by Timothy Zahn
He pulled out the gun the mugger had given him as she reluctantly sat down again. "You and your dad used to go shooting together, right? Tell me if this feels too light to you."
Her eyebrows lifted as she took it. "Way too light," she said, frowning as she hefted it. "Is it a toy?"
"Don't ask me," he said. "Could it be some kind of high-tech plastic gun?"
"I don't know," Caroline said. "It looks like a standard 1911 Colt .45." She turned it over, and her searching eyes widened slightly as she saw the blood smear. "Is that—?"
"I doubt it's tomato juice," Roger said. "Anything else you can say about the gun itself? I really don't want to have to tell the cops I got mugged by an F.A.O. Schwartz Special."
"Well, the slide works," Caroline said, pulling the upper part of the gun back and then letting it go, the way Roger had seen them do in the movies. "Toy guns usually don't do that."
She fiddled with the bottom of the grip. "But the clip seems to be glued in place," she added.
"So that means no bullets?" Roger asked, trying to decide if that made him feel relieved or just more ridiculous.
"I don't know," Caroline said, pulling the slide back again and peering inside. "There's something in there that looks like a cartridge. But—"
She let the slide go, pulled it back again. "But if it was real, it should eject when I do this. Either the round is jammed, or else it's a fake."
"Any way to tell for sure?"
"You want me to try pulling the trigger?"
Roger snorted. "No, thanks. So what exactly have we got here?"
"I don't know," Caroline said again, handing the gun back. "The slide works, but the slide release doesn't. The safety catch works, but not the clip release. There seems to be a round chambered, only I can't get it to eject. It's like it was designed to look like a real gun, but only up to a point."
"You mean like a movie prop?"
"Maybe, but why go to the trouble of making a prop that only works halfway?" she pointed out.
"Why not just use a real gun filled with blanks? It doesn't make sense."
"Yeah." Roger fingered the gun. "Speaking of making sense, what did you think of her outfit?"
"A little out of style for New York," Caroline said. "Reminds me of the costumes they wear at madrigal concerts."
"I meant the material," Roger said. "What is it?"
"I didn't really pay attention," Caroline said. "It shimmered like silk, though."
"But it doesn't feel like silk," he told her. "It's too smooth."
"I don't know, then," Caroline said. "Maybe something new."
Across the room, the doorbell chimed. "Here they are," Roger said, standing up. "They made better time than I expected."
"Wait," Caroline said suddenly, jumping to her feet and grabbing his arm. "Are we sure that is the police?"
Roger stopped short, a fresh chill running across his skin. "Stay here," he said, dropping the gun into his pocket and moving past the front door into the kitchen. The bell rang again as he pulled a carving knife from Caroline's knife rack and returned to the door.
The two men he could see through the peephole certainly looked like cops. "Who is it?" he called.
"Police," a muffled voice said. "You called in a foundling report?"
Roger got a good grip on his knife. "I'm going to open the door," he said, making sure the chain was secure. "I want to see your identification."
He opened the door a crack, fully expecting the heavy wood to come crashing back at him as the two men tried to break it down. Instead, a hand eased gingerly through the gap holding a police badge and ID card for his inspection.
Roger gazed at the card a moment, uncomfortably aware that he didn't have the slightest idea what a real police ID looked like. But he had called them, and there wasn't much he could do now but hope they were genuine. "Thanks," he said. "Hang on, and I'll unchain it."
The hand withdrew, and he closed the door. Caroline's knickknack shelf was a step to the right; hurriedly sliding the knife out of sight behind one of the enameled plates, he unchained the door and opened it.
The two cops looked like they'd walked off the set of a TV show: one of them burly and Caucasian, with the look of long experience etched into his face, the other young and Hispanic and barely out of rookiehood. "I'm Officer Kern," the older cop identified himself, his eyes resting on Caroline a moment and then taking a quick sweep of the living room behind her. "This is Officer Hernandez.
