I’m going to treat you the same way—like you’re nobody. She felt a pang of guilt. Harkman was asking her something, but she was so flushed with remorse, she didn’t hear.
“Miss Quinn!”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Did you say you worked on your brother’s reelection campaign last year?”
“Yes.” She frowned.
“Did you tell Detective O’Malley that you and your friend Amy both worked on his campaign?”
“Yes, I probably mentioned that. We helped at the Port Jeff office. We got a college credit for it, for our political science course. Why?”
Harkman and Spencer exchanged glances. “In my notes,” and Harkman leafed through some papers, “in my work on the background of this case, I spent many hours calling the numbers on your phone statements. One of the numbers was your brother’s congressional office in Washington.”
“So? I call him there all the time.”
“Yes, yes. It took him a while to call me back; it says here in my report that I had to call him three or four more times before he would speak to me.”
“He’s always like that. I haven’t spoken to him in months.”
“Our conversation was very short. I asked if he frequently got phone calls from your apartment, and he said, once or twice a month, you would call him, and the phone records do confirm that, as well as his phone calls back to your apartment. Sporadically regular, I would say, lasting for twenty to thirty minutes.”
“Yes.”
“We had a very short chat and hung up, but not before I asked him if he knew Amy McFadden, and do you know what your brother said?”
Why did Lily’s heart start to beat so fast? What could he have said?
“He said, Miss Quinn, that he could not recall.”
In a voice that was not hers, Lily said, “Could not recall what?”
“Amy McFadden.”
They
