Chapter One – The Ad
To this day, Oscar didn’t know who sent him the newspaper clipping. The return address on the plain white envelope read New York Times headquarters, but he doubted someone at the Gray Lady sent him a week-old page from their classified section with an ad circled in red ink.
Sitting at his makeshift desk, an old door painted black on top of two beat-up gray filing cabinets, he sipped his coffee and contemplated the envelope and the pile of mail under it. The mail being a thing that brought much anxiety because of creditors and the IRS, and even worse, family. A mystery seemed far more rewarding than a final notice.
The date on the newspaper clipping read September 9th, 1996. A week before he was reading it. The ad that was circled read, “Looking for relatives or acquaintances of F. Abbott, who lived or worked in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s. Full first name unknown. This pertains to a personal matter, related to Marsha Grant.” There was a phone number and some kind of switchboard code.
His father had been Francis Abbott. Frank to his friends. Oscar didn’t subscribe to the Times or any newspapers. He picked up the envelope again, turning it around, but there were no other markings or clues other than the two typewritten addresses and the stamp.
Oscar didn’t like being played, but his curiosity was certainly piqued. His father had died in ‘88, and Oscar hadn’t liked him much before that. Still, a mystery was a mystery, so he called the number.
It was some kind of message service. A recording of a nervous woman’s voice said, “If you have any information about someone named F. Abbott, who may have had contact with someone named Marsha Grant, please leave me a message with that information. If it proves helpful, I will call you back and may offer a reward of $100. Leave a phone number where you can be reached.”
Oscar cleared his throat as a loud beep rang out. “My name is Oscar Abbott, my father was Frank Abbott. He managed an eyeglass shop in the Lower East Side on Rivington from 1965 to 1988. I’m not sure if that’s who you’re looking for, but it might be.” He left his number.
Some might say “and then he forgot all about it,” but he didn’t. Oscar thought about it constantly. It kept him up at night. There was some strange web around the whole thing. He felt it. A sticky spot he had just barely touched. He still had time to escape, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
His father had been a complicated and stoic man. Their family lived deep in south Brooklyn. Oscar, his mother, his father, and his older brother, in a shabby townhouse. His father went to work six days a week, usually until the late evening, often staying in the city overnight. That’s the way it was. That’s what lots of the fathers of kids he knew did. His father said there was a little bedroom above the store, but Oscar had never seen it.
It was almost a week after getting the newspaper ad that Oscar got a call back. First, his phone rang, and the caller hung up. A moment later, it rang again, and there was the nervous voice from the recording. “Mr. Abbott? I’m Katherine Grant. From the ad in the newspaper.”
“Oh, right, the ad. I’m not sure I have any information you need, but I’m happy to help.”
There was a long pause. “I’m sorry, I’m not really a phone person. Would you meet me for coffee? Or lunch? I’ll buy you lunch. And if your information helps, of course, there’s the reward. I just have all these papers and things, I think it might be better to do this in person.”
Oscar wondered again what the con was. He was broke, so he doubted it was a money thing. He tried to think of a reason not to meet her, but it seemed like at least something to do, and if he was honest with himself, a free lunch was actually something he could use.
“Sure, where and when?”
There was some rustling of papers, and the phone knocked against something, and then a little breathless, she offered, “Tomorrow? One o’clock? Odessa Cafe. Do you know where that is?”
He laughed. The old diner was one of his favorite haunts as a teen. “Yeah, I know that place. I can do one o’clock. I’ll see you then.”
“Good, I mean, thank you. One o’clock. Yes,” she said awkwardly and then hung up.
A pretty voice. The gravity of the mystery was pulling him in. He felt it. Still, he was on his guard in case it was a con.
The next day Oscar took the train into the city. There was a familiar nostalgia to the trip. He felt it every time he went into Manhattan. At twenty-eight, he lived and worked in Brooklyn, so he didn’t go into Manhattan much, but he spent all of his time there as a teen. He went to punk shows and walked around St. Marks and played chess in The Marshall Chess Club, and listened to poetry at the Nuyorican Cafe.
His time galavanting around the city was long gone, though. He was trying to make a life for himself, though he wasn’t doing a great job of it. His friends had either opted for corporate gigs, real estate, and medicine or dug further into the punk scene and usually hard drugs.
The ones who got out had big families and houses out in Long Island or Upstate. The ones who stayed often died.
