Unsurprisingly, Mom had taken a deep pot of soup out of the refrigerator, placing it on the stove to reheat. Schmaltz? No, even better, she had deeply browned the chicken in duck fat, with onions and caraway, the grudging acceptance of a few tomatoes and far too much garlic , just enough to be perfect in its excess, before adding the broth a few ladlefuls at a time. Rice, each grain swollen but not burst, filled in the empty spaces, each black fleck of wild rice in the pot offering a little crunch to go with the plump tenderness of the white rice around it. I would have been sure that the scent would reached up to lure Dad back down to earth to share in this meal.

How Rabbi would have loved to have heard that last thought. I had been going to St. Etta's for too long. "Does wine go with ..." I started to wonder, but I could already hear Mom insisting that her little girl wasn't going to drink on an empty stomach, and I wasn't going to argue the point. How many years had Dad been gone? How long had grandmother taken to join grandfather? The mathematics of that offered far less comfort than did the little swirls of yellow fat on the surface that Mom stirred away, dissolving them back into the rice that they had abandoned.

Wine would always be there to be had. The soup would not.

The bubbles, just barely a shimmer, finally broke through the surface. Satisfied, Mom turned the heat as low as she could without the flame flickering out, partially covering the pot as we waited for dinner to reheat. She was free to talk.

"Meg" ... not Meggulah, not Margaret ... "You wouldn't object if we called the police a little?" "How does one call the police a little, Mama", I wanted to ask, but I understood. "It scares me a little, that racket downstairs. I don't worry worry about what the neighbors will think, because I'm sure that most of them have left town after listening to those two crazies. I'm worried about the fact that they know where you live. You didn't tell them, did you?"

"Of course not! Mom, some credit?

"Then how did they know?"

"I don't know"

She studied my face for a moment, and smiled sadly.

"Then I'd really better call somebody, Meggulah. This isn't right."

Of course it wasn't, and wouldn't have been even if somebody had been here to look at our door at any time in the last ten years. Not knowing if he was real? Even Charles Manson knew that he was real. I wasn't going to say that and scare Mom, but looking at her, I was sure that she had just had the same thought. That for two people who had so much to say, with no sign that they cared how much of it was making sense, our two friends were very silent, all of a sudden. That, and how loud they had been, up until now. Where were they, anyway, and what were they up to?

Mom went to each window in turn, looking out, shrugging for time to time and seeming ever more confused, until she came to the window that looked down on the entrance to the back of our flat. Looking at the cord to the shade that covered that window, she reached out and pulled back in revulsion. That shade had not been up for days, with good reason, but we had more pressing matters to worry about, at the moment. "Mom, I don't think you'll be able to see their dumpster in the dark", I told her, as Mom struggled to hold onto her last meal, remembering what she had seen.

The building next door had still been in the middle of negotiating pick up services, a fact unknown to the large family that, having but recently moved to our city, celebrated their arrival on these shores with a seafood feast the likes of which an ancient Roman could only have dreamed. "Their food certainly is colorful, isn't it?", Mama had asked, with as much approval as a Jewish mother should give to unbagged garbage. In the days to come, as the sun beat down from a cloudless sky, what remained of that beautiful meal would only grow the more colorful. Days stretched into weeks, as the molehill grew into what probably would have been a fertile mountain, had not the worms and maggots expired from the heat.

Mom wasn't moving. "I can't believe that you walked past all of that. Over and over and ...", breaking off, as she leaned over, hand cupped over mouth, as she shook with the movements of the gorge rising and then sinking in her throat. We didn't have time for this. "Mom, I'll look." "No, I'll do it". She lifted the shade, peering out toward that which she didn't want to see, but couldn't look away from, as hard as she tried. A sigh of relief. "I guess that Benjamin Franklin fellow did know what he was talking about", she said, as she gazed down on the faintly lit forms of a few small animals who were doing their utmost to take care of our garbage removal problems for us. "In the dark, all cats are gray." "I don't think those are cats, Mom."

"Wonderful. You tell a mother this? It's a wonder you haven't been bitten. Did anybody see you walking past all of that? Over and over? What if they think that's our mess, out there for the whole world to see?"

"I don't know, and I'm not worried. About that. Could we get back to now? Crazy guy one and crazy guy two, downstairs?

"OK. I'll look."

Minutes passed without a word. Why was she taking so long? Aside from that little corner of the dumpster of doom, there wasn't much to see - just the back of a building and a narrow little footpath. I came closer to see if she was OK, and saw that she wasn't. Not really. Worried, she was, and it wasn't just Mom worry, like when she'd say "Meggulah, in that dress you're going out for all of the neighbors to see", because a full inch of one of my ankles had shown when I stepped out the door. No, this was real fear.

