Hidden Prey

the careful eye of a sales clerk, she bought deodorant, razor blades and a razor, fingernail clippers, tweezers, a hairbrush and comb, a bottle of soap, and two tubes of lipstick. She was about to check out when she caught sight of herself in a mirror on a Camel’s display; she went back into the store and bought a bottle of moisturizing lotion.
    The next stop was the Westerway Motel, where she’d stayed three or four times when she had the money, before she hit bottom. The place was dank, the beds were crappy, but the price was right and the showers were just as good as the showers at the Radisson. Most important, they’d let her in.
    At the Westerway, she stood in the shower for fifteen minutes. She would have taken a bath, but the tub was so grimy that it frightened her. Besides, somebody had stolen the drain plug. Who in the fuck, she wondered, jabbing at the furry hole with her big toe, would steal a drain plug? Never mind. When she was thoroughly clean, she began grooming herself. Nothing she could do about her hair, she thought: she looked like a witch.
    Clean, dry, nails clipped, deodorized, and moisturized, she headed downtown. Stopped at a bank, where she changed three hundreds into twenties. Passed a test, too: a woman rubbed one of the hundreds with a test pen, and they were fine. If they’d been fake, Trey thought, she’d have had a heart attack.
    She would catch a cab, she thought, and head up to a sporting-goods store across the highway from the Miller Hill Mall, and buy a real pack, the kind young women sometimes traveled with. An expensive one.
    On the way down the street, she passed Hair Today, and saw the sign in the window that said, “We Take Walk-Ins,” and she walked in.
    By noon, she had a cut and a ’do that would take her anyplace in Minnesota; she still had that burned-out, feral face, but you couldn’t see that from behind.
    And by two o’clock, she had a new backpack full of new clothes from the Miller Hill Mall, two delicate pearl earrings, and a selection of expensive facial creams and moisturizers.
    Back at the Westerway, she gathered up the few remaining pieces of her old identity, her old pack and the coat, and carried them out to a trash can. As she was about to dump them in, she saw Mary Wheaton rattling down the street with her cart.
    The coat, she thought, was perfectly good . . .
    “Mary . . .”
    The older woman turned and looked and kept going. Trey caught up with her: “Mary. You want my coat?”
    Wheaton looked at her nearsightedly, then looked at the coat. “Who’re you?”
    “I’m . . . just a person. You want the coat?”
    Wheaton took the coat, shook it, looked at it, and said, “You don’t want it?”
    “No more.”
    Wheaton nodded, put the coat in the cart, and rattled away without a backward glance. She and Trey had talked a dozen times, and Wheaton knew her. This time she showed no sign of recognition.
    Back at the Westerway, she looked in the mirror: she was changing, she thought. She tried to spot one thing that made the difference, but finally decided it wasn’t one thing—it was a haircut that looked paid for, rather than done with manicure scissors or a knife; it was a face that looked cared for, instead of desert dry and flaking; it was an uprightness.
    The next morning she left the Westerway, walked downtown, and caught a cab to the airport. She didn’t have a reservation, so she had to sit in the terminal for six hours, until she got a seat on a Northwest flight to Minneapolis.
    She took a cab from the airport to the University of Minnesota, where she bought a used Corolla for cash from a Lebanese graduate student who seemed nothing less than grateful for the money. Not a great car, with 85,000 miles, but it would do. As soon as she got the paper on it, she’d trade up: changing $50,000 into usable money wasn’t all that easy, but she knew a few tricks from her doper days.
    From Minneapolis, she moved on to Hudson, Wisconsin, on the Minnesota border twelve miles from St. Paul, where she knew a motel that would take cash, and wouldn’t ask to see a credit card. Again, not a great place, but she was developing a base.
    The next move: an apartment in the city, a bank account, and credit card applications. She saw the applications everywhere, and took them.
     
    S HE WAS STILL in Hudson, waiting to be approved for an apartment in suburban St. Paul, when she sat down to eat French toast and link sausages in the Hudson Country