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she tried again.
    Nothing.
    “You’re going to wear the battery down,” he said. “Maybe it’s flooded. Leave it alone for a few minutes and try it again, it might turn over. Sometimes that happens.”
    Mary Ellen had the window down. She was still sitting in her car. He was standing by her window, leaning down. At some point (Mary Ellen couldn’t recall exactly when) the man left her, got into his car, and pulled up alongside. Their cars faced opposite directions, but they were parked side by side to each other. He, too, sat in his car with the window rolled down. Waiting for the carburetor to flush itself out and dry up, so she could try to restart her car, they talked some more about how she would get on the highway. The man wanted to be sure she knew where she was going.
    After waiting for what was about ten minutes, she tried to start her car again. Turning the key and allowing the ignition to crank and crank, the engine finally fired. But it was bumpy, sputtering and backfiring. She was nervous about driving it home.
    “It stalled on the way over here,” Mary Ellen yelled out her window as the engine groaned and hiccupped.
    “I can show you how to get on the highway if you follow me,” the man yelled back. “Maybe I ought to follow you after that, because your car doesn’t sound right.”
    “That would be nice,” Mary Ellen said to the man. “Thank you.”
    Mary Ellen followed the man onto the highway and then pulled ahead of him so she could show him the way to her apartment.
    II
     
    Inside about twenty minutes, Mary Ellen pulled up in front of her apartment and parked her car on the street in front of the lawn.
    The man parked directly behind her.
    Before Mary Ellen could even get out of her car, the man was, as she later put it, “right up by my car door.” He had startled her. As she opened the door, he said, “I didn’t realize it was so far. I have to use the bathroom.”
    She didn’t see the harm. He had helped her. He had demonstrated his thoughtfulness by following her home. The least she could do was allow him to use her bathroom.
    “Sure, let me open the door.”

15
     
    I
     
    Mary Ellen Renard had lived in fear for so many years after she left her first husband that she had become blind to its most outward signs. In some ways, she was an absolute whiz when it pertained to certain things. Her job was to transcribe doctors’ notes. No one else could understand the Asian and other foreign language–speaking doctors who spoke with broken-English accents. But Mary Ellen picked it up with ease.
    Where it pertained to judging males and their intentions, however, Mary Ellen later admitted that she was a bit naïve. She was cautious, but maybe just a bit inexperienced and trustworthy. It was 1987. What woman didn’t watch the news? What woman didn’t know that it wasn’t such a smart move to invite a man you had just met into the privacy of your home? For all she knew, this man had taken her gratitude as a open sign for a nightcap and some good lovin’.
    Still, if there was one attribute that separated Mary Ellen from most, it was that she gave people the benefit of the doubt. She wanted to believe in people.
    II
     
    After Mary Ellen unlocked the dead bolt and let him into the hallway leading up to her apartment, she turned around and, with her key, locked the dead bolt to the entrance door behind her, per her meddlesome landlady’s orders. It was a safe bet, in fact, the nosey old woman was on the opposite side of her door as Mary Ellen and her friend were in the hallway, peering through the peephole, watching them.
    A moment later, Mary Ellen and her new friend walked up the stairs to her apartment; within a moment, they were inside. “The bathroom,” Mary Ellen said, putting her pocketbook down on the counter in the kitchen and pointing to the hallway just beyond where they were standing in the living room, “is right down there.”
    “Thanks,” he said, looking around, adding,