"Meg, it isn't like you to leave the gate open like that ...", she started, uncertainty in her voice. "Mama, you know I haven't been using it, since I heard those footsteps a few nights ago? I've been going in the front, just like you asked me to." "That's good, Meggulah, but if not you ...?"

I went up beside her to see what she had seen, and with eyes not as yet dimmed by age as hers, saw something that stopped the words in my throat, however vaguely the faint light revealed it, even to my younger eyes. Though the details might be lost, the big picture wasn't. "Mama, that gate wasn't just left open. It was cut or something. I can't see the lock."

"How could they do so without our hearing them, just now?" Good question. It wasn't like we weren't paying attention, We had been hanging on every word. How could they have ...?

This wasn't funny, any more. "Maybe they're thieves?" "Thieves who shout to us to tell us that they're here, Maggie?" "I don't know. Maybe their friend is a thief, somebody we don't even know is there, and they're here to distract us from what he's up to?" "Like a magician, making that back gate disappear?", Mom asked. "Yeah, like Copperfield."

A mean, angry David Copperfield who wasn't going to be amused when the two chicks he'd been staking out had nothing worth stealing. But wait ... if he's been watching us, been clever enough to plan this out, he'd have seen the thrift store vintage we'd been wearing, so why ...

And then I got it. Mom might have been old to me, but in her 40s, she was still pretty young to some of the guys. I'd seen how they looked at her. What was I thinking? Every woman had something worth stealing until the day she died, which might not be too far off for us. Men like that didn't like to leave witnesses, especially not witnesses who the doctors could examine.

"Do you remember that building that burned down on Central, last week?", Mom asked in a hoarsely failed attempt at a whisper that anybody could have heard, her voice rising. "Do you remember what the police found? A smashed lock." And a building full of dead women. A lot of them hadn't even been that good looking, if the newspaper photos told the truth. Somebody's standards weren't very high.

My God, we were dead! Who even knew how that fire had started? Was he just trying to incinerate the bodies so that the coroner couldn't find his DNA on them, or were his appetites more interesting than we had suspected? A cooking fire run out of control, maybe, the poor woman bound to spits, roasting as they struggled to plead for mercy through their gags? Or through the apples stuck in their mouths?

What was it with goyim and apples? No, I didn't have to ask. As the piece de resistance, I was sure that I would be told this by the insane chef who would be preparing me for an indecent burial in the pit of his stomach. Explaining all as he leered over me, his victim, as all victims did in any movie worth watching. "Ms. Schwarz", he would begin, for surely he knew our names and life stories by now, "Ms. Schwarz, you should be honored, not afraid. Did you not notice that the furniture in your room was made of the finest hickory? So delicious you will be as I feed you to my friends. I believe you met them a few minutes ago, as they shared ... but a gentleman does not speak of such things. Such a hunger one works up on a chain gang! You will be, as you already have been, blessed relief to these men, blessed, delicious relief."

No, don't think about it. "You know, I think they saw somebody running from that building. Looked kind of wiry and scrawny and ..." Hungry. Oh my God, I was right! We might as well have been wearing shirts with the name "Encore" written in front. What had I gotten us into, stupid girl, stupid, delicious girl that I was? "Mom, I'm sorry. If I knew he was ... the moment he started talking like that ..." I stopped. "Why is he here? What does he want?", I squeaked out, pointlessly, as if I didn't already have a few good guesses. "Do you think you'd go better with honey mustard, or with garlic and rosemary?", I pictured Jack asking me. NO! No more of that.

"Police?", I asked, fear and hope in my voice. "Yes", she said, as uncertainly as she had to, because the phone had been unhooked the month before, and the alley was silent, again. Who knew where they were? They could be inside the building at this very moment, waiting to ...

Not a thing to think about. That hallway was no place to be. "Could we pound on the wall? Mr. Abrahmsen is home by now, right?", I asked. "They would hear us for sure", Mom said, "even if we closed the windows." She was right. That glass was as thin as tissue. "It's only ten feet", she said. "I'll go."

"No, Mom, I'll go."

"We'll go."

And then we started at each other for what seemed forever, until we heard the next click of the clock on the wall. "Remember when you first learned to swim", Mom said, a sickly uncertain smile on her face as she crept toward the stove, "and you were so scared and knew that you couldn't but you had to", turning off the flame as she turned to look at the door, "and you had to do it really quickly, because the teacher was going to get back to you at any moment, so you ..."

"Just dived in and stopped thinking about it", I finished, lunging for the door. "Run!", she cried as well as she could, and still keep her voice muffled.