Back on the street, I said, "Should we call the cops?"

Maddie shook her head. "I asked Trish that, and she said, 'And tell them what? That someone kidnapped Dewitt in Mayne and you tracked a helicopter to New Park?' She said they might start listening to you next Tuesday."

"Oh."

"Also, they're cops. What're they going to do?"

Maddie unlocked the green front door of her building, and climbed the stairs in front of me. I watched her hips sway, I watched the curve of her ass and felt it in my stomach. I knew that nothing mattered except Dewitt, but she’d been gone almost a year, and in all that time, there’d been nobody else. Not for me at least.

On the fourth floor, she led me into a narrow hallway and unlocked a door.

"Who’s Emilio?" I asked.

"A friend."

We stepped into a studio apartment with high ceilings and a square windows. The main room was a box, twenty feet by twenty feet. A kitchen nook with a minifridge and a hot plate added another forty square feet, and the bathroom looked about the same.

Six hundred square feet, made smaller by a workbench cluttered with vises and clamps and tackle boxes and pliers. Shoeboxes were piled beside the bench. The other side of the room contained a card table with one plastic chair, and a messy bed covered with sketchbooks and charcoal pencils.

I lifted a pair of needlenose pliers from the workbench. "A boyfriend?"

"Do you really want to know?"

"I guess not."

She pulled out her laptop. "What was the sign Shandra saw? ‘Dane Street?’"

"Yeah, but we already checked the map."

She tapped the keyboard. "Maybe it’s not a street. Maybe it’s a shop or a band or something."

While she searched for Dane Street, I set the pliers down on the workbench and looked closer at one of the vises. I saw an elaborate little insectoid thing clamped there, a tiny assemblage of … I didn’t know what. Organic matter, intricately looped and tied and twisted, like a fly-fishing lure.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"What’s this?" I asked.

Maddie didn’t look away from the screen. "One of my mozzies."

"Huh?"

"My art."

"Oh."

I flicked on a swivel lamp with an attached magnifying glass. Only at 50X magnification did the full complexity of the mozzy become clear: tiny wires looping through curled crescents, surrounding a hunched cylinder like a malformed goblin with a feathery bridal train.

"Wow, that’s great," I said.

"You wouldn’t know art if Damien Hirst exhibited your head in a box of maggots."

"I have no idea what that means."

"Exactly. "

I flicked off the lamp. "Are you ever coming home?"

"I am home."

"You know what I mean."

Maddie raised her gaze from the computer screen. "You’re fine on the Rock, Lark. You like it there. Look at you. Still making Corene breakfast every morning, right? Still mowing lawns and cleaning gutters?"

I shrugged. "Only when they get clogged."

"Good for you. I spent six months working as a sandwich artist here. ‘Do you want oil and vinegar with that?’"

"Yeah, but--"

"If I hadn't stolen food from work, I would've starved. And you know what? I don’t care. If the tenth gallery in a week rejects me, screw them. This is my one shot at getting what I want."

I looked at her for a moment, then nodded. "Yeah.

"Don’t pretend you know what I’m saying," she said, her eyes narrowing.

"You think I don't know what it's like, not getting the one thing you want?"

She knew what I meant, bcause all I ever wanted was her. And sure, that wasn't fair; she never asked to be the most important thing in the world to me. At least not after the first year together. But that's how I felt, and we both knew it.

Her face hardened. "You know what I look for in a guy?"

"What?"

"Success," she said, turning back to her computer. "But I’ll settle for ambition."

I know that I’m not painting a picture of reunited soulmates here. Still, I’ll resist the urge to insert a hundred pages of flashbacks: the two of us laughing together and crying together and just … together. Skinny-dipping off the old pier, baking a wedding piefor Patty and Steve after our attempt at a cake turned into glop.

We'd been happy together until she’d seen her future: living on the Rock with me, settling into a comfortably routine. My idea of heaven. Her idea of hell.

I looked at the dusty ceiling fan for a while, then poked around in a big pile of shoeboxes. I opened one. Then I opened three more. Each one contained quart-sized black plastic bags with white labels for dates.

"Don’t mess with those," Maddie said.

"What are they?"

"Specimens."

"Huh?"

"They’re art supplies, Lark. Leave them alone."

So I left them alone. I paced, then leafed through some magazines, then turned at a slackening in Maddie’s typing.

"Any luck?" I asked.

"No."

"How about the sun?"

"What sun?"

"The sun pierced by a spear."

"Oh, did she see that? I thought she was gibbering."

She tapped a few more keys and the street noise rose through the window and brought the scent of cinnamon toast. I went into the tiny bathroom and washed my face. I did not check the medicine cabinet. In the kitchen, I threw together some pancakes--Maddie liked pancakes for lunch--and we ate as she searched.

She suddenly laughed. "Oh, God."

"What?"

"That’s not a spear, that’s a straw. And the sun’s an orange."

"Huh?"

"A straw through an orange." She snapped the laptop closed. "It’s a juice bar. I know exactly the place."