Why hadn’t the woman gone to the store management to report her purse missing? She’d had a fit in the aisle. Sarah had seen that much. But what had she done after that? Maybe she’d gone out to her car, thinking she’d left the purse there. But she wouldn’t have been able to get into her car, of course, because the keys were most likely in the purse. Unless she didn’t have a car, and walked to do her grocery shopping. There were hundreds of houses within walking distance of Mindy’s. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from our neighborhood. So maybe she walked back home, thinking that her purse hadn’t been swiped, but that she’d forgotten it. But if she got home and found her door locked, she’d know she had her keys with her when she left, which would mean that she’d left home with her purse. And if she’d had her purse when she left, and didn’t have it now, that meant that yes, someone had swiped it.

And furthermore: Who’s on first?

Was there a point to this line of thinking?

There was an easy way to solve this, I told myself. Get the purse out of the trunk, check the wallet for a name and an address, go to her house, return the purse, offer a million apologies, hope to Christ she had a sense of humor.

An excellent plan. But first, I had to pick up Sarah. She had said she’d be fifteen or twenty minutes, and I was pushing half an hour now. As I feared, Sarah was already standing out front, weighed down with four white plastic shopping bags.

“Pop the trunk,” she mouthed from the other side of the passenger-door window.

Shit shit shit shit shit. Wasn’t this what went through my mind only half an hour earlier? That Sarah would come out and want to put the groceries in the trunk? Of course, my plan back then (it seemed like hours ago) was that by now the purse would be back with its rightful owner.

I shouted, “Just throw them in the back!”

“What?”

I fumbled with the power window switches on the armrest under my left hand. First I put down the left rear window, then the right rear, then the window where Sarah was standing. She had that tired, why-did-I-marry-him look on her face. “You figured it out, huh?”

“Just throw the stuff in the back seat,” I said. She sighed, opened the rear door, and set the bags on the floor. She slammed it shut and got in the front.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said.

Sarah nodded. “Did you get anything?”

“Hmm?”

“At Kenny’s. Did you get anything? Did the drop-thingy come in?”