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Chrissy looks around, just as Trig did before her. She pulls off the keypad’s cover, just as Trig did before her. She reads the Plumber’s Code on the inside of the cover—9721—just as Trig did before her. She pushes the numbers. The light on the keypad turns green, and shehears a clunk as the locking bar releases. She snaps the cover back onto the keypad and goes inside, ready to run if she hears themeep-meep-meepof a burglar alarm. There’s nothing. She closes the door.
Safe! Good God almighty, she’s safe.
She’s glad she didn’t toss the burner down a sewer grate. It’s a flashlight-equipped Nokia Flip. She takes it from the jacket pocket of the pants suit, turns on the light, and shines it around. She’s in a lobby. There are a couple of dust-covered ticket windows on the right and on the left there’s a snackbar denuded of snacks. The smell in here is stronger, and she no longer thinks it’s trash from the fish wagon. That’s a decomposing animal.
Chrissy goes into the rink, phone in one hand, suitcase in the other, shoes gritting on the dusty concrete. The floor, once a-shimmer with ice, is now just cracked concrete crisscrossed with beams that look like railroad ties. For all she knows, that’s what they are. From high above, where the last daylight is still leaking through cracks in the roof, she can hear the soft coo and flutter of pigeons.
There’s something draped across the beams at the center of the rink. She believes it’s the source of that smell, and too big to be a dog. She thinks it could be a person, and as she walks toward it, stepping from one beam to the next, she sees that it is.
Chrissy examines the decaying body and murmurs, “Oh, you poor thing. I’m so sorry.”
She kneels down, although this close, the stench of decay is almost unbearable. It’s a girl. Chrissy can only be sure of that because of the scraggly hair and the nubs of breasts. The fiends and fuckers have mostly been kept out, but there’s no way to keep the rats and insects at bay, and they have picked away at the dead girl’s face until there is little face left; the eyes are empty sockets that stare sightlessly up at the roof with an expression of outraged shock.
There is something in the girl’s right hand. Chrissy spreads the fingers and brings the phone down close. Two words: CORINNA ASHFORD. Probably her name.
“Until tomorrow night, it’s just you and me, Corinna,” Chrissy says. “I hope you don’t mind the company.”
Chrissy stands up and beam-walks back to the snackbar. She feels terribly sorry for the dead girl, no doubt killed and left here by some sex maniac. But Chrissy isn’t sorry enough to sit with her.
Corinna is just too smelly.
3
Back in her connecting room, while Holly is trying to decide if seven-thirty is too early to get into her pj’s, her phone rings. It’s Barbara. She sounds out of breath and happy. Her phone call telling Holly she’d won tickets to the Sista Bessie show seems like years ago instead of weeks. Since then she’s become an honorary Dixie Crystal and has established a firm friendship with the woman she now calls Betty.
Holly listens to what Barbara is proposing and says she will if she can; she has to check with the woman she’s protecting. She doesn’t want to call Kate her boss, probably because that is exactly what Kate is.
Kate is sitting on the sofa in her suite, watching a panel of politicians or politician wannabes (Holly isn’t sure there’s a difference) discuss the latest cultural hot-button issue.
“Holly, you should sit down and listen to this shit. You won’t believe it.”
“I’m sure it’s interesting,” Holly says, “but if you’re set for the night, I’m going out for an hour or two.”
Kate turns from the TV and gives her a wide smile. “Hot date?”
“No, just going to see my friend Barbara. She’s going to be singing at the shows here in town with Sista Bessie. Including one song, which was originally a poem, that she wrote herself.”
“No shit!” Kate jumps up. “How totally cool! She won that poetry prize, didn’t you say?”
“Yes, the Penley.” Holly knows (courtesy of Charlotte Gibney, from whom all wisdom of the bummer type flowed) that pride goeth before a fall, but she feels pride, anyway. Is almost bursting with it. “Her book has been published and is selling pretty well.” This is a white lie, but Holly feels that wishful thinking makes it hardly a lie at all.
“Then get with her, for God’s sake!” Kate goes to Holly, puts her hands on her shoulders, and gives her a friendly shake. “Take somevideo, if she sings and if they’ll allow it. I’ll send Corrie out to get her book tomorrow. I want to read it.”
“If I can get over to my apartment, I’ll give you a copy,” Holly says. “I’ve got an extra.” Actually she has ten, purchased from Appletree Books in Cleveland.
“Fantastic.” Kate grabs the remote and zaps off the TV. “When I was a kid, I idolized Avril Lavigne and Rihanna. I used to fantasize about being onstage in a glittery low-cut gown, singing something bouncy and fast, like that song ‘We Got the Beat.’ Do you remember that one?”
“Yes.”
“Instead, I wound up doing… this.” She looks around at her new suitcases and stacks of her latest book, waiting to be signed. “It’s good, I wouldn’t change it, but dreams… sometimes dreams, they…”
She shakes her head, as if to clear it.
“Go on. Visit your young friend. Tell her we’ll be in the audience Saturday night, clapping and cheering her on. Also tell her Katie McKay envies thehellout of her chance to sing with Sista Bessie.”
There’s a knock on the door. Holly checks the peephole, then lets Corrie in with an armload of Woman Power tee-shirts for Kate to sign. Kate groans, but good-naturedly.
“I’m going out for awhile,” Holly tells them. “Keep the door locked, okay?”