Gathering Dark

so much, Sneak,” I said. “That sort of thing won’t help right now.”
“She’s a good person.” She thought about it and shrugged, bewildered. “I don’t know how she ended up that way. She was preaching to me about rehab. She’s really smart. Likes animals. Wants to do something with that. Study them or whatever. This thing is completely out of character. Dayly is not like me. I was never around her long enough to stain her that way.”
Dayly’s apartment building was a stucco and terra-cotta-tiled place near the Warner Bros. lot. I watched the billboards roll by, prime-time television shows I was never at home to watch, Ellen DeGeneres’s cartoonish eyes peering over a cut-foam letter E. Sneak headed up the stairs before me and stopped abruptly. There were people on the landing. Residents of the building, it seemed, four or five of them hanging around looking bemused. One man was wearing a blue bathrobe. Sneak went directly to a young woman, a thin redhead wearing a T-shirt that read Be Kind To Bees, standing in the open door of one of the apartments.
“What happened? What happened?” Sneak asked the girl. Her voice was higher now, almost shrill. She didn’t wait for an answer, went inside the open apartment. The girl turned to me and the crowd.
“We should call nine-one-one.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I was just telling these guys,” the girl in the bee shirt said, gesturing to the people around us. “I was out last night. I had an audition. I stayed with my boyfriend. This morning I came back and the door was open and the place is … There’s blood in there. Hey! She shouldn’t go in there. That’s Dayly’s mom, right? She should come out. I think … It might be, like, a crime scene. What if it’s a crime scene? Do we call nine-one-one?” The girl fell into tears. No one seemed game to hug her.
I entered the apartment. There were droplets of blood on the carpet just inside the door. An overturned chair on the way to the tiny kitchen, a little table knocked askew. There was smashed glass on the floor, papers brushed off the front of the fridge where they had been arranged with colorful magnets. It was the sight of all the lights on in the apartment that made my stomach plunge. Whatever happened here, it had happened in the dark hours.
Sneak had been right—her daughter had been doing well for herself. The apartment was cluttered and small but obviously shared between two young women who worked hard at their dreams and lived busy lives. A dying peace lily on the kitchen windowsill told me they were rarely home. Dust on a magazine near the couch. There was another blood smear and a picture knocked from its hook in the hallway. I found Sneak in Dayly’s bedroom, standing by the desk.
“Her bag’s here.” Sneak pointed to a handbag on the floor by the messily made bed. The bag flopped open, showing the usual things a woman kept in her everyday carryall: tissues, a notebook, some makeup. I knelt and went through the bag, moving things about with my knuckle when I could to avoid leaving prints.
“No phone,” I said. “Did she have a car?”
“No,” Sneak said.
“Well, she does now.”
There was no blood in this room, no signs of disturbance. I noticed a laptop charger peeking over the edge of the desk, leading to a clear space where the laptop must have belonged among the papers, takeaway coffee cups, and pieces of stationery that covered the surface.
“Laptop’s gone,” I noted. “So she’s somewhere, and she’s got her phone and her laptop. But no bag. Or a different bag than her usual one.”
“You see a bag on her at the Pump’n’Jump?” Sneak asked.
“No,” I admitted.
“So what did she do? Put the laptop on the ground outside before she robbed you?”
“I don’t know, Sneak.”
“Whoever attacked her has got the laptop, probably the phone, too.”
“We don’t know she was attacked,” I said.
Sneak didn’t answer. We stood quietly together, locked inside a bubble of dread. I tried to take Sneak’s hand but she pulled away from me, went to the little desk and picked up a flyer that was sitting there.
“Parachuting?” She showed me the brochure. A flight school in a place called San Jasinte was advertising tandem parachuting adventures for $200 per drop. A windswept, grinning couple was leaping out of a plane on the cover. Sneak pocketed the flyer and went to a table by the door, which held a fish tank. I picked up a strangely shaped piece of plastic from the desk. Layers of sticky tape rolled into a small tube, cut and unraveled, like snake skin. There were notes pinned on the backing of the desk. Reminders, it seemed, from Dayly to herself. STAY ON TRACK! CHIN UP! I dropped the tape and peeled off a small yellow note that was stuck to the edge of the shelf above the desk.
BIRDS ONLY.
When I joined Sneak at the fish tank, I noticed the thing had no water, just a layer of sawdust and a blue plastic wheel.
A small, brown, ratlike creature was huddled in the corner of the tank, licking its small pink paws and brushing them against the backs of its tiny ears.
“Oh, wow. What is it?” I asked, whispering in case I startled the animal. “A hamster?”
“A gopher.” Sneak picked up the little creature from where it crouched and cupped it in her hand. “She found it sitting in a driveway, poisoned.”
“So she brought it here?” I asked. I’d had gopher men to my house in Brentwood more than once to poison dozens of the creatures that were digging holes in my lawn. I’d never seen one, only their small round tunnels and the devastation of my expensive landscaping. The gopher ran across Sneak’s palms as she made an endless track for it, putting one hand in front of the other.
“She’s like that. A bleeding heart,” Sneak said. “Always picking up wounded