The Ways of the Dead

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The first long shadows were falling across Georgia Avenue when Sarah Reese trotted down the steps to the lobby after her dance class, a big, loose jacket pulled over her tights. She didn’t have long. Her mother was always a few minutes late, always dragging out happy hour drinks with her girlfriends downtown, but it wasn’t as if she had an hour to burn.

She stepped onto the sidewalk outside the studio and felt the light breeze ruffle her hair. She looked both ways across the four lanes of traffic, making sure she didn’t see her mother’s green Land Rover idling or approaching. She bit the inside of her lower lip, felt the small roll of bills in her left hand, and then jogged across the street at an angle.

It was the first day of October, three months before the end of the twentieth century. The leaves were turning their flaming colors of yellow and amber and red and burnt orange. The colors were lush at this early stage of fall, and the air through the trees, just off the Chesapeake, carried the traces of an autumn chill. Sarah felt it as a quickening coolness, the sweat drying against her spine, her thighs, turning her forearms to gooseflesh. It was Friday night, the sky arching from black in the east to indigo blue overhead to a blaze of orange and pink on the western horizon. She would meet Michael later, after her parents had gone to bed. She shivered at the thought of it-she couldn’t help it, her eyes sparkled-and she crossed the last lane of the street into the tiny parking lot of Doyle’s Market. It was an old brick building with peeling blue paint and a sagging roof. The little silver bells at the top of the glass front door cling-clinged when she pushed it open.

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