Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,90

stepped a few feet away and was intent on the television behind the bar. Adam was standing, too, chatting with another man who had come in. The bartender was watching the television, and he had—I realized this without having registered it at the time—turned up the volume a moment earlier. I had the thought that maybe Marse was going to flirt with the bartender, and that Adam was occupied, and Dennis was with Julia, many steps away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll be there Wednesday, I promise.”

“Let’s not trash your tennis career over one afternoon at the beach.”

“No, of course. Of course not.”

“I’ve missed you,” he said.

“Frances?” said Marse. There was an edgy timbre in her voice, a shiver of hardness. I turned toward her, and she crooked her finger. “Come here,” she said.

“Excuse me,” I said to Jack. Had our flirting been so obvious, so terrible, that I was being scolded? When I reached her, Marse said, “Watch this,” and put her hands on my shoulders to turn me toward the television. On the screen was a newswoman in a yellow blazer with large gold buttons, and behind her was a white front door in a low brick building cordoned off by yellow police tape. There were officers milling around, and in the corner of the screen, an ambulance with its back doors open.

Did I recognize the building, in that instant? In the bottom third of the screen was the story ticker: GAINESVILLE STUDENTS SLAIN, it read, and then: TWO DEAD AT WILLIAMSBURG VILLAGE APARTMENTS.

I had no trouble placing the building’s name. The newswoman was saying, “We’re reporting that the victims were both women in their late teens or early twenties, students at the university, where the fall semester is currently under way. The bodies were discovered this afternoon at four p.m., after one of the girls’ mothers reported that she had not heard from her daughter. The killer appears to have entered through the apartment’s sliding glass doorway.”

“Dennis?” I said to Marse.

“Your friend’s getting him,” she said.

“When did I talk to her?” I said.

“I don’t know, but I’m sure she’s safe.”

“You’re sure?” I said.

“Yes.”

Dennis rushed into the bar with Jack as the newswoman closed her segment, saying, “For now, Gainesville students are being cautioned by police to stay alert, travel in pairs, and lock their doors.”

“Give me the phone,” said Dennis to the bartender, and after some maneuvering, the bartender was unable to pull the phone away from its spot beside the cash register, so Dennis went around the bar. He started dialing, then stopped and looked at me. “Is it 5269 or 6952?” he said, then without waiting for an answer turned back and finished dialing. Marse and I watched him. After a long moment, he spoke into the phone. “Call your parents,” he said urgently, then put the phone down and reached across the bar for my hands. “Just the machine,” he said. “She’s not in, that’s all.” My chest was tight. “We’re going home—we’ll be there in ten minutes—and she’ll have left a message. If I know Margo, she’s already on a bus.”

I nodded. Home seemed a long way away.

“I’ll walk out with you,” said Marse. She collected my purse and took my arm, and the three of us headed together toward the parking lot. Only later did I consider that I hadn’t said good-bye to Jack, and that I owed him a word of gratitude: not only did he retrieve my husband when I needed him, but he also must have paid for our drinks.

Today, with cell phones and the Internet, the whole event would have unraveled differently. But then, the only people I knew who had cell phones were a secretary at Dennis’s firm whose husband was rumored to be a member of the Cuban mafia, and a doctor I knew from my office, who preferred it to a beeper in case of emergencies. We knew several people who had car phones, and indeed our next car would have one, but at the time we did not, and so we drove in silence, Dennis squeezing my knee. As I’d watched the newscast at the bar, my mind had been cloudy with panic, my vision had narrowed, and I’d had difficulty viewing the screen as a whole—instead I’d seen the ambulance in the corner, then the words on the screen, then the newswoman in her yellow jacket. But in the car, looking out at the clear bright night, I grew calm. Not this, I