Oscar was trying to avoid both those outcomes. He was a writer and photographer. He did odd jobs, articles for local newspapers and magazines, music reviews, he dabbled in wedding photography, he occasionally resorted to somewhat shadier vocations. He generally struggled to get by without selling out or hitting bottom.
Still, the city was there, unmoved by his plight. The East River was dark gray, and he found a strange comfort in seeing it as his train crossed the Manhattan Bridge.
The Odessa Cafe was bustling with a lunch crowd, but people were mostly sitting at the shiny chrome counters in the front or getting food to go. One woman sat in a booth at the back, alone. She was pretty but red-eyed. Someone you might want to paint a portrait of. In that moment, Oscar considered the camera he had in his messenger bag, but thought better of it.
Straight chocolate brown hair in a shoulder-length bob. A dark-gray cardigan over a simple black dress. Bare legs and paint spattered work boots. She looked about the same age as him. She looked up as he approached.
“Katherine?” he said though he knew.
“Kate. You must be Oscar,” she said, her eyes skeptical. He nodded and smiled, and she motioned to the seat across from her.
There was silence for a moment. Oscar looked around for a waiter, but no one caught his eye. “Have you had many bites? I mean, anybody else know anything about your mom?” He asked carefully.
She sipped her coffee and looked at her pie. “You’re the only person who responded. I don’t know. I kind of got an instant feeling it was your father. Maybe I shouldn’t trust my instincts. I wonder, though. There was a business card from an eyeglass store with my mother’s things. So when you said what your father did…”
“Was is Miltzen’s?” Oscar asked, and her eyes lit up.
“Yes. Yes, that was it. I suppose the pieces will come together quickly. I’m rushing ahead, though. My mother died last year, in August. Cancer. Earlier this year, my father moved down to Florida and asked me to handle selling their house. The house I grew up in. So I’m finally going through my mother’s things, and I find this weird locked metal box. A weirdly difficult-to-open box. It wasn’t some fire safe you got at a hardware store. When I finally got it open, I found, well, I found a lot of things, but among them were these letters.”
She took a thick swath of envelopes out of her bag. He saw the familiar logo of his father’s store on a business card paper clipped to one of the envelopes. He saw the first letter, addressed: F. Abbott to M. Grant. One post office box to another. On the bottom of the envelope was the date January 8, 1978, written in blue ink.
“My mother was having an affair. Well, more than one affair. It’s been a difficult thing to parse because I thought I knew my parents well. My mother was a very private woman, very quiet, but apparently, she had another life. A very sordid other life.”
He touched the edge of the stack of envelopes but didn’t pick them up.
“My parents were married at that time,” Oscar started, carefully. “I’ve known certain elements of my father’s life or lives. This doesn’t come as a huge shock. Frankly, I didn’t know my father very well. He died in ‘88.”
They sat for a moment, looking at the letters between them. “They are strange. Sort of formal correspondences. They never write each other’s names. It’s like Last Tango in Paris or something. It’s mostly your father’s replies, but there are some copies of my mother’s letters. She sometimes typed on carbon paper. They are all typed. I don’t know why I find that strange.”
He took a deep breath. He hoped a waitress would come by. He needed coffee. He wanted something stronger. “They were both children of the 40s. It was a more formal time. I don’t know. My father was formal with everything. He wore a suit to get on an airplane.”
She laughed at that, the first break in her mask of sadness. “This is more… This is, well, I guess you don’t need to know…”
“Tell me,” he said instinctively. Their eyes met for a moment. Curiosity meeting curiosity. As much as he hated his father, he wanted to know things about him. Moreover, Oscar wanted to know things. His curiosity was always paramount.
“Sir, master, stuff like that. Whips and rope and so on. It’s hard to conceive of my mother writing or even reading those words, let alone participating in any of that.”
It was hard for him to think of his father in that framework. The dower bespectacled man, always in a dingy black suit, trudging to work every day. In some strange way, it sparked a bit of pride for some reason. “The old man wasn’t always working and drinking himself to death.”
The waitress finally arrived. Oscar ordered pierogi and kielbasa, and coffee. He did some quick math to make sure he could pay for it if she didn’t fulfill her promise.
“So, what do you want to know? Did you just want his first name?”
Kate shook her head. She went through the pile of letters and found one with a star drawn on it. “This, um, I guess it’s better just to read it.”
