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about it.
    She didn’t. As she got up to answer the telephone, she waved a hand toward the hallway. “The last bedroom,” she said, and disappeared into the kitchen.
    “I’d call that permission,” Frank said in a low voice. “I’ll stay here.”

     

    He knew it was probably unnecessary, but Bill pulled on a pair of plastic gloves as he went into the boy’s bedroom. It was remarkably tidy for a teenager’s room: the bed was made and there were no dirty clothes littering the floor. The dresser, television, and video game console were free of dust and the goo that he knew generally went along with having kids. He suspected that Mrs. Catlett ran a pretty tight ship.
    With expert speed he pawed through the boy’s clothes-filled drawers and found nothing unusual but a plastic Baggie filled with condoms ( Extra Ribbing for Extra, Wild Pleasure! ) and, in a drawer’s corner, a few loose pot seeds that were so old they’d lost their scent.
    There were pictures in this room, too. These were unframed, taped to the mirror or stuck on the bulletin board: more shots of the car; a snapshot of the boy, younger, with a famous astronaut (space camp, maybe?); and several of pretty girls smiling shyly for the camera. Maybe he was an okay kid, after all.
    On the way out of the room he noticed the Buyer’s Mart bag hanging on the back of the door. Inside were five or six boxes of cold medicine, the liquid nighttime stuff, and several boxes of generic cold tablets. He wondered if the mother had bought them herself or if it had been the boy, hiding things in plain sight.

     

    4

    FRANCIE LET HERSELF into the apartment a few minutes before two o’clock. She had two hours before her shift at the hospital began, but she would have plenty of time to get there. Closing the door softly behind her, she could hear noise from a television in the apartment below. She had come into the building through a side door that opened onto a sheltered sidewalk, so she was certain that she hadn’t been seen.
    She dropped her purse into a chair and sat down on the edge of the couch to slip off her shoes. Stretching her legs out in front of her, she surveyed her feet. The night before, she’d given herself a pedicure, scraping her heels and soles with a pumice stone and slathering them with a rose-scented lotion she’d gotten in a Christmas gift exchange. Then she trimmed her toenails and painted them a delicious, golden apricot color. Even in this uncomfortable place, she preferred bare feet.
    No one had been in the apartment for several days, and it had a stuffy, shut-in feel to it. She went to the window and turned the casement handle to let in some air. With it came the sounds of Middleboro’s afternoon traffic. Only fifteen minutes up the highway from Carystown, Middleboro was less of a town than a suburban accident. From the window, she could see four fast-food restaurants (she’d driven through them all more than once on her way to work), five gas stations, and a single minimall with a grocery store, hair salon, cheap shoe store, and dollar store. The other thing that Middleboro had in abundance was hastily constructed apartment complexes, like the one that held the apartment in which she stood.
    The apartment was ugly. But it hadn’t been her idea to rent the place, and it certainly wasn’t her money. The walls were painted an uninspired yellow, someone’s lame attempt at getting beyond the standard beige of most furnished places, and the cushions of the couch were a badly faded puke green and covered in dark stains that spread over them like amorphous blossoms. The two tables in the room were of some kind of veneered plywood, their grains like no wood she’d ever seen. A single chair and floor lamp with a shade whose shape vaguely resembled an elephant’s head sat in a corner. When she’d first seen the lamp shade, she laughed, thinking it was a joke, but it had lost its bizarre charm for her now. There was nothing funny about the