Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

Hang in There!
She posts her poster with all sincerity. I
like to picture her running into some self-impressed
Williamsburg bitch, all Bettie Page bangs and pointy
glasses, who owns the same poster ironically. I’d like to

---

listen to them try to negotiate each other. Ironic people
always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it’s their
kryptonite. Dorothy has another gem taped to the wall by
the soda machine, showing a toddler asleep on the toilet –
Too Tired to Tinkle
. I’ve been thinking about stealing this
one, a fingernail under the old yellow tape, while I distract-
chat with Dorothy. I bet I could get some decent cash for it
on eBay – I’d like to keep some cash coming in – but I can’t
do it, because that would create an 
electronic trail
, and I’ve
read plenty about those from my myriad true-crime books.
Electronic trails are bad: Don’t use a cell phone that’s
registered to you, because the cell towers can ping your
location. Don’t use your ATM or credit card. Use only public
computers, well trafficked. Beware of the number of
cameras that can be on any given street, especially near a
bank or a busy intersection or bodegas. Not that there are
any bodegas down here. There are no cameras either, in
our cabin complex. I know – I asked Dorothy, pretending it
was a safety issue.
‘Our clients aren’t exactly Big Brother types,’ she said.
‘Not that they’re criminals, but they don’t usually like to be
on the radar.’
No, they don’t seem like they’d appreciate that.
There’s my friend Jeff, who keeps his odd hours and
returns with suspicious amounts of undocumented fish that
he stores in massive ice chests. He is literally fishy. At the
far cabin is a couple who are probably in their forties, but
meth-weathered, so they look at least sixty. They stay
inside most of the time, aside from occasional wild-eyed
treks to the laundry room – darting across the gravel
parking lot with their clothes in trash bags, some sort of

---

tweaky spring cleaning. Hellohello, they say, always twice
with two head nods, then continue on their way. The man
sometimes has a boa constrictor wrapped around his neck,
though the snake is never acknowledged, by me or him. In
addition to these regulars, a goodly amount of single
women straggle through, usually with bruises. Some seem
embarrassed, others horribly sad.
One moved in yesterday, a blond girl, very young, with
brown eyes and a split lip. She sat on her front porch – the
cabin next to mine – smoking a cigarette, and when we
caught each other’s eye, she sat up straight, proud, her chin
jutted out. No apology in her. I thought: 
I need to be like her.
I will make a study of her: She is who I can be for a bit –
the abused tough girl hiding out until the storm passes
over
.
After a few hours of morning TV – scanning for any news on
the Amy Elliott Dunne case – I slip into my clammy bikini. I’ll
go to the pool. Float a bit, take a vacation from my harpy
brain. The pregnancy news was gratifying, but there is still
so much I don’t know. I planned so hard, but there are
things beyond my control, spoiling my vision of how this
should go. Andie hasn’t done her part. The diary may need
some help being found. The police haven’t made a move to
arrest Nick. I don’t know what all they’ve discovered, and I
don’t like it. I’m tempted to make a call, a tip-line call, to
nudge them in the right direction. I’ll wait a few more days. I
have a calendar on my wall, and I mark three days from now
with the words