Conspiracy Theory(6)

She got a black jersey turtleneck out of her wardrobe, to go with her black pants. She would find a black sweater to put over that. She considered pinning her Freedom FROM Religion button to her sweater, and decided against it. There was no point in antagonizing Father Kasparian, who was not representative of the kind of religion she wanted to be free of, at least as far as she could tell. She ran a brush through her hair and then ran her hands through it, ruining everything. It had been weeks since she had had a full day to herself, and she was exhausted.

The would be out, in their cars the way they always were. With the cold this bad, they’d sit well back in their seats. They wouldn’t stick their heads out the windows. That would make it all the harder to get pictures of them, which meant she would have to rely on the pictures of the license plates, which was always problematic. Hell, even when she got a picture of money being passed with the john’s face as clear as it would have been for a video dating service, it was nearly impossible to get the police to do anything. It didn’t matter that the girls were mostly under sixteen or that there had just been a raid on a child porn ring on the other side of the city. She wondered what that meant, that the police jumped right in to protect boys, but looked the other way when it came to teenaged girls, and there were no other kinds of girls on the streets of Philadelphia. Whores might get old in New York and Los Angeles, but here, they seemed to disappear as soon as they hit eighteen. Maybe they just died.

She found the sweater she was looking for and pulled it over her head. She shoved her feet into good black leather sneakers. She felt like James Bond, sometimes, except that she either walked or took the bus. She’d long ago decided it was too expensive to keep a regular car. A couple of centuries ago, her family had come to this part of Pennsylvania as dissenting Quakers, pacifist and dour, with a streak of asceticism in them that some of their neighbors would have considered extreme in Puritans. That was a part of the family legacy she’d hung on to with both hands. “You’ll never be really happy unless you start flagellating yourself,” Lucinda said, whenever she went on a streak of self-recrimination and self-denial—and it was true, but it was limited, because she would never allow it to interfere with her work. Maybe that explained what all those women were doing, like her mother, when they starved themselves into their size twos. Maybe it was just Puritanism come back to haunt them, disguising itself as snobbery.

She took twenty dollars and her driver’s license out of her wallet. When she hit the street, she carried neither her purse nor any significant amount of money. She took the gold chain off her neck and left it on top of her vanity table. The table seemed badly named, since the mirror was unusable and there was no sign of makeup on it. She brushed the hair out of her eyes again and vowed, for the thousandth time in the last two years, to let it grow out long enough to be held back in a rubber band. The three-by-five cards stuck into the mirror’s sides shuddered a little in the draft allowed by the fact that the windowpane here had a crack in it and three tiny pieces missing. Freedom from Religion Foundation: http://www.ffrf.org, one of them said. Lucinda’s birthday, June 26th, said another. Anne looked at the one with Father Kasparian’s name on it, said the name three times in her head and once out loud, and then gave the whole thing up.

Out in the hall, the rest of the house felt deserted. It probably was. Six o’clock on a Friday night was not usually one of their busier times, although with the cold this bad it would get busy later. They’d start lining up outside the front door, looking for shelter, somewhere around ten. She looked at the drawings Lucinda had put up on the walls without really seeing any of them. They had a woman come in once a week who worked with the girls with what she called “art therapy.” Anne didn’t think she was doing any good, but she didn’t think she was doing any harm, and the girls seemed to like it. She got to the stairwell and went down. Nobody was in the foyer, and there was no sign of anybody on the porch. She checked her watch, a plain steel Timex she’d bought at Kmart for seventeen dollars. When she was seventeen, her mother had given her a gold dress watch from Tiffany’s. It had cost 1,500 dollars and she had lost it one day playing tennis at the Coach and Racquet Club. She had had it for less than two months.

At the bottom of the stairs, she turned toward the back of the house. The walls here were lined with drawings too, a lot of them faintly obscene. The girls liked art therapy, but they laughed at the therapist, who always reminded Anne of the woman who had taught her dancing in kindergarten. Everything was cheerful. Everything was obvious. She got to the back of the house and pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen. Lucinda was sitting at the table with her feet propped up on another kitchen chair. The television was on, as it always was whenever Lucinda was near it. When they’d first met, Lu-cinda had announced, without embarrassment, that if she were rich she’d have a television in every room in the house, including the bathrooms. It had taken Anne a while to realize that that feeling she had, as if all the air had been knocked out of her lungs, was culture shock.