Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Eleven

Spike and I had searched the neighborhood once we realized she was gone. I had called Samantha Heller and asked if she had the ability to track Melanie Joan’s location on her phone. She said that sadly she did not; Melanie Joan wouldn’t allow it, that she refused to be treated like some teenager whose mommy and daddy wanted to know her whereabouts at all times of the day or night.

We called the bar at The Newbury, then called the front desk and asked them to check her room, on the chance that she’d gone back there. Maybe she had planned to slip out all along, and was just waiting for the call. Maybe she had called a cab. Or an Uber. She must have left her bag, with her purse in it, in the kitchen, because she hadn’t brought it to the dinner table. And now it was gone.

“Fired up,” Spike said. “Ready to go.”

“Without even waiting to see what you made for dessert,” I said.

Spike finally left. He had spent the day with her. The reason he had spent the day with her was that we had determined that she might be in danger. Then she had snuck out the first chance she got, like a teenage girl trying to get away from Mommy and Daddy.

I periodically tried her phone, but it went straight to voicemail. Maybe when she came back, I’d find a way to sync up Find my Friends on our phones, as extremely unfriendly as I was feeling toward her at the moment.

Rosie and I took our last walk at around midnight, so she could perform her nightly oblations.

I was reading The Globe around eight the next morning when I heard the front door. I had given Melanie Joan her own key. The only other person with one was Spike, and I knew he was at home, because he’d just called wanting to know if she’d shown up yet.

Then there she was, in the same clothes she’d been wearing when she slipped out, plum-colored jeans that were a size too small for her figure, black sweater, sandals I knew were Manolo. Doing what was once known as the walk of shame, before even thinking something like that would get you drummed out of the feminist movement. Walk of shame? Just one more thing that made me feel as old as the Old State House.

I briefly wondered how she’d play it, but didn’t have to wait long to find out.

She just went for pushy broad, another one of her specialties.

“You are not allowed to be cross with me,” she said.

She tossed her own Prada bag on the kitchen counter and proceeded to make herself a cup of coffee from my Keurig. When she sat down across from me she said, “Well, aren’t you going to say something?”

“Sure,” I said. “I quit.”