First it was one thing and then another. I’d begun to think she was one of those clients who go in and never come out again. Her house had taken on the faded, seedy look of a place that’s been abandoned, and it gave a start and shrank back on itself whenever I walked in. The spider plant I’d been watering all this time had grown so many baby plants that some of them trailed to the floor.But then at the end of October—Halloween, in fact—they said she was well enough to leave. I remember it was Halloween because she asked me to pick up some trick-or-treat candy before I came to collect her. “I don’t want any neighbor brats soaping my windows in spite,” she told me. Though how she expected to answer the door when they rang, I couldn’t say. She was still exceedingly lame.So I dropped Martine at Mrs. Cartwright’s, where the two of us were scheduled to clear out the guest room, and then I went to the supermarket. Halloween this year wasn’t likely to amount to much. A thunderstorm had been threatening since early morning.