You said you'd found a missing girl?"
"That's right," Roger said. "At least, we assume she's missing. There was this mugger in an alley on
101st Street—"
"Only he wasn't actually a mugger," Caroline interjected. "He wanted us to take her and—"
"Quiet!" Roger cut her off as a soft thud came from somewhere behind him. "What was that?"
"What was what?" Caroline asked tautly.
"I didn't hear anything," Kern said.
"Something went clunk," Roger said grimly, heading for the bedroom. "Like someone getting hit on the head."
He thought he was hurrying; but even so, both cops got to the bedroom door ahead of him. "Stay here," Kern ordered, his gun ready in his hand. Turning the knob, he shoved it violently open.
Hernandez was ready, diving through and ducking to the left. Kern was right behind him, breaking to the right. The closet light was still on, and from the doorway Roger could clearly see the bed and his coat lying open and rumpled.
The girl was gone.
"The balcony!" Caroline said in a shaking voice, pointing over Roger's shoulder at the sliding door.
"The broomstick's been moved."
"And the latch is open," Roger said grimly. "They've got her out there!"
Kern grunted something as both cops made for the sliding door. Hernandez got there first, shoving the door open and disappearing onto the balcony, the older cop right on his heels. Clenching his teeth, Roger followed, the cold air cutting across his damp shirt like a late-June breaker at Coney Island. He ducked through the opening—
And nearly ran full into Kern's back.
"What is it?" he demanded, skidding to a halt. Both cops were just standing there, looking around.
At the empty balcony.
Roger looked again. Aside from himself, the two cops, and the two heavy ceramic pots with Caroline's orange trees sticking out of them, the balcony was completely empty.
The outside lights suddenly came on, making him jump, and the living room door slid open. "Where is she?" Caroline asked anxiously, poking her head through.
"Good question," Kern said, his voice suddenly darkly suspicious. "You got a good answer to go with it?"
"But she can't be gone," Caroline objected, looking around. "She was right there in the bedroom.
Where else could she be?"
"Not here, anyway," Kern said, holstering his gun as he looked along the sheer wall. "And it's too far to jump to the next balcony."
"Couldn't have gone down, either," Hernandez added, leaning over the solid balcony wall and gazing down. He twisted his head and looked up along the wall of the balcony above theirs. "Or up, either.
Railings you could climb, but not solid walls like these."
"But she was here," Caroline insisted. "She has to still be here."
"Okay, fine," Kern rumbled. "Come on, Hernandez. By the book."
They spent the next fifteen minutes going systematically through the apartment, looking everywhere anything bigger than a Chihuahua could be hiding. In the end, they found nothing.
"Well, it's been fun, folks," Kern said as they headed for the front door. "Next time you feel like pulling someone's chain, leave the NYPD out of it, okay?"
"Sure," Roger growled. "Thanks for your time."
He let them out, deadbolting and chaining the door after them. Caroline had gone back to the balcony, looking around as if she still expected to see the girl hiding in a corner. With a tired sigh, he crossed the room and went out to join
her.
"I don't understand," she said as he stepped to her side. "She was here, wasn't she? We didn't just dream it."
"If we did, we dreamed this, too," Roger told her, pulling the gun from his pocket.
"The gun!" Caroline gasped, all but pouncing on it. "Quick—call them back. This proves it!"
"This proves what?" Roger countered disgustedly. "A toy gun? It doesn't prove a thing."
"But—" Caroline seemed to sink back into herself again. "You're right," she said, her voice quiet again. "But then where did she go?"
"I don't know," Roger admitted, looking around the balcony. "I just hope... never mind."
"That whoever tried to strangle her didn't come back and finish the job?" Caroline said, her voice almost lost in the whistling of the wind.
"Yeah." Roger took a deep breath of the cold northern air. Winter was indeed coming early this year.
"Come on," he said, not knowing what else to say. "Let's go to bed."
