An Inconvenient Woman by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Penzler Publishers

5.

I am heading to my last client of the day when my phone rings.

It’s Mehdi.

“Claire, did you get my flowers?”

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

“But Claire, I want you to know how I feel about you.”

“Please don’t do anything like that again.”

“But it was out of love, Claire. You must learn how to accept it. It’s because you are stressed. I know you are stressed.”

“Mehdi, I have to go.”

“But Claire, just tell me yes to one thing. That we can have another class.”

I am only an image in his head. As unreal as an actress on the screen. Soon his ardency will be focused on someone else. A customer in one of his shops, perhaps. Someone he meets on the street. She could be anyone, because she cannot be real. He can’t imagine her growing old, falling ill, requiring all the forms of care that have nothing to do with his romantic fantasy.

“I have to go,” I repeat.

I hang up.

I am almost at my client’s door when my phone rings.

It’s Destiny.

“Hi, Claire.”

“Hi. What’s going on?”

“Nothing. Just wondered how you were doing.”

This is the first time Destiny has ever called simply to chat.

“Fine. You?”

“Okay. Doing okay.”

But is she?

I hear something strained in her voice.

“I was wondering if you’d heard anything from that reporter,” Destiny says.

“In terms of what?”

“She’d tell you if she found out some stuff about me, right?”

This is an odd question, and as she poses it, Destiny’s tone becomes more urgent.

“Stuff about you?” I ask. “Like what?”

“You know, like about when I was on the street.”

I feel Destiny’s mind working. She is still worried about her talk with Julie Cooper. It’s obvious that she’s trying to escape a trap she thinks she’s foolishly walked herself into. It strikes me that this is typical of her life, a tendency to charge ahead impulsively, then regret it and beat a swift retreat.

“Julie’s not a cop, Destiny,” I remind her. “She’s a writer, and the story she’s writing isn’t about what girls did while living on the street. It’s about how they got off the street. How they made better lives. Which you’ve done, remember? Anything she wrote about you would be complimentary.”

Destiny’s anxiety appears to lessen somewhat.

She switches to another subject.

“I’ve been thinking of that dead girl,” she says. “I feel bad about her.”

“Bad in what way?” I ask.

“Sorry for her. Because she, like, never talked. I mean . . . never.”

When she doesn’t elaborate, I try to draw her out.

“How often did you see her?” I ask.

“Just now and again. She’d show up on the beach. Paint. Then she’d just . . . disappear.”

“She didn’t sleep on the street?”

“I don’t think so.”

I ask a few more questions but fail to get more information out of Destiny. I sense that she’s holding back, that this entire business of “feeling bad” for the girl at the pier is a screen for some deeper and less kindly motive for talking to me.

“If you know something more about this girl, you need to tell the police.

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