Free Disappearing Nightly by Laura Resnick

multidimensional truths of a complex cosmos.”
    I seized his throat and throttled him.
    “Esther, please! No violence!” he wheezed.
    I realized what I was doing. “Oh! Sorry!” I backed off, hands raised in apology. “Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to…What are…?” I felt dizzy and staggered a little.
    “Breathe,” he instructed, “breathe.”
    “Huh? Oh, right.” I inhaled and exhaled a few times. “Max, I don’t understand—”
    “I think it would be best to provide you with a chair and a soothing beverage before we chat about this.”
    “Chat,” I repeated.
    “While I don’t mean this as a criticism, your agitation is attracting some attention to us—even in this neighborhood, where flamboyant behavior is not unknown. And given that we’re dealing with a treacherous problem—”
    “What…what treacherous—?”
    “The disappearing women,” he reminded me gently.
    “Oh, right!” Another wave of dizziness.
    “Keep breathing.”
    “The disappearing…yes.” I’d forgotten about them.
    “So far, widespread panic has been avoided,” Max said, “and it would certainly be best to keep it that way. So we should be discreet in public.”
    “Uh-huh.” I looked around in bewilderment. We were on a street that was quiet by Manhattan standards. It was lined by elegant town houses, most of them from the nineteenth century. “There are trees here,” I said, my shocked mind focusing on something manageable. Ahead of us I saw a church with gardens that looked vaguely familiar. “Is that…um?”
    “St. Luke’s in the Fields,” Max said.
    “St. Luke’s…” I glanced around me, concentrating on facts I could actually assimilate. “We’re still in the West Village.”
    “Yes!” He sounded pleased, as if I were a bright pupil correctly answering a difficult question.
    We had, in fact, come very little distance from the New View Venue, which was barely two blocks away. “This is close to the theater,” I said vaguely.
    “Yes. That’s why I was alerted to, uh…these events by Miss Gee’s, um…unfortunate experience.” He kept looking around warily, as if expecting the street’s few other pedestrians to eavesdrop on us.
    “Huh?”
    “I mean to say…” We overtook two well-dressed men holding hands while walking a bull terrier. They were engaged in an animated debate about investment strategies and they didn’t pay any attention to us. Max lowered his voice. “I live just around this corner. So it was due to the proximity of your musical play that I first noticed the phenomenon that concerns us.” He steered me past the gay couple and into a mews that, even in the dark, looked charming and prosperous.
    “You mean, because Golly’s, er, unfortunate experience occurred so close to you? To your home?”
    “Yes.” Seeing there were no people in this little court, he continued. “An expenditure of power great enough to make someone disappearinvoluntarily could not help but attract my attention when it occurred that close to me. Especially since there is, as near as I can ascertain, no attempt to disguise these disturbances with wards or cloaks.”
    “Why not?” I asked, though I didn’t really understand what he was saying.
    He shrugged. “Arrogance? A need for haste? Ignorance of my presence here? Insufficient power or skill?”
    “Speaking of your presence here—”
    “So I immediately hastened out in search of the source of the disturbance.”
    “And you found us?”
    “Actually,” he admitted, “I saw the police cars parked outside the New View Venue and realized that this was unlikely to be mere coincidence.”
    “So you lurked?”
    “I made discreet inquiries,” he said with dignity. “Avoiding unnecessary contact with the police, of course.”
    “That was wise.” If Lopez had heard Max talking, he might have felt obliged to take him to a psychiatric hospital.
    Max continued. “A young lady with a great deal of facial piercing who was loitering outside to