3
They slept poorly that night. At least, Caroline slept poorly, and she assumed from the strained and mostly monosyllabic conversation between them the next morning that Roger hadn't done very well, either.
But at least they'd never gotten around to arguing about the play. That was something, anyway.
October was usually a quiet month in the real estate business, and this October had been no exception. Summer vacation rentals were only memories and bills, families with small children were firmly settled into the school year, and the Christmas bonuses that drew young couples' thoughts toward a nice co-op with a view were still two months away.
Which left Caroline plenty of time to think about the events of the previous evening. To think and to try to pick at the knots of the mystery in hopes of untangling them a little.
But all her efforts yielded nothing. She searched the local papers and Internet news sources for stories of urban violence that might connect with the bruises they'd seen on the girl's neck, but found nothing that matched both the crime and the girl's description. The man who'd left a streak of his blood on the strange gun also seemed to have slipped back into the shadows without any notice. She spent what seemed like hours on hold at the Missing Person's Bureau, only to come up empty on both the girl and the man.
She didn't talk to Roger at all that day. Sometimes he called her at lunch, but today she was so busy with the Internet that she never even noticed it was one-thirty until the twelve-thirty lunch shift swept back into the office. For an hour after that she worried about whether she should have called him, even if he hadn't called her, and spent the rest of the day sitting vaguely on pins and needles as she wondered if interrupting his afternoon would make things better or worse.
It was with considerable relief that she returned home that evening to find Roger not only not angry with her but already working on dinner.
"Hi, hon," he greeted her, giving her a distracted sort of kiss. "How was your day?"
"Slow," she said, hanging up her coat and returning to the kitchen. "Yours?"
"The same," he said, opening a can of tomatoes. "Judge Vasco is down with the flu, so the contractdispute argument I was putting together for Bill is on hold for at least a week. And Sam and Carleton are out in the wilds of corporate Delaware on some big rainmaking expedition."
"At least they're not running you off your feet like they usually do," she commented.
"Which was handy, given how much time I spent on hold with Missing Persons," he said a little sourly. "Turns out they don't have anyone on their books who matches the girl's description."
"I know," Caroline said, peering at the open recipe book and pulling a block of cheddar out of the fridge. "They don't have anything on the man, either."
He glanced at her, a flicker of surprise and perhaps even respect flashing across his face. "You called them too?"
She nodded. "I also checked the news sources to see if I could come up with any events that might link to the bruises on her throat. But there was nothing."
He grunted. "I took the subway up to 103rd at lunchtime and walked back along last night's route," he told her. "I couldn't get into the alley—the gate was locked—but I couldn't see an single thing that looked out of the ordinary."
Caroline selected a knife and started cutting slices of cheese. "It's like it never happened."
"Pretty much," Roger agreed. "I did hear one interesting tidbit, though. Seems there was a massive power outage up in Morningside Heights last night. The west part, over by Riverside Park."
Caroline frowned. "How far up?"
"Kelly said everything around his place on West 115th was completely dark." He paused. "Or at least it was after the big flash."
"Flash?"
"Yeah," Roger said. "Like all the streetlights blew at once, he said."
"Did ConEd have any explanation?"
"Just the usual bafflegab," Roger said. "Overloads, cable stress, squirrels in the wiring, or maybe the Broadway construction."
"You think that might have had something to do with our streetlight problem?" Caroline asked.
"I'd like to," Roger said. "But there are three problems. One, it doesn't sound anything like what we ran into, so I don't know how they could be related. Two, the Morningside outage happened nearly an hour before our lights did their magic trick. And three, there's still the problem of why the streetlights went out and not the power in the buildings themselves."
Caroline grimaced. "So we're back where we started," she said. "We've got a wild story without a single bit of proof. Except the gun," she corrected herself. "What did you do with it?"
"I put it in the junk drawer last night," he said. "Underneath your latch-hook stuff."
