Paullina Simons - The Girl in Times Square

They had been tape recording the whole conversation, though by the sharpshooter look in O’Malley’s eyes, Lily didn’t think an electromagnetic recording was necessary. She signed the missing person’s report, threw away her bloodied cotton wool, took his business card and stepped to the door. O’Malley remained sitting behind the table, his feet up on a chair.

“Still, though, doesn’t it niggle you a little bit, Miss Quinn,” said Detective O’Malley, placing his hands behind his head, “just a tiny bit, that your good friend wouldn’t tell you about her love life? I mean, why would she keep that a secret from you?”

Lily didn’t know what he was getting at, and so she didn’t reply. Did he think Amy wasn’t into boys? Did he think Amy was into her boyfriend Joshua? She didn’t want to think.

O’Malley didn’t get up, telling her to call the station or the beeper number on the card any time if she learned anything, or thought of anything. She left the room without glancing at Harkman. She would have preferred him interviewing her. She would have preferred Robespierre interviewing her.

Home wasn’t nearly far enough to walk off the gnawing sense of malaise around Lily’s nerve endings.

The Noho Star on Bleeker and Lafayette was short people, so Lily came in the following day and worked the graveyard shift, thirteen hours, from eleven in the morning until midnight. Her hours, as per her request, had been increased to fifty. She hoped she could handle it.

When she got home from the precinct the night before, Lily had found Rachel, Paul, and to her greatest surprise, Joshua! camped out on her front stoop. They followed her up the stairs to her fifth floor crawl-up. By the third floor, Lily was so out of breath, she had to stop and rest. How did old Colleen do it? When she finally got inside, she collapsed on the futon.

Joshua had been calling the last two weeks, he said, because he needed to pick up his guitar case. “What happened to your hand?” he asked Lily. Unhappily she didn’t want to talk to him in the presence of all those other people.

Paul, small, slender, perfectly groomed, perfectly dressed, perfectly Italian-looking and calm as a small pond said, “Are you all right, Lil?” Then, “What happened? Where’s Ames?”

Lily opened one eye from the futon. “Is that a trick question?”

Rachel, once a kinky-black-haired Puerto Rican fourth runner up in a San Domingo teenage beauty pageant, now a Puerto Rican bleached blonde with hair thinner and straighter than Lily’s, was making retching noises in the kitchen sink after drinking three-week-old apple juice from the too-warm fridge. Lily couldn’t keep her eyes open. Suddenly there was a tree in front of her eyes, and an animal hiding behind it, and there was a whirl of red color, and patches, and small bits of dialogue, and here came that cold damp and Amy again, and Hawaii, the red flowers, and her mother saying, everything I go through I go through completely alone, and here were the sounds of Rachel swirling her mouth out with water, irritating Lily. She wanted them all to leave, especially Joshua. So she kept her eyes closed and pretended they did, and fell asleep, just in that position, on the futon, still sitting up, slightly hunched over to one side, and Amy away, her mother away, her father away, perhaps Amy was with her own father? Perhaps she went down to Florida to visit him? She must mention it to the detective—what was his name? Joshua away, Joshua, who was supposed to be the real deal, now coming for his guitar case, and when Lily woke up fourteen hours later, her body was stiff, the phone was ringing, and her knuckle was seeping blood through the bandage.

Today at work, the jetlag was getting to her. During her break, instead of eating Jell-O with whipped cream like always, she put her head down on the waitresses’ table in the booth in the back and was instantly asleep. She didn’t fall asleep, she went to sleep. When she awoke, Spencer O’Malley sat looking at her from across the table.

“Your hand is still spontaneously bleeding, I see,” he said.

She looked around groggily. His partner was not with him. “Did you come here to tell me that?” She felt disgusting.

“You called me this morning. I thought you might have remembered something important.”

“Yes. Yes.” She struggled to remember anything at all, much less why she called him nine hours ago.

“Something about Amy?”

“Something about Amy.” Lily nodded, rubbing her eyes. He pushed a glass of water toward her. She drank from it, came to a little. “Her father lives down in Islamorada, I think. Or Cape Canaveral?”

“St. Augustine perhaps?”

“No, that’s not it.”

“Yes, that’s where he lives. St. Augustine.”

“Okay then. Maybe she went to visit him.”

O’Malley was quiet. “That’s what you called to tell me?”

“Yes.”

“You must think I just started this job. You’re going to have to do better than that. He was the first one we called. He hadn’t heard from her. But besides, Miss Quinn, you’re missing the point about Amy. She told her mother she would be coming home. She didn’t. She told her family she would be graduating. She didn’t. Hasn’t called, hasn’t shown up, and no one’s heard from her, not even her father in Islamorada.”

Lily struggled up. “Would you excuse me? My break is over, I think.”

“Break?” said O’Malley. “I think your shift is over.”

“Ha.” She left to wash her face. He was still sitting in her booth when she returned.

“Detective, I really must …”

But he wasn’t moving. “Just two more minutes of your time. There were a few things I forgot to mention yesterday; after all, we had so much to cover. During our search of Amy’s room, we discovered her house keys and her wallet on her dresser, leading us to suspect that she didn’t go far.”

“As I told you, that’s probably true.”

“Was she generally in the habit of leaving the apartment without her wallet or keys?”

“I guess,” said Lily. “I’m not trying to be evasive,” she added, seeing his face. She smiled wanly, but O’Malley didn’t smile, in fact, studied her extra carefully, as if she were a word on the page whose meaning he was trying to decipher. “She used to go running and didn’t like to weigh herself down. She usually took what little money she had with her. Crumpled up into a ball, or change stuffed into her pants pocket.”

“Where did she go running?”

“Central Park. The reservoir.”

“Far to go for a run all the way from the East Village.”

“Far, but worth it.”

He made a note on his pad. “What about other times? When she would disappear overnight? Did she also leave her wallet and her keys then? Running for days at a time, was she?”

“She was very fit,” Lily said, a feeble attempt at a joke. During those days too, Amy would leave her wallet. Why did Lily strongly not want to tell the detective that? “You know I didn’t always notice. I tried not to go into her room when she was gone unless I needed something. So I don’t know if she always left her wallet. I’m sure sometimes she took it.”

“Where’s her driver’s license, by the way?”

“I don’t think she had one,” Lily said hesitantly.

“Really?” With obvious surprise and a glance at her hesitation.

Lily averted her gaze, trying to think of the thing that turned her face away from him. Some vague confusion, some vague inconsistency regarding the license, but she couldn’t quite place it, hence the averted gaze. “Amy didn’t know how to drive. We live in New York. I don’t know how to drive either.”