I
WATCHED THE STREET AWHILE, then the news, but some athlete had tested positive for drugs and another Hollywood couple filed for divorce, so my block wasn't the hot topic anymore, except they were waiting for results of the investigation. I guess that meant no one had captured the troll. I couldn't imagine how he wasn't spotted. I mean, where can a ten-foot-tall, craggy red monster hide? Then again, how do you capture something that big, that strong, that hard-skinned? Bullets would bounce off him, tasers might tickle him, and I doubt if a polite request could encourage a troll to trot off to jail.
Mostly, I suppose, no one wanted to send the city into a panic by mentioning an alien invasion or something.
Which gave me pause. What if there was more than one of the creatures? I looked at the lock on my file drawer. I know I only wrote about one. Maybe they were like dust bunnies that multiplied when you weren't looking.
No. I did not call on some weird magic to animate an idea. I did not. Hell, I don't know any magic, not a single spell, no matter if people called my grandmother a witch. I kept my distance from the old bat, but sorcery had nothing to do with my staying away. And nothing to do with me.
After all, I'd written about a sea serpent, and no waterspout with eyes and fangs rose sixty feet to flood Ellis Island. Okay, so it rained a lot while I wrote the story, but that was all. My book before that, the one that won all the awards, was called
The Wild Child
. No feral female alien climbed out of the subway, only the usual young Lolitas who dressed like hookers. So I was not responsible for the troll.
To prove it, I cleaned the apartment. I mean, if I could wave a wand and produce a rock giant, surely I could cast a cleaning charm on three rooms.
I couldn't. So I'd do it myself. With a vengeance, to show my mother I was no man's servant, to show Mrs. Abbottini I was no slob, to show myself there were no bogeymen in the bathroom. Mostly I'd do it because this is my home: mine, safe, secure, needing no one or no thing but what I could provide.
Except today I missed a small smattering of human comfort and contact to show I mattered to someone else.
Damn.
I tied the tails of my shirt up in a knot, gathered my hair into a scrunchie, hiked up my low-riding shorts, and pulled on yellow rubber gloves. Luckily the intercom buzzer went off before I had to plug in the vacuum. Three short beepsâArlen's signal that he was downstairs. He did come, he did care! I beeped back to unlock the lobby door, then hurried to kick the (still dry) mop and bucket back into the closet, throw the (unused) dust rags on top of it. The furniture polish can rolled under the couch, but who looked there? I threw the yellow gloves after it, then the scrunchie. I fluffed my hair into place as best I could, undid another button on my shirt, pulled the shorts back down to my hips, and opened the door before Arlen could knock.
The problem was, the man staring at my half-bared, bra-less chest was not Arlen. For one thing, Arlen wasn't as tall. Or as handsome. He never wore tight jeans, and he'd never have filled them so well if he did. Mostly, Arlen was not a black man.
This one had his right hand raised to knock on the door, his left reaching into his back pocketâoh, my God, he was going for a gun or a knife. He was going to kill me. If he didn't, my father would, for opening the door without looking through the peephole. Mrs. Abbottini would never hear my screams. She might ignore them anyway, figuring she'd finally get the front apartment.
“Miss Willow Tate?” the man asked. He looked angry, now that he wasn't looking at my boobs.
All I could do was nod, clutching the doorknobâafter I buttoned my shirt right up to my chin.
“Do you always buzz open the lobby without asking who's there? Or open your door to strangers?”
“I, ah, I am expecting . . .”
His brown eyes dropped to my waist, which was exposed by the knotted ends of the shirt and the low rise of my shorts.
I untied the shirt and said, “No, I am expecting a friend. He was on his way over, and I thought . . . That is, he always buzzes three times.”
He frowned and spoke sternly: “I buzzed twice, the same as I do at my grandmother's house so she knows it's me. She still waits to hear my voice before she unlocks the door.”
He had a grandmother that he spoke of fondly. How bad could he be? Uh, who could he be?
