LITMIR.BIZ

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asked. They’re always lit. It’s foggy, said Amy, sounding so empty. It’s a blackout. Can’t see them. Why was Lily remembering all that now?

      She slept on the futon and remembered Amy, and when she woke up, Amy was so vivid as if she were still in bed sleeping.

      And Lily cried.

      The mattress came, the iron frame. She tipped the two Hispanic delivery guys twenty bucks for being young and flirty with her, showered, got dressed and went to work a double. After making one-hundred-and-seventy dollars, she took a cab back home. She paid ten bucks to take a cab home from work every night now, the days of no cabs long behind her. One evening it had occurred to her that if only she cashed in her 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1, she could have a limo and a driver waiting for her every night when she finished her shift as a diner waitress. Lily had laughed and walked home that night.

      Tonight Spencer was waiting for her on the front stoop. “How long is that shift, anyway?” he said, closing his police notebook.

      She couldn’t help a small smile. “Detective O’Malley, it’s nine thirty at night. Don’t you ever not work?”

      “Not when I have a mother who calls me every day wanting to know if I’ve found her child,” said Spencer.

      Lily stopped smiling and was silent. Silent or defeated. She made to move around him but he took her arm. “Why did you call me in the middle of the night, Lilianne?”

      “I—” she stammered.

      “Did you have something to tell me?”

      “I just—I got worried about something.”

      “About what?”

      “I don’t remember now.”

      They sat down on the stoop. It was a New York night in July, still dusky out, still hot out.

      “I’m not Miss Quinn anymore?”

      “When Miss Quinn calls me in the middle of the night she automatically becomes a Lilianne. City regulation 517.”

      When does Lilianne become a Lily? she wanted to ask but didn’t. It sounded too flirty.

      Spencer said, “The Odessa Café on Avenue A and 7th has very good stuffed cabbages, and I’m starved. Can I work and eat?”

      “Will eating count as working?”

      “Of course. Dining with witnesses. It’s called canvassing. Come. While you eat, you can try to remember what you were thinking about at four in the morning. But you know, don’t you, that if you’re calling me at that time of night, I’m going to think Amy has come back.”

      “Unfortunately, no.” Lily struggled up from the stoop and saw he struggled with resisting helping her. She wanted to ask if she could call him Spencer. Seemed odd to be so formal. “You must see quite a bit on these mean streets, no?”

      “Yes, especially in your neighborhood.”

      “Did you say you drove a patrol car on the LIE before coming to New York?”

      “Yes.”

      “You went from being a traffic cop on the expressway to manning a special division?”

      “Before that I was for years a senior detective up in Dartmouth College.”

      Lily perked up. “That must have been some great job! I actually took a tour of Dartmouth in my senior year in high school. It sure looked like an awesome place to go to school.”

      “Hmm,” he said. “I didn’t go to school there. I wouldn’t know.”

      “But what kind of investigative experience was that for you? Arresting frat boys on Saturday nights for underage drinking?”

      “If only,” said Spencer.

      Lily glanced at him with curiosity. “More?”

      “A little more.”

      Was he clamming up? “Detective … does Ivy League Dartmouth have a steamy underside?”

      “I don’t know if steamy is the right word. Maybe wicked.”

      “Oh, do please tell. I love wicked stories.”

      “Another time. Though I do like your faith in the things you believe to be true. It’s very youthful.” He smiled. “I’m slightly less youthful.”

      At the diner after they sat and ordered, Lily said, “I remember what I wanted to tell you.”

      “Is it something about Amy?”

      “Yes. She took two years off between high school and college. Right after high school she went traveling cross country with some friends of hers from Port Jeff. Eventually I think she got tired of the whole thing and came home.”

      Spencer became interested in Amy’s sabbatical. He asked about the people she traveled with. Lily told him what she knew which admittedly wasn’t much. Paul might know more, having gone to the same high school.

      “What happened to them all? Did they come back to Long Island, like Amy?”

      Lily wasn’t sure. The only thing she thought she knew for sure was that one committed suicide, one OD’d, one was killed in a drunk driving accident, smashing their traveling van, and two were still at large. But she wasn’t sure.

      Spencer stopped eating his stuffed cabbage.

      Lily coughed. “Amy was evasive when she talked about this period in her life. She told me some anecdotes, of Kansas, of New Orleans, but she barely volunteered information other than to tell me a little about her friends, and to caution me against using drugs.” Lily looked into her cold cabbage. “She was like you with Dartmouth. Cagey.”

      Spencer tapped on the table to get her attention. “You better hope she wasn’t like me at Dartmouth. But are you telling me that of the six people that went in one beat up van—three of them are dead?”

      “If you put it like that.”

      “How would you put it?”

      “Just life, detective. Car accidents, drugs, suicides. What else kills the young these days?” Lottery tickets?

      Spencer quietly studied Lily. “Aren’t you wise. I’ll tell you what else kills young people. Unlawful killing. Homicide. Manslaughter. Killing with depraved indifference to human life. Murder. But two more people missing? Paul must know these kids. They all went to the same high school. Tomorrow you and I will go talk to him.”

      “Spencer—I mean Detective O’Malley …” Lily turned red. He smiled. “I don’t know if Paul knows anything. But these kids aren’t the important thing.”

      “You don’t think so? Six people in one car meeting with extreme fate? Not important?”

      Lily wondered if their birthdays or significant digits were 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1. But why would she wonder that? What did her six numbers have to do with six people she did not know?

      She knew Amy. Amy was 24.

      Lily was 24, too.

      This was a stupid line of thinking. Lily wished Spencer hadn’t led her to it with his talk of fate.

      When he went to pay and took his cash out, a stash of lottery tickets fell out of his wallet. She laughed. “Aren’t you an optimist. Are you collecting them?”

      “Yes, when I get to twelve, I check them all at once. But what, you just collect the one on your wall?”

      Her heart skipped a beat, another. “So is there anything at all that you don’t notice, Detective O’Malley?”

      “Obviously, Miss Quinn, or I wouldn’t still be looking for your roommate.”

      They met the next afternoon in the downstairs reception area of the precinct to go see Paul

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