Cut to the Bone. Joan Boswell

said.

      “Not Ms. Grant’s office?”

      “No. We’ve interfered enough in their lives. The party room will be fine.”

      “We should have it to ourselves. No one will be partying right now,” Ian said.

      Before entering Sabrina’s apartment, they pulled on gloves and protective covers for their shoes.

      “If we turn up anything significant, we won’t have contaminated the site,” Rhona said.

      The apartment reeked of paint.

      “I thought the new paints didn’t smell,” Ian said.

      “Latex is better. They’ve used oil in here,” Rhona said, flicking on the hall light to reveal deep amber walls, the colour intensified by the amber shade on the overhead light. The effect was strange but attractive. From the hall they moved to the living room.

      “Charcoal. Isn’t it smashing,” Ian said. “The white woodwork, the ebony furniture — absolutely smashing.”

      Rhona wasn’t quite so taken with it, but it was a stunning room.

      “I never considered charcoal. My pine furniture would stand out against it. I see a project coming on.”

      Rhona reflected that if Ian had made that statement with any of his male colleagues, he would have been mocked, if not to his face then behind his back. Maybe the fact that he revealed so little about himself was a careful cover-up because he realized how he’d be perceived. Interesting. Maybe he wasn’t the metrosexual she’d pegged him for. Maybe … but what did that have to do with anything.

      “Nothing personal here. It could be a hotel,” Rhona said.

      They continued to the master bedroom, also painted charcoal with a black iron bedframe and white linens. A well-stocked bar cart and the same mirrored ceiling they’d seen in Ginny’s bedroom as well as a white floktari rug on the black-stained floor made a dramatic but impersonal impression.

      Ian slid open the drawer of one bedside table.

      “Anything?” Rhona asked.

      “A selection of condoms,” he said and bent to open the cupboard underneath. “Sex toys to please almost anyone.”

      “See what’s in the one on the other side,” Rhona instructed.

      Ian walked around the bed and checked. “Same kind of stuff, but there’s more sadomasochistic things — a whip, handcuffs.” He probed further. “Leather masks and other things,” he said and shut the door.

      “Tools of the trade, I suppose. Could be relevant — too soon to tell. We need to know more about her, who she is, and where she came from. Let’s try the other bedroom. She must stash personal belongings somewhere. This room reveals nothing about her personality other than her dramatic taste in furnishings and colour and her willingness to do whatever her clients asked.”

      She opened the door of the second bedroom and stopped to absorb the total contrast to the rest of the apartment. Soft rose walls, a white wooden single bed with a beautiful quilt. Four more beautiful antique quilts hung on the walls. On the white desk an open, ready-to-go, state-of-the-art sewing machine and a closed Apple laptop took up the space. Two tall white bookcases filled with rectangular white baskets and a series of black binders, a chest of drawers with a wall-mounted flat-screen TV, and an armchair slip-covered in cream cotton with a footstool upholstered in rose-patterned chintz completed the furnishings. A multi-coloured rag rug on the floor added to the room’s welcoming coziness.

      “The real Sabrina Trepanier lived here,” Ian said.

      “No photos, which may or may not mean she’s totally alienated from her family. Some people don’t like having photos around.”

      “Because they think a photographer steals their soul? I remember learning in introductory anthropology that some tribes in the South Pacific believe that and won’t have their pictures taken,” Ian said.

      “Maybe that’s their reason, but I think I’ve read that for some people photos remind them constantly of happier times, of the speed with which life is passing, of people they’ve loved who’ve died, and of their own mortality,” Rhona said.

      “Interesting explanation. I’ll think about that, because I don’t display photos in my apartment. I have some stashed away but not on display.”

      Rhona, who’d been about to open the top bureau drawer, smiled at Ian. “At last we have something in common. I feel the same way. Photos make me sad, and you won’t find any in my apartment either. I do have photo albums. It’s funny, people who visit always comment and their remarks always sound critical.”

      Ian grinned back. “What do you know, something in common.” He turned to the desk, where he pushed the sewing machine to one side, opened the computer, and booted it up.

      Rhona found a tidy selection of underwear in the top drawer of the bureau. On the left it was black, filmy, and sexy, and on the right utilitarian and unexciting. This woman certainly had compartmentalized her life.

      “The computer doesn’t require a password, which is not usually a good thing for us,” Ian said over his shoulder. “The user either has nothing to hide or doesn’t think anyone else will ever look at it.” He folded himself onto the white wooden desk chair, which had a grey Obus cushion attached to its back, and began clicking away. “Speaking of family, I’ll check the address book.”

      A minute later he said, “No Trepaniers here. Now I’ll pull up her emails.”

      Rhona continued with the drawers. She felt underneath each pile of T shirts, sweaters, workout clothes, but found nothing. She then removed the drawers to check their undersides and the back interior of the bureau. Again she found nothing.

      “We need to know if her real name is Sabrina Trepanier and if she has any family contacts. You may have to scan subject headings to figure that out,” Rhona said.

      “I’m ahead of you. I’ve done a brief run-through. Most correspondence is with quilters, suppliers of fabric, and other people connected to sewing. Now I’m looking in her folders. None labelled family. One for friends in Toronto, one for passwords, one for Aeroplan.”

      “Aeroplan. Check that one. If she ever travelled she had to have a passport, and it will have her birth certificate name.”

      “Got it. Claire Sabrina Trepanier.”

      “Mystery solved.”

      “Now to find her family. I’ll check filed information and the sent emails. Usually that list is shorter than received.”

      “Is there a heading for clients? I thought that was how escort services operated,” Rhona said.

      “Nothing.”

      Rhona, finished with the bureau and moved to the bookcase. Sabrina had not been a reader. A pile of People, US, In Style, and quilting magazines did not count as literature. The baskets held fabric and sewing equipment. Rhona glanced at the bed. She thought the carefully pieced pattern was called double wedding ring. She didn’t know where the information had come from — crafts and sewing had never interested her. In one basket, completed blocks in pinks, creams, and mauves almost filled the space. They were beautiful and she felt a momentary sadness that Sabrina’s quilt would never be finished. She opened another covered basket and found neatly organized files. Thumbing through, she discovered that Sabrina had taken a small business course at George Brown College. She had documented her progress towards the establishment of a quilt- and latch-hooking business. A file on possible properties, another on sourcing, on quilt shows and competitions. On a piece of paper she’d written possible names for the store.

      “She was a quilter, not a reader, and she was in the final stage of preparing to open a business,” Rhona said, reaching for the first of the black binders.

      In a minute or two Ian looked up. “What’s in the books?” he asked.