It was maddening. Kate's eyes stung with tears. She lay looking at the door that closed behind Erika, listening to her walk down the stairs and out of the house. The hell with her. I ought to go out and get stinking, it would serve her right. Then she sighed, knowing how useless it would be.

With Erika gone the room felt chilly. The bed was lumpy. Kate got up, pulled on her old cotton robe and made her way to the bathroom, taking Erika's key with her. Emerging, she hesitated in the hall, then unlocked Erika's door and went in. The building was quiet; everyone was at work. I'm out of coffee, she told herself firmly. I’ll just borrow a little and go home again.

The room was almost a replica of her own, the same size and shape, the same ugly tan wallpaper and too-small kitchen. The metal bed sagged and the window was curtained in muddy, faded cretonne. There was the busty old-fashioned dresser with swinging mirror, the veneer marred by cigarette burns and white rings from wet glasses. A cheap room like half a dozen she had lived in, all nearly but not quite clean, shelter for anyone... home for nobody. It told her nothing.

Instead of the bony rocker, however, there was a round chair of black steel mesh, Erika's probably, she couldn't imagine Mrs. Brownlee rising to such heights of interior decorating. There were maybe two hundred books on an arrangement of unpainted boards and common bricks with bits of mortar still clinging to them. And on the wall behind the bed was a big unframed poster of a girl in ballet practice clothes, a thin sallow girl whose dark eyes stared bleakly out of her thin face. It made Kate feel uneasy, as though she were intruding.

She moved around the room quietly, trying to find some clue to Erika Frohmann. The closet held a short row of slacks, skirts and blouses on wire hangers; at the end an evening dress of black satin, with a full skirt, suggested that it had been borrowed from a more feminine type wardrobe. Three pairs of shoes, all rather worn, stood in a row on the floor. There was a thin coat and a cheap duster, nothing else. It was the closet of a girl who had no money and cared little for clothes.

The dresser held a few plain bras and cotton panties and some stockings and a little packet of letters postmarked Milwaukee, addressed to Erika in a flowery foreign script. These Kate picked up, then dropped them as though they had burned her fingers. Snooper, she thought.

She moved to the improvised bookcase, curious as always about other people's books.

They were an odd mixture. Paper-covered murder mysteries, the poems of Rilke in English and German on facing pages, half a dozen textbooks on harmony and composition, some of these with library serial numbers stamped on their brown-bound spines. A government handbook on how to become a citizen and a fat little German-English dictionary. There were two or three popular novels and an album of music. Grouped on the lower shelf were five or six paperback novels in similar covers. Kate opened some of them. We Walk Alone, Whisper Their Love, Edge of Twilight. She chose a couple and curled up with them in the black mesh chair, which looked unfitted to the human frame but proved to be surprisingly comfortable.