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College Street. Up past the medical building. That wasn’t there then, she said. Up next to the parkette. Number 102.
    You’re on my walk to work, I said. I took the copy of Helter Skelter back out of my purse and turned it over in my hands. I might just go get a coffee.
    She clipped the helmet to her bike lock.
    You have to thread it through, I said. So that it’s locked on.
    No one is going to steal this helmet, my mother said. She stood back a moment, then slid the key back into the lock and rejigged the helmet anyway.
    I, for one, could eat a blintz, she said. Three, in fact. Sure you’re not coming?
    I’m sure, I said. Sorry.
    It’s not a sorry thing. She gave me a quick salute, then nodded toward the book. Just be kind to yourself. You know why women read that stuff.
    I know, I know. Vicarious living.
    Don’t kid yourself, she said. It’s so we learn how to get away.

CHAPTER 3
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    I need you to compile some stats.
    I’d been sitting in my cubicle at work, filling in the blanks in an article about city zoning issues infringing on existing businesses on St. Clair West. Newbie reporters are like caulking: stuffed into the cracks for the City page, or Lifestyle, or wherever the holes are big enough to be noticed on a daily basis.
    Angie Cavallo was the news editor, this second-generation Italian tough cookie who kind of clawed her way through the glass ceiling. She didn’t so much break through as smash it with her skull. Then she crumpled a beer can on her forehead. Angie wrote the Page Three Opinion column and did more than her fair share of violent-crime reporting. It was also her job to assign me as required.
    She leaned over the cubicle wall. She was eating an apple fritter out of a box and bits of white icing fell off the doughnut and onto my shoe.
    I want to do a feature on women’s safety, she said. When Did Toronto The Good Go Bad? Go down to the archives, get together a dateline of every girl who’s gone missing since ’83. That Keenan girl right through to now, to the girl in Burlington and Kristen French last year.
    Two summers before, a girl had gone missing near Niagara Falls. When she turned up later, it was her chopped-up body they found, in cement blocks in the lake. That’s who Angie meant by the girl in Burlington . Leslie Mahaffy. Kind of her own fault: she’d missed her curfew and gotten locked out of the house. There are remarkablyfew places for a fifteen-year-old to go at three in the morning. She probably sat out on her own curb in the middle of the night. Tough love. The wrong person offered to give her a lift and she said yes.
    This new girl—Kristen French—was from the same area and that always makes everyone nervous. Her tenth-grade school picture was on all the news reports: brown hair, big smile, blue background. It’s hard not to think about Lianne whenever stuff like this happens. Things got all mixed up in my brain, and I started thinking how much Kristen and Lianne really looked alike. I guess any smiling girl looks basically the same, if you think about it.
    Those last two aren’t really the city, I said. More like St. Catherines.
    Still counts, Angie said. She wrapped the doughnut up in a napkin and squeezed hard to compress it back into the little box. She closed up the box and dropped it on the floor. Then she stepped on it.
    So I won’t eat the rest, she said. She looked down at the smashed box for a second and then bent low to pick it up again, letting it play back and forth in her hands in a contemplative way. Also do another list. From, say, 1960 to ’82. Just to show the trend. Maybe we can make a chart or a graph or something.
    That’s a whole lot of time in the basement, I said. The archives were in the bottom of the Free Press building, in a kind of infinite, windowless room. I looked from the smashed doughnut box back to Angie. What did I ever do to you?
    Get started down there, she said. Find something interesting, maybe I can get you better research