One Cold Night

irrelevant.
    The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
    A dozen chocolate apples, made from handcrafted hollow molds, undeliverable to the address on the invoice. The credit-card charge had been challenged by the bank; it wasn’t the first loss Water Street Chocolates had incurred via the Web site. The expensive special order had been dismantled, each apple individually wrapped in cellophane and placed in the shop for sale. The failed address was a defunct farm or an orchard somewhere in upstate New York, if she remembered correctly.
    “Where is Dave?” Susan asked Johnson.
    He looked at her and seemed to consider whether or not to answer. But she knew he would; he had given her everything else she had asked him for so far.
    “Gardiner,” Johnson said. “Upstate New York. They flew in, should be there by now.”
    “Why are they going there?”
    Johnson half smiled. “I’ve already gone out on a limb here.”
    Even without the details, Susan felt safe in assuming that something had led Dave to Gardiner. Something important. She wasn’t sure if the delivery address for those chocolate apples had been in Gardiner, but it was ringing a loud bell in her memory. Maybe the apple falling far from the tree saying had been some kind of foreshadowing by the Groom — a clue — and maybe if she could find the invoice for those chocolate apples she could give Dave a location he didn’t have. Maybe Lisa was there.
    “I need to get to my office,” she said. “Can you help me get through that crowd outside?”
    He nodded, eyeing her. “Why?”
    “Please trust me; it could be important.”
    She hurried out of the stinking apartment with Johnson right behind her, running down the steps until he urged her to slow down.
    “Keep cool,” he told her, “or they’re going to chase you.”
    When they emerged from the building, Susan lowered her head and followed Johnson through the crowd. Reporters called to them and cameras snapped, but they didn’t respond. They walked slowly now, moving in the direction of Susan’s shop. With each step, she prayed as hard as when she was a little girl sending out elaborate wishes at bedtime. But now her desires were concrete and immediate: to find that invoice. It would either be in the “Invoices — Unfulfilled” file drawer or the overflowing “To File” basket on the shelf above her desk.
    “Tell me what I can do,” Officer Johnson asked heras soon as they were inside her shop, making their way through the factory and to her office.
    Susan flicked on the light, and the white rectangular room where she spent so many hours of her life popped into focus. Things were mostly in their places here, including the colorful slips of personal reminders tacked to the bottom corner of her corkboard: the name of a book she wanted to buy for Dave; tonight’s tickets to the Brooklyn Academy of Music; the address of the restaurant where she was supposed to meet a friend for dinner later in the week; a two-day-old phone message from Carole.
    “See that wire-mesh basket on the second shelf up?”
    Johnson looked in the direction she was pointing.
    “Start looking for an invoice for a dozen chocolate apples, dated late September, upstate New York. I don’t remember the name of the town.”
    Johnson lifted down the basket and began sifting through papers by the handful.
    “Better do it carefully,” Susan said. “Look at every one.”
    Meanwhile she opened the top file drawer and took out the slender file that held invoices that had, for various reasons, gone unpaid. Some customers habitually paid late and responded to dunning on their own schedules: some always on the second month, or the third, or the fourth. After a quick search, she was satisfied that the invoice she wanted was not in the file cabinet, so she joined Officer Johnson at the desk, where he had made a pile of papers already seen. She grabbed a chunk and began to peel off one paper at a time: weekly payroll records, receipts, supplier confirmations, proof of the dull minutiae involved in running even the most creative of enterprises.
    “Hold it.” Johnson was staring at a white paper. “Check this out.”
    She scanned the paper quickly and there it was in black ink: one dozen chocolate apples in a decorative wicker basket, cellophane wrapped with a frosted green bow, undeliverable to the address on the order — an intersection of two numbered routes in Gardiner, New York. No name or phone number had been included in