Read Second Chance for Free Online Page A

her the courtesy of treating her as an adult. But it seemed
heartless to me when she was so obviously not fully an adult. Even
Professor Heldman seemed irresponsible, knowing as he did that
Kirsten was close to suicide and still letting her walk off to her
self-pronounced doom. Maybe that was the way enlightened people
treated each other in academia.
    It was past nine when the cabbie dropped me off at
the brownstone on 54th. No light was on in the second-floor apartment
windows, and no one answered the entry buzzer. I fished through my
pocket, found the keys that Pearson had given me, and let myself into
the front hall. The hallway was dark, and the cat piss smell was
overwhelming. I fumbled up the staircase to the apartment, unlocked
the door, and went in.
    A sliver of moonlit sky hung in the darkness like a
hallucination. It took me a second to realize that it was being
reflected off the mirror in Marnee Thompson's bedroom. I
found the desk light and clicked it on.
    The boxed manuscript was the first thing I saw. The
box had been opened and the manuscript removed. At first I thought
that Marnee Thompson must have taken it out to read. But on further
thought I couldn't see Marnee tampering with Kirsten's things—not
with her fierce sense of propriety. Which meant one of two things.
Either someone else had broken in and stolen the manuscript. Or
Kirsty Pearson herself had come back for it. I liked the idea of
Kirsty taking it, for several reasons.
    One, the apartment lock hadn't been tampered with, so
whoever had removed it had had a key to the room. Two, Kirsty hadn't
finished the book yet. According to Art Heldman she was waiting for
real life to supply her with an ending. Maybe she'd found that ending
over the past four days.
    There was a third reason why I liked the idea. If
Kirsty had taken the manuscript, it meant she was still alive. And I
wanted her to stay alive until I could find her. I went down the hall
to Kirsty's bedroom, flipped on the light, and went through the
trashy room again—carefully this time—looking for any other sign
that Kirsty might have returned to the apartment. But nothing else
had been moved or taken—the clothes were still disarrayed, the
books made their tipsy towers, the birth control pills were hidden in
the underwear drawer, the picture of Phil Pearson lay facedown in the
panties.
    I hadn't examined the loose papers scattered on her
desk the first time I'd searched the room. This time I read each one
through. They were fragments of prose, mostly journal entries that
made little sense to me and one that made too much sense, a scrap cut
from The New York Times Magazine and pasted to a blank page:
    Suicide was a crime—ironically, a capital crime—in
most Western nations well into the nineteenth century. In England,
failed suicides were frequently nursed back to health in order to be
hanged.
    There was a fragment of a prose poem, copied out
several times. Presumably one of her own:
Closing windows at dawn
Against
the heat of the day,
He is suddenly lost
among bulky
Colorless furnishings
The windows stick
in
swollen tracks;
the blinds will not close
under thin sheets
his
feet search out her legs
his hands . . .
    And that was all, as if she'd stopped those hands
with her own. I put the paper down and thought about Jay Stein—about
paying him another visit—when the phone in the living room rang. I
went back down the hall and picked it up. It was Brandt Scheuster,
returning my call.
    "I've got a missing person, Brandt," I told
him. "A Cincinnati girl, going to school up here, who dropped
out of sight about four days ago. She's unstable, possibly suicidal.
I need you to check with the cops—see if she's been picked up or if
they've got her in a morgue. You could canvass hospital emergency
rooms and psych wards, too."
    I gave him Kirsty's name and physical description.
    "I'll see what I can do," Brandt said.
"Does she have a car?"
    "A yellow VW Bug. I don't know the plates