Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,34
to check the rest of the apartment, just to be sure?” Gruder jerked his head toward the hallway with doors to a bedroom and bath, both closed. “Or do you want me to?”
Diana rose to her feet. She walked past Gruder to the closed bathroom door. She knocked on it. “Ashley! You in there?” She didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. She knocked again, then pushed the door open a crack.
The bathroom had barely space enough to turn around, and the world’s smallest bathtub. There, from a mirror over the sink, her own face gazed back at her.
It had been months since she’d seen her own reflection. Her skin was pale, and her hair—oh God, her hair—she reached up and touched it. Shapeless curls nearly to her shoulders looked like a dull cloud of frizz around her face. She pushed her hair back from her face. She didn’t remember having cheekbones, yet there they were. The dark smudges she’d always had under her dark eyes were more pronounced, making her eyes look as if they’d sunk into her skull.
Diana ran warm water in the sink and splashed her face. On the bathroom wall over the hand towel hung the Hypochondriac’s Calendar—a Christmas gift she’d given her sister. On today’s date, Ashley could have had “such a pain in my neck.” Tomorrow: “Bowlegs.”
Diana opened the medicine cabinet. A phalanx of vitamins and minerals and herbal supplements stood on its narrow shelves, sorted alphabetically. Vitamins from A to E, biloba tablets, folic acid, gingko, iron pills . . .
“Find anything?” Gruder asked.
“She’d never have left home for an extended period without her arsenal of pills and supplements,” Diana said, holding the medicine cabinet open.
Finally she checked the bedroom, not bothering to knock. Ashley’s queen-size bed was neatly made up with a white down comforter and a pile of lace-covered pillows. Along one full wall were shelves and clear Lucite drawers with meticulously folded clothing layered inside. The door to the walk-in closet stood open. Diana stepped inside.
Some clothing lay in a little heap on the closet floor. Diana lifted a crumpled T-shirt and shook it out. The fractured word HACKER was printed across the chest. Diana buried her head in the cotton and inhaled—picking up mostly the scent of store-bought newness and just a whiff of Ashley’s licorice.
When she looked up, Gruder stood in the doorway looking in at her. She met his gaze. “This and those cowboy boots out in the front hall are what she had on. She borrowed this outfit from me on Friday.”
Gruder’s gaze traveled across the rods along the three inside walls of the closet where Ashley’s clothes hung, sorted in orderly precision by color and season.
“My clothes she leaves jumbled up in a heap,” Diana said. “Hers get princess treatment.”
“So she came home, changed, and took off again?” Gruder asked.
“Seems like it.”
Diana carried the jeans and T-shirt that Ashley had borrowed from her into the living room. There, she carefully folded them. She picked up the red boots and laid them on top.
She found the leather jacket hanging in the coat closet by the front door. She slipped it on and slid her hands into the pockets. In one she found the sunglasses she’d lent Ashley. In the other, a slip of paper. She pulled it out. It was a cash register receipt from Bouchée on Newbury Street. Friday. 5:45 P.M. A cosmopolitan—Ashley’s favorite—a white Russian, and an order of frites. Nearly thirty dollars before tip. The price for cutting Aaron loose?
Diana shoved the receipt back into the pocket. The only piece of the outfit that was missing was the red cap.
Gruder opened the apartment door and held it for her. “Happens all the time,” he said. “As far as missing persons go, fortunately for us false alarms are more common than not.”
False alarm—was that what this had been? Maybe. And maybe Ashley was back and on her way into work. But it wasn’t like Ashley to disappear for days. Not like her to be late for work. Not like her to forget to call Mom on Monday.
Diana glanced over at the coffee table—and not like her to leave mail scattered all over the table.
Chapter Fifteen
Reluctantly Diana gathered up the clothes Ashley had borrowed and left the apartment. She locked the door, then hung there for a few moments, wondering who had been the last person to lock that door.
Gruder was halfway down the hall. He looked back. “What?” he said.