At the end of the year I decided it was time to graduate to Cindy, the second blonde roommate who replaced Chrissy. Cindy was Chrissy’s cousin. I couldn’t bear to be Mrs. Roper after Rita’s departure, and I wanted to reclaim the solace of Apartment 201, where my real heart lay. So as the year got on I let my hair grow out a little, and by December it was long enough to attach extensions to it, and on New Year’s Eve I bleached it all out and dyed it a warm blonde color, and I traded my cardigans and khakis for kneesocks and short shorts and crop tops. I stopped taking the birth control pills, which relieved me of the horrible fits it gave me, but overall I found it difficult to go back to being so radically feminine—within a matter of weeks I had returned to gazing in the mirror, arranging my hair and face into pleasing contours, and I could find no joy in it.

Before I went upstairs for good, I emptied the downstairs apartment of anything perishable. I stood in the open doorway and said goodbye to what had once been such a happy place, now turned sour. Then I shut the door and pulled the lever the way Ray had shown me, switching it over to Furley’s place, saying goodbye to the Ropers once and for all. Behind the shut door the gears ground as I listened. I inwardly prayed that nothing would go wrong. I had no cause for worry, though. I opened the door to Apartment 101 and it was new again. For a while, my heart was lighter.

Cindy was the shortest-lived of the roommates on the show, irrepressibly young and sweet. She was not as empty-headed as Chrissy but she was clumsy, and I adopted her way of moving through the world, which was disaster personified, slamming open doors, knocking things over, a walking accident.

I had been Cindy for nearly two months before I saw the first intruder. It was one of my off days, the days I did the restocking and necessary chores. I was walking toward the main house to retrieve the groceries (a phone call to Larwin had fixed the business about Bernie, the fink, just in case Krystal’s story was true) when I noticed movement in my peripheral vision. When I turned around, I saw two young men standing at the tree line. Both of them were peering into a camera in their hands. When they saw me, they turned and ran.

In a few seconds I was alone again, stock-still, staring at the tree line. I walked to where they had been standing but saw no one. It was late February and the air was still biting, and a light snow had fallen the week before. I could see their footprints where they’d run into the woods.

What did it mean? I remembered Krystal saying she had told people where she was going. But why had they come now, why so much later? Nearly a year had passed since her visit. If police were going to come, they would have come by now.