She pulled out a thin yellowed page. The words were typed in ink that had gone slightly gray.
“My precious one. When you lie long enough, you start to forget the truth. Going through my life, my office, my home, I don’t know who I’m pretending to be anymore. The man in the eyeglass shop or the man lying next to you. These days bleed into each other, between the nights I lay with you. That is the division of my life: in your arms or not in your arms. I dream about all the ways I will torment you and seeth, thinking about all the ways the world will bore me. I don’t think I can wait until the fifteenth. I’ll need you as soon as you read this. I’ve finally gotten the keys to that little apartment we used. I’ve made arrangements, and it can be our secret place from now on. Any time we want. I’ll be staying there every day this week, waiting for you after work. Come as soon as you can, and remember our rules.”
She put down the letter and turned it over as the waitress came back with Oscar’s food.
“I read that early on, when I first got the box open. A few days later I found this key,” she said, taking a small worn yellow envelope and retrieving a single brass key.
“I don’t know what it’s for, but I thought you might.”
Oscar ate his meal, staring at the key. He shook his head. “My father stayed in the city a lot. We lived out in Brooklyn. He said he slept in an office above the store, but it seemed unlikely. By the time I was old enough to question it, I didn’t really care. My father was, well, we didn’t have a very good relationship.”
She nodded somberly. “I thought I had a good relationship with my mother, but there was so much I didn’t know.”
Oscar drank his coffee quickly, ordering a refill. “I don’t know anything about what my father did in the city, but the store he managed is still open. I know the guy who worked with him, Andre. He became the manager when my father died. He’s got to be in his seventies now. I could stop by and ask him some questions if you’d like.”
Her eyes lit up again. “Yes! Would you?” He nodded, finishing his second coffee.
“That would be wonderful. I feel like this is my first lead since I found all of these letters. Oh, yes, and since you had some information, here’s the reward I mentioned,” she said, passing him a white envelope.
He picked it up. Inside were five crisp twenty-dollar bills. He felt a pang of guilt, but she had said in that first phone recording there was a reward. He contemplated it as she paid the bill. She didn’t seem rich, but certainly didn’t seem like she was struggling.
A hundred dollars was a hundred dollars, and no amount of guilt would help with his rent. “Do you think, I mean, you have more information and more questions than me. Would you wanna come with me to see the shop and talk to Andre?”
“That would be amazing!” She said, her eyes wide, and her whole demeanor changed. She looked like a kid who just figured out part of a puzzle.
Oscar chucked. There was some little ping somewhere in his internal radar. A woman, his age, not unattractive, curious. As she got her things, his eyes carefully scanned her. She leaned forward to get all the papers together, giving him more than a hint of cleavage and the edge of her white lace bra. It stirred lust and then shame. She was asking for his help. She was paying him. He averted his eyes.
“Ok, well, let’s go,” he said, getting up and watching as she exited the booth. Her dress was simple but charming. A spare black cotton summer dress that reached exactly to her knees. She had wide hips and thick strong legs, like an R. Crumb character.
Her sudden excitement and the fact that they were embarking on an adventure of some kind made him notice more about her, though he tamped down the instinct to flirt. He put the money in his back pocket and kept his eyes on the door, curious about what kinds of trouble they were going to get into.
Chapter Two – The Clerk
Kate was ecstatic, but she was trying hard to stay cool. All the waiting, all the worry, all the second-guessing, but it seemed to be working out. She was on the trail of the next clue, and she had lassoed a partner in crime, perhaps.
Oscar was not like anyone she usually hung out with. She was part of a crowd, vaguely. Uptown girls, mostly friends from her private school days. Mixed with new friends she had made in art school.
Oscar was her age, maybe a year or two older. He was tallish and thinnish and world-weary. Black jeans worn in the knees and pockets, a black t-shirt with a band name that faded into illegibility, a threadbare pea coat, and old but well-polished Doc Martens. His clothes weren’t artfully distressed, though, they were just old and not particularly well kept, except his boots.
He was handsome, in a way. A little scary, too. There was a thing art school boys tried for, that Oscar had for real. A danger. Short dark brown hair, spiky but not particularly styled. A scar that cut across his left eyebrow. An aging punk. Something about him set her off a little. Got her heart pounding. Not that she was going to date him or anything, but proximity to a tough-looking stranger could get her a little turned on.
