Unidentified Woman #15 Read Online Free Page B

me a hard time about it ever since?
    After we bought the condominium, I thought our problems were over. I had made a huge sacrifice moving to Minneapolis and deserved a little slack, right? Things just seemed to get worse, though, because now we were skirmishing over furnishings and deciding which drawer would hold the silverware and whether we should shelve our books by author or subject matter and what towels to buy for which bathrooms because our old ones simply were no longer good enough.
    I did something then that I had promised Nina I would do months earlier. I bought her a piano—a baby grand piano with ebony polish, to be precise—and had the delivery guys set it up near the glass door leading to the balcony. I had a moment of panic when the woman I hired to tune it arrived late, yet it was sitting there, ready to be played, when Nina returned home.
    “Hi,” she said as she walked through the door.
    “Hi,” I replied from the sofa, where I was pretending to watch ESPN.
    She stopped. Said, “Oh. My. God.” Dropped her bag and rushed over to the instrument. “You bought this for me?”
    “I said I would,” I reminded her.
    “You have always kept your promises. You have never broken a promise to me in all the years I’ve known you.”
    “Well…”
    Nina tossed her coat on the floor, sat on the bench, and began to play. She started with some boogie-woogie.
    “It’s tuned,” she said.
    “Of course it’s tuned. What kind of guy would give his girl an untuned piano?”
    She segued into some Dave Brubeck and Bill Evans, followed by Chopin’s Prelude in E minor before playing the adagio from Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony, one of my favorite pieces of music. While she played I gathered up a huge throw pillow with the logo of the Minnesota Twins—which Nina preferred I get rid of—and laid beneath the piano to listen. A good half hour passed before she stopped playing and crawled beneath the Steinway to be with me. As we embraced, I was reminded of the final line in the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations —“I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”
    We haven’t had a serious argument since.
    And then they rolled the girl off the back of the pickup truck.
    *   *   *
    I was lying beneath the piano when our landline rang, a rare occurrence since most people we know call our cell phones. I was propped up against the Twins throw pillow, which no longer seemed to annoy Nina, with a clear view of the HDTV above the fireplace. Fox Sports North was broadcasting a rare Minnesota Twins evening spring training game from Fort Myers, and I was watching it with the sound off. Meanwhile, Nina was having a difficult time teaching herself a Gershwin piano prelude, Number Two, I think, which was a hoot because whenever she made a mistake she would shout things like “fudge nuggets” and “geez willigers.” Should she ever cut loose with an honest-to-God high-octane expletive—that’s like tornado sirens going off. It is wise to pay attention.
    “Dang,” she said when the phone rang.
    “I got it,” I said.
    I crawled out from under the Steinway and crossed to the desk we had located by the bookcases.
    “McKenzie,” I said.
    “Mr. McKenzie, this is security. We have a woman who would like to come up to your condominium.”
    “What’s her name?”
    “She doesn’t seem to have one. She says, just a moment…” I heard a muffled sound over the telephone receiver, and then the guard spoke clearly. “She says her name is Fifteen.”
    “I’ll be right down.”
    I hung up the phone. Nina quit practicing and called from the piano.
    “The woman they pushed out of the pickup truck six weeks ago is in the lobby,” I told her.
    I moved toward the door. Nina said, “I’m coming with.”
    *   *   *
    The young woman was surrounded by security guards, yet they didn’t mean her any harm. It was as if they wanted to be near in case she should swoon; she looked so fragile that it seemed it