Striking Out by Alison Gordon

right?”
    “He’s fine. He suggested you might be able to give me advice about a homeless woman who lives near here. Actually, she’s disappeared. I’m trying to find her.”
    “I can’t help you right now, because I’ve got to get this application in the mail tonight, but maybe you could come in tomorrow and I’ll see what we can do.”
    We agreed on eleven the next morning. After I hung tip, I went to the kitchen, opened a beer, and heated up the three-day-old Chinese food.

Chapter 17
    I parked the car on Gerrard across from the Regent Park public housing development the next morning, feeling faintly apprehensive, nervous about encountering experiences I couldn’t handle. SisterLink turned out to be a converted supermarket with the front windows painted over to a height of eight feet or so, for privacy.
    I was surprised at the cheeriness of the place. The walls were painted in warm colours. There were bright posters tacked up everywhere, and more laughter than I would have expected. Women chatted on couches and in comfortable chairs or at tables with cups of coffee. Others used phones in cubbyholes against the far wall. There were a few muttering to themselves, or behaving otherwise strangely, but the rest were, well, ordinary.
    Energetic staff members, black, white, Asian, and native, dealt with inquiries at the front desk, talked with the women, and worked in the kitchen, separated from the lounge by a long counter. The smokers were segregated behind a glass wall, of course, but their penalty box seemed as pleasant as the rest of the place.
    Moira fetched coffees from the kitchen, then took me on a tour: the laundry room; the nurse’s station stocked with basic first-aid supplies and cases of tampons and condoms; a room with a TV and a library of battered paperbacks; the shower room; and a few quiet cubicles with built-in beds.
    “The bedrooms aren’t exactly legal,” she explained, leading me into her office. “We’re not a registered shelter. But sometimes people need a nap. What am I going to do? We call them consulting rooms and hope that no one checks them too closely.”
    She closed the door of her small, cluttered office against the general hubbub of the centre, but sat so she could see through the half-glass wall.
    “Tell me about this woman,” she said. “How long have you known her?”
    I took her through the story of Maggie’s arrival in the neighbourhood last spring, about her relationship with T.C. and his friends, and about my talks with her.
    “Something or somebody scared her away,” she said. “That’s my quick answer, anyway. You just have to find out what.”
    Moira was an attractive woman, with a kind of raw elegance I found disconcerting, considering her mysterious past with Andy. She was slim, rangy almost, with strong, competent hands and long legs. She was dressed in an oversized red cotton T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, light blue skinny pants, and Birkenstock sandals. Her toenails were crimson.
    Her greying hair was short and spiky, and she wore silver earrings that looked native in design. Her face, with no makeup, was lined, but no less beautiful for it. Her mouth was wide and good-humoured, and she looked me right in the eye.
    “The God’s Law people, maybe,” I said.
    “I doubt it. I’m pretty sure I know the woman you’re talking about, and she doesn’t scare easily.”
    “So you know her. She comes in here?”
    “Sometimes. It depends on the neighbourhood she’s sleeping in. If she’s the Maggie I’m thinking about, she roves.”
    She gestured through the window to the lounge.
    “Some women, like Daphne, over there by the bulletin board, are regulars. They live their lives in unchanging patterns. They’re the predictable ones. Daphne is here every day, without fail. If she didn’t show up, we would worry about her. She likes things to be the same, whenever she comes in.”
    Daphne, who looked to be in her seventies, sat in a chintz armchair