He walked with purpose, and she found herself rushing to catch up. He seemed to know the city, and she liked that. It made her feel both safe and like she was on the right track. She felt the weight of her messenger bag. The letters, the key, the ephemera she had found in the little locked box in her mother’s closet.
After her mother died and her father went down to Florida to wait to die, she was left to sell the house and sort through the detritus of her childhood and her parent’s sham of a marriage.
The locked box was really the only thing like a mystery. Everything else was a known entity. Her mother’s dresses, the wedding album, the boxes of old bills and taxes. Everything made sense except the mental box with a far too complex lock.
She couldn’t find a key, and a locksmith wanted to charge her a fortune. Eventually, she had to rent a high-powered drill and an angle grinder. It took hours, but she finally got into the thing and found the secrets her mother had hidden so well.
Then, that night, falling into the letters. The bizarre reality of her mother’s secret life. It turned her stomach, and yet she couldn’t stop reading. The detached intimacy. The formality juxtaposed against romance, or at least lust.
More than any of that was the mystery. All of the shadows left between the lines of the letters. The initials, the hinted-at locations, the fragments, and the code words.
“I’ve never experienced as much delight as when I saw you writhing on the bed, surrounded by hands. The jealousy flared in me like a Molotov Cocktail, yet I enjoyed it. I enjoyed watching you there, blindfolded, as M and Q groped you. As the Fox smiled from her perch, watching all. Then to take you back to our secret little room and have you all to myself,” read one of the strangest letters.
“This is it,” Oscar said, pulling Kate out of her memories.
The facade of the storefront was a large yellow sign and a colossal pair of black eyeglass frames. The yellow was surprisingly bright, considering the weathered look of the sign. “Miltzen’s Fashion Opticals,” read a bold, artful sans serif type.
Oscar smiled and opened the door for her.
The place was large and dimly lit, reminding Kate of the old jewelry shops up on Madison Avenue that her grandmother had taken her to. It was undoubtedly the nicest eyeglass shop she’d ever seen, with displays that looked like they belonged in Brooks Brothers or Ralph Lauren.
There were tables with antique globes and leather satchels and compasses like Indiana Jones had just put down his travel gear which happened to include twenty pairs of tortoiseshell glasses. There were glass displays housing artfully arranged glasses between beautiful leather-bound books and expensive-looking watches.
Oscar looked around at the three customers and two clerks, but none seemed to be who he was searching for. He waited patiently for one of the clerks to be free, and Kate continued to browse, keeping him in the corner of her eye.
She tried on a pair of old movie star-style sunglasses as Oscar finally spoke with a clerk, who nodded and smiled and then went into the back of the store. A few moments later, Oscar was beckoned to go behind the counter, and he, in turn, beckoned Kate.
The back office was small, cramped, and looked like it was from the set of a film noir private eye movie. A typewriter and a few filing cabinets with bits of glasses and frames strewn about.
At the desk sat a rotund, mostly bald man in a very loose-fitting black three-piece suit. He was examining a purple frame with a loup and only lowered it a bit as Kate and Oscar entered.
“Oh, there he is, the prodigal son returns. Frank’s boy. He said you were going to take over one day if you ever got a decent haircut and started wearing shoes,” the older man said in a high nasal voice that was teasing but not unkind. He looked Oscar up and down and shrugged. “I guess my job is safe.”
Oscar laughed. Kate sank back a little and let the two men catch up. Oscar seemed uncomfortable talking about his father, but he also seemed to have some fond memories of the store and of the man, Andre.
“So we’re here because we have a little mystery,” Oscar said with a smile. Andre raised an eyebrow and smiled. “A mystery? Oh, do go one.”
“My father used to stay in the city a lot when he worked late. We’re trying to find the apartment he rented or stayed at.”
Andre’s face fell a bit. “Oh, right, yeah. I think I remember him saying he stayed around here. I never knew where it was, though. I thought maybe a hotel or something. Maybe with a friend. Your father was a quiet man.”
Then there was a rather awkward silence. Andre didn’t look Oscar in the eye. Kate stepped forward.
“Hello, Andre. I’m Kate. Oscar’s girlfriend. Sorry, he didn’t introduce me,” she said and elbowed Oscar in the ribs lightly with a big grin. “Oscar’s been thinking about this a lot lately. I can’t get him to shut up about it, actually. I wonder if his father left anything in the office. Like a locker or a drawer in his office or something?”
