The Ghosts of Lovely Women by Julia Buckley

“This journal.”
    “Ah,” he said.
    “But that can’t be right, right? They wouldn’t ransack my apartment for a journal?”
    “One thing at a time. Let’s talk to the police.”
    An officer with a crew cut approached us in my lobby. “Ma’am,” he said, nodding at me.
    We went upstairs together, where another officer waited. It didn’t look as bad as I feared, but it looked bad enough: drawers left open with the contents dangling out; closet doors open and boxes, bags turned over; my clothing strewn around the room. It was a violation. I shivered. Derek put an arm around me. “I’ll help you clean it up,” he said.
    Nothing valuable was missing, as far as I could tell on my brief tour of the premises. I went through the whole thing with the police. Told them my name, my occupation, my little problem with my key. “I’ll have to check if it’s at work tomorrow, but there’s always the chance, I guess, that someone took it out of my purse. I keep my house key separate from my car key, but no one really knows that. Except—” I felt my skin heating as I came to an embarrassing realization.
    “Yes?”
    “It— uh— has a keychain attached to it. It’s in the shape of a little house. I guess that could be a kind of giveaway for anyone going through my purse. But it could be on my desk. If it is, then I don’t know how the person got into my apartment, or why they messed it up.”
    I had told Derek on the walk over that I didn’t want to mention the journal, because that could well just be my paranoia and entirely unrelated to the break-in.
    So the officers left with my information and a warning that I should get a new lock. They said they would keep me apprised of any leads. I thanked them, watched them leave, then turned to Derek, summoning up all of my courage. “Well, you should get back to Charlie. What if he wakes up?”
    Derek shook his head. “You’re coming, too. The last thing you need to do right now is stay in this mess while you’re shaken up. And before you do anything here, you need to read the journal. If it’s innocuous, you can remove it from your list of motives for the break-in. But you need to find out. Come read it at my place.” He took my hand and I let myself be led back outside. P.G. followed again; I’m sure he was getting sick of all the walking around and missed his nice, worn-in, creaky basket.
    But life sometimes intrudes; I had to know what was in that journal.

Ten
     
    “But it’ll be different after this. Playtime’s over. Now for the schooling.”
     
    —Torvald,
A Doll’s House
, Act III
     
    Derek tossed some giant pillows on his floor and we lay side-by-side, reading Jessica Halliday’s words. “Quite a writer,” he said. “Do all your students write this well?”
    “Lord, no.” We were munching almonds from a little dish he’d put between us, and I found myself, once again, feeling quite comfortable with him, which was especially odd considering the circumstances.
    “Jessica was an exception. But I always have a few really good writers and thinkers. Some with occasional bursts of insight. Others whose writing is just dreadful.”
    “Sounds about right.”
    “Thank you for helping me. I didn’t mean to interrupt you and Charlie. Does he live here?”
    Some of my hair had fallen over my left eye. He reached out to put it back behind my ear. His fingers were very gentle. “He sleeps over sometimes. My sister is a single mom, and she’s going to school at night, trying to get her degree. She’s almost there. I have to give her credit — she was going in what I feared was a bad direction, but Charlie came along and she got serious. She’ll graduate next year, and she’ll find a good job, and that will be good for her and the boy. Meanwhile, she needs me, which is why I took the job at St. James. I can be here for Charlie when necessary, and she won’t have to worry about leaving him with a stranger. She’s a good mom; she dotes on him and