I must have said that out loud, because he finished reaching behind himâI tried not to cringeâand pulled out a wallet, which he flipped open to show a police badge.
“Officer Donovan Gregory, ma'am. I was off duty when the call came out for every available man to help canvas the neighborhood. That's why I'm not in uniform. Not that you would have noticed, since you didn't look through the peephole.”
A policeman! I wish I'd cleaned the apartment yesterday. I wish I'd combed my hair and put on makeup, too, he was so sharp looking in jeans and a loose jacket. “Please, come in. I'm sorry.” I hoped he did not think I was apologizing for being afraid of him because he was African-American. The messy room, the stupidity, the wardrobe malfunctions, and thinking he was Arlen,
that's
what I was sorry for. “It has been a distressing afternoon.”
“For all of us.” He came through the door, glancing around. I'm sure he noticed the dust on the furniture and the cleaning stuff under the sofa, but he did not say anything. He went directly toward what had been my mother's dining alcove, which was now my office. Officer Gregory bent over to look out the window from the height of my chair. “You had the perfect view.”
I still did. I'm afraid I stared at his butt as rudely as he'd stared at my boobs, until I realized he was looking at some drawings and notes on the table near my computer. I stood beside him, moving the pages away. “But I was working here, so I didn't notice anything at first.”
He looked at the papers, sketches from an earlier idea. “What is it you work at, ma'am?”
I reached under the table to produce a copy of my latest book,
I'ver the Hero
. I kept a box there to give away. Sometimes I had to use them as tips for the UPS guy or the pizza deliverer, when I was out of small bills. “Here, maybe you know a kid who likes superheroes.”
“The department doesn't like us taking gifts.” But he smiled and said, “A lot of the guys at the precinct think they're superheroes already, and my grandmother thinks I can walk on water.” He touched the “Willy” on the cover. “That you?”
“Yup. Boys don't want to read girlie authors, so I use Willy. That's what my friends call me, anyway, short for Willow.”
He smiled again and tucked the paperback in his jacket pocket. “So you're a writer?”
“And illustrator.”
“Great, then you must be observant. I sure hope so. We're having trouble getting a handle on today's events. So many people, so many bad descriptions.” He took out a small pad from an inside pocket and flipped through a few pages. “You told the emergency operator you saw a truck?”
“I don't really remember what I said, I was so upset. Is that what it was? I couldn't be sure. I was busy, as I told you, and only looked up when I heard a commotion. At first all I noticed was the carnage in the street. I did spot something red going around the corner.”
I stepped closer, and pointed to the right position.
“Yes, ma'am. Everyone saw the red. It's after that we have problems. Most of the witnesses say they saw a trolley.”
“A . . . trolley?” Not a troll? “But . . . ?”
“I know. We don't have trolleys. But that's what a lot of them say they saw. An out-of-control, high, red trolley.”
I didn't have to lie to say, “I didn't see anything like that.”
“We're looking at a tour bus as a better possibility. One of those double-deckers with railing. Apple Tours or something, but no one mentioned passengers or a driver, and this street isn't on any sightseeing route.” He looked back at me and flashed a really cute dimple on his cheek. “You're not that famous, are you?”
If great smiles counted, he'd be running the police department. I smiled back. “No such luck.”
He flipped a few more pages of his notebook. “The report from the hospitals is that most of the injured suffered shock rather than actual injuries. One driver went into cardiac arrest, and several others needed stitches for cuts from the broken glass. None of them can remember anything, and they were right there on the street. Weird, huh?”
“Weird,” I agreed. No one saw a troll? No one remembered an animated clump of rose marble rampaging thorough the street? Knocking signposts and parking meters down like a drunken adolescent out to get mailboxes with a baseball bat? Playing in the water from the broken hydrant like a city kid in the hot summer? Maybe the other witnesses were like me, too embarrassed to admit what they'd seen, because it couldn't exist. “Are you sure the others said a trolley? Like on tracks?”
