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Rm’ were ‘Yng Prof’l Fem,’ ‘GWM,’ ‘SBF,’ and ‘SBM prof nSmkr.’ Allie took these to mean ‘Young professional female; gay white male; single black female; and single black male professional, nonsmoker.’
    She decided to make the wording of her ad more economical and change it to read “SWF seeks same.”
    Graham took the order of a middle-aged couple who’d just entered the restaurant, then walked over to Allie. For the first time she noticed that he had an oddly bouncy sort of walk, jaunty, with a lot of spring in his knees. A tall Groucho Marx. He used his sawed-off pencil as a pointer. “Refill on the Pepsi?”
    “No, thanks, I’m going in a minute.”
    He tucked the pencil behind his ear, then thumbed through the torn-off order slips stuck into the cover of his note pad. He laid Allie’s check on the table with practiced precision, as if dealing her a card face up. “You can pay the cashier up by the door. See you next time, Allie.”
    “Right.” She watched him bustle away, the busy waiter, showing her he wasn’t the sort to get smarmy and make a pest of himself.
    Allie chewed on the crushed ice in her glass for a while, thinking about how life could change so drastically and unexpectedly. A phone call in the night, and the center of her universe had shifted. A simple phone call, and a relentless momentum had taken hold. Everyone’s fate was so precariously balanced, even if people didn’t seem to know it.
    She paid for her lunch and left a tip, nodding to Graham Knox as she pushed open the door to the street. In the bright sunlight outside the restaurant she stood still for a few minutes, as if trying to decide which direction to take.
    Then she walked back to her apartment and phoned in the ad.
     
Chapter 8
     
    ALLIE’S classified ad appeared in the Wednesday
Times
. Seated in bright sunlight at her kitchen table, steaming coffee cup before her, she read it to make sure it was worded correctly, then found herself scanning the news. The city’s murder rate was up (a bloodless statistic listed along with the birth and divorce rates and per capita income). A woman’s body had been found in her apartment, dismembered and decomposed. Yesterday a man’s body had been discovered hidden in the bushes in Central Park, only a few hundred feet from Fifth Avenue. Someone had struck him in the back of the head with a sharp rock, perhaps during sexual intercourse, and severed his hands. New York was a tumult of souls seeking fulfillment bright and dark, where sanity and madness converged often and sometimes violently. Allie grimaced. A nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to die there.
    The rest of that week her phone rang almost continuously. Most of the people who answered her ad were eliminated almost immediately by the amount of rent, or the apartment’s precise location, or the fact that Allie preferred a nonsmoker without a pet. Or for various personal reasons.
    After the initial winnowing process, five seemed promising enough to interview.
    Allie set up appointments and had each person who arrived fill out the rental application form she’d composed and printed out on her computer. It asked for present and previous addresses. Occupation, salary, reason for wanting to move, approximate work/sleep schedule. Whether friends would be entertained in the apartment and if so how often. Any hobbies or activities that might cause problems.
    Afterward, mulling over the interviews and rental applications, she reflected that no matter how much information you gleaned about someone, you were still taking a chance on any prospective roommate. It figured to be that way. Even people who’d known each other for years and then married, sometimes found out when living together day in, day out that they hadn’t
really
known each other. She felt a cold weight in the pit of her stomach. She hadn’t really known Sam, and she’d lived with him for two months.
    Allie finally settled on Hedra