Andre considered that and then nodded his head. “Oh, yes, actually, yes. He had a locker, but we didn’t have the combination to the lock. So we just ended up not using it anymore. I forgot all about it,” he said with a laugh.
He groaned a little as he got out of his chair and led them to another door and down a narrow hall. They passed a room where someone was grinding glass and another where someone was having lunch until they got to a long room with a row of lockers.
“Most of the new guys don’t even really use these. Your father is at the end of the row. I can get you some tools if you need them.”
Oscar shook his head. “No, no, thanks. I can get it,” he said with a wink. Andre looked at both of them for a moment and then nodded and turned, and left.
Oscar twisted his neck back and forth and then cracked his knuckles. “Do you have a pencil?” He asked, looking at the lock seriously. Kate looked through her purse and found one. She handed it to him.
He put his finger in the loop of the lock and pulled on it, keeping it taut. Then he turned the knob, testing, pulling, wiggling, and noting down numbers on a rusted spot on the locker. Kate sat down on the little bench in front of the lockers and watched, curious if what he was doing would work or if she would have to wait hours for him to try every combination. It only took him about five minutes.
The smile he got when the lock clicked open was contagious. It was exciting. Kate had felt something, watching him break into the locker. Their little adventure was growing more illicit and daring. He was the kind of man who could crack a lock in under ten minutes. She felt a little silly realizing she liked that.
Inside the locker was a dark navy blazer that Oscar looked at for a long moment. He touched the garment meaningfully, then pushed it aside to examine the other items. There was a sweater, a hat, a pair of shoes, and a small briefcase. The case was empty, to both of their disappointment.
“Check the pockets, or I can if you’d rather,” Kate said, seeing how affected he seemed from looking through things. He shook his head and checked the jacket pockets, finding a small handwritten note.
“I wake up to the smell of you on my fingers. My lips are sore from your kisses. My head is full of secrets. I think of your eyes and the neon coming in from the window and the shadows of your curves. Meet me there, at our new place. KITWEA. 2A. Our secret. Remember. I left the key for you at the cafe.”
Oscar held out the letter, and they both read it again, Kate getting closer and leaning on his arm.
“What’s Kitwea?” She asked in a whisper.
“Kitwea, 2A. 2A sounds like an apartment number,” Oscar added.
They both stood there, close together. Kate became aware of their proximity suddenly. The warmth of a stranger. He smelled of some kind of cheap aftershave that was strangely intoxicating. Like the smell of a barber shop. She reread the letter, not just for its clue, but for the other words, the context.
“They were in love,” she said under her breath. She was unsure if he had heard her.
“We should go to the library,” he said.
Chapter Three – The Library
In the small but busy Hamilton Fish Park Library, the two investigators sat next to each other at a table with dictionaries and encyclopedias spread out around them.
“Kitwea is a Swahili word meaning loneliness,” Oscar said, his eyebrows furled in confusion.
“Kitwea was a part of Tanzania,” Kate read, examining a page of an encyclopedia.
Oscar closed his book and sighed. “It’s familiar, somehow. Like, I’ve seen that word somewhere, but I can’t remember where. It’s something, though.”
They had been at it for over two hours, and those were the only two things they had found about that particular set of letters. They didn’t even know if it was a word or a code or some kind of puzzle.
A woman walked over to them, she looked to be in her early twenties or possibly her late teens. She wore a plaid skirt and ripped fishnets and a black t-shirt with a black leather jacket over it. Her eyes were circled in thick black makeup.
“Well, well. Look who it is. Oscar. It’s been a while.”
Kate looked at the woman and then to Oscar, whose face seemed to drain of color. “Hello, Colette. It has.”
There was a pregnant pause. Kate fidgeted. The girl bit her bottom lip. She was very beautiful. The longer Kate looked at her, the more she realized it was a beauty like the women in magazines. Fine cheekbones and full lips. She looked like Anna Karina in one of those old French films.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your new girl?” Colette said with a bitchy smile.
Oscar sighed deeply. “This is my friend Kate, we are a little busy researching right now. Sorry about that, Kate. Colette’s a troubled youth. We should probably go, I don’t think we’re going to get any more information here.”
Colette raised an eyebrow and let out the smallest scoffing sound, but Kate thought she also seemed amused by the insult. “Careful of this one, Katie. He may be a good lay, but he’s a heartbreaker.”
