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By Root 580 0

one of her class and culture, had succumbed to the lure of the ’60s and gone the whole countercultural route—rock band groupie, communard in California, a little drugging, some casual sex—and then the semishame-faced resumption of real life in the form of a B.A. from City College and an M.S. in library science. Her own parents had known nothing of the wilder part of this history, for she was not one of the many of that time who were naughty to get back at the folks; naughtiness for its own sake had been quite sufficient. But she had always felt a bracing Catholic guilt at deceiving them and had resolved, when she came to have children of her own, that intergenerational deception was not going to be part of the deal. She occasionally thought that this was why she had married a cop.

As planned, she presented the nice breakfast, her son shuffled up to the table, sipped some fresh orange juice, took a few forkfuls of French toast, and announced that thanks but he wasn’t really very hungry, at which point Mary Peg banged a teaspoon against a glass in a good imitation of a fire alarm. He jerked and stared.

“Okay, spill it, Buster!” she said, fixing him with her eyes, these being the color of gas flame and, just now, about as hot.

“What?”

“What, he says. You’ve been doing a scene from The Night of the Living Dead for nearly two weeks. You didn’t think I noticed? You’re a wreck.”

“It’s nothing, Ma….”

“It’s something. It’s that girl, what’s-her-name, Carol.”

“Carolyn.” Followed by a great sigh.

“Her. Now, you know I never pry into the personal lives of my children…”

“Ha.”

“Don’t be fresh, Albert!” And in a milder tone, “Seriously, I’m starting to worry about you. You’ve broken up with girls before but you never acted all weird like this.”

“It’s not a breakup, Ma. It’s not…I don’t know what it is. That’s the problem. I mean basically we had one date, very nice, but then she…I guess she sort of vanished.”

Mary Peg sipped coffee and waited, and in a few minutes the whole confused story came out, the convoluted tale of Rolly, and the manuscript, and Bulstrode. Her husband had described any number of interrogations to her, for he was not among the majority of police detectives who thought their spouses too tender to listen to cop stories; nor was she. This was how it was done, she knew, a sympathetic ear, an encouraging word. She was disturbed to learn that her son had abetted what an unsympathetic person might regard as a felony, nor did she like anything of what she heard about Ms. Rolly. But she declined comment; and now her son arrived at the period subsequent to their first date: he had not of course filled in the moister details, but she had the experience and imagination to provide these herself.

“Well, like I said, we had a nice time and I was feeling pretty good. I went to work the next day expecting to find her in the shop, but she wasn’t there. I asked Glaser and he said she’d called and said she had to go out of town for a couple of days. I thought that was a little peculiar, I mean I thought we had something going, that she would’ve called me, but like I said, she was a strange bird. So I was, you know, cool about it. Anyway, the day comes when she’s supposed to come back and no Carolyn. Mr. Glaser calls her—the phone’s disconnected, so now we’re a little freaked and I told him I’d go by after work and see what was up. And when I got to her street there was a big dump truck parked outside and a wrecking crew was all over her building. They were just finishing up for the day, but I could see they had set up one of those chutes that wreckers use to slide debris and stuff down to the Dumpster and it was stuck in her window on the top floor. I talked to the crew chief and he didn’t know anything. He’d gotten a call from the building management that they needed a rush job, the building had to be gutted down to the brick shell and made ready for renovation. I got the name of the management company from him but he wouldn’t let me go into the building. Like I told you, Carolyn had built all this furniture out of pallet