Murder in the Collective (29 page)

I never talked about her to anyone, didn’t know how to talk about her. I didn’t have the words to describe what I’d felt with her. The nearest I could come was the phrase, “We were so regular together.” Sometimes I wondered if it had ever really happened. I would have liked to ask her, but she wasn’t even in Seattle any longer. Her father had had a stroke and she’d gone back to Houston to help take care of him. A postcard with a skyscraper skyline had arrived one day in December and its message had been as uninspiring as its view: “I miss Seattle, but not the rain. My accent’s coming back with a vengeance. You’d probably laugh to hear me.”

Nothing about giving me the opportunity.

I went around my apartment, nervously turning on lights, trying not to think too much about what had happened at the hospital. But the image of blood running down Rosalie’s face, of Trish’s black-rimmed, frightened eyes wouldn’t leave me. They were so young to be on their own, so young to be using their sexuality, and used for it.

Rosalie was dead now, and Trish was running. From who, from what? From me, because I’d pushed her? I should have handled it differently, should have handled the whole thing differently. But I’d been afraid of them, hadn’t really looked at them. Just hadn’t seen them.

In the kitchen I opened the refrigerator out of habit rather than hunger. In a flash Ernesto was there, roused from whatever deep feline sleep he’d been enjoying by the prospect of food. Ernesto was Ray’s cat and I had promised to take care of him while Ray was away. It had been a weak moment and I was regretting it.

Ernesto was as profusely furred as a mohair sweater and as solid as a tank; big as a dog, but without a dog’s friendly, trusting eyes. Ernesto’s gaze was superior, distant and calculating. Even during the time Ray and I had been involved I hadn’t liked Ernesto much. He had a way of ignoring me when I tried to get his attention that made me feel foolish—and a way of being physically aggressive just when I was least interested, when I was trying to sleep, for instance. Now I faced six weeks of his company, a fact that didn’t seem to excite him either. For when it became obvious that he wasn’t going to be fed, he contemplated me severely and gloomily for a moment before turning and padding heavily back to whatever dark recess of the apartment he’d emerged from.

Next to food, sleep was most interesting to Ernesto—and after a few more minutes of bleakly staring at the contents of my refrigerator—old tofu, an open can of tomato paste, six bottles of salad dressing and three withered carrots—I decided he was right and went to bed.

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Barbara Wilson is the pen name under which Barbara Sjoholm has published the Cassandra Reilly Mysteries and the Pam Nilsen Mysteries.
Gaudí Afternoon
, of the Cassandra Reilly series, won a Lambda Literary Award and a Crime Writers’ Association Award, and was made into a film by the same name. Like her detective Cassandra Reilly, Sjoholm is a translator, but of Norwegian and Danish books. In addition to her fiction and the memoir
Blue Windows
, Sjoholm is the author of the travel books
The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea
,
Incognito Street
, and
The Palace of the Snow Queen
. Her essays have appeared in the
American Scholar
,
Harvard Review
, the
New York Times
,
Smithsonian
, and Slate, among other publications.

For more about Barbara Sjoholm, please visit
www.barbarasjoholm.com
.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1984 by Barbara Wilson

Cover design by Tracey Dunham

978-1-4804-5514-6

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com