Free We Are Here by Michael Marshall Page B

something, but it wasn’t so. I’d merely been killing time before pulling the pin out of the grenade.
    Put more simply, Catherine’s stalker was beginning to annoy the hell out of me.
    Rather than take the subway, I’d elected to walk back from Clark’s gallery, which was doubtless good for my heart but took a very long time. I didn’t like the fact that I’d spent the whole way back thinking about Catherine’s stalker. I didn’t like that I was mad at myself for losing the guy when I’d tracked Catherine—and for undertaking that without telling Kristina. Something that was supposed to have been a quick favor had gotten under my skin, and I wanted the situation gone.
    By the time I arrived weary-footed back at our apartment, Kristina had left for work. I turned straight around and went to join her. As we walked home hours later, I filled her in on the discussion with Clark. I could see her wishing she’d been there to take her own reading.
    “You really don’t think he’s the guy?”
    “No.”
    “So … ?”
    “So I don’t know. I guess I should call Catherine, tell her that he’s probably not the man. Probably she should talk to the cops. Log her suspicions, so if the situation ramps up it’s a matter of record.”
    “But you said Bill felt they probably wouldn’t do much.”
    I shrugged. I had said that, and he had said that, and I didn’t know what more there was to add.
    As we turned onto a side street that we customarily used on our journey home, there was a noise from up ahead that sent a chill down my back. It was a sound that said someone was in pain, or needed help, and badly. Half the lights in the street were out and it was impossible to see what might be happening.
    We trotted up until we could tell the noise was coming from someone standing in the middle of the street. It was a woman, not young. She was shrieking, apparently at a brick wall on the other side of the street.
    It was Lydia. Her body was rigid, arms held down hard and straight, as if in face-to-face confrontation with someone. I’d never seen her like this.
    I covered the last yards cautiously, walking in an arc so I came around the front and she got a good chance to realize someone was approaching, and who it was.
    “Lydia?”
    She stopped screaming as if someone had punched a mute button, but maintained the same position, every stringy tendon and underfed muscle taut.
    “Lyds? It’s John.”
    She turned her head and slowly seemed to recognize me. “Is that you?”
    “Yes. It’s John. From the restaurant.”
    “For real?”
    “Yes.” I held my hands up in a way that was supposed to be reassuring. “Was somebody giving you trouble?”
    “It was Frankie,” she said. Her voice was even more of a rasp than usual. “And he was close .”
    She grabbed me with hands that were bony and surprisingly strong. “I tried to catch up to him. But … he ran away from me. He saw it was me, and he ran . He didn’t want to see me.”
    She started to cry, irrevocably, the tears of a child, the worst kind of all: the tears of someone who feels all the hope in the world disappear at once.
    Kristina waited a few yards down the street, sadness in her face. “Lydia,” I said, but I didn’t know where to go afterward. The things it made sense to say—that the person hadn’t really been there, or was some random stoner or thief taking a back route home and who ran because he’d been startled by being chased by an elderly street person—were not explanations she was going to accept.
    Instead I put my arms around her shoulders. She did not smell good and I knew there would be a significant community of small, unwelcome insect life about her clothing, so I made the hug tight but quick.
    “It’s been a while,” I said, stepping back. “Maybe he was just surprised to see you. Or maybe he feels shy or embarrassed that it’s been so long.”
    She gave this some thought. “You think?”
    “I don’t know. But it could be.