She thought about the papers out on the dining room table, and mentally imagined them dissolving into air. There were people she needed. Tim Brand was one of them. She could just imagine what Tim would say about all that.
She got up and went out into the kitchen to see if there was anything going on. Sometimes she fell into a stress-induced sleep before she’d remembered to put away the mayonnaise or clean up the stove after dinner.
She looked into the refrigerator and didn’t like anything she saw. She looked into the freezer and found a large bag of Pizza Rolls. She took this out and arranged twenty of them on a plate. She shoved the plate into the microwave and set it for two minutes and fifteen seconds. Then she went back to the refrigerator and got a large, three-liter bottle of IGA cola.
The microwave beeped. Hope took the plate of Pizza Rolls and the bottle of cola and went through the dining room into the living room. She sat down on the couch and put the plate and the bottle on the coffee table. The coffee table was covered with books and magazines and take-out menus from half a dozen restaurants. The menus came in the snail mail, and Hope kept them all just in case something came along that meant that she could use them.
She was feeling a little dizzy again. She needed to take the medication Tim had given her. She preferred to get her medication from Tim rather than the emergency room, because Tim never looked at her funny or asked her to make a plan to pay.
She finished off the Pizza Rolls and thought about making another plate. She decided against it and went upstairs to shower. The stairs were hard. She was hyperventilating by the time she got to the top of them, and she was dizzy again.
She showered, and washed her hair, and gave some thought to the world out there, if only in Alwych. This was the day Gregor Demarkian was supposed to show up. She didn’t believe the man would be able to make any more sense out of the life of Chapin Waring than anybody else had. It was silly to think of Chapin as a force of nature. She had only seemed like that to Hope when Hope was very young, and it was part of being very young that you overestimated the lightweights with charisma.
She went down the hall to her proper bedroom, the same bedroom she had had when she was growing up. She went into her big wardrobe and found some summer clothes. One of the wonderful things about being up here on the second floor was that she had access to all her things.
She found a skirt and a T-shirt she particularly liked, and some almost-new underwear. She got dressed and then she looked through the wardrobe again. She got T-shirts and skirts and big, stretchy dresses.
She went back downstairs again, carrying the big pile of clothes, humming a little. She put the clothes on the dining room table, on top of the papers she had spread out there.
She was just about coming to the decision that she needed that extra plate of Pizza Rolls when she heard the sharp click from the computer that meant that she had new mail. She went in to see if it was something important.
She found a new e-mail from Caitlin Hall. That would be Caitlin confirming she’d gotten Hope’s message, and probably promising an attachment with a syllabus template as soon as possible.
Hope opened the e-mail. She stared at it for a minute.
Oh, Hope, it said. I’m so sorry. I sent that last night, and I was under a lot of pressure to fill that immediately if not sooner. I’ll let you know if anything else shows up.
The dizzy thing was back again, right there at the top of her head. Her entire skull felt numb.
It would be crazy to think Caitlin had done this on purpose, but that was what Hope did think. There was just something about this that felt deliberate, like the bait and switch children used to make fun of other children. Lucy taking the ball away before Charlie Brown could kick it. Kids at a junior high school dance pulling a chair out from under someone trying to sit down near the wall.
Hope closed the e-mail. She got up and walked away from the computer. She walked into the dining room. The clothes were still there, spread out across the papers.
She leaned forward and picked up some of the clothes. She moved them carefully to another part of the table. She looked at the papers underneath them and made a face.
She had to ask herself, when she found herself in these situations, if the people who believed in karma had it right. Maybe she had been something terrible in her last life, something that deserved everything she was getting now.
Maybe she had been Caitlin Hall in her last life, and the gods that controlled that sort of thing would never let her forget it.
EIGHT
1
The Alwych Police Department was the model of modern suburban law enforcement—suburban in the old sense of the word, when suburbs were places rich people went so they didn’t have to live next to all those other people in the city. The building was small but very, very clean. All the surfaces gleamed as if they had never been used. There was a big open area at the front, with a counter staffed by a woman in a crisply immaculate uniform and, beyond her, a sea of uncluttered desks. There was a corridor that looked completely blank going off toward the back. There wasn’t anything that looked like it could be a jail, or the gateway to a jail.