“He had a ring,” I blurted out.
Alex’s eyes roved all around me without landing. “He was going to ask you?”
“At some point,” I said. “Apparently. Not necessarily… soon.”
“If he had the ring in his pocket…” Alex said.
I recognized processing silence this time and turned for the big booth, crawling onto the cushions on my knees to reach the curtain and be near the cool of the window. Through the glass, Milwaukee Avenue was waking up, proper morning at last. What this neighborhood needed was a pancake place. But I realized, with a lump in my throat, that I could stop wishing for the place next door to be something useful to me.
I reached for the curtain and unknotted it.
“Or the ring could be at your apartment,” Alex said.
I still had the curtain fabric in my hand when the deepest déjà vu feeling washed over me. I was side by side with another time and place, twinned, like the apartments upstairs.
Something I was supposed to remember?
Whatever it was, it wouldn’t fall away. I was caught there, the edge of the stained curtain in my hand. How many years had this thing bothered the customers and we’d never had it hemmed—
I suddenly knew where I was, and when.
“I need to go to my old apartment,” I said.
“Okay,” Alex said.
I didn’t have a key. “I need tobreak intomy old apartment.”
36
Alex talked me out of breaking and entering at the old apartment. Instead, he convinced me to call Detective Aycock and ask him to meet us there. When Aycock asked me why, I said I had new information about Joey’s death. I thought.
“You think,” he repeated in a dull voice. But he wasn’t fooling me. He’d show.
When Alex and I arrived, Aycock had already fetched Cam from the manager’s apartment.
“When do I get the go-ahead to get this place emptied?” Cam was complaining loudly up at the apartment door as Alex and I climbed the stairs to the second floor. “You’ve already searched it up and down! I need to get it rentedASAP to get back some of the money those last two—”
When he spotted me, his mouth snapped shut and he folded his skinny arms over his gut.
Aycock turned and clocked us. “He’s right,” Aycock said to us. “The crime scene team has been all over the building, and there’s no blood evidence, no sign your friend got into any trouble here. Some… quality-of-life violations,” he added as Cam opened the door.
Inside, Cam planted his ratty slippers in the mossy carpet of our living room as though I might try to knock him over for the turntable.Myturntable. I brushed past him, noting that things looked a little off, like a big hand had turned the snow globe of our place over andshookit.
Behind me, I heard Alex say, “There might be a ring missing.”
“What kind of ring?” Cam said. “Worth anything?”
He’dbe turning the place over as soon as we left.
“We never found anything of value,” Aycock said. “Uh, monetary value, I mean. No jewelry at either scene. Could the victim have had the ring on him when he was assaulted? What’s this new information Miss Devine claims to have?”
“I remembered that Joey stopped by the pub Wednesday,” Alex said.
I stopped. Oh, Alex.
Everything Alex said sounded like he’d just had a new idea. This was a bad one.
“Oh, did he now?” Aycock said, and I didn’t have to look back to know the detective’s notebook was either actually or metaphoricallyout. “Yourememberedthat, did you?” Aycock said. “All of a sudden? What time was this?”
