growls a lot. He hopes Saturday gets here fast.” It was signed with a full line of X’s and O’s.
Kate had written, “Trooper does snarl every time he sees Bandit, but Cal’s getting homesick for you two so I thought it would help to have his dog here. He’s asleep now with his arms around Bandit.”
“That was nice of her,” I said. Truth to tell, I was starting to miss Cal, too.
We turned off the lights and lay awake a few minutes trying to decide what we wanted to do next day. For Christmas, Dwight’s mother had given us mock tickets to a Broadway play and a check large enough to buy real tickets, but we hadn’t decided what we wanted to see. Comedy or drama?
“Nothing too heavy,” Dwight said sleepily.
“Musical?” I asked.
He yawned. “Anything except Mamma Mia! Okay?”
“We could just go down to the TKTS booth and toss a dart at the list,” I said, but he was gone.
I should have been sleepy, too. I was sleepy, but even though I nestled in next to Dwight, I couldn’t seem to turn my brain off. I kept thinking about Lee and how someone seemed to be getting into his locker at will. If Emma was right, if the Benton boy was the one who did it, he might be afraid to admit it. Not only was Jenny Benton overprotective, she also had a wide streak of prudery. She would probably be horrified to think that her son had any idea what a girl’s nude anatomy looked like. If he did it, was it because he was jealous of Lee or was it simply an adolescent joke?
Like Corey Wall taking the elevator when it was left unattended?
The digital clock beside the bed clicked from 11:45 to 11:46. When it hit 11:53, I slipped out of bed. No need to switch on any lamps; the reflected glow from outside was more than enough to let me navigate the rooms. I went out to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, but I wasn’t really hungry and none of the little boxes or packets tempted me. Instead, I poured myself half a glass of wine from the opened bottle on the counter and wandered back to the living room. Too cold to go out onto the balcony, but I stood by the French doors that let me see a small sliver of upper Broadway where traffic had dwindled to a few cars and cabs.
The street below me seemed almost as deserted as the lanes that crisscross the farm back home, yet even as I watched, a cab slowed to a stop in front of the building across the way. I moved to the dining room window for an unobstructed look and saw a couple emerge from the cab. The woman wore an evening cape and a long gown. With his back to me, I couldn’t tell if the man was wearing a tux underneath his overcoat, but that was certainly a white silk scarf draped around his neck. Fred and Ginger home from a formal party?
I was amused by the juxtaposition of elegance and ugliness as he helped her from the cab. The space immediately out front was clear enough for her high heels and his patent leather shoes, but dirty snow still lined the curbs on either side of the polished glass door and large black bags of garbage were piled atop the snow by the service entrances of all the buildings from one end of the street to the other. I counted six bags from this building alone. Trying to multiply the garbage on this one street by the number of streets in the city numbed my brain. I sipped my wine and I wondered how many trucks it would take every day and what did they do with so much trash? Where was it all dumped? Or was it incinerated?
I vaguely remembered that when I’d lived here with Lev a million years ago, there had been controversy over landfills in the Brooklyn marshes, but surely they had long since reached capacity?
And why was I standing here in the middle of the night wondering about New York’s garbage?
My glass was empty but I still wasn’t sleepy. Okay, another half glass ought to do it, I decided.
When I returned to the window, I saw a figure turn the corner onto Broadway. A moment later, the man on duty across the way stepped out onto the sidewalk and flexed his arms as if to