Gathering Lies. Meg O'Brien

      “The woman walks into her apartment with a new friend, and it’s a mess. Clothes, books, tapes, food all over the place. Bureau drawers wide open in the bedroom, shoes all over the floor. The friend says, horrified, ‘My God, you’ve been burglarized!’ The woman says, ‘No, I just didn’t clean today.’”

      Kim laughed. “Works for me.”

      We decided to go through the mess once more, on the theory that we might have missed something useful, focused as we’d been on finding a cell phone and radio. After another twenty minutes of scavenging through kitchen and living area, we had little to show for our efforts: the cans of food, a pair of suede gardening gloves, a screwdriver, and one huge Tweety Bird beach towel.

      “Too bad we didn’t bring backpacks for this stuff,” I said, looking at the results of our heist. “I had two of them, but they were buried in my cottage under all the mess.”

      “I’m afraid I never dreamed I’d need a backpack here,” Kim responded. “Talk about a babe in the woods.”

      I made a knapsack of the beach towel by tying the corners together, and put our cache inside.

      At my insistence, Kim was already wearing the gloves. “When we get out of this,” I’d argued, “you can’t be making movies with your hands all scarred up. Me? If I ever get out of this, I may just beat a few people up. I could use some calluses.”

      I took the knapsack and set it by the kitchen door, thinking we’d go down to the dock and look around before we left. “I guess we should tackle the second floor while we wait for the others.”

      Kim had been standing at the door, which, since Ransford had been built on a small peninsula, faced the opposite shoreline from where we’d come. Over the past few minutes, dark storm clouds had formed, and a brisk wind was kicking up. Kim anxiously scanned the horizon.

      “What’s next, do you suppose?” she said. “Hurricane? Floods? Pestilence?”