With that, Colette went to the other side of the library and browsed the sci-fi section. Oscar continued to pack up. His jaw was clenched.
“Interesting company you keep,” Kate said, hoping her smile showed she was only teasing. Oscar glared at her and the scariness she sensed before appeared once more and made her swallow.
“Kept. I don’t come back to the Lower East Side much, but I used to spend a lot of time down here. Colette’s one of the punks I used to run with.”
Kate nodded, putting away her encyclopedias and getting her jacket. “She’s very pretty,” she said carefully.
Oscar nodded and sighed. “She is very pretty,” he repeated, adding nothing and making Kate want to dive into yet another mystery.
They went back into the street and with their hands in their pockets, as the cool wind picked up, they just started to wander. Kate was still following Oscar, unsure of where he was going. He seemed on some kind of trail, though, like a bloodhound.
He got a cup of coffee at a little stall on Suffolk. He talked to a guy selling newspapers on Delancey. Kate window-shopped as they got to the little strip of leather good stores on Orchard.
In Seward Park, Oscar spoke to some shady individuals. Tall men in hoodies selling weed and probably other things. Kate wondered if Oscar was a junkie or had been one. He seemed frustrated when no one had answers. Finally, he sighed deeply and looked Kate in the eye.
“I’m all in on this. I want to figure it out. Unfortunately, that means I’m going to have to deal with some people I don’t like very much.”
Kate followed as Oscar pushed through a little crowd of tourists. “More punks?” She asked, a little breathless.
“Worse. Anarchists,” he said, and she realized they were heading back to the library.
Of all the people from his past to run into, of all the people to ask for help, Colette was one of the most painful. She’d been his girl for a while. It was exciting and intense and wild, but she was a bit too young, and he knew it. Eventually, he felt like he was holding her back from growing up, so he broke it off. She didn’t take it well.
He saw her sitting across a bench in the park in front of the library with her feet up. She read a beat-up copy of Dune and didn’t look up when he got to her, Kate in tow.
“We need your help with something,” Oscar said flatly. Colette stared up with a look of mild curiosity.
“We have a mystery. I think you and your friends might enjoy it. A sort of scavenger hunt.”
Colette seemed to consider it. “What’s in it for us?”
It was Oscar’s turn to consider. Before he could say something, though, Kate piped up. “A hundred bucks?”
Colette frowned, her jaw tightened. “Ah, capitalism. I thought you might be more interesting than that.”
“What do you want?” Oscar said, with a coldness in his voice.
College shrugged. She put away her book and stood up. She took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. It smelled strongly of cloves. “It’s a mystery? A puzzle? What kind of puzzle?”
Oscar looked at Kate, who nodded. “It’s a place. Somewhere in the Lower East Side. We have a word and an apartment number. The word is some kind of code.”
Colette took a long drag on her cigarette. Oscar knew the look in her eye. She was curious. She liked a mystery, just like he did. It was one of the things that drew them together. She had stopped hanging with most of the punks he knew and had been living in some kind of anarchist collective. ABC No Rio. Oscar didn’t like them.
She seemed to be weighing her options. She looked Kate up and down and then at Oscar again. Oscar felt the strange impulse to again clarify that they were dating.
“I tell you what. I’ll bring your clues to the Collective, and if we come up with an answer, you’ll just owe me one.”
Oscar’s jaw clenched. He licked his lips. He cleared his throat. “Fine,” he said.
“Each of you, I mean. Each of you will owe me one. How’s that for you ‘not-Oscar’s-girl?’”
Kate smiled back at her and took a step forward. She shrugged. “Sounds good to me.” Oscar watched the two women size each other up, not entirely sure if they were flirting or fighting.
Colette’s smile spread across her face slowly until it was wide and bright. “Hot. I’ll go tell the Collective. You two come with and bring your clues.”
Kate nodded, but Oscar frowned. “You two go. I have to take care of something else. If you find something or need me, leave me a message on my answering machine. I can check it from a payphone.”
Kate’s eyes widened. She caught Oscar’s gaze, and he grimaced. “I don’t get along with Colette’s new… friends. Sorry.”
Colette shrugged. “Whatever’s clever. We can get to know each other in the meantime.”
For a moment, Kate and Oscar locked eyes. They communicated a lot. It was fine. She would be safe. It’s complicated. He was okay. More later. Kate nodded.
And with that, they split up.
The End