Nowhere to Run. Nancy Bush

apparently died along with her mother.

      She stood to one side, leaning against the gate to the parking lot, gazing out. Occasionally she’d left the building this way when Aaron had propped open the door. She completely agreed with him that bypassing Paul de Fore was worth breaking some rules. Paul was just one of those guys no one could stand, the type who took his job too seriously and made it hell on everyone else.

      Being too serious, though, wasn’t Aaron’s problem.

      “Tell me something about yourself,” Aaron said now. He had long hair and wore a plaid shirt over a T-shirt, slacker-style. It hardly mattered since his dad was the boss, but truthfully the programmers and game designers who were on the upstairs floor kind of dressed the same way. Slacker, hacker, computer techie, video game designer . . . there seemed to be an unspoken dress code with them that thumbed its nose at accepted business attire.

      Only Liv and Jessica Maltona dressed in legitimate office wear: skirts or slacks, blouses, vests, jackets, sensible shoes, tasteful jewelry and makeup. Paul de Fore wore a navy shirt and pants as if it were a security uniform though there was really no such dictum.

      “Well, I’m a Leo,” she said. “I like Italian food and expensive coffee and live in an apartment with a three-hundred-pound cat.”

      Aaron coughed out some smoke on a laugh. Liv had never so much as hinted that she might have a personality and she’d taken him by surprise. She wasn’t even sure why she’d said it. She’d just wanted . . . to not be so serious for once.

      “Cool. What’s the cat’s name?” he asked.

      “Tiny.”

      He grinned at her and Liv smiled back at him. It was the most playful conversation they’d had to date and though Liv was simply talking to talk, Aaron peered at her as if she were something he’d just discovered.

      “Who are you?” he asked. “You’re too good-looking to be this mousy bookkeeper you want us all to think you are.”

      Too good-looking? She had straight brown hair, hazel eyes and a mouth and jaw that were set too tightly, or so she’d been told. “I’m kind of average-looking.”

      “Look in the mirror, sometime.”

      She shook her head. Whenever she looked in the mirror she saw a woman with anxious eyes whose personal life was nonexistent and whose professional one was practically invisible, too.

      He flapped a hand at her and sucked in his last toke. “You’re good-looking and you’re too serious. You should have some of this.” He held out the teensy little end of the joint.

      “Nah.”

      “Or a glass or two of wine, or a few mojitos, or some Xanax. You just need to let go.” He pushed on the gate and let himself into the back parking lot.

      “You’re going to piss off your father by ignoring security,” she warned him.

      “A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do. You go out this way sometimes, too.”

      It was true. Though Liv generally played by the rules, there was this inner part of her that occasionally liked to flout authority. Most of the time she pretended it wasn’t there. But sometimes it stretched and peered around like a waking beast, looking to prowl. Was it because she’d spent time constrained by others? Or, the fact that the police had left an indelible impression on her since her mother’s death, and not a good one. Or, maybe it was just a side of her personality that she mostly ignored and that surprised her and others now and again when it suddenly popped up. She wasn’t the meek worker bee everyone thought she was, though she took pains to make others see her that way. A kind of camouflage, like an animal’s coat or a bird’s feathers.

      By the time she left work she still hadn’t opened the package and when she got back to the apartment she dropped it on the kitchen counter while she threw together a quick meal—a microwavable TV dinner with limited calories and limited taste; her eating habits hadn’t evolved over the years, either.

      She went to bed at ten-thirty and stared up at the ceiling through the dark. She could hear the comfortable sounds of the refrigerator humming and the tinny voices from her neighbor’s television, which seemed to be right behind her head, set against the paper-thin wall that separated their units, her bedroom butting up against theirs.

      She fell asleep, then came to abruptly at midnight, wondering what had woken her. There was moaning from behind the wall. It had been her neighbor Jo’s last climactic shriek during lovemaking—something that happened regularly enough—that had penetrated her sleep.

      Sleep . . . That’s what some people called it, though Liv was pretty sure her sleep was different than others’; she’d learned that over the years. Hers was disturbed by images that kept coming back, creeping into a dream that had nothing to do with whatever the dream was about, images burrowing inside, memories from her childhood that simply wouldn’t go away. Gruesome visions. The kind that had sent her to Hathaway House, a place for troubled teens who were recovering from serious issues: drug addiction, suicide attempts, self-mutilation . . . whatever. She’d been sent there because she was “disturbed,” or so said her evil stepmother—yes, she really did have one—who had convinced her father to seek help for his nutso daughter. Only it hadn’t helped, apart from making Liv realize that her problems were small compared to some of the other kids’ at Hathaway House.

      But because she was underage and had no choice, Liv put in her time there and finally, much to the evil stepmother Lorinda’s dismay, had been pronounced “in recovery” sometime in what would have been her senior year of high school. She was released into her family’s care and she went on to earn her GED. She’d learned by then that the best thing to do was just not to tell anybody about the powerful images she had of her mother’s body hanging limply from a noose that had been attached to the rustic kitchen rafters of their old home. Images that stole her sleep. Images of a suicide that had left Deborah Dugan’s two children, Liv and her brother, Hague, in the hands of a stunned father who quickly took a new bride.

      Liv blinked in the darkness. The television next door was now tuned to an old sitcom that ran in the off hours and every so often the canned laughter would burst out in little fireworks of har, har, har. Liv listened to it and thought of the couple who lived adjacent to her in Apartment 21B. Young and in love, around her own age, they seemed to live on pizza and Diet Coke. At least the girl did. The guy had a penchant for beer. “Whatever’s on special,” he told Liv one day when she met them on the outdoor balcony and he was lugging a six-pack of Budweiser. They were trying to hug, kiss and giggle with each other while he also was threading the key into the lock and then they sort of fell inside and slammed the door shut behind them.

      Liv had opened her own door and was greeted by the scent of loneliness and lost opportunities.

      The next-door couple’s name was Martin and though they hadn’t formerly introduced themselves she knew the shrieker was Jo. His name started with a T . . . Travis, or Trevor, or something kind of cowboy-sounding to Liv’s mind. She should know what it was as she’d heard Jo scream it out enough times while they were making love, but it always made her feel like an auditory voyeur and therefore Liv covered her head with her pillow whenever they went at it.

      The worst of it was that their lovemaking reminded Liv of the two times she’d gotten close to sex and the third time that she’d actually gone through with it and had been left wondering, what the hell? Where were the bells and flowers and rainbows and endorphins? She’d mostly felt sort of depressed and wondering if sex, too—touted as a supposedly wonderful expression of love—was just another part of life that she wasn’t able to experience like everyone else.

      Cynical. That’s what she was. And afraid . . . afraid to open a package from someone who’d sent it to her long, long after her death.

      The following morning she went through the shower, dressed in black slacks and a black, long-sleeved T-shirt, drank a glass of orange juice and ate a piece of peanut-butter toast, her gaze on the envelope. She grabbed her purse and keys and headed out the door, then turned around