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could barely hear him. But then suddenly my arm was free and I was on my own. I know I stood there for like a minute, idiotically, until I realized I had to be walking. I took very short steps—not even steps really, dragging my feet through the cold sand, arms out in front of me, because I had this image of myself stepping off a cliff. It took, literally, forever. The longest walk of my life. Another plane roared overhead, a rising roaring, a terrible noise, like pulling all the air up with it—and then the sand was different and I felt water washing around my heels. I pushed off the blindfold and I was alone. And I had only walked maybe, thirty feet.” The toes of one foot rubbed the heel of the other as she looked at her ruined stockings. “Why did they take away my shoes in the first place?”
    “To keep you from kicking or running, don’t you think?”
    She reached for the water and swallowed some down, her hand shaking more now. “My first day of kindergarten, I pitched a fit when my mother tried to leave, and Mrs. Webly took away my new patent leather shoes as punishment. And just like that, I stopped crying.” She rubbed at her stained fingers.
    Frawley let her burn off more residual adrenaline, then focused her on the robbery itself. She took him through it with mixed results, returning again and again to the garish black stitches on their masks. Tears pushed to her eyes but did not spill as she recounted Davis Bearns’s beating at the hands of the “angry” bandit. “He had fallen… he was just sagging off the chair… and that one just kept hitting him…”
    “Did you see Mr. Bearns activate the alarm?”
    She reached for her Poland Spring again but held the bottle without openingit, watching water slosh around inside. Car-wreck eyes. Something was up, but he couldn’t tell if it was her account or just trauma bleeding through.
    “No,” she answered softly.
    The foot traffic outside the break-room door had quieted. “Ms. Keesey, are you sure you don’t want to go somewhere and get checked out?”
    “I’m sure. I’m fine.”
    “It was a long ride. And you said yourself, you can’t really account for the entire trip.”
    “I just… spaced. I shut down, that’s all.”
    “It’s available to you now. It couldn’t hurt.”
    Her eyes came up on him, cooler, assertive. “Nothing happened.”
    Frawley nodded. “Okay.”
    “But that’s what everyone’s going to think, isn’t it?”
    He tried to distract her. “Is someone coming here to—”
    “He rubbed his gun against my butt.” She blinked a few times, fighting back tears and exhaustion. “The angry one. While we were standing at the vault. He said some things, told me what he wanted to do to me. That is
all
.”
    Frawley started off shaking his head, shrugging, searching for something to say, then ended up just nodding. “Do you want to tell me what he said?”
    Her smile was fierce and cutting. “Not particularly.”
    “Okay,” said Frawley. “Okay.”
    “Now you’re looking at me like I’m some stupid…”
    “No, no, no.”
    “Like I’d jump in a van with
anybody
.”
    “No. Look—”
    He reached over for his tape recorder. In fact he had nothing to say to her. He only hoped the act of pressing STOP would provide a distraction.
    She sat there breathing deeply, thinking deeply. “When I was walking to the ocean… I thought of nothing. Nothing, no one. But in the van, driving, blindfolded like that—I saw my life. I saw myself as I was, as I am, my life up until this day. Today—it’s my birthday.”
    “I see,” said Frawley.
    “Sounds crazy. Just another day, I know. I don’t know why it matters.” She crossed her arms, her stockinged foot bobbing. “It doesn’t matter.”
    A quick thank-you and a handshake could have ended it there if she weren’t still wearing his coat.
    “Look,” Frawley said. “I’ve seen people—bank customers standing in line to cash their check when a two-time loser comes