The latch-hook stuff she hadn't done anything with in years, she recalled, a brief flush of warmth rising into her cheeks. She should either pick up the hobby again or get rid of the trappings. "It's like one of those old ghost stories we used to tell around the campfire," she said. "You ever do that?"
"Nope," Roger said. "And if she was a ghost, she was a damn heavy one."
"Oh, they can be substantial enough," Caroline assured him. "I remember one story about a highschool guy who picked up a girl at a dance and lent her his sweater on the way home."
"Caroline—"
"Anyway," she said, ignoring the interruption, "the next day when he went to the house he'd dropped her off at—"
"Caroline!"
She broke off, startled at the harshness in his voice, shrinking automatically into herself. What had she done now?
Roger was staring into space, the muscles in his throat gone suddenly rigid. "Listen," he said softly.
She frowned, holding her breath and straining her ears.
And there it was. A quiet tapping sound coming from the direction of the living room.
The kind of sound made by knuckles rapping on glass.
"I think," Roger said, his voice sounding unnaturally casual, "we've got company."
He headed for the living room. Caroline looked for a moment at the knife in her hand, then set it down beside the block of cheese and followed.
She found Roger standing just inside the living room, gazing across at the balcony door. There, standing outside looking in at them, her slim figure framed by the darkening sky and the lights of the cityscape behind her, was the girl from last night, still wearing the same patchwork tunic and tights.
Taking a deep breath and letting it out in a whoosh, Roger crossed the room, popped the broomstick out of the rail, and slid back the door.
The girl ducked her head toward him in a sort of abbreviated bow. "May I come in?" she asked. Her voice was deep and throaty, with a slight accent Caroline couldn't place.
"Sure," Roger said, stepping to the side. "Unless you want to stay outside with the trees all night."
It seemed to Caroline that she gave Roger a sharp look at that. But with only that one moment of hesitation, she stepped inside. "Thank you," she said. "And thank you for helping me last nig
ht."
"It seemed the right thing to do," Caroline said, ungluing herself from the floor and moving forward as Roger closed the door and latched it. "I don't believe we've properly met," she added. "I'm Caroline Whittier. This is my husband, Roger."
"Hello," the girl said, ducking her head again. "I'm Melantha Gre—" She broke off abruptly.
Gre? "Green?" Caroline hazarded, glancing at the green-and-gray color scheme of her tunic.
The girl's lips compressed briefly. "Yes," she conceded.
"Melantha Green," Caroline repeated. It was, she decided, an attractive combination of the exotic and the down-to-earth. "That's a nice name. How old are you?"
"Twelve," Melantha said. "I'll be thirteen next May."
"I'll bet you're looking forward to becoming a teenager," Caroline commented. "Do you have any family?"
The girl sent a furtive glance back over her shoulder at Roger. "I'm really hungry," she said. "Do you have anything I could eat?"
So family wasn't a topic she wanted to talk about. Interesting. "Certainly," Caroline said, taking her hand and leading her back toward the kitchen. Her skin was cool, but not nearly as cold as it should have been if she'd been sitting out on the balcony all day. "The casserole's not ready, but I can get you something to tide you over. Do you like cheese?"
"Goat's cheese?" Melantha asked hopefully as they stepped into the kitchen.
"Sorry," Roger said from behind them. "Just plain old cow-brand cheddar."
"That's okay," Melantha said, eying the cheese hungrily as Caroline pulled out one of the two chairs at the small breakfast table and settled her into it.
"You can start with this," Caroline said, piling the slices she'd already cut onto a plate and setting it in front of her. "Would you like some milk or juice? We have orange and apple."
The girl had one of the slices in hand before the plate even hit the table. "Some apple, please?"
"Certainly," Caroline said, getting a glass out of the cabinet and turning toward the fridge. She had to make a quick sidestep around Roger, who was suddenly and inexplicably moving past her toward the table. "Tell me, why did you leave us last night?" she asked as she pulled out the bottle of juice.
