Free Whispers and Lies by Joy Fielding

she’d been gone by the time everything had settled down. Was it possible she’d helped herself to Caroline’s wallet?
    Why would I think that?
    Surely it was much more logical to assume that Caroline had left her wallet in the cafeteria. “I think you should call downstairs,” I advised, opening and closing drawers, checking each small compartment behind the desk, then peeking into my own purse to make sure nothing was missing.
    “I’ll call the cafeteria,” Caroline agreed grudgingly, “but I know it’s not there. Somebody took it. Somebody took it.”

S IX
    S aturday night, the phone rang just as I was stepping out of the shower. I wrapped one large white towel around my body, threw another one across my shoulders, and padded across my bedroom floor toward the phone, wondering if Alison was calling to cancel our dinner. I lifted the phone to my ear and pushed my wet hair away from my cheek. “Hello?”
    “I’d like to speak to Erica Hollander,” the male voice announced without further preamble.
    It took half a second for the name to register on my brain. “Erica Hollander is no longer my tenant,” I said coolly, my eyes following several wayward trickles of water as they ran down my legs to the ivory carpet. Anxiety simultaneously trickled through my insides.
    “Do you know where I can reach her?” The voice carried traces of a soft Southern twang. I didn’t think I’d heard it before.
    “I’m afraid I have no idea where she is.”
    “When did she leave?”
    I thought back to the last time I’d seen Erica. “It was the end of August.”
    “She didn’t leave a forwarding address?”
    “She didn’t leave a thing, and that includes the two months’ rent she owed me. Who’s calling?”
    The answer to my question was a resounding click in my ear.
    I dropped the receiver into its carriage, then plopped down on my bed, taking a series of long, deep breaths, trying to push unpleasant memories of Erica Hollander out of my head. But she was as stubborn in her absence as she’d been in her presence, and she refused to be so easily dismissed.
    Erica Hollander was young, like Alison, and like Alison, willowy and tall, though not quite as tall, not quite as willowy. Her hair was a luxurious dark brown and hung straight to her shoulders, and she was continually tossing it from side to side, the way you see them do in those annoying television commercials that equate a good shampoo with a good orgasm. But her face, while pretty enough in a certain light, hovered perilously close to plain. Only her nose, a nose that was long and thin and veered suddenly to the left, gave her any character at all. It was her one distinguishing feature. Of course, she hated it. “I’m saving up to have it done,” she’d told me on more than one occasion.
    “Your nose is beautiful,” I’d assured her, ever the mother hen.
    “It’s awful. I’m saving up to have it done.”
    I’d listened to her whine about her nose; I’d listened to her brag about her boyfriend—“Charlie’s so handsome, Charlie’s so smart”—who was spending a year working in Tokyo; I’d listened when she stopped bragging and started whining—“Charlie didn’t call this week, Charlie better watch his step”—and I’d reserved judgment when she got involved with some guy she’d met at Elwood’s, a well-known biker hangout on Atlantic Avenue. I’d even lent her money to buy a used portable computer. All because I thought we were friends. It never occurred to me that she’d skip out in the middle of the night, still owing me for the computer, not to mention several months in back rent.
    Smart, handsome Charlie in Tokyo couldn’t accept that his girlfriend had dumped him as unceremoniously as she’d dumped me and had plagued me with increasingly unpleasant phone calls from Japan, demanding to know her whereabouts. He’d even notified the police, who basically corroborated my story, but even that wasn’t enough to satisfy him.