Free The Book of Illumination by Mary Ann Winkowski

fact that Sylvia’s lock had been picked; there was no sense alarming everyone in the building, when the thief was so obviously disinterested in the baubles and doodads of the average Brookline pad.
    “My bike was stolen,” Sylvia lied to the first person who opened a door, a gloomy-looking man in his sixties. The cooking aroma of an unfamiliar meat—something gray, I intuited, and not normally consumed in the continental United States—drifted into the hall. It was carried on strains of what sounded like Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff.
    “Oh, no!” he said. Was he looking slightly more cheerful? No, he couldn’t be.
    “It’s my own fault—it wasn’t locked,” Sylvia went on. “I thought it would be safe on the landing. I was just wondering if you might have seen anyone. If anyone asked to be buzzed in, or—”
    No, no, he hadn’t seen anyone. He’d been at Symphony Hall all day (turned out he was a cellist) and had only been home for an hour.
    The woman who lived below him had spent most of the day in the bathroom, she overshared enthusiastically, because she was having a colonoscopy in the morning. So no, she hadn’t been outside of her apartment or heard anything unusual. We wished her luck with her procedure and headed down to the first floor.
    Sylvia knew the two guys who lived on the right, married gay men who owned a housewares shop called Chez Nous in the South End. She had been to a couple of their Academy Awards parties, once winning a bottle of Perrier-Jouet for being the only person to predict that Adrien Brody would take home an Oscar for
The Pianist
. I thought they would be fun to meet. They weren’t home.
    Nor was the couple across the hall, a lawyer and her graduate student/high school baseball coach husband, who had just moved in within the past six months. Nor were the occupants of 2A or 3A. Well, we reminded ourselves, it
was
Friday night.
    We hit pay dirt, though, with the woman who lived across the hall from Sylvia. She was a statuesque faux blonde named Carlotta McKay, employed, I later learned, as a writer of technical manuals four days a week. On Fridays, she worked from home, on a screenplay she was writing with her boyfriend, who lived in LA and was trying to break into the film business. If they could sell the screenplay, she was planning to move there.
    Carlotta didn’t know anything about the bike—she had never even noticed it in the hallway—but she had met Sylvia’s new
friend
.
    “Oh!” Sylvia said, a smile frozen on her face. She glanced at me.
    They had run into each other in the hall. Carlotta had hit a wall with her writing, at about two thirty, and she’d decided to walk down to Trader Joe’s to pick up a few things and get some fresh air. As she was locking her own door—
    “What’s his name?” she asked us.
    I jumped in with “John.” Dull, but serviceable.
    “He was just coming out of your place. You guys must have had a late night!”
    “Kind of,” Sylvia said, unconvincingly.
    Carlotta liked older guys, too, she volunteered. In fact, Craig, that was her boyfriend, he was going to be forty-three in April, but she was sworn to secrecy on that, because if it got out, it might work against him when he went up for the younger parts. Which was really unfair, because he really did not look his age at all, on account of all the yoga and internal cleansing.
    “You didn’t tell me he was
older,”
I said teasingly to Sylvia, then turned to Carlotta. “How old would you say he is?”
    Carlotta looked questioningly at Sylvia.
    “Guess!” Sylvia had the presence of mind to respond.
    “Forty-five? Forty-six?”
    Sylvia nodded. “Pretty close.”
    “She’s hardly told me anything,” I confided, girlfriendlike, to the woman I had met thirty seconds ago. “She’s afraid she’ll jinx it. I don’t even know how tall he is.”
    “Six one?” Carlotta squinted, shrugging at Sylvia. “Six two?”
    “Around there,” Sylvia said.
    “Blond?” I asked