Her clothes. Still on the floor, in a sodden heap.
Billy gets off the couch and takes them into the bathroom. On the way he stops to look at his uninvited guest. She’s stopped snoring but she’s still shivering. A sodden clot of hair lies against one of her cheeks. He bends and pushes it away.
‘Please, I don’t want to,’ she says.
Billy freezes, but when there’s nothing more he goes into the bathroom. There’s a hook on the door. He hangs the cheap jacket on it. There’s a shower-tub combo of the sort found in cut-rate motels. He wrings out her shirt and skirt in the tub and drapes them over the shower curtain rod to dry. The jacket has three zip-style pockets, a little one above the left breast and two bigger diagonal ones on the side. There’s nothing in the breast pocket. There’s a man’s wallet in one of the side pockets and a phone in the other.
He removes the SIM card and puts the phone back in the pocket it came from for the time being. He opens the wallet. The first thing he finds is her driver’s license. Her name is Alice Maxwell and she’s from Kingston, Rhode Island. She’s twenty years old. No, check that, just turned twenty-one. DMV photographs are awful as a rule, something you’re even embarrassed to show the cop who stops you for speeding, but hers is pretty good. Or maybe Billy only thinks that because he’s seen her looking far worse than any DL photo. Her eyes are wide and blue. There’s a little smile on her lips.
First license, he thinks. She hasn’t even had it renewed yet, because it’s still got the one A.M. restriction for teenagers.
There’s one credit card, which she has signed Alice Reagan Maxwell with painstaking clarity. There’s an ID card from Clarendon Business College here in the city, an AMC gift card （Billy can’t remember if those were the late Ken Hoff’s theaters or not）， an insurance card which includes her blood type （O）， and some pictures of a much younger Alice Maxwell with her high school friends, her dog, and a woman who’s probably her mother. There’s also a picture of a smiling teenage boy with his shirt off, maybe a high school boyfriend.
In the billfold he finds two tens, two ones, and a newspaper clipping. It’s the obituary of one Henry Maxwell, services at Christ Baptist Church in Kingston, in lieu of flowers send contributions to the American Cancer Society. The picture shows a man in mid to late middle age. He has jowls and thinning hair painstakingly combed across his otherwise bald dome. He looks like anyone you would pass on the street without noticing, but Billy can see the family resemblance even in the grainy photo, and Alice Reagan Maxwell loved him enough to carry his wallet, with his obituary inside it. Billy has to like her for that.
If she’s going to school here, and her father was buried there, her mother, almost certainly back in Kingston, won’t wonder where she is, at least not immediately. Billy puts the wallet back in her jacket but takes the phone and puts it in the top drawer of his bureau, under his own supply of T-shirts.
He wonders if he should clean up her vomit in the foyer before it dries and decides against it. If she wakes up thinking he’s the reason her female works feel like they’re on fire, he’d like to have at least some evidence that he brought her in from the outside. Of course that won’t convince her that he didn’t help himself later, once he was reasonably sure she wasn’t going to spew on him or wake up and fight while he was humping her.
She’s still shivering. That’s got to be shock, doesn’t it? Or maybe a reaction to whatever those men put in her drink? Billy has heard about roofies but has no idea what the aftereffects might be.
He starts to leave. The girl – Alice – moans. She sounds desolate, bereft.
Well shit, Billy thinks. This is probably the worst idea ever, but what the hell.
He gets in bed with her. Her back is to him. He puts an arm around her and pulls her close. ‘Snuggle up, kiddo. You’re okay. Snuggle the fuck up, get warm, stop shaking. You’ll feel better in the morning. We’ll figure this out in the morning.’
I’m fucked, he thinks again.
Maybe the comfort is what she needed, or the extra heat from his body, or maybe all that shivering would have stopped on its own. Billy doesn’t know and doesn’t care. He’s only glad when the shakes become intermittent, then finally quit. The snoring has quit, too. Now he can hear the rain pelting the building. It’s an old structure, and when the wind gusts, its joints creak. The sound is oddly comforting.
I’ll get up in a minute or two, he thinks. Just as soon as I’m sure she’s not going to snap awake and start screaming bloody murder. In just a minute or two.