Free Trip Wire by Charlotte Carter Page B

I knew that much. But sometimes I lost control of who I was replacing her with.
    And now I’d made a clumsy pass at my beloved friend. He’d rejected me and I’d turned ugly. What unspeakable thing would I do next? Chase him around the room like an old lech in a Dagwood cartoon? He was right to put me in my place. Oh, God, I was mortified.
    Owen tried to make me stay, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I hurried down the stairs without a backward glance. I’d never felt more lumbering and unlovely in my whole life.
    I had gone there seeking refuge, a way to stop thinking about the murders and everything else that was weighing on me, even if just for an hour. But apparently there was to be no rest.
    No rest.
    7
    Unhinged by the scene with Owen, I stopped at the coffee shop on Lincoln Avenue and ordered a cheeseburger with onion rings and extra fries. No way to get slinky. But I forgave myself for the orgy of grease. I was ravenous. Before going to see Jack Klaus that morning, I had tried to eat a bowl of Mia’s hand-mixed granola, but it stuck in my throat.
    It had turned bitter cold again, and I’d lost my muffler somewhere. The powdery snow sifting down the back of my collar was like freezing ground glass. I pressed on along the darkened streets. The closer to home I got, the more watchful I became. I was afraid Nat might be waiting to ambush me again. Not only was I checking out the face of every man I passed on the sidewalk, I even began to look with suspicion at the cars moving slowly on the slippery road. Once or twice it seemed that a dark-colored sedan was keeping pace with me. I was being paranoid again. Stupid. Nat didn’t own a car.
    Chicagoans can’t afford to be sissies about frigid weather. The shoppers going in and out of the neighborhood boutiques were bundled in hooded parkas and six-foot-long scarves, going on with their holiday errands despite the weather. I counted that as a blessing—plenty of people about.
    Last year, about fifteen minutes after the release of
Sgt. Pepper,
head shops started springing up on every other corner of the North Side. In this neighborhood, if you run out of rolling papers or feel the urgent need at midnight for penny candy or a copy of the
Bhagavad Gita,
help is never far away.
    The head shop is also a place to pick up the newest Kurt Vonnegut and sign up for a macrobiotic cooking class, buy a tarot deck or a framed photo of Chairman Mao. The geniuses behind the concept had a perfect read on the youth market. They’d hit on a brilliant way to merchandise to the anticonsumer sector.
    The busy shop where Annabeth and Clea worked was called the Glass Bead, so named because the owner was an avid Hermann Hesse reader. But the Glass Bead had expanded way beyond the standard inventory of sandalwood incense and Top rolling papers. It now carried secondhand fur coats, Guatemalan ponchos, coffee beans from Africa, Dylan’s last LP, or for that matter Dylan Thomas’s last, India print bedspreads, straw tote bags from Mexico, hammered copper earrings, turquoise belt buckles. When good little hippies died they didn’t go to heaven, they landed here on Lincoln Avenue.
    A poster of the guys in Buffalo Springfield hung behind the counter where Annabeth, recently promoted to manager, stood sorting sheer cotton blouses into small, medium, and large piles. She was biting down on her bottom lip as she worked, her movements jerky and robotic.
    That wasn’t Buffalo Springfield on the sound system. It was Ravi Shankar. Annabeth seemed to lean into the music. It took a while for her to notice me.
    “Sandy. I didn’t see you.”
    “I know. You look—” I began.
    “Yeah,” she said. “Not so hot. You, too.”
    “I just wanted to get warm for a minute.”
    She laid her delicate fingers on my cheek, and then picked up my hand and began to chafe it. “Wow. You’re frozen solid.”
    Annabeth was a classic slinky. Men had flocked to Mia’s side, attracted by that willowy Mother Earth