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invite you to dinner tonight.”
    I answered with silence. The kind of silence heavier than spent uranium wrapped in lead. The kind of silence louder than sonic booms in the Grand Canyon. She understood.
    “No,” she replied to the unspoken questions, “my motives aren’t purely social. And yes, I’ll probably ask about the dead woman and your lame story concerning the events surrounding her demise. Look,” she cleared her throat, “I was a bit of an ass the other night—”
    “A bit,” I agreed.
    “Thanks for making this so easy,” Barnum replied sarcastically.
    “Think nothin’ of it.”
    “Will you shut up, please!” There was strain, all right. “You know you aren’t half bad looking for a guy as gray as London in December. And if you really are the man who wrote this dark poem I just finished reading,” she ruffled some pages by her phone’s mouthpiece, “then we should be able to get through dinner without much bloodletting. Even if you don’t answer my inevitable questions. What do you say?”
    “I say you’re tryin’ too hard,” I paused a few beats, “but it’s been a long time since anyone’s tried at all. So, yeah, sure. I’m game.”
    “My digs. Eight, eight-thirty.”
    The rest of the conversation consisted of directional babble: “Make a sharp left after the alley behind Smythe’s Antique’s . . .” That sort of thing. Sound Hill didn’t really have a wrong side of the tracks, but her address was located in that part of town which came closest to qualifying.
    I had neglected to ask what we were having for dinner. I guess I really wasn’t very interested. I was, however, very interested in her. I felt it in my head and in my pants. From her fall to my poetry to her apology, she had pushed every right button there was to push. I forgot about attempting to write or making long lists. What I did do was to recall, in detail, the nightmare I’d had on the evening of the yellowbird murder and to try and regain the feeling of Kate Barnum’s imagined breasts in my now curious hands.

Cat Sneeze
    The Christmas lights were not so bright here. Residents of Dugan’s Dump were no less religious than other Sound Hillians. They just tended to be lower on the great American scale of the middle class. Besides, pronking reindeer with synchronous flashing antlers would have looked incongruous amongst the wilting wooden bungalows. Dirt was the major feature of Dugan’s Dump; dirt lawns and dirt driveways. And in every third yard the rotting hulks of lobster boats and Edsels waited patiently on cinder blocks and bent rims for the pick-axes of future archeologists. But the wanna-be artifacts that decorated this part of town had nothing to do with its appellation, at least not originally.
    All of the Christmas Eve snow was gone; some back to the clouds, most back to the soil. Around here, that was trouble. And when I pulled off the pavement of Owl Lane, the reporter’s driveway started swallowing the tires on my old Volkswagen. But if fifteen-odd years of my driving hadn’t killed the clutch, this surely wouldn’t. That’s what I told myself. That’s always what I told myself.
    There were no shipwrecks or encrusted cars in Kate Barnum’s front yard, just a lone dead apple tree and a corrugated garage waiting for a cat sneeze to blow it over. Her bungalow was a match for most of the others on surrounding plots; sturdy, but unspectacular. I followed the cracked flagstones to her door.
    She was waiting for me in the vacated jamb, shaking her head and blowing streams of smoke through cracks in a cynical smile. The sleeves of her gray Yale jersey formed lumpy bundles above her calloused elbows. The collar of the ashen sweatshirt was slit into a V-shape and, intentionally or not, it accented the braless cleavage underneath. Her jeans were scratchy new and hid the necks of cowboy boots I’d seen once before. As I was about to take the singular step up to Kate’s pedestal, she flicked her