...And Never Let HerGo

original boxes, where she always kept them, but some of the boxes were scattered on the floor now—as if she had been in a hurry tochange her shoes and intended to put things back together when she got home.
    Anne Marie was the first to admit she was a compulsive neat freak. Her friends teased her and called her Anal Annie when she went through her little rituals. She arranged her CDs alphabetically, stacked her pennies so that Lincoln’s profile faced the same way, and made her bed even as she was crawling out of it. She actually folded her soiled laundry, rather than just tossing it in the hamper. Kathleen always smiled at that; her sister did her laundry at Kathleen’s house every Wednesday night, and usually had dinner there, too.
    The U.S. Open T-shirt Annie had worn when Kathleen saw her last on Wednesday night now lay on the top of the clothes hamper. And there was a long floral-patterned Laura Ashley summer dress folded on a small settee rather than being placed with the rest of the laundry. A small thing, but very unusual for Annie. Kathleen recognized the dress; it was new and one that Anne Marie had bought to wear to the Point-to-Point amateur steeplechase with Mike Scanlan on May 6.
    The red oblong box on the floor looked familiar, too. It was from Talbot’s, one of the Wilmington area’s better women’s shops. It hadn’t been opened. Kathleen slid the ribbons free, opened the box, and saw that the Talbot’s seal still held the layers of tissue inside together. But she knew what the taupe garment beneath was; it was an expensive pantsuit, the same suit she had talked Annie out of buying a week earlier because it cost far too much for her budget. They’d had a little argument about that. When had she gone back to buy it?
    There were five people in Anne Marie’s apartment: Kathleen, Mike, her friends Jill Morrison and Ginny Columbus, and Ginny’s mother, Virginia. They respected Annie’s privacy, but they had to look around for some clue to where she might have gone, even as they knew it was an intrusion.
    Annie didn’t own much, and the furniture she did have was secondhand or the kind of inexpensive stuff that had to be assembled after purchase, but the way she had decorated her place was her and it was charming. There were photographs: family pictures with her brothers and sister one Easter, a candid shot of Anne Marie and Mike taken at her surprise birthday party at Kathleen’s in January, and on the wall a picture of their mother, also named Kathleen. There were Annie’s scruffy old stuffed animals wearing women’s rights buttons, a motley collection of knickknacks that pleased her.
    Anne Marie always kept her kitchen almost antiseptically clean. But this was the source of the miasma in her apartment; the wholeroom smelled of rotting food. The counter was littered with fruit and vegetables long since grown overripe and mushy. The strawberries were brown and had a sickly sweet odor; mushrooms dank as a swamp added to the stench. A garbage can with its plastic liner pulled up was next to the kitchen table, and it, too, was full of decaying food.
    Mike shook his head. He knew that Anne Marie hated to keep any garbage in her apartment; when he picked her up for a date, she invariably carried a neat bag of garbage to put in the cans outside. There was no way she would have left her kitchen in this condition.
    Looking into the refrigerator, Kathleen found two doggie bags of leftovers from a Philadelphia restaurant, Panorama. The food inside wasn’t spoiled, but it looked dry, as if it had been there for a few days at least. Anne Marie wouldn’t have left all this food out on the counter. She wouldn’t even have kept restaurant food in her refrigerator so long. Kathleen looked at Mike questioningly. Had he and Anne Marie been to this restaurant? He read her mind and shook his head slightly.
    Oddly, there were other things on the kitchen counter: prescription medications, sample size, arranged like a row of dominoes; pouches of Rice-A-Roni; pretzels. They hadn’t been opened, but they hadn’t been put neatly in the cupboards, either.
    Perhaps most frightening of all, Anne Marie’s purse was there in the kitchen, along with her wallet and all of her credit cards. There was about $40 in bills in the wallet. The day-runner that she used to keep track of all her appointments was also there, but her keys weren’t. She kept her house and car keys on a ring attached to a leather pouch that held