One Cold Night

followed. When they reached the stairwell, he asked her to wait. He took his cell phone out of his pants pocket and fingered the blue-glowing rubber buttons, then seemed to change his mind. He slipped his phone back into his pocket and hunched toward her.
    “Tell you what,” he whispered close to her ear. “I’ll take you up and you won’t touch anything. I mean anything. You’ll stand in the middle of the place and you’ll look around, see what you want; then we’ll go.”
    His decision to bring her inside had been an improvisation, Susan realized, and now he was trying to figure out how to cover himself and help her at the same time. She wondered why he was willing to risk it, but wasn’t about to ask.
    “Okay,” she whispered back.
    Susan followed Officer Johnson up to the third-floor landing, where another officer was positioned outside one of the apartments, guarding the door. Johnson nodded briskly to the officer, whose eyes flicked on Susan as, stomach churning, she walked into the apartment the detectives had been so interested in.
    She immediately saw why.
    The room was nearly bare of furniture but its walls were papered with images. Images of her. And Lisa. Especially Lisa. Even Dave. Scanning the dizzying montage, her eyes landed on an old photo-booth strip of Susan’s and Peter’s teenage faces pressed together, expressions shifting in each shot; but there were only three frames here and she remembered four. The Family Dollar Store had just installed the booth and eachvertical strip cost five dollars. Susan had paid but Peter kept the pictures, which had irritated her a little at the time, though she’d said nothing.
    Technicians seemed to hover everywhere, but when Susan focused her mind on them she realized there were only three, a man and two women, matter-of-factly collecting some kind of physical data from this place where clearly Peter Adkins had lain in wait.
    Well, he had never been shy, she thought, and almost laughed; and then the prick of humor blossomed into tears. She remembered loving that boy, so pleased all those times she had left her home to find him standing outside waiting for her. She had thought it meant that he cared. This, she remembered thinking as a girl just about Lisa’s age, this is love.
    And now he had Lisa. She was with him. And it wasn’t love, nor had it ever been love. It had been obsession.
    Susan closed her eyes and visualized Lisa alive. Alive. Alive.
    Suddenly she recalled Peter the first time she was with him after she had learned she was pregnant. It was late January and she was just four weeks along.
    She contemplated how to tell him but nothing came to mind. They were sitting in the backseat of his mother’s car — she had gone into a store to run an errand — and Susan thought it might be a good idea to tell him here, when his mother would soon return, preventing him from making a big scene. On the last errand his mother had bought apples to make a pie, and Peter pulled one from the bag at his feet. He polished the bright red Macintosh apple on his sleeve and took a big bite of it. He didn’t offer Susan an apple, or even a bite of his, and that instant of selfishness was themoment she decided she did not want him anymore. She had sensed something inchoate lurking within herself, something averse to the idea of spending her life with this exciting, demanding boy-man, but that apple bite was the crystallization of her brand-new decision. That crisp snap of sweet apple misting the air between them.
    “I love apples,” he said, staring past the car’s front seat and through the windshield. He loved apples, and she would never marry him. She ran away from home that very afternoon. That morning of errand running with his mother was the last normal time they spent together before her lies and his anger laid down a minefield they could never cross.
    Susan thought of Marie’s recollection, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Apparently the groom had said so many odd things in his phone calls to her that had blended together over the months. Was Marie’s memory of that statement what had made Susan think of Peter’s apple now? Could it possibly be true that Peter was the groom? Susan had trouble believing it; and yet, what if he had remembered that errand-running morning as a last, missed chance and in his sick mind pieced it together with the chestnut about progeny?
    The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
    Now when she pictured him