Read Online No Footprints by Susan Dunlap - Free Book Online Page A

the door of the converted house that was number 40.
    She was maybe twenty, bone thin, with long dark hair knotted at the nape and a tattoo of a dancing Shiva rising from her chest and reaching some of his many arms across her shoulders. Several more arms shot up the sides of her neck in a way that was at once stunning and frightening. A needle that close to the carotid!
    â€ŸTessa—” I began after introductions.
    But a screeching kettle grabbed Kristi’s attention. She nodded me in, raced across the room, and doused a teabag. The concoction smelled like cardamom and manure.
    The place itself was not an office but a workroom with a smattering of papers, the kind that might be used in collages, two copy machines, each on a long fake wood table, a tiny fridge, and an industrial sink that suggested this room had originally been a basement. The only decoration was, in fact, a collage, one that looked much better than this space deserved. In contrast were the windows. They might have looked out over the basketball
courts across the street to the south or the jungle gym to the west, except that they’d been painted white six feet high. ‟So they don’t look in, or you don’t look out?”
    She took that as a comment rather than a question.
    â€ŸWhat is this place?”
    She was plugging in the space heater. ‟Skilled Copy.”
    â€ŸYou duplicate skills?”
    She shot a look that acknowledged the joke without appreciating it. ‟We make copies, skillfully. Like for lawyers when they’ve got eight things to send to twenty people but some of those people only get the first and third thing, some the last two, some get the cover letter, and one gets the originals and all the copies plus copies of all the cover letters. And the client wants a copy of everything everyone got. And it’s all got to be in the mail by five, with those little green ‛certified’ slips.”
    â€ŸGot it.” I glanced around. ‟What’re you copying now?”
    â€ŸNada. We never have orders waiting. It’s all last minute. If a client’s prepared days ahead, they can handle it in their own office. If they’re calling here, it’s a crisis. There’ve been times we had to work like crazy till the last second and then just about kill ourselves to make it to the late mail drop before midnight, with both of us still writing the certified labels in the back of the cab.” She pointed to a sign on the wall that said Lack of planning on your part does not necessarily mean an emergency on my part. ‟Tessa put it up. She liked the irony.”
    That made me like her. ‟I’m looking for her.”
    â€ŸHow come?”
    â€ŸI just want to make sure she’s okay.”
    â€ŸShe’s fine,” she said, ‟on vacation.”
    Ah, so Kristi was here alone, with nothing to do and no one to talk to but me. ‟Better than boredom” is a great position for a questioner to be in.
‟On vacation? Really?” I said, as if I knew her better than Kristi did, and found that conclusion contrary to any hint I’d gotten in our long friendship. Tessa and I were, after all, closer in age. Recalling how hopefully she’d looked over when Mike blew the horn, I said, ‟New boyfriend?”
    She hesitated.
    I knew that kind of look. ‟Oh, God, not that same . . . what’s his name?”
    â€ŸShit. She takes one vacation in three years and the asshole chooses the Friday before she leaves to break up with her.”
    â€ŸWow.”
    â€ŸYeah. I just get called to work here when there’s overload and, yeah, we’re dervishing around to get things done and afterwards we’re too wiped to even go for a drink. But anybody who saw her staring at her cell phone, trying to call him that day, could figure out what was going on.”
    The cell that would have his number. The cell that, likely, was in her purse on the bottom of the