Free Search Party by Valerie Trueblood Page A

name appeared. At that point the camera lunged as though it had to swing across miles of the world, and without any warning at all a woman filled the screen. She was putting on lipstick in a car mirror. Nervous. A nicetwo-piece outfit with black frog buttons up to the little flat lapels, and a tight skirt.
    She was unusually pretty, with a hairdo that gave Abby a stab of regret that time could not be reversed so that her own blonde could have lain on her shoulders in just that silken way when she bent her head getting out of a car. It had been pretty hair all right, but not like that, not perfect. When the girl drew her legs out of the car she had on the wartime nylon stockings with seams, and ankle-strap shoes. A man held the door for her, followed her up a flight of stairs and unlocked an apartment, carrying sheet music under his arm.
    Abby sank back in her seat. Bowen. This was not any part of the experience and it would have been the considerate thing to let her know it was going to be in the movie.
    She would not have spelled out the details to Jake, she felt sure. In fact she could remember Jake saying the later years did not concern him.
    Bowen Gray. As soon as ever they got behind a closed door they would fall kissing onto the bed and kissing get back up to pull their clothes off. And Abby was well aware that movies felt free to show that, all the way to the clear indication of just where a body sank itself in another.
    But as it turned out nothing happened, it was just a brief scene, puzzlingly there for a minute or two and then over when the last of the opening credits faded from the screen. Abby was amazed, when the scene was over, at how much could happen or seem to happen in that amount of time, with a woman doing nothing but strolling around a man’s room, wearing only his half-unbuttoned shirt and touching the things he had, with a cigarette in her fingers.
    The girl glanced over her shoulder at the man, who lay on a Murphy bed watching her with narrowed, critical eyes. Against one wall of the room was a piano. That was what appealed to me, Abby thought. I always liked somebody who could sit down and play the piano. Piles of music on the rack and the bench, and along another wall a phonograph cabinet and an entire bookcaseof records. The girl went over and pulled out records, pretending they impressed her, while the ash from her cigarette dropped on them.
    She held on to her arms, the ash dusting her own skin while her thumbnail flicked the cigarette. She had on a dark nail polish and heavy lipstick, garish in black and white. But she didn’t look hard; she looked too young to be smoking and to be engaging in an affair like this one, full of accusation and disrespect. You wouldn’t have to know a thing about it to know that was what it was. A stupid girl. Of course Jake would go to some trouble to make exactly this kind of an impression on you; that was the business he was in.
    Abby looked over at Darla, who was watching the screen exactly the way she watched Another World in the mirror while she was coloring your hair, with her lips pursed and her eyebrows pulled together.
    The woman leaned on the windowsill, with an expression on her face that made it clear she was just barely keeping herself in hand. She had it in her to do something unexpected and possibly awful. Her dark lips were moving but the music drowned out her words, and the man was not listening anyway. The camera came close and the angle made her whole face slope back from the mouth opening for the cigarette.
    Again there was a tree outside the window and as the branches tossed, the girl, propped on her elbows, stared and stared at them. She had stopped talking and the cigarette burned down in her fingers, and you could follow the pretty line of her back and neck to the eyes fixed on a tree.
    What was coming? Jake couldn’t have the girl jump out the high window because she, Abby, was alive, she was here in the theater.
    Jake had