Habit of Fear by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

look. I always turn away when people I don’t know speak to me.”
    “But what could you see without looking?” Julie persisted. “You know, like out of the corner of your eye.”
    “He limped as though he was lame. And his red hair hung down over one cheek.”
    “Red?”
    “Yes …”
    “And his eyes—what color were they?”
    She shook her head. She simply had not looked until he had turned away.
    “How old would you say?”
    Again she shook her head, and Julie thought she would learn more questioning May Weems about what Missy had told her. But first: “Where were you, Missy, when they stopped the car and spoke to you?”
    “I was working my way from the street. I had my back to them.”
    “When they whistled?”
    She nodded.
    “Did they speak from the car?”
    “One of them called to me, ‘Whatcha doing, honey?’ I didn’t answer.”
    “Did you see what kind of car they were driving?”
    “A small car—like an egg.”
    A Volkswagen, Julie would say. “What color was it?”
    “It wasn’t any color.”
    “Did you see them enter the trailer?”
    “They couldn’t get the door open at first. That’s when one of them came and asked me what I was looking for. When he went back, the door was open.”
    “Did you see the baby?”
    Missy Glass just stared, that surprised look on her face. Then she said, “The baby stopped crying when the woman came and they helped her into the trailer.”
    “Yeah,” Julie said and let it pass. “Did you see anybody leave the trailer, Missy?”
    She shook her head. “I went away then. I thought they might be watching me. I had some very good glass I didn’t want stolen from me.”
    Julie turned to May Weems. “When did you two get together to talk all this over?”
    “When the police asks me if I knowed a street person like her. I don’t know from nobody till Detective Russo says it’s you they do that to. I don’t owe him nothing, but I say to myself Missy got to stay with the sisters if she going to help Friend Julie. She don’t always come home at night.”
    “I don’t like walls,” the woman said.
    “I still say she better keep staying here in case they looking for her. They in big trouble when they mess up Friend Julie. She going to find them.”

THIRTEEN
    W AS SHE? SHE CARED more about their being found than she had before, certainly. But what did she know about them now that she hadn’t known before? That the shorter one had red, longish hair, a thatch of which fell all the way down to his cheek. And she knew they were bullies as well as beasts: they had baited their trap for a woman who was aging, frail and not right in the head.
    At her desk, to cleanse her mind, she looked up at the poem “Where the Wild Geese Fly No More” and recited it aloud. She concentrated on each phrase as though the poem was a mantra. Before going about the work by which she was earning her living, she looked up the literary agency of Walsh and Kendall, as Ginny Gibbons had suggested. It was now called Kendall Associates, John Walsh having retired. At least he wasn’t dead. The bookkeeping department gave her an address and phone number. She phoned, and John Walsh agreed to see her the next day.
    She made her business calls—on to a Sardi’s Restaurant observer who was great on who was holding hands with whom, another to an apprentice printer whose boss turned out the postdated press released for a lot of celebrities. From another source she picked up an item about the entrepreneur who collected, processed and merchandised as plant fertilizer the droppings of zoo animals.
    She reached the precinct station house in time to see Detective Russo before he went off duty.
    “I knew she’d turn up the witness,” he said of May Weems in a self-congratulatory tone.
    “I don’t know whether the police can get more out of her than I did or not.” She recounted her meeting with Missy Glass.
    He picked up on the red hair immediately. “And the other one is taller and