Officer Gregory shrugged. “That's what they said. Only no one saw any tracks or overhead wires, so no one can explain how it could have gotten here or why it ran wild. And there are no extra skid marks or red paint chips on anything. Yet a lot of people swear they saw a trolley.”
“Could it be mass hysteria?” I was thinking mass amnesia, if there was such a thing.
“You're not hysterical, are you?”
“No, but for one frantic instant during the crisis, I thought I saw a big red man.”
“An Indian? He'd have to be one hell of a brave to do the damage he did.”
I didn't correct him. “I know. I guess panic can do that to your brain, make it come up with a plausible explanation. I must have seen the back of the truck, trolley. Whatever. Like you said, a man would have to be over nine feet tall.”
“That's what doesn't make sense. You'd think people in the cars would have seen what flattened them. There was a messenger thrown off his bike, a pizza parlor waitress standing by the glass window before it got smashed. Even a dog-walker who ended up hanging off a fire escape, with her dogs. None of them can say what hit them.” He flipped through his pages. “I've got one more resident to track down. I'm hoping he can be more helpful.”
I felt like apologizing again. Officer Gregory was so niceâand cuteâI really did want to help him. He'd been called in on his time off and all, only to hear bullshit from everyone. But if no one else saw Fafhrd . . . ? My dragging in an impossible, otherworldly suspect could only make his job harder. And weirder. Untethered, unoccupied trolleys were bad enough.
“You might talk to the superintendent of the building across the street,” I offered, trying to give him something constructive. “He's always hanging around, watching everything. If anyone saw what happened, it would be him.”
“Lou?”
“You know him?” I
knew
the old man was a criminal!
“Sure, everyone knows Lou. Nice guy. He was the first to call in the accident, and he took a bunch of the victims into his lobby until help came.”
While all I did was call 911 and fret from upstairs. I could tell I'd disappointed the cop again. But Lou, the Good Samaritan? “I find that hard to believe.”
He turned another page. “Yes, I have a note that you'd called in a complaint once. Nothing came of it.”
“He still stares at me.”
“Lady, if you walk around in short shorts, your shirt tied under your ribs and your buttons open so it's obvious you're not wearing a bra, every man in the borough is going to stare at you.”
I could feel the heat start under my newly buttoned collar and flood my face with color. “I don'tâThat is, I wasâ” I pointed to the cleaning supplies under the couch, as if that explained anything.
“But I guess,” he continued, “that they'd stare no matter what you wore.” He smiled again. “Great legs, Miss Tate. And the rest ain't bad either.”
Oh, my.
“Sorry. I forgot I'm back on duty. You wouldn't report me for sexual harassment, would you?”
For making me feel attractive in my uglies? For admiring my book? For not making me feel like a total idiot? “Not at all. I, uh, thank you, I think. Would you like some iced tea, or coffee?” Or to pose for a portrait, maybe?
“Thanks, but I better get going to find some answers. But I appreciate the offer.” He took a card from his pocket. “Here's my number if you think of anything else.” He headed for the door, but turned and said, “Promise you'll be more careful about letting strangers into the building. I have enough to worry about with reckless drivers. I know this is a nice neighborhood, but you never know what kind of monster walks through the streets.”
“Like trolls.”
His eyebrows lowered. “That's a polite term for some of the berserkers I've seen, but I guess you being a writer it makes sense. Be careful.”
“Thank you for caring. I appreciate it, especially on this horrible day.”
I held the door open, because I couldn't very well ask him to stay. He was a policeman, a stranger. Maybe he was married. Maybe I was wishing, but he seemed reluctant to leave, too.
He flashed those dimples again. “And keep your shirt buttoned or I'll be citing you for obstructing traffic and causing civil unrest.”
Damn my pale coloring for the blush I could feel spreading across my cheeks. “I'll be sure to do that. I was going to change before my, ah, friend came over.”
“He's a lucky guy.”
The devil made me say, “Just a friend.”
And the devil rewarded me with another burst of sunshine from Officer Donovan Gregory's smile. “I'll let you know if I learn any pointers from your book,” he said.